SN 1.4Time Flies
Pāli / Sanskrit:Accentisutta
Time flies, so we should drop the world’s bait.
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– Chapter 1: Linked Discourses with Deities
– I: A Reed
1.4. Time Flies
… The occasion was at (Sāvatthi); standing to one side, that deity recited this verse in the presence of the Blessed One:
Time passes silently,
The days and nights move on,
The stages of youth
Keep leaving us behind.
Whoever contemplates
This peril of death
Should perform meritorious deeds
That lead to true happiness.
(The Blessed One):
Time passes silently,
The days and nights move on,
The stages of youth
Keep leaving us behind.
Whoever contemplates
This peril of death
Should abandon every worldly lure,
With the mind intent on peace.
These discourses were translated into Vietnamese by Venerable Thích Minh Châu and published by Vạn Hạnh Meditation Monastery in the early 1980s. Later, as part of the Vietnamese Buddhist Canon translation and publication program, the collection was reprinted in 1993 and assigned sequence numbers 12 through 16.
Prepared for SuttaCentral by Blake Walsh .
The “…” is an abbreviation carried over from the Pāli original itself, called peyyāla. The early canon was memorized and recited, so passages repeated verbatim from a preceding discourse were commonly contracted to an elision mark rather than written out in full. Venerable Thích Minh Châu's translation preserves this convention. Some texts therefore look short — but that is the canonical form, not missing content or a truncated translation. The elided passages can be read in full in the preceding discourses of the same chapter.
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