Reading guide
Seduction, not mockery or doubt
This discourse's tactic is distinct from Māra's approach elsewhere in this saṃyutta: rather than attacking Vijayā's capability, grief, or the possibility of escape, he presents himself as an attractive peer offering companionship and music — flattery and invitation rather than challenge.
The senses handed back, not merely refused
Vijayā's first stanza doesn't simply state disinterest in sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches; it ‘hands them right back to’ Māra specifically, an active image of return rather than passive rejection — the sense pleasures framed as belonging to Māra's domain to begin with.
The body's decay meditated on directly
The second stanza turns explicitly to physical repulsion — the body as rotting, decaying, frail — a traditional meditation object (asubha, the unattractive) named and applied directly against the very premise of Māra's romantic approach.
A claim extending beyond sensual rejection entirely
The verse's final stanza reaches further than refusing seduction: it claims to have dispelled darkness ‘regarding all such peaceful attainments’, naming the realms of luminous form and the formless explicitly — rejecting not just sensuality but confusion about even the most subtle meditative states beyond it.
A scope this saṃyutta will echo again
The specific naming of luminous-form and formless realms recurs almost identically at SN 5.6, suggesting this particular doctrinal point — that even refined meditative attainments can still be a subtle trap if misunderstood — mattered enough to this saṃyutta's compilers to state more than once.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. Then the nun Vijayā robed up in the morning … and sat at the root of a tree for the day’s meditation. Then Māra the Wicked, wanting to make the nun Vijayā feel fear, terror, and goosebumps, wanting to make her fall away from immersion, went up to her and addressed her in verse:
§2“You’re so young and beautiful, and I’m a youth in my prime. Come, my lady, let us enjoy the music of a five-piece band.”
§3Then the nun Vijayā 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 Vijayā, knowing that this was Māra the Wicked, replied to him in verse:
§4“Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches so delightful. I hand them right back to you, Māra, for I have no use for them. This body is rotting, decaying and frail. I’m horrified and repelled by it, and I’ve eradicated sensual craving. There are beings in the realm of luminous form, and others stuck in the formless. I’ve destroyed the darkness regarding all such peaceful attainments.”
§5Then Māra the Wicked, thinking, “The nun Vijayā knows me!” miserable and sad, vanished right there.
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