Vanavaccha — The Book of the Ones · Chapter Twelve · Poem 3 of 10
Setting
Rocky crags in a forest, with clear water, moss, monkeys, and deer
Speaker
Vanavaccha (2nd), exclaiming his own delight directly
Form
One four-line verse, closing on a line shared verbatim with an earlier namesake
Length
under 1 minute to read
Northern parallel
This reading guide does not assert a specific matching text for this poem in other Buddhist literatures.
Difficulty
★☆☆☆☆ — pure sensory delight, without a single doctrinal term
Why this text
This verse's closing line — ‘these rocky crags delight me!’ — is word for word identical, in Pali, to the closing line of Thag 1.13, spoken by another monk who also carried the name Vanavaccha, a hundred poems earlier in this same collection.
Reading guide
The same delight, word for word
Te selā ramayanti maṁ closes both this verse and Thag 1.13 exactly, in identical Pali. The two poems vary everything leading up to that line: Thag 1.13 describes crags the color of blue stormclouds, cool water, and ladybugs; this verse describes broad rocks, clear water, monkeys and deer, and crags festooned with dewy moss. Both are pure nature-delight poems, entirely free of doctrinal vocabulary, and both funnel their different specific details into the identical closing exclamation.
Two poems, one template, a hundred poems apart
This is an unusually close match for two poems that don't otherwise share a narrative connection: not just the same name, marked with the same ‘(1st)’ and ‘(2nd)’ disambiguation already seen elsewhere in this collection, but the exact same closing line, describing the exact same kind of scene, a hundred poems apart. No surviving comment explains whether this reflects a shared formulaic convention for describing forest delight, coincidence, or something else — this reading guide notes the match without asserting a cause.
Key terms
acchodikā — “clear-watered” — describing the water at this site.
puthusilā — “broad rocks” — puthu (‘broad’) plus silā (‘rock’).
