Greed, Abbreviated

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Whatever the defilement and whatever you want done to it, the answer is serenity and discernment.

The multiplication

Seventeen items: greed, hate, delusion, anger, acrimony, disdain, contempt, jealousy, stinginess, deceit, deviousness, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence. The first three are the root defilements; the next ten are the five pairs from the Kodhapeyyāla; the last four are a cluster around self-regard, closing on negligence, which the Ones treated at length.

Ten operations: abhiññā insight into, pariññā complete understanding of, parikkhaya finishing, pahāna giving up, khaya ending, vaya vanishing, virāga fading away, nirodha cessation, cāga giving away, paṭinissagga letting go.

Those ten are not stages, and reading them as a sequence is a mistake worth avoiding. They are ten ways of naming what happens to a defilement when it goes, ordered roughly from the cognitive to the volitional — knowing it, understanding it, its exhaustion, your relinquishing of it. The Aṅguttara covers the ground by enumeration rather than by definition, as it does everywhere.

Why the answer never changes

A hundred and seventy discourses with one answer is a strong claim, and it is worth stating what it amounts to. It is not that serenity and discernment are useful for these things. It is that there is no defilement on the list, and no operation on the list, that requires anything else.

That closes off a possibility a practitioner might reasonably entertain: that different faults need different remedies. The Ones spent a chapter doing exactly that for the five hindrances — the feature of ugliness for sensual desire, love for ill will, energy for dullness. This chapter says that at the level of what actually removes a defilement rather than what counters it in the moment, the toolkit has two items.

AN 2.31 gave the mechanism, and it explains the invariance. Serenity develops the mind, and a developed mind gives up greed; discernment develops wisdom, and developed wisdom gives up ignorance. Every item on the seventeen is a form of one or the other, or of both, so the two remedies exhaust the field. A one-line chapter would have said so. This one says so a hundred and seventy times.

The colophon

The chapter, and the Book of the Twos, closes with the standard formula: that is what the Buddha said. Satisfied, the mendicants approved what the Buddha said. The Book of the Twos is finished.

Unlike the Ones, the Twos do not append a disputed count of their own discourses. Modern editions number them to four hundred and seventy-nine, which is itself a figure produced by choosing how to expand the four abbreviated chapters that close the book — the same counting question the Ones’ colophon raised. Nineteen chapters, and the last four of them hold more than half the total.

That proportion is worth carrying forward into the Threes. The Aṅguttara grows by multiplication as much as by composition, and a reader who expects each nipāta to consist of discourses like AN 2.15 or AN 2.33 will be surprised by how much of it looks like this page instead.

What to do with it

Practically, nothing — and that is a legitimate answer for one chapter in nineteen. The seventeen items are worth reading once as a list, because several of them (thambha, obstinacy; sārambha, aggression; mada, vanity) do not appear elsewhere in the first two nipātas and are useful words to have.

And the invariance is worth noticing once. A reader who has come this far through the Twos has met a great many pairs. The book ends by naming one pair and applying it to everything, which is as close to a summary as a collection organized by number can give.

Key terms