Each sutta in the Tamnan is introduced by a verse of this kind, and this is the first of them. What such a verse does is say why the text that follows was needed — the occasion, not the content.

These introductions are not part of the suttas they precede. They are the tradition explaining its own collection to the people chanting it, which is a different kind of writing altogether.

The story is told in four lines, and it is a story about failure. For twelve years, beings together with their devas pondered what a blessing is; and though they pondered long, they never came to know.

The scale of the argument is then given, and it is deliberately absurd: throughout ten thousand world-systems an uproar arose over the question, reaching as far as the dwellings of the brahmās. The verse is making a point about how hard an apparently simple question turns out to be.

Then the resolution, in a single line — that which the Refuge of the World taught, the destroyer of all evil — and the handover. Twelve years of confusion have been built up in order to make the plain list that follows land as an answer rather than as advice.