The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [572]
189 The idiom yathābhataṁ nikkhitto evaṁ niraye is knotty; the rendering here follows the commentary: “He will be put in hell as if carried off and put there by the wardens of hell.”
190 In later Buddhist tradition the asuras, titans or “anti-gods,” are added as a separate realm to make six destinations.
191 MA: Even though the description is the same as that of the bliss of the heavenly world, the meaning is different. For the bliss of the heavenly world is not really extremely pleasant because the fevers of lust, etc., are still present there. But the bliss of Nibbāna is extremely pleasant in every way through the subsiding of all fevers.
192 At this juncture, MA informs us, the Buddha related this account of his past ascetic practices because Sunakkhatta was a great admirer of extreme asceticism (as the Pāṭika Sutta shows) and the Buddha wanted to make it known that there was no one who could equal him in the practice of austerities. The passages to follow should be collated with MN 4.20 and MN 36.20–30 for a fuller picture of the Bodhisatta’s experiment with the extreme of self-mortification.
193 The idea seems to be that his pity was directed, not towards the microbes in a drop of water (as the rendering in the first edition implied), but towards the creatures that might be hurt or killed by carelessly discarded water.
194 MA says that the “eight-days period of snowfall” (antaraṭṭhaka himapātasamaya) occurs over the last four days of the month Magha and the first four days of the month Phagguna (i.e., in late February). However, the cold period in South Asia typically falls in late December or early January.
195 That is, they hold the view that beings are purified by special diets and reduced intake of food.
196 Rebirth into the Pure Abodes (suddhāvāsa) is possible only for non-returners.
197 The Pali for the four terms is: sati, gati, dhiti, paññāveyyattiya. MA explains sati as the ability to grasp in mind a hundred or a thousand phrases as they are being spoken; gati as the ability to bind them and retain them in the mind; dhiti as the ability to recite back what has been grasped and retained; and paññāveyyattiya as the ability to discern the meaning and logic of those phrases.
198 Ven. Nāgasamāla had been a personal attendant of the Buddha during the first twenty years of his ministry.
199 Lomahaṁsanapariyāya. The sutta is referred to by that name at Miln 398 and in the commentary to the Dı̄gha Nikāya.
SUTTA 13
200 MA: “Full understanding” (pariññā) here means overcoming (samatikkama) or abandoning (pahāna). The wanderers of other sects identify the full understanding of sensual pleasures with the first jhāna, the full understanding of material form with the immaterial planes of being, and the full understanding of feelings with the impercipient plane of being. The Buddha, in contrast, describes the full understanding of sensual pleasures as the path of the non-returner, and the full understanding of both material form and feelings as the path of arahantship.
201 MA gives a graphic description of each of these forms of torture.
202 It should be noted that while the previous dangers in sensual pleasures were called “a mass of suffering visible here and now” (sandiṭṭhiko dukkhakkhandho), this one is called “a mass of suffering in the life to come” (samparāyiko dukkhakkhandho).
203 MA says that Nibbāna is the removal and abandonment of desire and lust for sensual pleasures, for in dependence on Nibbāna, desire and lust are removed and abandoned. It might also be taken to include the path of the non-returner, which accomplishes the abandoning of desire and lust for sensual pleasures.
204 To expose the danger in feelings, the Buddha chooses the most refined and exalted type of mundane pleasure, the bliss and peacefulness of the jhānas, and shows that even those states are impermanent and therefore unsatisfactory.