Reading guide
Success as a problem
This heartfelt saying is unusual among the ten in this chapter because its trigger isn’t suffering, grief, or a chance encounter — it’s success. The Buddha and the mendicant Saṅgha are, the text says plainly, “honored, respected, revered, venerated, and esteemed,” and well provided with robes, almsfood, lodging, and medicine. Wanderers who follow other religious paths receive none of this. Rather than simply describing an imbalance, the text goes on to its consequence: those wanderers, “unable to bear the esteem of the mendicant Saṅgha,” turn to abuse — insulting, harassing, and troubling mendicants wherever they find them, in village or wilderness.
Reported, not asked about
Several mendicants bring this to the Buddha directly, simply telling him what has been happening. There’s no question posed — no “what should we do,” no request for a strategy for dealing with hostile rivals. The Buddha’s heartfelt saying that follows isn’t operational advice about handling harassment; it’s addressed to something underneath the situation entirely.
Contact, not ownership
The verse doesn’t tell mendicants how to respond to the wanderers’ hostility. It reframes what “being struck” even is. Being honored is a kind of contact; being abused is another. The verse’s instruction is to regard neither “as self or alien” — not to claim it as confirmation of who you are, and not to treat the person delivering it as simply an enemy to be resisted. What makes any contact — praise or blame, esteem or abuse — land with force is attachment (upadhi); remove that, and the verse asks, rhetorically, how contact could still strike at all.
The pattern the story sets up
The surrounding narrative gives the abstract verse its edge. It would be easy to read “regard it not as self or alien” as detached advice from a position of comfort, but the frame makes clear the Buddha’s own community is the one currently on the receiving end of both extremes — first great esteem, then, indirectly, the resentment it provokes in others. The teaching isn’t offered from outside the situation; it’s offered from inside it.
Key terms
The text
§1.1–1.6So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. Now at that time the Buddha was honored, respected, revered, venerated, and esteemed. And he received robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicines and supplies for the sick. And the mendicant Saṅgha was also honored, respected, revered, venerated, and esteemed. And they received robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicines and supplies for the sick. But the wanderers who followed other religions were not honored, respected, revered, venerated, and esteemed. And they didn’t receive robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicines and supplies for the sick. Then those wanderers who followed other religions, unable to bear the esteem of the mendicant Sangha, abused, attacked, harassed, and troubled the mendicants in the village and the wilderness.
§2.1Then several mendicants went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and told him what had happened.
§3.1Then, understanding this matter, on that occasion the Buddha expressed this heartfelt sentiment:
§4.1–4.4“When struck by pleasure and pain in the village or wilderness, regard it not as self or alien. Contacts strike because of attachment; how would contacts strike one free of attachment?”
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