Reading guide
Ordinary delight, ordinary suffering
The prose opens with gods and humans (devamanussā) liking, loving, and enjoying sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and ideas in turn — and living in suffering precisely when each of these perishes, fades away, and ceases, which every conditioned thing eventually does.
The Realized One's different relationship
Against this, the Realized One is said to have truly understood the origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape of each sense field — and so doesn't like, love, or enjoy them, not out of aversion but because that understanding has already done the work aversion would otherwise need to do. The result is happiness through the very same changes that bring gods and humans suffering.
The closing verse: happiness inverted
Nine stanzas restate the same contrast as direct paradox: “what others say is happiness, the noble ones say is suffering; what others say is suffering, the noble ones know as happiness” — a teaching the verse itself admits is “hard to understand,” confusing the ignorant, dark for those shrouded by it, yet open like light for the good.
Sakkāya, once more
The verse's own culminating line, “the cessation of substantial reality is happiness” (sakkāyassa nirodhanaṁ), reuses a term this project has already met many times across Book III's own SN 22 (Khandhasaṃyutta, already fully published on this site) — the five aggregates viewed as a self. Its appearance here, applied instead to the six sense fields, is this discourse's clearest link back to that earlier vocabulary.
Key terms
The text
§1“Mendicants, gods and humans like sights, they love them and enjoy them. But when sights perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering. Gods and humans like sounds … smells … tastes … touches … ideas, they love them and enjoy them. But when ideas perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering.
§2The Realized One has truly understood the origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape of sights, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them. When sights perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily. The Realized One has truly understood the origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape of sounds … smells … tastes … touches … ideas, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them. When ideas perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily.” That is what the Buddha said. Then the Holy One, the Teacher, went on to say:
The accompanying verses
§3“Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touches and ideas, the lot of them—they’re likable, desirable, and pleasurable as long as you can say that they exist. For all the world with its gods, this is what they deem happiness. And where they cease is deemed as suffering for them.
§4The noble ones have seen that happiness is the cessation of substantial reality. This insight by those who see contradicts the whole world. What others say is happiness the noble ones say is suffering. What others say is suffering the noble ones know as happiness.
§5See, this teaching is hard to understand, it confuses the ignorant. There is darkness for the shrouded; blackness for those who don’t see. But the good are open; like light for those who see. Though close, they do not understand, the seekers inexpert in the teaching.
§6They’re mired in desire for continued existence, flowing along the stream of lives, mired in Māra’s dominion: this teaching isn’t easy for them to understand. Who, apart from the noble ones, is qualified to understand this state? Having rightly understood this state, the undefiled are fully extinguished.”
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