WorkNāgārjuna

Letter to a Friend

Advice in verse to a king on living by the Buddha's teaching while holding power, from the choice of a wife to the fear of hell.

by Nāgārjuna19 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Suhṛllekha
Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

Yijing, a Chinese pilgrim to India in the seventh century, found this letter widely read and learnt by heart there. Its name, Suhṛllekha, means "friendly letter", and it is a poem of advice that Nāgārjuna, whom historians place in the second or third century CE, addressed to a king. Chinese sources name the king as one of the Sātavāhanas, an Indian royal house. The Sanskrit is lost; the letter survives in Tibetan and in three Chinese versions, one of them Yijing's own. Near its start the poem compares itself to a crudely carved wooden image of the Buddha, honoured for what it shows, not its workmanship. Its reader already knows the Buddha's teaching, and the letter tells him how to keep it while he rules: look at no other man's wife, avoid the kinds of wife who rob a household and cherish the kinds who keep one, give up wine and the other faults, and remember that in the long round of rebirth the mother of one life becomes the wife of the next. It describes the hells in detail, as the price of forgetting. Samuel Beal, a London professor of Chinese, translated it from Yijing's version; he died in 1889, and the book appeared in 1892, its title page naming the addressee "King Sadvaha". In this version the letter ends by wishing the king rebirth in the land of Amitābha, the Buddha of boundless light.

Key concepts

What are the three trainings the letter builds on?

They are moral conduct, meditation and wisdom, the three strands of Buddhist practice. The letter says that all the hundred and fifty-odd rules of the monks are gathered into these three, so a king who cannot keep a monk's rules can still train in what they are for. It closes by urging the same three as the road to a nirvana free of old age and death.

What are the four applications of mindfulness?

They are four steady meditations the letter asks the king to keep up: on the body as impure, on sensation as bringing pain, on thought as passing, and on the conditions of existence. Kept up, they show a person what they are actually made of. Without this right attention, the letter warns, every good thing a person has learned is swallowed up and forgotten.

Why does the letter call contentment the chief gain?

Because contentment is the one gain that does not bring new wants with it. Whoever practises it, the letter says, is rich even when poor, while a man who searches everywhere for possessions finds fresh cares arriving the moment he reaches his aim. For a king, whose means are almost limitless, this turns wealth from a measure of success into a test of desire.

What is merit, and why give wealth away to earn it?

Merit is the good that a generous or virtuous act stores up for a person's future lives. The letter grounds its advice to give on impermanence: wealth is not stable, so it should be given while it is in hand, to monks, to the poor and to brahmins, the priestly class. What is given away is not lost, it makes true friends in the life to come.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A King's Practice

A ruler has wealth, desire and power within reach every day. The letter asks how such a man keeps the Buddha's teaching, and measures the cost of forgetting it across many lives.

Nāgārjuna writes as a friend, not a debater: his reader already accepts the teaching and needs it applied to a palace. The advice is concrete, from giving wealth away while it lasts to shunning wine, gambling and other men's wives, and its motive is the long view of rebirth, in which a king may return as a slave and a mother as a wife. The hells are described at length because the stake is real to him: a human birth is rare and should not be wasted.

karma
rebirth
ethics
Buddhist ethics
impermanence
liberation
nirvana
meditation
mindfulness
wisdom
desire
craving
anger
suffering
merit
body
hell
hungry ghosts
animal suffering
peace of mind

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Within this work

passages held: 19
distinct concepts: 49
by passages held, corpus-wide: #786

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 23 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
karma	rebirth	4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

Letter to a Friend (Suhṛllekha) you are here EN
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā)
Nāgārjuna's main philosophical work, written as verse compressed for memorising and meant to be unpacked by a teacher — which is how this German version carries it, inside a commentary.
DE

— or open another of their works