Sure-bet Dice

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The connection between how a person is and where they end up is not a gamble.

Apaṇṇaka

The word means unfailing, incontrovertible, a sure thing. It is the title of a famous discourse at MN 60, where it names an argument constructed so that it holds whichever way an uncertain question turns out.

Here it is applied to dice. Apaṇṇaka dice always fall the right side up — loaded dice, or a throw that cannot lose. That is a strange image for a tradition whose precepts and lay advice consistently warn against gambling, and choosing it is not an accident.

What the image says is that the outcome is already determined by the state of the thing thrown. Nobody is watching to see how it lands, and no interpretation of the throw is required. The dice are made a certain way and they land accordingly.

What the simile is doing

AN 3.117 said that beings are reborn badly because of failure in ethics, mind, or view, and reborn well because of accomplishment in the same three. This discourse repeats that and then adds the dice.

The addition removes an ambiguity in the original. Some sentient beings are reborn thus — which could be read as saying that failure sometimes has this consequence. The dice say it is reliable.

That is worth being careful about, because the discourse is not claiming that every detail of a rebirth is determined by the three, and the collection elsewhere is explicit that results depend on more than one factor — AN 3.100’s lump of salt turns entirely on the difference between two people doing the same deed. What is claimed here is a direction, held reliably: these three failures do not sometimes lead down.

Why gambling

The choice of image deserves attention rather than being passed over. Dice appear in the canon as an example of what a householder should not waste money on, and gambling is named among the causes of ruin in DN 31’s advice on lay life.

Using a loaded die to illustrate the reliability of kamma is therefore slightly subversive, and it works precisely because the audience knows that ordinary dice are a gamble. The point of the image is the contrast: this is the one throw where the outcome is not in doubt.

It is also an image that assumes the audience knows what a rigged throw looks like. The canon is generally comfortable drawing on the world its listeners actually lived in, including its vices, and this is a small clear instance.

Reading the pair

AN 3.117 and AN 3.118 are the same discourse with one image added, and the collection has done this repeatedly — AN 3.109 and AN 3.110, AN 3.103 and AN 3.104, AN 3.37 and AN 3.38.

Here the addition is a simile rather than a definition or a frame, which is a fourth kind of variation. The doctrinal content does not change at all; what changes is how certain the reader is meant to feel about it.

For a class the pair is a good demonstration of what a simile is for in this literature. It adds no information. It settles a question of degree that the prose left open, and it does so with an image that takes three seconds to understand.

Using it

Teach AN 3.117 for the content and this one for the image, and give the image its strangeness. A class asked to guess what a Buddhist text would compare the reliability of moral consequence to will not guess loaded dice.

The usable point is the one the simile settles. Most people’s working assumption about consequences is probabilistic — that bad conduct usually catches up. The discourse’s claim is stronger and simpler, and worth stating so that a class can decide whether they accept it.

Key terms