The Girimananda Sutta: Ten Perceptions for the Sick

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 7 September 2026

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The Girimananda Sutta is discourse 60 of the Book of Tens in the Aṅguttara Nikāya (AN 10.60). The monk Girimānanda lies gravely ill, and the Buddha answers not by going to him but by giving Ānanda ten perceptions to recite at his bedside. This page gives all ten in the discourse’s own words.

The discourse is offered here as it stands in the canon, for reading and reflection. It is not medical advice and nothing on this page should be used in place of a doctor’s care.

What is the Girimananda Sutta?

AN 10.60 sits in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the “numbered discourses” of the Pāli Canon, where texts are gathered by how many items they list — so a discourse of ten belongs to the Book of Tens. Its Pali title is Girimānandasutta, and SuttaCentral places it in the chapter called Sacittavagga, “Your Own Mind”.

It is short, and almost all of it is a list. What the ten perceptions mean is doctrine held elsewhere on this site — impermanence, not-self, the five aggregates. This page gives the text, its setting, and what it does and does not claim.

Who was Girimananda?

The discourse says nothing about him beyond his name and his illness. Five verses under that name survive in the Theragāthā, the Verses of the Senior Monks, and they are about weather:

The verse repeats five times, changing one phrase each round: peaceful, then my mind at peace, then free of greed, of hate, of delusion. It is a poem of self-sufficiency — a monk who needs nothing and can dare the sky to do its worst. AN 10.60 shows the same man at the other pole: too ill to sit, dependent on another’s voice.

How the discourse opens: Ananda asks, the Buddha redirects

The Pali is ābādhiko hoti dukkhito bāḷhagilāno — afflicted, in pain, severely sick. The phrase recurs across the canon whenever someone is gravely ill, and it is all the diagnosis we get: the discourse never names the illness, dates it, or says whether Girimānanda was old or young. Nor does it say where he lay; the only place named is the Buddha’s own, in the standard setting formula.

Ānanda asks for a visit. The Pali phrase is anukampaṁ upādāya, “taking up compassion”, the idiom used across the canon for doing something purely for another’s sake. Ānanda served as the Buddha’s attendant for his last twenty-five years, and interceding on another’s behalf is characteristic of the role.

The answer is a redirection, and the qualifier in it matters. Ṭhānaṁ kho panetaṁ vijjati means “this possibility exists”; the verb that follows is in the optative, paṭippassambheyya, “might subside”. The Buddha states a possibility, not a promise, and offers words rather than a visit. Why, the discourse does not say — nor whether he ever went.

The ten perceptions, in the discourse’s own words

Saññā, “perception”, is the third of the five aggregates — the mind’s work of recognising and labelling. Note that the tenth item is not a saññā at all: it is ānāpānassati, mindfulness of breathing, and it is by far the longest of the ten.

1. The perception of impermanence

Wilderness, tree root, empty hut: this formula opens six of the ten, and it sits oddly here. These are places a healthy monk walks to; the man who was to hear the list could go to none of them. The ten are to be recited to him, not performed by him.

2. The perception of not-self

The frame changes. The first perception took the five aggregates; this one takes the six āyatana, sense fields, counted as six inner faculties and their six outer objects. Twelve items, each named and each denied: anattā, not-self. The mind, mano, is listed as a sense among the others, not as the one doing the looking.

3. The perception of ugliness

Asubha, here “ugliness”, is more literally “the not-beautiful”. What follows is an inventory of thirty-one parts, from head hair to urine, in wording identical — in Sujato’s English, word for word — to the list in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta at MN 10. The discourse offers no rationale: it says only that the mendicant so meditates observing ugliness in this body, and moves on.

4. The perception of drawbacks

This is the strangest thing in the discourse: a catalogue of diseases, sent to a man who has one. Two details repay attention. It ends with cold, heat, hunger, thirst and the two excretions — ordinary bodily need on the same footing as leprosy. And the causes are plural: weather, neglect, exertion, the humours, and past deeds. Illness is not laid at kamma’s door alone.

5. The perception of giving up

Pahāna, giving up — one of the four items that drop the wilderness formula: it happens wherever the thought turns up. Sujato compresses what the Pali spells out four times over — once each for sensual, malicious and cruel thoughts, then once for bad, unskilful qualities in general — with the same four escalating verbs every round: pajahati, vinodeti, byantīkaroti, anabhāvaṁ gameti, abandon, dispel, finish off, make cease to be.

6. The perception of fading away

Virāga is literally de-colouring, the fading of a dye; the canon uses it for the fading of desire. “All attachments” renders sabbūpadhi, the whole apparatus a life is propped on. “Extinguishment” is nibbāna (nirvana): the sixth and seventh perceptions are the only two of the ten in which the goal is named outright.

