Reading guide
The birth of Buddhist missionary activity
This is the historic commissioning of the first sixty arahants to spread the teaching independently — the moment the Dhamma stops being confined to the Buddha's own presence and becomes something transmitted outward, underlying the entire subsequent spread of Buddhism across and beyond India.
Let not two go by one road
This specific instruction — maximizing geographic coverage rather than traveling in groups — is one of this canon's most quoted lines on the logic of teaching at scale, prioritizing reach over companionship or safety in numbers.
A formula for the teaching itself, still recognizable
‘Good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end, meaningful and well-phrased’ supplies a standard description of the Dhamma repeated throughout the wider canon, appearing here at what this discourse frames as its founding commissioning moment.
Escalation matching escalation
Where SN 4.4 named Māra's snares as merely human and heavenly, this discourse's Māra claims ‘the great bond’ — a single, larger claim replacing the earlier twofold one — met by the Buddha's parallel escalation, ‘freed from the great bonds’, keeping the two discourses structurally paired while raising the stakes of each.
A mission announced just before the confrontation, not after
Unlike discourses where Māra's challenge occasions a teaching, here the order is reversed: the commissioning speech comes first, complete and uninterrupted, with Māra's challenge arriving only after the mission has already been fully declared — his claim landing as a direct threat to a mission already in motion, not a prelude to one.
Key terms
The text
§1At one time the Buddha was staying near Varanasi, in the deer park at Isipatana. There the Buddha addressed the mendicants, “Mendicants!” “Venerable sir,” they replied. The Buddha said this:
§2“Mendicants, I am freed from all snares, both human and heavenly. You are also freed from all snares, both human and heavenly. Wander forth, mendicants, for the welfare and happiness of the people, out of sympathy for the world, for the benefit, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans. Let not two go by one road. Teach the Dhamma that’s good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end, meaningful and well-phrased. And reveal a spiritual practice that’s entirely full and pure. There are beings with little dust in their eyes. They’re in decline because they haven’t heard the teaching. There will be those who understand the teaching! I will travel to the town of Senā in Uruvelā in order to teach the Dhamma.” Then Māra the Wicked went up to the Buddha and addressed him in verse:
§3“You’re bound by all snares, both human and heavenly. You’re bound by the great bond: you won’t escape me, ascetic!”
§4“I’m freed from all snares, both human and heavenly. I’m freed from the great bonds; You’re beaten, terminator!”
§5Then Māra … vanished right there.
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