Reading guide
A wife and child, described in a dancer's words
The second verse describes Candana's own wife, ‘the mother of my son’, in language identical to Thag 4.1's street dancer: ‘adorned with jewelry and all dressed up, set up like a snare of death’. The same phrase, applied to a professional performer in one poem and to one's own family in another, extends this chapter's recurring danger-image across two very different relationships.
The same closing pair, a third time
As at Thag 4.1 and Thag 4.2, this poem's third and fourth verses — realization, disillusionment, a freed mind, the three knowledges attained — are word for word identical to those two poems' endings. Three different encounters — a dancer, a fall, a wife and child — converge on the same eight-line resolution for the third time in this single chapter.
Family, not a stranger, completing the pattern
Where Thag 4.1's danger was a public figure glimpsed in passing, this poem's is the speaker's own wife and son, greeted directly and by name of relationship (‘the mother of my son’). The chapter's shared image of adornment as danger is not limited to strangers; it reaches into the household as well.
Key terms
The text
§1Covered over with gold, surrounded by all her maids, with my son upon her hip, my wife came to me.
§2I saw her coming, the mother of my son, adorned with jewelry and all dressed up, set up like a snare of death.
§3Then the realization came upon me—the danger became clear, and I was firmly disillusioned.
§4Then my mind was freed—behold the clear rightness of the teaching! I’ve attained the three knowledges and fulfilled the Buddha’s instructions.
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