• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

739 See nn.588–89.

SUTTA 75

740 Bhūnahuno. In Ms, Ñm had rendered this cryptic expression “a wrecker of being.” I follow Horner in translating after the commentarial gloss hatavaḍḍhino mariyādakārakassa . MA explains that he held the view that “growth” should be accomplished in the six senses by experiencing whatever sense objects one has never experienced before without clinging to those that are already familiar. His view thus seems close to the contemporary attitude that intensity and variety of experience is the ultimate good and should be pursued without inhibitions or restrictions. The reason for his disapproval of the Buddha will become clear in §8.

741 MA glosses the term nippurisa, lit. “non-men,” as meaning that they were all women. Not only the musicians, but all posts in the palace, including the door-keepers, were filled by women. His father, the king, had provided him with three palaces and the entourage of women in hopes of keeping him confined to the lay life and distracting him from thoughts of renunciation.

742 MA: This is said referring to the attainment of the fruit of arahantship based on the fourth jhāna.

743 The expression viparı̄tasaññā alludes to the “perverted perception” (saññāvipallāsa) of perceiving pleasure in what is really painful. MṬ says that sensual pleasures are painful because they arouse the painful defilements and because they yield painful fruits in the future. Horner misses the point by translating the line “(they may) receive a change of sensation and think it pleasant” (MLS 2:187).

744 Māgandiya evidently understands the verse in line with the fifty-eighth wrong view of the Brahmajāla Sutta: “When this self, furnished and supplied with the five strands of sense pleasures, revels in them—at this point the self attains supreme Nibbāna here and now” (DN 1.3.20/i.36).

745 MA: The full verse had been recited by the previous Buddhas seated in the midst of their fourfold assemblies. The multitude learned it as “a verse concerned with the good.” After the last Buddha passed away, it spread among the wanderers, who were able to preserve only the first two lines in their books.

746 The emphatic yeva, “just,” implies that he was clinging to material form, feeling, etc., misconceived to be “I,” “mine,” and “my self.” With the arising of vision—a metaphorical expression for the path of stream-entry—identity view is eradicated and he understands the aggregates to be mere empty phenomena devoid of the selfhood that he had earlier imputed to them.

747 “These” refers to the five aggregates.

SUTTA 76

748 Tiracchānakathā. Many translators render this expression as “animal talk.” However, tiracchāna means literally “going horizontally,” and though this term is used as a designation for animals, MA explains that in the present context it means talk that goes “horizontally” or “perpendicularly” to the path leading to heaven and liberation.

749 The “four ways that negate the living of the holy life” (abrahmacariyavāsā, lit. “ways that are not living the holy life”) are teachings that in principle nullify the prospect of attaining the ultimate fruits of spiritual discipline. As the sutta will show, their proponents—inconsistently with their own principles—did observe celibacy and practise austerities. The “four kinds of holy life without consolation” (anassāsikāni brahmacariyāni) do not undermine the principles of the holy life, but they fail to offer the prospect of attaining the ultimate fruits of spiritual discipline.

750 The following passage makes explicit the materialist premises of the nihilistic view already set forth at MN 60.7. The Sāmaññaphala Sutta ascribes this view to Ajita Kesakambalin (DN 2.23/i.55).

751 The point seems to be that even if one does not live the holy life, one ultimately reaps the same rewards as one who does, as the rest of the passage will make clear.

752 In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta the view that follows, as far as “the space