Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Both formerly and now, what I teach is suffering and the cessation of suffering.”
The Buddha · Buddhism · Ancient · canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later
Part of:Ancient questions, modern life →
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that the teaching is a diagnosis and a way out, suffering and its cessation, not a theory of everything he is willing to chase. A competing reading notes that the canon also contains cosmology and debates he sometimes brackets, so the narrow brief is a refusal to wander, not a claim that no other sentence was ever taught. The line is in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 22. In the same discourse he compares misusing the teaching to grabbing a snake by the wrong end.
Did The Buddha really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. A standard English of a Pali canon sentence. It is 'the Buddha' as the canon presents him, not a modern motivational line, and not a contemporary stenographer's record.
Where it comes from
Majjhima Nikāya 22, Alagaddūpama Sutta
Approximate date: canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later.
How to use it
When a philosophy, including this one, starts explaining the whole cosmos in a comment thread, bring it back to the test he names: does it address suffering and its end in a life you can actually live? A clever cosmology that never meets that test has left the brief. The brief is allowed to be narrow.
A mindset reading
A narrow brief can be a strength. Not every interesting question is the question a practice is for. The habit is to ask what a teaching is for before you grade it as a system of the universe.
Understand the philosophy
The Buddha, as this discourse presents him, is answering people who use the teaching to win quarrels or to build views he will not underwrite. Suffering, dukkha, is the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned life, not only a dramatic pain. The four noble truths are the shape of the brief: suffering, origin, cessation, path. The snake image says a true teaching badly grasped still bites.
- meaning
- ethics
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that the teaching is a diagnosis and a way out, suffering and its cessation, not a theory of everything he is willing to chase. A competing reading notes that the canon also contains cosmology and debates he sometimes brackets, so the narrow brief is a refusal to wander, not a claim that no other sentence was ever taught. The line is in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 22. In the same discourse he compares misusing the teaching to grabbing a snake by the wrong end.
Did The Buddha really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. A standard English of a Pali canon sentence. It is 'the Buddha' as the canon presents him, not a modern motivational line, and not a contemporary stenographer's record.
Which work is it in?
Majjhima Nikāya 22, Alagaddūpama Sutta Approximate date: canonical discourse; oral tradition from the 5th–4th century BCE, written down centuries later.