Reading guide
A near-repeat of SN 5.9's riddle, with the terms sharpened
This discourse's opening question is structurally identical to SN 5.9's — who made it, where is the maker, where does it arise, where does it cease — but shifts its subject from ‘puppet’ to ‘sentient being’ specifically, escalating the riddle's stakes from an abstract image to personal identity itself.
A question turned back as a diagnosis
Vajirā's reply opens by naming Māra's own question as itself the problem: ‘why do you believe there's such a thing as a sentient being… is this your theory?’ — treating the assumption embedded in his question, not merely its content, as what needs addressing.
The chariot simile: this canon's most famous analogy for non-self
‘When the parts are assembled we use the word ‘chariot’; so too, when the aggregates are present, ‘sentient being’ is the convention we use’ states directly that personhood is a linguistic convenience for describing a temporary configuration, not a name for some further thing standing behind or beneath that configuration.
A resonance with this site's Madhyamaka translations
This same chariot analogy for conventional designation recurs across later Buddhist philosophical literature, including the Madhyamaka tradition already represented elsewhere on this site — a continuity between this early canonical source and centuries of subsequent philosophical elaboration on the same basic insight.
Only suffering arises, only suffering ceases: the closing reduction
The verse's final stanza pushes past even the chariot simile's conventional-designation framing to something starker: ‘naught but suffering comes to be, naught but suffering ceases’ — the entire discussion of what a person is reduced to a claim about what actually arises and passes, closing both this discourse and the Bhikkhunīsaṃyutta as a whole on its own translated colophon.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. Then the nun Vajirā robed up in the morning and, taking her bowl and robe, entered Sāvatthī for alms. She wandered for alms in Sāvatthī. After the meal, on her return from almsround, she went to the Dark Forest for the day’s meditation, plunged deep into it, and sat at the root of a tree to meditate. Then Māra the Wicked, wanting to make the nun Vajirā feel fear, terror, and goosebumps, wanting to make her fall away from immersion, went up to her and addressed her in verse:
§2“Who created this sentient being? Where is its maker? Where has the being arisen? And where does it cease?”
§3Then the nun Vajirā thought, “Who’s speaking this verse, a human or a non-human?” Then she thought, “This is Māra the Wicked, wanting to make me feel fear, terror, and goosebumps, wanting to make me fall away from immersion!” Then Vajirā, knowing that this was Māra the Wicked, replied to him in verse:
§4“Why do you believe there’s such a thing as a ‘sentient being’? Māra, is this your theory? This is just a pile of conditions, you won’t find a sentient being here. When the parts are assembled we use the word ‘chariot’. So too, when the aggregates are present ‘sentient being’ is the convention we use. But it’s only suffering that comes to be, lasts a while, then expires. Naught but suffering comes to be, naught but suffering ceases.”
§5Then Māra the Wicked, thinking, “The nun Vajirā knows me!” miserable and sad, vanished right there.
§6The Linked Discourses on Nuns are completed.
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