Psalms of the Brethren CCXLVI: Anna-Kondanna

Hearing thy doctrine’s mighty properties,
Lo! I thereby am more than satisfied.
Most passionless and pure the Norm thus taught,
From every form of grasping wholly free.

Many the motley pictures in the world,
Enjoyed within this earth’s circumference,
Inciting, I do note, man’s purposes,
Fair-seeming hopes, and linked with fierce desire.

As dust by wind upchurned the rain-cloud lays,
So are those purposes composed and quenched,
When he by wisdom doth discern and see.

When he by wisdom doth discern and see:
‘Impermanent is everything in life,’
Then he at all this suffering feels disgust.
Lo! herein lies the way to purity.

When he by wisdom doth discern and see,
That ‘Everything in life is bound to Ill’ . . .

That ‘Everything in life is Void of Soul,’
Then he at all this suffering feels disgust.
Lo! herein lies the way to purity.

Brother Kondanna, wakened by the Wake: —
Lo! he hath passed with vigour out and on;
Sloughed off hath he the dyings and the births,
Wholly accomplishing the life sublime.

And be it ‘flood’ or ‘snare’ or ‘stumbling-stone,’
Or be it ‘mountain’ hard to rive in twain,
The net, the stumbling-stone I’ve hacked away,
And cloven is the rock so hard to break,
And crossed the flood. Rapt in ecstatic thought
I dwell, from bondage unto evil freed.

A bhikkhu of distraught, unsteady mind,
Who doth associate with vicious friends,
In the great flood [of constant living] falls
Headlong and drowning sinks beneath its waves.

But who, with concentrated, steady mind,
Discreet and self-restrained in heart and sense,
Doth wisely join himself to virtuous friends,
His it may be to put an end to Ill.

Lo! here a man with worn and pallid frame;
Like knotted stems of cane his joints, and sharp
Th’ emaciated network of his veins;
In food and drink austerely temperate,
His spirit neither crushed nor desolate.

In the great forest, in the mighty woods,
Touched though I be by gadfly and by gnat,
I yet would roam, like warrior-elephant,
In van of battle, mindful, vigilant.

With thought of death I dally not, nor yet
Delight in living. I await the hour
Like any hireling who hath done his task.

With thought of death I dally not, nor yet
Delight in living. I await the hour
With mind discerning and with heedfulness.

The Master hath my fealty and love,
And all the Buddha’s bidding hath been done.
Low have I laid the heavy load I bore,
Cause for rebirth is found in me no more.

The Good for which I bade the world farewell,
And left the home to lead the homeless life,
That highest Good have I accomplished.
What need have I as cenobite to dwell?