Purity (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Purity of body is not killing, stealing, or sexual misconduct; of speech, four kinds of speech avoided; of mind, contentment, kindness, and right view.

What soceyya meant to the audience

The word is from suci, clean or pure, and in the brahmanical world it was a ritual category. Purity was a matter of what one touched, ate, and washed in; impurity was contracted by contact and removed by prescribed procedures.

This discourse takes the word and fills it entirely with conduct. Nothing in the three definitions concerns washing, food, contact, birth, or ritual. The body is pure when it does not kill, steal, or commit sexual misconduct; the speech when it is not false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical; the mind when it is content, kind-hearted, and holds right view.

This is the same move the Brāhmaṇavagga made repeatedly with tevijja and brāhmaṇa and AN 3.74 made with the Jain nijjarā: keep the word, replace what satisfies it. It is worth telling a class that the collection does this so often that it should be expected.

Three doors, ten items

The distribution is the standard one. Body gets three of the courses of action — killing, stealing, sexual misconduct. Speech gets four — false, backbiting, harsh, and nonsensical. Mind gets three — and here they are given positively: content, kind-hearted, and holding right view.

Ten items across three doors, which is the canon’s standard scheme of the courses of action. AN 3.117 split the same ten differently, putting seven under ethics and holding back covetousness and malice for the mind category and wrong view for its own. Here all ten are present and sorted by door.

That is worth showing a class as an example of how this material is organized. The items are fixed; the groupings are not, and each grouping is chosen for what the discourse is doing.

Why the mental three are stated positively

Body and speech are defined by what is not done. Mind is defined by what is present: content, kind-hearted, and has right view.

That asymmetry runs through the canon and it is not accidental. A body can be pure by abstention — a hand that does nothing steals nothing. A mind cannot be pure by abstention, because it is never empty; something occupies it, and purity of mind is therefore a matter of what is there rather than what is absent.

The Pāli behind content and kind-hearted is negative in form, as AN 3.117’s guide noted, and the third item is unambiguously positive: right view is a view, not the absence of one.

So the discourse’s account of a pure mind is a mind holding three things, and it is the shortest statement in the collection of why mental training cannot consist of restraint alone.

Using it

This is a good discourse for a first lesson on the ten courses of action, because it sorts them by door and takes a minute. Most people who have met the five precepts have not seen the full ten, and the speech list in particular is usually a surprise.

The historical point is worth making too, briefly. A tradition that redefines purity as conduct is doing something to the religious vocabulary of its society, and the same operation is visible in AN 3.31, AN 3.58, AN 3.74, and AN 3.93. By this point in the collection a reader should be able to name the move.

Key terms