Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
What a person does, how they make their living, and what they take to be true — and failure in any of the three is enough.
The substitution
Three discourses running on the same frame: failure in ethics, mind, and view; the same with sure-bet dice; and now failure in action, livelihood, and view.
Two changes, and only one of them matters. Ethics has become action, kammanta, with the identical definition — the seven courses of body and speech. That is a change of label.
The middle term is the real change. Covetousness and malice are gone and ājīva, livelihood, has taken their place. The discourse has moved from what a person wants to how they are paid.
Right and wrong livelihood, undefined
The definition given is circular and worth noticing: it’s when a noble disciple has wrong livelihood and earns a living by wrong livelihood. Nothing is specified.
That is unusual for this collection, which normally spells out its terms, and it is the one place a reader has to go elsewhere. The canon fills the gap in two ways: AN 5.177 names five trades a lay follower should not undertake — weapons, living beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison — and the monastic texts treat wrong livelihood as obtaining requisites by hinting, flattery, or false claims.
The word for the person is also worth noticing: ariyasāvaka, noble disciple, which appears in the definition of livelihood and nowhere else in the discourse. The other two failures are stated of anybody; this one is stated of a follower.
Whether that is significant or a scribal habit is not something the text settles. What can be said is that livelihood is the one item on the list that depends on what a community makes available, and the only one framed in terms of somebody inside a tradition.
Why livelihood gets its own place
In the eightfold path, right action and right livelihood are separate factors, and this discourse preserves that separation. The distinction is that action covers what a person does and livelihood covers what they do it for — the same act can be blameless as an act and unacceptable as a trade.
That is a real distinction and it is worth drawing out for a class, because it is easy to collapse. Selling something is not on any list of unwholesome courses of action. Selling weapons is on the list of trades to be avoided. The difference is not in the transaction but in what it supplies.
It also explains why livelihood can substitute for mind in this set. Both are about the direction a person’s life is pointed rather than about individual acts, and both are invisible in any single moment. A person’s trade, like their covetousness, is a standing condition.
Reading the three together
AN 3.117, AN 3.118, and AN 3.119 are one discourse in three versions, and taken as a set they say something none of them says alone: that the third item, view, is constant while the first two are variable.
Ethics or action; mind or livelihood. Both slots accept substitutions and the definitions shift. The wrong-view formula is given identically in all three and is never abbreviated, which in a collection that abbreviates freely is a signal.
For a class the exercise is to line the three up and find what does not move. The answer is the longest and least convenient part of the material, which is generally how this collection works.
Using it
This is the discourse to teach on work, and its most useful feature is the empty definition. A class asked to fill in wrong livelihood for themselves will produce a more interesting list than the canon’s five trades, and the exercise makes the category live.
The one thing to insist on is the distinction the set preserves. The question is not whether any individual act at work was wrong. It is what the work supplies, which is a question about the whole of it and cannot be answered a day at a time.
Key terms
The text
Three failures
§1“Mendicants, there are three failures. What three? Failure in action, livelihood, and view. And what is failure in action? It’s when someone kills living creatures, steals, commits sexual misconduct, and uses speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. This is called ‘failure in action’.
§2And what is failure in livelihood? It’s when a noble disciple has wrong livelihood and earns a living by wrong livelihood. This is called ‘failure in livelihood’.
§3And what is failure in view? It’s when someone has wrong view, a distorted perspective, such as: ‘There’s no meaning in giving, sacrifice, or offerings. There’s no fruit or result of good and bad deeds. There’s no afterlife. There’s no such thing as mother and father, or beings that are reborn spontaneously. And there’s no ascetic or brahmin who is rightly comported and rightly practiced, and who describes the afterlife after realizing it with their own insight.’ This is called ‘failure in view’. These are the three failures.
Three accomplishments
§4There are three accomplishments. What three? Accomplishment in action, livelihood, and view. And what is accomplishment in action? It’s when someone doesn’t kill living creatures, steal, commit sexual misconduct, or use speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. This is called ‘accomplishment in action’.
§5And what is accomplishment in livelihood? It’s when a noble disciple has right livelihood and earns a living by right livelihood. This is called ‘accomplishment in livelihood’.
§6And what is accomplishment in view? It’s when someone has right view, an undistorted perspective, such as: ‘There is meaning in giving, sacrifice, and offerings. There are fruits and results of good and bad deeds. There is an afterlife. There are such things as mother and father, and beings that are reborn spontaneously. And there are ascetics and brahmins who are rightly comported and rightly practiced, and who describe the afterlife after realizing it with their own insight.’ This is called ‘accomplishment in view’. These are the three accomplishments.”
Self-check quiz
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