The same observance, different intentions
A person living in a forest may be seeking seclusion. The same choice can also serve reputation or ambition. The Aṅguttara Nikāya’s discourse on five forest dwellers recognizes this difference. Among its examples is a forest dweller driven by bad desires; it commends one whose choice rests on fewness of wishes, contentment, and the purpose of the practice.[1]
This creates a precise problem for a meditation manual. If forest dwelling is an ascetic observance, does bad motivation make it an unwholesome ascetic practice? Or does that motivation mean that the outward act does not qualify as the practice in the first place? The answers can share an ethical judgment while defining the technical term differently.
A difficulty worth preserving
The Chinese Vimuttimagga, preserved as the Jietuo daolun, T1648, lists thirteen ascetic observances. Its discussion of their ethical classification is unusually compressed. One sentence says they should not be spoken of as wholesome, unwholesome, or indeterminate. The explanation that follows connects bad motivation with an adverse judgment, ending with the words 是故不善, “therefore unwholesome.”[2]
The tension matters. A tidy paraphrase can easily suppress one side of it. Is the opening statement about the observance considered by itself, while the later judgment concerns the person or the mind carrying it out? Is a necessary qualification compressed in the Chinese wording? These remain interpretive questions. Supplying a smooth answer is not the same as recovering a missing sentence.
When intention enters the definition
The Visuddhimagga makes a closely related distinction explicit. In its chapter on dhutaṅga, it objects both to an unwholesome ascetic practice and to placing the practice outside the ethical triad. Its technical account locates the practice in the intention of undertaking it. An outward description of behaviour and the manual’s definition of a purificatory practice therefore need not have the same scope.[3]
The comparison asks what the word names, as well as whether a motive is wholesome. It grew from our work on the Vimuttimagga and its parallels. The complete paper examines the Chinese passage alongside the Pāli argument, retaining the uncertainty of the received wording rather than treating a reconstructed Pāli sentence as independent evidence.
Sources for this opening
- Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.181, Āraññikasutta; five kinds of forest dweller. ↗
- 解脫道論 / Vimuttimagga, T1648, fascicle 2, T32.406b16–28; ethical classification and motivation. ↗
- Visuddhimagga II, CST numbered block 37, beginning Tattha kusalattikatoti; including samādānacetanā, the intention of undertaking. ↗
Chinese references use Taishō page, column, and line numbers. CST references use numbered blocks in the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana electronic Pāli edition. The textual passages have been checked; the interpretation is offered for discussion.
Discuss a source or suggest a correction ↗