Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
With desire for sensual pleasures dispelled and renunciation seen as sanctuary, one who lets the past wither away, allows nothing to be built up for the future, and refuses to grasp even at the present moment in between, lives at peace and is free of the defilements that let Death take hold.
Arriving on reputation
Jatukaṇṇī’s opening is notable for being built almost entirely on hearsay: he has heard of the Buddha as a “hero with no desire for sensual pleasures... who has passed over the flood,” and has come with a question for someone he is, at this point, still taking largely on report. He compares the Buddha’s progress to “the blazing sun” shining on the earth — an image of something whose effect is felt at a distance, before it is verified up close. His request is direct: “tell me the state of peace... as it really is,” and specifically, how one gives up “rebirth and old age here.”
Before, after, and the middle
The Buddha’s answer opens with the dispelling of sensual desire and the recognition of renunciation as safety, then gives its most quotable lines: “What came before, let wither away, and after, let there be nothing. If you don’t grasp at the middle, you will live at peace.” The three-part structure — before, after, and the middle — maps onto past, future, and present, and the instruction treats all three the same way: nothing to hold in any of them. It would be easy to assume the “middle” is simply the safe, neutral zone between two dangers, but the verse is explicit that grasping the present is just as capable of disturbing peace as clinging to memory or expectation.
Taking up and putting down
A smaller phrase earlier in the same answer is easy to pass over: “don’t be taking up or putting down anything at all.” Even “putting down” — ordinarily framed as the virtuous half of a taking-up/letting-go pair — is folded into what should simply not be happening. The point isn’t a special skill at releasing things one has picked up; it is to stop the whole activity of handling experience as something to be picked up or set down in the first place.
Rid of greed for name and form
The closing verse addresses Jatukaṇṇī as “brahmin” and names the scope of what must be released: greed “for the whole realm of name and form” (nāmarūpa), the classical pairing in early Buddhist analysis for a living being’s mental and physical constituents taken together. Someone rid of this greed “has no defilements by which they might fall under the sway of Death” — the same connection between grasping and Māra’s reach found throughout this chapter, here stated in terms not of time but of what a person is made of.
Key terms
The text
§1“Hearing of the hero
with no desire for sensual pleasures,”
said Venerable Jatukaṇṇī,
“who has passed over the flood, I’ve come
with a question for that desireless one.
Tell me the state of peace, O natural visionary.
Tell me this, Blessed One, as it really is.
§2For, having mastered sensual desires,
the Blessed One proceeds,
as the blazing sun shines on the earth.
May you of vast wisdom explain the teaching
to me of little wisdom so that I may understand
the giving up of rebirth and old age here.”
§3“With desire for sensual pleasures dispelled,”
replied the Buddha,
“seeing renunciation as sanctuary,
don’t be taking up or putting down
anything at all.
§4What came before, let wither away,
and after, let there be nothing.
If you don’t grasp at the middle,
you will live at peace.
§5One rid of greed, brahmin,
for the whole realm of name and form,
has no defilements by which
they might fall under the sway of Death.”
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