Reading guide
The same fourfold structure as SN 48.30
Confirmed by direct reading, this discourse repeats SN 48.30's own itemized structure exactly: rather than bundling the five feeling faculties as SN 48.34 did, it applies the fourfold judgment (understanding a faculty, its origin, its cessation, and the practice leading to its cessation) to each of the five faculties in turn — pleasure, pain, happiness, sadness, and equanimity.
No vagga-closing colophon here, unlike SN 48.30
Confirmed by direct reading of this discourse's own source, there is no vagga-closing formula here matching SN 48.30's own “Chaḷindriyavaggo tatiyo” and its uddāna verse — only the bare ordinal marker “Pañcamaṁ” (“the fifth”). This project's own honest reading concludes Sukhindriyavagga does NOT close at five discourses; more of this vagga's own discourses remain to be read fresh, without assuming they will match Chaḷindriyavagga's own length or further structure.
Confirming a decision made rather than assumed
This project's own methodological note: this discourse vindicates the deliberate choice, stated explicitly at SN 48.34's own reading guide, not to assume this vagga's sequence would match Vagga 3's own length — the close tracking of discourse TYPES (plain, stream-enterer, arahant, ascetics-and-brahmins) did not extend to a matching total COUNT of discourses.
Key terms
The text
§1“Mendicants, there are these five faculties. What five? The faculties of pleasure, pain, happiness, sadness, and equanimity. Mendicants, there are ascetics and brahmins who don’t understand the faculty of pleasure, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation. There are ascetics and brahmins who don’t understand the faculty of pain … happiness … sadness … equanimity, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation. I don’t deem them as true ascetics and brahmins. Those venerables don’t realize the goal of life as an ascetic or brahmin, and don’t live having realized it with their own insight. There are ascetics and brahmins who do understand the faculty of pleasure, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation. There are ascetics and brahmins who do understand the faculty of pain … happiness … sadness … equanimity, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation. I deem them as true ascetics and brahmins. Those venerables realize the goal of life as an ascetic or brahmin, and live having realized it with their own insight.”
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