Reading guide
What "plain" means here
The Pali title Suddhika, rendered "Plain Version," marks this discourse as a deliberately unadorned restatement — the same mendicant's question about permanence, and the same denial, without any accompanying object, gesture, or narrative frame.
Where SN 22.96 supplies a lump of cow dung and a wheel-turning monarch's story, and SN 22.97 supplies a fingernail's worth of dirt, SN 22.98 supplies nothing beyond the question and the answer.
A method visible across the triad
Reading SN 22.96, 22.97, and 22.98 together makes explicit what the collection's editors were doing: presenting one core teaching first with an elaborate illustration, then a minimal one, then none at all — moving from image to bare statement.
This stripped-down placement is itself instructive: once an insight has been shown through images at two different scales, the collection trusts it to stand without any image at all.
The content of the bare question
"Is there any form at all that's permanent, everlasting, eternal, imperishable, and will last forever and ever?" — asked and answered identically for feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness — the same fivefold negation found throughout this short run of discourses.
Its place in Pupphavagga
This is the exact numerical and thematic midpoint of the vagga's ten discourses — after the two similes of instability (river, foam-lump-and-companions) and before the two leash similes and the closing Adze and Impermanence discourses, this bare restatement functions as a brief pause between two more elaborately imaged pairs.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. Seated to one side, that mendicant said to the Buddha: “Sir, is there any form at all that’s permanent, everlasting, eternal, imperishable, and will last forever and ever? Is there any feeling … perception … choices … consciousness at all that’s permanent, everlasting, eternal, imperishable, and will last forever and ever?”
§2“Mendicant, there is no form at all that’s permanent, everlasting, eternal, imperishable, and will last forever and ever. There’s no feeling … perception … choices … consciousness at all that’s permanent, everlasting, eternal, imperishable, and will last forever and ever.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.