Reading guide
The full nine-term list, personally addressed
"Rādha, you should give up any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for form; and any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies" — the identical nine terms already given at SN 22.112 (and reused once more at SN 23.3's own definition of the leash to existence), now completing their third appearance in this book.
The same palm-stump image, closing three separate discourses
"Thus that form will be given up, cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated, and unable to arise in the future" — the identical closing image used at SN 22.111, SN 22.112, and SN 23.9, now completing its fourth appearance, always marking the same complete and irreversible removal.
Closing Māravagga: a vagga built almost entirely from reuse
Looking back across all ten discourses, Māravagga's own character becomes clear: SN 23.1-3 introduce genuinely new material specific to Rādha (Māra as the aggregates, the sandcastle simile, the leash to existence definition), while SN 23.4-10 systematically restate — sometimes verbatim, sometimes recombined — material already established at SN 22.106-112 much earlier in this book.
This is a distinctive structural choice: rather than generating fresh technical content for Rādha's saṃyutta, the collection largely repurposes Antavagga's own already-established teaching, personalizing its address without altering its substance.
What follows
Māravagga's own name ("About Māra") is confirmed by SN 23.1's opening discourse; Dutiyamāravagga ("About Māra (2nd)"), this saṃyutta's second vagga, begins next at SN 23.11, opening with its own discourse on Māra before moving through a further twelve discourses.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. When Venerable Rādha was seated to one side, the Buddha said to him:
§2“Rādha, you should give up any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for form; and any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies. Thus that form will be given up, cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated, and unable to arise in the future.
§3You should give up any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for feeling … perception … choices … consciousness; and any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies. Thus that consciousness will be given up, cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated, and unable to arise in the future.”
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