Reading guide
A child prodigy, stated as fact without elaboration
The poem's opening claim — seven years old, newly gone forth, already able to overcome a ‘mighty adder king’ (pannagindaṁ mahiddhikaṅ) through psychic power — is delivered flatly, without any framing as remarkable. The poem treats the child's attainment as simply true, leaving the reader to register its strangeness unassisted.
Three voices in six short verses
The poem shifts speaker twice: Sumana narrates the opening two verses in his own voice; the third and fourth verses quote the Buddha directly, addressing Sāriputta by name (‘Sāriputta, see this young boy coming’); the fifth verse continues in this reported voice describing Anuruddha's training; the sixth returns to third-person narration of Sumana's own attainment and his private wish. This layering of voices within so short a poem is unusual even within this collection's variety of forms.
Completing this collection's Sumana pair
This poem's speaker is explicitly numbered ‘(2nd)’ against Thag 5.4's Sumana, following the same disambiguation-by-ordinal convention already used for this collection's two Kassapa pairs and elsewhere. The two Sumanas share only a name; nothing in either poem suggests a further connection between them.
Anuruddha, mentor to a child prodigy not yet given his own page
Anuruddha, named directly as Sumana's teacher (‘he is Anuruddha's novice’), is renowned in the wider canon chiefly for his own mastery of the divine eye and for his extensive verses much later in the Theragāthā — in the Book of the Twenties, far beyond where this project has yet reached. This poem offers a first, secondary glimpse of him through a student's eyes, well before his own verses come into view.
A closing wish for anonymity, not recognition
The poem's final line reports Sumana's own private wish — ‘mā maṅ jaññāti icchatī’, ‘may no-one find me out!’ — even after ‘attaining ultimate peace and witnessing the unshakable’. A seven-year-old novice's attainment, reported through someone else's praise, closes on his own desire not to be singled out for it.
Key terms
The text
§1I was only seven years old and had just gone forth when I overcame the mighty adder king with my psychic powers.
§2I brought water for my mentor from the great lake Anotatta. When he saw me, my teacher declared:
§3“Sāriputta, see this young boy coming, carrying a water pot, serene inside himself.
§4His conduct inspires confidence, he is of lovely deportment: he is Anuruddha’s novice, self-assured in psychic powers.
§5Made a thoroughbred by a thoroughbred, made good by the good, educated and trained by Anuruddha, who has completed his task.
§6Having attained ultimate peace and witnessed the unshakable, that novice Sumana has the wish: ‘May no-one find me out!’”
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