Fools, Again

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Anxiety about what has not happened and avoidance of what has are the same failure seen twice; and a judgment can go wrong in either direction.

The two burdens (AN 2.98–99)

The Pāli is compressed to the point of terseness. Two fools: one who carries the burden of what has not come to pass, and one who does not carry the burden of what has. Two who are astute: the exact inversion.

The first half is anxiety, described without the word. Carrying something that has not happened is exactly what worry consists of — the weight is real, the occasion is not. The second half is avoidance, and putting the two on one line is the insight: they are not opposite failings but the same misallocation. Attention and effort are finite, and both fools have spent theirs on the wrong side of the line between what is actual and what is not.

It is also worth noticing that the astute person is not described as carrying nothing. They carry the burden of what has come to pass. Nothing here recommends detachment from one’s actual responsibilities, and the discourse would be a much weaker teaching if it did. What is recommended is that the load correspond to the facts.

Two discourses, four clauses, and no elaboration at all. This is the Aṅguttara at its most efficient, and it is a passage worth carrying around.

Getting a judgment wrong in either direction (AN 2.100–107)

Four pairs follow, all on one pattern: perceiving what is unallowable as allowable and the reverse; a non-offense as an offense and the reverse; what is not the teaching as the teaching and the reverse; what is not the training as the training and the reverse.

The symmetry is by now familiar from the Ones, where whole chapters were built on it, and it carries the same lesson: strictness and laxity are equally errors, and neither is the safe default. A community that treats permitted things as forbidden is being foolish in exactly the sense the chapter means, not merely being careful.

What is new here is the framing. The Ones put this material under “making the true teaching disappear” — an institutional consequence. Here it is put under “two fools” — a description of the person. The same behavior, filed once as a harm to the tradition and once as a defect in the individual.

Remorse in the wrong places (AN 2.108–109)

Between the two runs sits a pair that deserves separate attention: for two, defilements grow — one who is remorseful over something they should not be, and one who is not remorseful over something they should be.

This is AN 2.98 applied to conscience. Misplaced remorse and absent remorse are the same failure of calibration, and the discourse says both make defilements grow. That second claim is the surprising one: scruple in the wrong place is not a harmless excess of virtue, it is named alongside its opposite as something that increases what it is trying to remove.

For anyone working with students or practitioners, this is a useful pair to have. The over-scrupulous practitioner and the unbothered one are usually treated as opposite problems requiring opposite corrections. The canon files them together, and the correction it implies is the same for both: find out what actually warrants remorse.

Why the material is repeated as defilements growing (AN 2.110–117)

The last eight discourses restate the four pairs from AN 2.100–107 with a different predicate: not “these are two fools” but “for these two, defilements grow.”

That is a real addition rather than padding. The first version says the misjudgment marks a person as foolish; the second says it does something to them over time. A wrong classification is not a static error but an accumulating one, and the chapter states both facts about the same behavior rather than choosing.

It is also a small illustration of how the Twos build. The pair is the unit; the same pair can be run under several predicates; and the collection assumes a reader who will notice that the content is identical and the frame is not.

Key terms