Reading guide
A question about abandoning, not arising
“How does one know and see so that wrong view is given up?” opens this discourse — a question about release, distinct from SN 22.154's own question about what conditions the view's arising in the first place.
The identical three technical terms, reversed direction
SN 22.154-156 traced micchādiṭṭhi, sakkāyadiṭṭhi, and attānudiṭṭhi to their arising, through “grasping and insisting” on each of the five aggregates in turn. This discourse and its own two companions (SN 35.166-167) take the same three terms and ask the reverse question: what dissolves them. Both directions converge on the same diagnosis — the aggregates there, the sense fields here — are what grasping and insisting (or their absence) turns on.
Knowing and seeing X as impermanent
The answer: knowing and seeing the eye, sights, eye consciousness, eye contact, and eye-born feeling — and by extension all six sense fields with their own four companions — as impermanent, wrong view is given up. No further elaboration is offered; the diagnosis is compressed into a single cognitive act repeated across all six fields.
Key terms
The text
§1Then a mendicant went up to the Buddha … and said to him: “Sir, how does one know and see so that wrong view is given up?”
§2“Mendicant, knowing and seeing the eye, sights, eye consciousness, and eye contact as impermanent, wrong view is given up. … And also knowing and seeing the pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on mind contact as impermanent, wrong view is given up. This is how to know and see so that wrong view is given up.”
Self-check quiz
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