Thinking

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A fool is recognizable because folly shows in thinking, speech, and action — and if it did not, nobody could be recognized as anything.

Three words again

Bālalakkhaṇāni, bālanimittāni, bālāpadānāni: characteristics, signs, and manifestations of a fool. As at AN 3.1, three near-synonyms are stacked. Nimitta is the sign or feature by which something is picked out — the same word as the feature of beauty in the hindrances material. Apadāna is the trace or track from the previous discourse.

The effect is to say that folly is visible under every description of visibility: as a characteristic, as a distinguishing sign, and as something left behind.

The counterfactual

The middle of each passage does something the Threes rarely bother with. Having said that a fool thinks, speaks, and acts poorly, the discourse asks what would follow otherwise: if a fool didn’t do these things, then how would the astute know of them, ‘this worthy one is a fool, an untrue person’? And then the positive: since a fool does do them, the astute do know.

The argument is small but it is doing real work. It establishes that recognition is possible, and it establishes why — not because the astute have some special faculty for detecting folly, but because folly is the kind of thing that necessarily produces evidence. Nothing hidden is being read. The signs are simply there.

That matters because the surrounding chapter is full of instructions that presuppose it. Shun what a fool does; keep good company; avoid bad friends; do not be taken in. Every one of those requires that a fool can in fact be identified, and this discourse is where the collection says so and gives its reason.

The symmetry, and its limit

The second passage is the first with every term reversed: an astute person thinks well, speaks well, and acts well, and is recognizable for the same reason. The Threes state both directions as a matter of course.

But the symmetry has a limit worth naming, because it affects how this discourse gets used. In both passages it is the astute who do the recognizing. The discourse does not claim that anyone can identify a fool, or that folly is obvious to everybody. It claims that folly produces signs and that those with judgment read them.

That is a more modest and more accurate claim than it is usually taken for. A reader who comes away confident of their own ability to spot a fool has read the discourse as flattery. What it actually offers is a criterion — thinking, speech, action — and the observation that the criterion is applied by people who are themselves reliable.

Thinking as the first item

The order is worth noticing: thinks poorly, speaks poorly, acts poorly. Thought comes first, and the discourse is named after it — Cintī, from cinteti, to think or ponder.

That ordering runs through the collection. AN 1.56–57 said that mind precedes all things and the rest follows behind. AN 1.306–315 said that view shapes every deed undertaken in line with it. Here the same sequence appears as a description of how folly becomes visible: it begins where nobody can see it and arrives, in speech and action, where everybody can.

Key terms