Reading guide
A disguise this vagga's most detailed yet
The farmer's description — plough, goad, messy hair, hemp clothing, muddy feet — is unusually specific and mundane compared to this vagga's elephants, serpents, or oxen, a convincingly ordinary figure rather than something overtly supernatural or frightening.
A question that drops its own pretense
The Buddha's counter-question — ‘what have you to do with oxen, Wicked One?’ — doesn't merely expose the disguise; it prompts Māra to abandon the farmer pretense entirely and escalate straight into his real claim, as though the disguise had already served its purpose simply by getting close enough to speak.
Ownership claimed over all six senses, exhaustively
Māra's claim runs through every sense field in turn — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind — each declared his alone, along with their objects and the consciousness arising from contact, an exhaustive territorial assertion rather than a single vague threat.
A reply that concedes before it transcends
Unlike this vagga's more common flat denials, the Buddha's answer initially agrees with Māra's claim entirely — yes, the eye and sights and eye-consciousness are indeed yours — before adding the decisive turn: where none of these exist at all, you have no place there, conceding the territory while stepping outside it.
A path Māra cannot even perceive, not merely cannot follow
The verse's final claim — ‘you won't even see the path I take’ — goes further than simple escape; it denies Māra even the perceptual access needed to track an attempt at escape, the strongest claim of separation offered anywhere in this vagga.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. Now at that time the Buddha was educating, encouraging, firing up, and inspiring the mendicants with a Dhamma talk about extinguishment. And those mendicants were paying attention, applying the mind, concentrating wholeheartedly, and actively listening.
§2Then Māra thought, “The ascetic Gotama is giving a Dhamma talk about extinguishment … and the mendicants are listening well. Why don’t I go and pull the wool over their eyes?” Then Māra the Wicked manifested in the form of a farmer carrying a large plough on his shoulder. He held a long goad, his hair was messy, he was clad in sunn hemp, and his feet were muddy. He went up to the Buddha and said to him, “So, ascetic, did you happen to see any oxen?” “But what have you to do with oxen, Wicked One?” “Mine alone, ascetic, is the eye, mine are sights, mine is the field of eye contact consciousness. Where can you escape me, ascetic? Mine alone is the ear … nose … tongue … body … mind, mine are ideas, mine is the field of mind contact consciousness. Where can you escape me, ascetic?”
§3“Yours alone, Wicked One, is the eye, yours are sights, yours is the field of eye contact consciousness. Where there is no eye, no sights, no eye contact consciousness—you have no place there, Wicked One! Yours alone is the ear … nose … tongue … body … mind, yours are ideas, yours is the field of mind contact consciousness. Where there is no mind, no ideas, no mind contact consciousness—you have no place there, Wicked One!”
§4“The things they call ‘mine’, and those who say ‘it’s mine’: if your mind remains there, you won’t escape me, ascetic!”
§5“The things they speak of aren’t mine; I’m not someone who speaks like that. So know this, Wicked One: you won’t even see the path I take.”
§6Then Māra … vanished right there.
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