Reading guide
Two Jentas, distinguished in the Pali title itself
This poem's Pali title, Purohitaputtajentattheragāthā, builds the disambiguation directly into the name: ‘Verses of the Elder Jenta, Son of the High Priest’. This distinguishes him explicitly from the unrelated Jenta of Thag 1.111, whose own poem opens Chapter Twelve of the Book of the Ones with a fourfold litany of hardship and shares only a name and, coincidentally, the same never-identified metre noted for Thag 6.2 earlier in this book — two separate coincidences involving the name Jenta, not one.
Conceit named three times over, in escalating specificity
The first three verses build from general intoxication (‘drunk with the pride of birth and wealth and authority... my own gorgeous body’) to comparative arrogance (‘no-one was my equal or my better’) to a specific, startling refusal: he wouldn't bow even to his own mother and father, ‘nor others esteemed as respectable’. The specificity increases with each verse, ending on the detail most likely to unsettle a listener.
A single sighting, described with solar imagery
The fourth verse narrates the turning point in a single image: ‘tapantamiva ādiccaṅ’, ‘shining like the sun’, describing the Buddha ‘at the fore of the mendicant Saṅgha’. No teaching is reported, no words exchanged — the sight itself is what dissolves conceit in the following verse.
Three grades of conceit, each named and cut off
The final verse doesn't simply say ‘conceit is gone’; it distinguishes three specific forms: atimāna (conceit of superiority), omāna (conceit of inferiority), and asmimāna, the subtle root conceit ‘I am’ that Buddhist psychology treats as the last to fall, even after other forms of pride have been abandoned. Naming all three distinguishes this poem's closing verse from the more generic conceit-abandonment language found elsewhere in this collection.
A structure built on reversal, not gradual practice
Unlike poems describing years of meditation practice toward realization, this poem's drama turns on a single encounter — conceit built up across three verses, then dissolved in one sighting and confirmed in one closing verse. The compression itself is part of the poem's rhetorical force.
Key terms
The text
§1I was drunk with the pride of birth and wealth and authority. I wandered about intoxicated with my own gorgeous body.
§2No-one was my equal or my better—or so I thought. I was such an arrogant fool, stuck up, waving my own flag.
§3I never paid homage to anyone: not even my mother or father, nor others esteemed as respectable. I was stiff with pride, lacking regard for others.
§4When I saw the foremost leader, the most excellent of charioteers, shining like the sun, at the fore of the mendicant Saṅgha,
§5I discarded conceit and vanity, and, with a clear and confident heart, I bowed down with my head to the most excellent of all beings.
§6The conceit of superiority and the conceit of inferiority have been given up and eradicated. The conceit “I am” is cut off, and every kind of conceit is destroyed.
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