Tomás Morales y Durán
Published: 2024-03-31
Total Pages: 185
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The sixth book of the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the Collection of the Numbered Discourses of the Buddha, collects 649 suttas or discourses whose subject matter is almost always centered on groups of six topics. And I say almost always, because there are not many topics in the texts of six elements, so many are forced as in the case of chapter 11 called triads because they are just that, triads. And well, since three plus three is six... two triads are put in and we have, supposedly, a sextet ready to be included in the Book of Sixes. But we will also see that six is made by adding one to five, or two to a group of four... In AN 6.29 he talks all the time about five things and ends up adding another to complete the six. Although this book also contains suttas to be read, except for the final Mātikās contained in the last chapters, its content remains uninteresting. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Anguttara Nikaya bases its popularity on its traditionally terrible translations that force the reader to go about inventing extrapolations to help him skip abstruse paragraphs, providing that undefined mysterious halo of the abstract. In the section of anecdotal suttas, we have AN 6.42 with Nāgita. In it the Buddha rants against fame and its drawbacks, such as the difficulty of being able to shit or pee in peace, with five hundred followers who do not stop following you wherever you go. We can highlight AN 6.18 A fish merchant where the Buddha exposes professions where his cruelty is not even economically compensated. AN 6.60 with Hatthisāriputta denounces the danger of teaching jhānas to people who are not going to pawn them for enlightenment. Finally, the group from AN 6.92 to AN 6.93 called Things that cannot be done, where obviousness is exposed, such as that it is absurd for someone with the correct belief to think of taking as a teacher someone who is not a Tataghata. Interestingly, this book lacks false suttas. In short, we are still engaged in an arduous and exhaustive work of research and reconstruction in comparative linguistics to unravel some texts without much interest.
