Reading guide
A familiar request, a named questioner
“Sir, may the Buddha please teach me Dhamma in brief. When I've heard it, I'll live alone, withdrawn, diligent, keen, and resolute” is the request already met at SN 35.86, 88, and 89 — but this time the questioner is named: Venerable Mahākoṭṭhita, opening the vagga's own three-discourse cluster bearing his name.
The same formula, a different frame from SN 22.66
“Give up desire for what is impermanent” is the identical core instruction SN 22.66 already used for the five aggregates — but there the frame was an unnamed mendicant confirming the teaching back to the Buddha, part of a four-discourse cluster (SN 22.66-69) also covering suffering, not-self, and “not belonging to self.” Here the frame is Mahākoṭṭhita's direct request-and-answer, and the cluster covers only three terms — impermanence, suffering, and not-self — without the fourth.
A fuller expansion than SN 22.66's own
Because the six sense fields each carry an object, a consciousness, a contact, and a contact-born feeling in addition to the field itself, this discourse's own expansion for the eye alone (five terms) is fuller than SN 22.66's single term per aggregate — a structural consequence of the two schemes' different shapes, not a difference in teaching.
Key terms
The text
§1Then Venerable Mahākoṭṭhita went up to the Buddha … and asked him, “Sir, may the Buddha please teach me Dhamma in brief. When I’ve heard it, I’ll live alone, withdrawn, diligent, keen, and resolute.”
§2“Koṭṭhita, you should give up desire for what is impermanent. And what is impermanent? The eye, sights, eye consciousness, and eye contact are impermanent: you should give up desire for them. The pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on eye contact is also impermanent: you should give up desire for it. The ear … nose … tongue … body … The mind, ideas, mind consciousness, and mind contact are impermanent: you should give up desire for them. The pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on mind contact is also impermanent: you should give up desire for it. Koṭṭhita, you should give up desire for what is impermanent.”
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