Reading guide
The same teaching, repeated rather than developed
Unlike many paired discourses in this collection that escalate or add content on repetition, this discourse's opening teaching to the mendicants is essentially identical to SN 4.9's, testing whether Māra's second attempt can succeed where roughly the same words already failed once.
A different strategy this time: denying urgency itself
Where Māra's first attempt (SN 4.9) urged complacent enjoyment while conceding death would eventually come, this second attempt is more radical: it denies that time moves quickly or that life shortens at all, contesting the premise underlying the entire teaching rather than merely its practical implications.
A chariot's rim: steady, cyclical, undiminishing
Māra's image — life ‘rolling on’ like a chariot wheel's rim around its hub — suggests circular, self-renewing motion rather than linear depletion, a picture of time that never actually runs out.
Tiny streams: steady, but toward vanishing, not renewal
The Buddha's answering image keeps the same quality of steady, ongoing motion Māra proposed, but reverses its direction entirely: water in tiny streams doesn't cycle back, it wastes away toward nothing, matching Māra's steadiness while reversing what that steadiness leads to.
A vagga's name, and its own closing colophon
This discourse's title, paired with SN 4.9's, gives the Jīvitavagga (‘Chapter on Lifespan’) its name — consistent with the naming pattern already observed across the Devaputtasaṃyutta and Kosalasaṃyutta, where a vagga takes its title from a discourse near or at its close, here fitting a full pair rather than a single discourse.
Key terms
The text
§1So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Rājagaha, in the Bamboo Grove, the squirrels’ feeding ground. There the Buddha … said:
§2“Mendicants, the lifespan of humans is short. You must go to the next life. So you should do what is skillful, you should practice the spiritual life. No-one born is immortal. A long life is a hundred years or a little more.”
§3Then Māra the Wicked went up to the Buddha and addressed him in verse:
§4“The days and nights don’t rush by, and life isn’t cut short. The life of mortals keeps rolling on, like a chariot’s rim around the hub.”
§5“The days and nights rush by, and then life is cut short. The life of mortals wastes away, like the water in tiny streams.”
§6Then Māra the Wicked, thinking, “The Buddha knows me! The Holy One knows me!” miserable and sad, vanished right there.
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