Reading guide
A hungry question, a threefold answer
The opening verse is a plain complaint: the harvest is in, but the speaker has found no almsfood. What follows isn't practical advice about where to beg, but three short couplets, each recollecting one of the three refuges in turn — Buddha, Dhamma, Saṅgha — closing on the identical line, ‘your body soaked with rapture, you'll always be full of joy’. The anaphora (repeated structure across the three) mirrors the standard order of the three refuges themselves.
An irregular verse structure, unlike this book's norm
Where Thag 6.1 ran a clean six verses of four lines each, this poem's middle three verses (on the Buddha, the teaching, and the Saṅgha) are two-line couplets, not four-line verses — giving a total of eighteen translated lines rather than the book's baseline twenty-four. This is the first poem in the Book of the Sixes to depart from the standard form, and a reminder not to assume every poem in a book matches its opening poem's shape.
A metre that has never been identified
Sujato's comment on this poem's very first line notes: ‘This is one of the very few verses in the Pali Canon whose metre has not been identified.’ This echoes a similar note on Thag 1.111 (Jenta), elsewhere in this collection — a small, recurring reminder that even after centuries of philological study, some corners of this literature still resist full technical description.
Winter cold met with an appeal to happiness, not endurance
The fifth verse voices a second concern — cold winter nights spent in the open — and urges the speaker to come inside. The sixth verse answers not with agreement but with a different appeal entirely: the four immeasurable states (mettā, karuṇā, muditā, upekkhā), practiced so thoroughly that neither hunger nor cold can disturb the meditator's dwelling, whether indoors or out.
Two poems in, a book already showing real variety
Between Thag 6.1's clean, single-voice narration and this poem's dialogue-and-refrain structure, the Book of the Sixes is already demonstrating the same poem-to-poem variety seen across every earlier book in this collection — a reminder that ‘the Sixes’ describes a typical verse count, not a rigid template.
Key terms
The text
§1“The rice has been harvested and gathered on the threshing-floor—but I don’t get any almsfood! How will I get by?”
§2“In faith, recollect the immeasurable Buddha! Your body soaked with rapture, you’ll always be full of joy.
§3In faith, recollect the immeasurable teaching! Your body soaked with rapture, you’ll always be full of joy.
§4In faith, recollect the immeasurable Saṅgha! Your body soaked with rapture, you’ll always be full of joy.”
§5“You stay in the open, though these winter nights are cold. Don’t perish, overcome with cold; enter your dwelling, with door shut fast.”
§6“I’ll realize the four immeasurable states, and meditate happily in them. I won’t perish, overcome with cold; I’ll dwell unperturbed.”
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