Anger, Abbreviated

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Five pairs of faults do five bad things, and their opposites do five good ones.

How to read a peyyāla chapter

Peyyāla is the canonical convention for abbreviating repeated material: the varying terms are listed once with ellipses, and the reciter expands. This chapter is fifty discourses written as ten, and Sujato’s translation preserves the compression rather than unrolling it silently, which is why the paragraph numbers below cover five discourses each.

Expanding it takes about five times as long and is exactly as tedious as it sounds. The point is not to read fifty near-identical sentences but to see the shape: a fixed list of five items, multiplied by a fixed list of predicates. The Aṅguttara does this whenever it has a list it considers settled, and the compression is a sign that the material was regarded as reference rather than as teaching.

The five pairs

Kodha and upanāha: anger and acrimony. The flare, and the grudge that keeps it after the flare has gone. Naming them separately is the chapter’s best single move, because they behave differently — anger is loud and brief, acrimony is quiet and durable, and a person who has dealt with the first often has not touched the second.

Makkha and paḷāsa: disdain and contempt. Sujato’s rendering; the first is more usually “denigration” and involves refusing to acknowledge another’s worth or another’s help, and the second is a kind of rivalry that insists on parity with those above one. Both are about placing oneself relative to others.

Issā and macchariya: jealousy and stinginess. Again a pair that runs together and is worth separating — jealousy resents what someone else has, stinginess refuses to release what one has oneself. They are the same reflex pointed outward and inward.

Māyā and sāṭheyya: deceit and deviousness. Concealing what one is, and operating crookedly. And finally the absence of hiri and ottappa, the two bright things AN 2.7–9 said protect the world, which appear here as the fifth fault rather than as a separate category.

The five predicates

Each pair is run through: simply being named as two things (AN 2.180–189); living in suffering or happily (190–199); leading or not leading to the decline of a trainee (200–209); being placed in hell or heaven as if delivered there (210–219); and being reborn in a bad or good destination after death (220–229).

The last two look like duplicates and are not quite. “Placed as if delivered there” is the image of AN 1.43–44 in the Ones: something carried and set down, the destination following from the state of mind with no interval and no tribunal. The final pair is the ordinary rebirth formula. The chapter states the immediate consequence and the eventual one separately.

What the list is good for

As a teaching this chapter says nothing new. As an inventory it is unusually useful, because the pairs are not synonyms and the distinctions inside them are the kind a person cannot easily make for themselves.

Anyone can notice that they are angry. Noticing that the anger has gone and the acrimony has not is harder, and requires having been given the second word. The same for jealousy against stinginess, and for deceit against deviousness. The value of a list like this is that it hands over vocabulary, and vocabulary is what makes a state findable.

These five pairs also became a fixed set in the later tradition. The Abhidharma classifies most of them among the secondary defilements — 隨煩惱 — and the Abhidharmakośa, on this site, discusses several of them by name in exactly this grouping.

Key terms