Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Dispel all craving for attachments in every direction — above, below, all around, and in between — because Māra pursues a person exactly wherever they grasp in the world, so a mindful mendicant who understands this refuses to grasp anything anywhere at all.
An address built entirely of epithets
Where most of the sixteen questioners open with a short description or a direct plea, Bhadrāvudha opens with eight rapid-fire titles for the Buddha in a row: the “bastion-leaver,” “craving-cutter,” “imperturbable,” “delight-leaver,” “flood-crosser,” “freed,” “formulation-leaver,” and “the intelligent.” The effect is almost incantatory, closer to a formal invocation than a conversational opening, and it signals something about how Bhadrāvudha understands the moment: less a private consultation than a public occasion, worthy of ceremony.
Speaking for the crowd
That public sense is confirmed directly: “different people have gathered from across the nations wishing to hear your word, O hero. After hearing the spiritual giant they will depart from here.” Bhadrāvudha is unusually explicit that this isn’t only his own question — he is asking, in effect, on behalf of everyone present, and asks the Buddha to “answer them clearly, for truly you understand this matter.” It is a reminder that the frame narrative behind these sixteen questions was never entirely private: Bāvarī sent his students specifically so that a wider report could travel back, and Bhadrāvudha here makes the presence of that wider audience explicit within the poem itself.
Every direction, all at once
The Buddha’s answer matches the scale of the address: “dispel all craving for attachments, above, below, all round, between.” Where Jatukaṇṇī’s answer just before this one (Snp 5.12) organized non-clinging along the axis of time — before, after, the middle — this answer organizes it spatially, covering every possible direction a person might reach for something. The two together suggest that grasping has no safe corner, whether measured across a lifetime or across the width of a single moment.
Wherever you grasp, Māra is there
The reasoning given is precise: “for whatever a personage grasps in the world, Māra pursues them right there.” This isn’t framed as Māra hunting a person down from outside; it is the act of grasping itself that opens the position Māra occupies. The closing line makes the same point from the other direction — “in clinging to attachments, these people cling to the domain of death” — so that letting go isn’t a defensive maneuver against an external threat so much as simply declining to occupy Māra’s territory in the first place.
Key terms
The text
§1“I beseech you, the bastion-leaver, the craving-cutter, the imperturbable,”
said Venerable Bhadrāvudha,
“the delight-leaver, the flood-crosser, the freed,
the formulation-leaver, the intelligent.
Different people have gathered
from across the nations
§2wishing to hear your word, O hero.
After hearing the spiritual giant
they will depart from here.
Please, sage, answer them clearly,
for truly you understand this matter.”
§3“Dispel all craving for attachments,”
replied the Buddha,
“above, below, all round, between.
For whatever a personage grasps in the world,
Māra pursues them right there.
§4So let a mindful mendicant who understands
not grasp anything in all the world,
observing that, in clinging to attachments,
these people cling to the domain of death.”
Self-check quiz
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