7. The perception of cessation

One word apart. The sixth reflection ends taṇhākkhayo virāgo nibbānaṁ, the seventh taṇhākkhayo nirodho nibbānaṁ: fading away becomes cessation, nirodho, the same term as in the third of the four noble truths. Recited aloud, the two are heard as one line said twice with a single word changed.

8. The perception of dissatisfaction with the whole world

Three Pali nouns are stacked here — adhiṭṭhāna, abhinivesa, anusaya: what the mind plants itself on, what it insists upon, and what lies dormant beneath both. The last, anusaya, is the technical term for tendencies that persist below awareness. “World” translates loka, and the sentence defines it by the mind’s own attachments rather than by anything geographical.

9. The perception of the impermanence of all conditions

The heading and the definition do not obviously match: one says impermanence, the other describes revulsion. The Pali as SuttaCentral prints it reads sabbasaṅkhāresu anicchāsaññā, from anicchā, “not wanting”, rather than anicca, “impermanent”. Translators divide on it, and the table below shows how.

10. Mindfulness of breathing

From here the discourse quotes the sixteen steps of breath meditation in full, in the same order and — in Sujato’s English — word for word as in the Anapanasati Sutta at MN 118, which sets out their four-tetrad structure. AN 10.60 is one of several places the sixteen recur; it adds no commentary of its own, so read the steps on that page.

How the translations differ

Three English versions are in wide use, and they part company in ways that change the text’s tone.

The fifth row is a genuine disagreement about the Pali. Ṭhānissaro follows anicchā, un-wishing, which fits the sentence that defines the perception; Sujato and Piyadassi both give impermanence, which answers to anicca.

The last row is the one to read most carefully. Paṭippassambhati is built on passambh-, the root the discourse itself uses inside the breathing steps, where Sujato renders it “stilling the physical process”. “Died down” and “allayed” stay close to that; “cured” imports a medical claim the Pali verb does not carry.

Did Girimananda recover?

That is what the discourse reports — and it is worth being exact about what it does not: no illness named, no timescale beyond “on the spot”, no mechanism. The Buddha’s own framing, which the text repeats immediately before Ānanda sets out, was conditional. This is an account of one monk, told in the idiom of a tradition that also records the Buddha and his senior disciples falling ill, being nursed, and dying.

So read these ten as reflection, the way the tradition itself offers them, and not as a treatment. Buddhist practice can sit alongside medical care and change how illness is met; the site’s page on Buddhism and illness sets out that distinction, and the second arrow is the teaching behind it. If you or someone you love is unwell, see a doctor, and let anything here keep company with that care rather than delay it.

Why the Girimananda Sutta is chanted for the sick

In Theravāda Sri Lanka the discourse belongs to a working liturgy. It stands as item 15 in The Book of Protection, Piyadassi Thera’s translation of the Pirit Potha or Catubhāṇavāra, the paritta anthology he calls the most widely known Pali book in the country. Paritta means protection, and the collection gathers discourses recited for blessing and safety — the Maṅgala Sutta and Metta Sutta among them.

Piyadassi describes monks being invited to homes to recite “on occasions of domestic importance, such as birth days, house-warming, illness, and similar events”, and notes that the Buddha “requested others to recite paritta for his own disciples when they were ill” — a remark he footnotes to the Girimānanda Sutta itself. AN 10.60 is close to that practice’s charter text: a discourse whose own frame story is a recitation at a sickbed. See Buddhist chanting for how a paritta recital is conducted.

The discourse outside the Pali canon

AN 10.60 is not confined to Theravāda. SuttaCentral lists a full parallel in the Tibetan canon: Degé 38, whose header gives the Sanskrit title Giri-ānanda-sūtra. The Tibetan text opens on the same scene — Giri-ānanda gravely ill, Ānanda asking the Buddha to go to him out of compassion, the Buddha sending Ānanda to teach ten perceptions instead — and enumerates the same ten in the same order. It is a quiet vote in the argument above, too: its ninth item is ‘du byed thams cad la mi rtag pa’i ‘du shes, impermanence in all conditioned things, siding with Sujato and Piyadassi against Ṭhānissaro’s anicchā.

Read the whole discourse

This page quotes one translation and passes over the sixteen breathing steps. Read the discourse whole in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation on SuttaCentral, public domain (CC0), or compare Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s and Piyadassi Thera’s on Access to Insight. For the collection see the Buddhist scriptures; for the sixteen steps, the Anapanasati Sutta; for the doctrine, anicca, anatta and the three marks of existence.