Reading guide
A question, then four answers on one refrain
The first verse poses the question directly, naming a ‘wind ailment’ (vātaroga) and a ‘tough place for gathering alms’. The four verses that follow each name a different resource — rapture and happiness, mindfulness and the awakening factors, the example of energetic companions, recollection of the Buddha — but all four close on the identical line, ‘I'll dwell in the forest’ (viharissāmi kānane), the fourth such refrain-built poem found in this book alone.
A name this site can independently confirm
This site's own SN 22.87 (With Vakkali) tells of a gravely ill mendicant who longs to see the Buddha in person, receives the famous redirection ‘whoever sees the Dhamma sees me’, and dies in an account the site's own guide there calls ‘difficult, much-discussed’. This poem's affliction — a wind ailment, not the terminal illness of that later account — and its resolve to keep dwelling in the forest despite it, reads as an earlier chapter in the same monk's life, not a retelling of the same crisis.
Resources named in ascending order of abstraction
The four answers move from the most immediate (bodily rapture pervading ‘this bag of bones’) through formal practice (mindfulness, the powers, the awakening factors) and community (energetic, harmonious companions observed) to recollection of the Buddha himself — ‘the best, the tamed, the serene’ — closing the poem on its most elevated resource last.
Key terms
The text
§1“Struck by a wind ailment while dwelling in a forest grove, you’ve entered a tough place for gathering alms—how will you get by, monk?”
§2“Pervading this bag of bones with abundant rapture and happiness, putting up with what’s tough, I’ll dwell in the forest.
§3Developing mindfulness meditation, the faculties and the powers, developing the factors of awakening, I’ll dwell in the forest.
§4Having seen those who are energetic, resolute, always staunchly vigorous, harmonious and united, I’ll dwell in the forest.
§5Recollecting the Buddha—the best, the tamed, the serene—tireless all day and night I’ll dwell in the forest.”
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