In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [227]
7 Ps: The four deities were the Four Great Kings (i.e., the presiding deities of the heaven of the Four Great Kings).
8 Ps explains each aspect of this event as a foretoken of the Buddha’s later attainments. Thus, his standing with his feet (pāda) firmly on the ground was a foretoken of his attaining the four bases for spiritual power (iddhipāda); his facing the north, of his going above and beyond the multitude; his seven steps, of his acquiring the seven enlightenment factors; the white parasol, of his acquiring the parasol of liberation; his surveying the quarters, of his acquiring the unobstructed knowledge of omniscience; his uttering the words of the “leader of the herd” (an epithet for an eminent person), of his setting in motion the irreversible wheel of the Dhamma; his statement “This is my last birth,” of his passing away into the Nibbāna element with no residue remaining (see Text IX,5(5)).
9 This statement seems to be the Buddha’s way of calling attention to the quality he regarded as the true wonder and marvel.
10 In the unabridged version of this text, gold and silver are excluded from the things subject to sickness, death, and sorrow, but they are subject to defilement, according to Ps, because they can be alloyed with metals of lesser worth.
11 Ākiñcaññāyatana. This is the third formless meditative attainment; preceded by the four jhānas, it is the seventh of the eight attainments (samāpatti) in the scale of concentration. These attainments, though spiritually exalted, are still mundane and, divorced from insight, are not directly conducive to Nibbāna.
12 That is, it leads to rebirth in the plane of existence called the base of nothingness, the objective counterpart of the seventh meditative attainment. Here the lifespan is said to be 60,000 eons, but when that has elapsed one must pass away and return to a lower world. Thus one who attains this is still not free from birth and death.
13 N’eva saññānāsaññāyatana. This is the fourth and highest formless attainment. It should be noted that Uddaka Rāmaputta is Rāma’s son (putta), not Rāma himself. The text gives the impression that while Rāma had attained the base of neither-perception-nor-nonperception, Uddaka himself had not done so. The attainment of this base leads to rebirth in the base of neither-perception-nor-nonperception, the highest plane of rebirth in saṃsāra. The lifespan there is said to be 84,000 eons, but being conditioned and impermanent, it is still ultimately unsatisfactory.
14 Text II,3(2) continues from this point with an extended account of the Bodhisatta’s extreme ascetic practices followed by his discovery of the middle way.
15 Saccaka was a debater whom, on an earlier occasion, the Buddha had defeated in a discussion. Aggivessana, the name by which the Buddha addresses him just below, is probably his clan name. The present discourse begins with a discussion about pleasant and painful feeling, which gives the cue for Saccaka to pose these questions to the Buddha.
16 It is puzzling that in the following paragraphs the Bodhisatta is shown engaging in self-mortification after he comes to the conclusion—in this passage—that such practices are useless for the attainment of enlightenment. This anomaly raises a suspicion that the narrative sequence of the sutta has become jumbled. The appropriate place for the simile of the fire-sticks, it seems, would be at the end of the Bodhisatta’s period of ascetic experimentation, when he has acquired a sound basis for rejecting self-mortification as a way to enlightenment.
17 This sentence, repeated at the end of each of the following sections as well, answers the second of the two questions posed by Saccaka in §11.
18 Ps explains that when the Bodhisatta was a child, his father brought him along to attend the ceremonial