Brahmadatta

Reading guide

A battle won by not fighting

The second verse states the poem's central paradox plainly: ‘when you get angry at an angry person you just make things worse for yourself... when you don't get angry at an angry person you win a battle hard to win’. Restraint is reframed not as passivity but as the harder, more decisive victory.

Two named similes, invoked rather than retold

The fifth verse doesn't retell either simile in full — it simply names them, trusting the listener already knows the stories: ‘reflect on the simile of the saw (kakacūpamaṅ)’ for anger, ‘remember the simile of the child's flesh (puttamaṅsūpamaṅ)’ for craving. Both are already translated in full on this site: the saw simile as MN 21, The Simile of the Saw, and the child's-flesh simile as SN 12.63, A Child's Flesh.

Healing both sides of a conflict

The fourth verse makes an unusual claim: ‘people inexpert in the teaching consider one who heals both oneself and the other to be a fool’. What looks, from outside, like weakness or foolishness — refusing to escalate a quarrel — is reframed as the wiser course, one simply unrecognized by those who don't understand the teaching.

A cow eating grain, for a wandering mind

The final verse closes on a third, unnamed simile of its own: a mind running toward sensual pleasures and future lives should be curbed with mindfulness ‘as one would curb a greedy cow eating grain’. This homely, everyday image contrasts with the two weightier named similes invoked two verses earlier.

A practical manual in miniature

Across six verses, this poem moves from a rhetorical question about anger's absence, through a paradox about who really wins a quarrel, to two specific named similes serving as memory-aids, and finally to a third homely image — assembling, in effect, a compact practical toolkit for meeting anger and craving as they arise, rather than a single sustained argument.

Key terms