Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Fights, quarrels, arguments, and disputes in the Saṅgha trace back to a mendicant explaining the same five things wrongly: the teaching, the training, and what the Realized One said, practiced, and prescribed, each explained as its opposite.
The same list, a third time, reframed
This is not a new list: it is AN 10.37's ten grounds for schism, transplanted into a new question. Where AN 10.37 asked what counts as schism, this discourse asks what causes ordinary discord short of a full split — the same distortion, read at a smaller scale.
A puzzling chapter title
Unusually for this nipāta, the chapter this discourse opens is named for a word that does not occur in it: Akkosavagga, the Chapter on Abuse. None of the ten discourses that follow is actually about abuse or reviling, by title or by content; the source gives no explanation, and this guide records the mismatch rather than inventing one.
Setting up two more repeats
The same five-reversal list will appear again, nearly unchanged, in AN 10.42, before AN 10.43 finally varies the pattern with a genuinely different list of ten roots of dispute, this time about disciplinary offenses rather than doctrine.
Key terms
The text
Upāli's question
§1Then Venerable Upāli went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him: “What is the cause, sir, what is the reason, why fights, quarrels, arguments, and disputes arise in the Saṅgha, and the mendicants don’t live happily?”
The cause of dispute
§2“Upāli, it’s when a mendicant explains what is not the teaching as the teaching, and what is the teaching as not the teaching. They explain what is not the training as the training, and what is the training as not the training. They explain what was not spoken and stated by the Realized One as spoken and stated by the Realized One, and what was spoken and stated by the Realized One as not spoken and stated by the Realized One. They explain what was not practiced by the Realized One as practiced by the Realized One, and what was practiced by the Realized One as not practiced by the Realized One. They explain what was not prescribed by the Realized One as prescribed by the Realized One, and what was prescribed by the Realized One as not prescribed by the Realized One. This is the cause, this is the reason why fights, quarrels, arguments, and disputes arise in the Saṅgha, and the mendicants don’t live happily.”
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