The Ascetic Who Refuses Gifts
Two excerpts from Sīlaniddesa's quietly cynical portrait of a monk whose showy renunciation is, in fact, a fundraising strategy: refuse gifts publicly to build a reputation for contentment, then accept ever-more-lavish ones "purely out of compassion for the giver." Nothing he says is false — which is exactly the text's point.
Excerpt 1: What the Householders Are Made to Think
The monk calculates that refusing gifts will make donors think exactly this — quoted here as their imagined inner speech, using the same conditional pattern this reading focuses on.
"...aho ayyo appiccho na kiñci paṭiggaṇhituṃ icchati, suladdhaṃ vata no assa sace appamattakampi kiñci paṭiggaṇheyyā"ti.
"...oh, our master wants so little that he won't accept anything at all — how fortunate we would truly be if he would accept even some small thing."
Excerpt 2: The Ideal Ascetic's Own Words
The monk's rhetorical questions about robes, food, and lodging — each one answered with a prescriptive "an ascetic should..." built entirely from optatives, a different sense of the same mood from Excerpt 1's conditional.
"Kiṃ samaṇassa mahagghena cīvarena, etaṃ sāruppaṃ yaṃ samaṇo susānā vā saṅkārakūṭā vā pāpaṇikā vā nantakāni uccinitvā saṅghāṭiṃ katvā dhāreyya."
"What use has an ascetic for an expensive robe? This alone is fitting: that an ascetic should gather rags from a charnel ground, a rubbish-heap, or a shop-front, make them into a patched robe, and wear that."
The full canonical citation repeats this exact pattern four times — robe, almsfood, lodging, medicine — each with its own optative (dhāreyya, kappeyya, kareyya) and each abbreviated in the source text with "…pe…," a standard Pāli convention (called peyyāla) marking "and so on, repeat the pattern" rather than an editorial omission on our part. You'll meet "…pe…" constantly in canonical prose; it always means the reader is expected to supply the obvious repetition themselves.
Later in this same passage, the monk's guilt-trip about merit uses the future tense twice in a row — bhavissanti, "[you] will become/be" and, just before it, paṭiggahessāmi, "I will accept," negated and contracted with a preceding word: sace + ahaṃ → sacehaṃ, "if I..." This is the same vowel-elision family as Lesson 15's kāni+assa, just running in the other direction — here it's the second word's short initial vowel (ahaṃ's a-) that drops, not the first word's final vowel. Sandhi always drops a short vowel at the seam; which of the two words loses it depends on the specific pair.
Continuing From Here
Future readings will keep drawing new passages from Sīlaniddesa, and later from Chapter 2 as that translation develops.