Bound for Loss

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Three faults lead to hell if they are not given up, and the condition is stated twice.

The clause that frames everything

Sace taṁ paṭinissajjati — unless they relinquish it. The condition opens the discourse and closes it, and it is not decoration.

Without it the discourse would be a list of people who are damned. With it, the discourse is a list of faults that remain fatal only while they are held, and the whole point of saying it twice is that a reader should not be able to miss it.

This is the same structure as AN 3.91, where a monk who resented a talk and then confessed it was told that recognizing a mistake and undertaking restraint is growth. The collection is consistent: what is fatal is the persisting, not the having done.

The first two, and why they belong together

Somebody unchaste who claims to be chaste; and somebody who makes a groundless accusation of unchastity against a person whose chastity is pure.

The pair is a false claim about oneself and a false claim about somebody else, on the same subject, in opposite directions. Both are lies about chastity and both are treated identically.

That symmetry is worth pointing out because religious communities have generally not treated the two as equivalent. The one who falsely claims purity harms the institution and their own practice; the one who falsely accuses harms a person who has done nothing. The discourse gives them the same sentence.

Both also correspond to grave matters in the monastic code — falsely claiming attainments is among the offenses entailing expulsion, and groundlessly accusing another monastic of a grave offense is a serious matter requiring formal handling. This discourse states the moral weight without the procedure.

The third, which is different in kind

Someone who has the view ‘there is nothing wrong with sensual pleasures,’ so they throw themselves into sensual pleasures.

The first two are lies; this is a view plus the conduct that follows from it. And it is worth being precise about what is being condemned, because the discourse is not saying that sensual pleasure is wrong.

AN 3.103, ten discourses earlier, said plainly that the pleasure and happiness arising from the world are its genuine gratification. What is named here is the view that there is no drawback — natthi kāmesu doso — and the conduct that follows from believing it.

So the fault is the second term of the three-term analysis going missing. A person who has the gratification right and the drawback wrong will behave exactly as described, and the discourse is naming the result of an incomplete survey rather than condemning enjoyment.

How to teach a hell passage

The collection has a longer one at AN 3.36, and the same principles apply. The destination is stated without softening; the condition is stated too and should be quoted with it; and nothing here is a claim about a particular living person.

What should be resisted is turning the conditional into a reassurance. The discourse does say these three go to hell, and the clause does not remove that; it says the fault can be given up. A reading that leaves an audience thinking nothing much was at stake has read the clause and dropped the sentence.

For a class the useful frame is the first two cases. Whatever one makes of hell, claiming a purity one does not have and accusing an innocent person of impurity are recognizable and serious wrongs, and the discourse’s judgment that they are equally serious is a claim worth discussing on its own.

Key terms