Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Energy, modest wants, contentment, well-aimed attention, situational awareness, and the company you keep are the factors that decide whether skillful qualities grow in you or fall away — and each has an opposite that does the reverse.
A list that ignores the chapter divisions
The first thing to notice is that this chapter does not begin or end where its content does. AN 1.58–60, at the close of the previous chapter, already gave negligence, diligence, and laziness on this same template. AN 1.61 opens here with arousing energy, which is laziness’s missing partner. And AN 1.70 ends the chapter with bad friends, leaving good friends stranded at the start of the next one.
That is worth pointing out to students once and then not belaboring. The vagga divisions in the Ones are counts of roughly ten, imposed for recitation, not thematic units. The content runs straight through them. Reading a chapter of the Ones as though it were a composed essay produces confusion that reading it as a stretch of a list does not.
The nine pairs
Taken together with the entries on either side, the full list is: diligence against negligence, arousing energy against laziness, few wishes against many wishes, contentment against discontent, rational against irrational application of mind, situational awareness against its absence, good friends against bad, and pursuing good rather than bad habits. The Aṅguttara will return to this list several times over the next seventy entries, applying it to different questions each time.
Notice what is not on it. There is nothing about doctrinal correctness, nothing about ritual, nothing about how much one has studied or how long one has been ordained. Every item is either a disposition one can check in oneself in the present moment or a fact about one’s circumstances that one can change.
Few wishes and contentment are not the same thing
Appicchatā and santuṭṭhitā get separate pairs, and the distinction is worth keeping. Having few wishes is about the size of what one wants; contentment is about one’s relation to what one has already got. A person can want very little and still be dissatisfied with the little they have; a person can be genuinely content and still be acquiring more.
For lay students in particular, this is a more forgiving pair of ideas than it first sounds. Neither term requires poverty. Both describe a relationship to wanting rather than a quantity of possessions, which is why householders in the canon are praised for them as readily as monastics.
Sujato’s “situational awareness”
Sampajañña is usually Englished as “clear comprehension” or “clear knowing,” and Sujato’s “situational awareness” is a deliberate departure worth flagging in class. The older renderings are more literal and sound more contemplative; Sujato’s is borrowed from aviation and emergency response, and it captures something the literal versions can obscure — that sampajañña is practical and outward-facing, a matter of knowing what is going on and what one is doing in it, not of an inward glow of clarity.
Either rendering can be defended, and showing students both is more instructive than picking one. The pairing throughout the canon is with sati, mindfulness: remembering to attend, and knowing what one is attending to.
Ending on friendship
The chapter closes on bad friends, and the next opens on good ones. That placement is not accidental even if the chapter break is. Everything else in the list is interior — energy, wanting, attention, awareness — and friendship is the one factor on it that lives outside a person entirely. The collection will make that structural point explicitly later, at AN 1.98–113, where interior and exterior factors are separated and friendship turns out to be the whole of the exterior list.
Key terms
The text
Energy (AN 1.61)
§61“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or makes unskillful qualities decline like arousing energy. When you’re energetic, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline.”
Wanting and contentment (AN 1.62–65)
§62“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to unskillful qualities, or makes skillful qualities decline like having many wishes. When you have many wishes, unskillful qualities arise and skillful qualities decline.”
§63“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or makes unskillful qualities decline like having few wishes. When you have few wishes, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline.”
§64“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to unskillful qualities, or makes skillful qualities decline like lack of contentment. When you lack contentment, unskillful qualities arise and skillful qualities decline.”
§65“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or makes unskillful qualities decline like contentment. When you’re contented, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline.”
Attention and awareness (AN 1.66–69)
§66“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to unskillful qualities, or makes skillful qualities decline like irrational application of mind. When you apply the mind irrationally, unskillful qualities arise and skillful qualities decline.”
§67“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or makes unskillful qualities decline like rational application of mind. When you apply the mind rationally, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline.”
§68“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to unskillful qualities, or makes skillful qualities decline like lack of situational awareness. When you lack situational awareness, unskillful qualities arise and skillful qualities decline.”
§69“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to skillful qualities, or makes unskillful qualities decline like situational awareness. When you have situational awareness, skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities decline.”
Company (AN 1.70)
§70“Mendicants, I do not see a single thing that gives rise to unskillful qualities, or makes skillful qualities decline like bad friends. When you have bad friends, unskillful qualities arise and skillful qualities decline.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.