Sources

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Deeds rooted in greed, hate, and delusion keep producing results wherever you go next; deeds rooted in their opposites are what brings the whole production to a stop.

The word nidāna, and why the title matters

Nidāna is source, origin, or ground — the same word that titles the great chapter on dependent origination in the Saṁyutta. The discourse is not asking which deeds are bad. It is asking what deeds come out of.

The answer is a triad that will be doing structural work for the rest of the collection: lobha, greed; dosa, hate; moha, delusion. East Asian Buddhism inherited it as 貪瞋癡, the three poisons, and built a whole moral psychology on top of it. This is one of the plainest early statements of what the triad is for.

Notice that the roots are not deeds. Greed is not stealing and hate is not violence; they are what stealing and violence come out of. That distinction is the entire content of the word nidāna, and it is why the discourse can then say something about all deeds at once.

Two clauses about where and when

Each root gets the same sentence: a deed born, sourced, and originated from it ripens where that new incarnation is born, and wherever it ripens, its result is experienced either in the present life, or in the next life, or in some subsequent period.

Two separate claims are packed in there. The first is about place: the deed matures wherever the doer turns up, not in some ledger held elsewhere. The second is about time, and it gives three options rather than one.

This is where a Western class usually stops, and the honest thing is to stop with them. The discourse assumes rebirth. It is not using “next life” as a metaphor for tomorrow, and reading it that way makes the sentence say nothing at all. Anyone who does not accept rebirth is entitled to say so, and should be told that the text is not on their side of the question.

What survives that disagreement is still substantial: that acts have sources, that the source determines what the act produces, and that results are not on a schedule the doer controls. The three timings are stated precisely so that no one can read a delay as an acquittal — which is the same point AN 3.100 makes with its lump of salt.

The two similes, and how differently they behave

The first simile is agricultural and entirely positive in mechanism: seeds intact, unspoiled, undamaged by weather, fertile, well kept; sown in a well-prepared productive field; the heavens providing plenty of rain. Then they grow, increase, and mature. Everything is working. That is the point — deeds rooted in the three roots are not defective machinery. They function.

The second simile takes the identical seeds and destroys them: burned with fire, reduced to ashes, and the ashes whisked away in a strong wind or floated down a swift stream. Not stored, not neutralized, not offset. Ended, and then the remains dispersed so thoroughly that the image forecloses recovery.

The asymmetry is the discourse’s real argument. A reader coming in expects a symmetrical ledger: bad deeds produce bad fruit, good deeds produce good fruit. The second half does not say that. It says that deeds rooted in non-greed, non-hate, and non-delusion are cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated, and unable to arise in the future. The subject has changed from what kamma produces to how kamma stops.

The sentence that has puzzled readers

In the second half each root gets this form: a deed that emerges from contentment “is given up when greed is done away with,” a deed from love is abandoned when hate is done away with, a deed from understanding when delusion is done away with.

Read plainly that is odd. It seems to say that wholesome-rooted deeds are abandoned when the corresponding unwholesome root goes — and it is the wholesome deed, not the unwholesome one, that is described as cut off like a palm stump. Translators and commentators have not read this uniformly, and this guide is not going to pretend the question is settled.

Two readings are worth having in mind. On one, the sentence is about the person in whom greed is gone: their good deeds no longer function as kamma-producing deeds at all, because there is nothing left to carry them forward — which is what the canon elsewhere says of an arahant’s actions. On the other, the passage is describing the whole apparatus of deed-and-result winding down, wholesome deeds included, since the goal is not an improved balance but no balance.

Both readings land in the same place, which is why the disagreement is tolerable: the second half of this discourse is not about accumulating merit. If a class comes away thinking that non-greed, non-hate, and non-delusion are how you earn a better rebirth, they have read the first half twice and the second half not at all.

The verses, and what they leave out

The closing verses say that when an ignorant person acts out of greed, hate, or delusion, any deeds they have done, a little or a lot, are to be experienced right here, not in any other place.

That is not what the prose said. The prose was careful to give three timings — this life, the next, or some subsequent period — and the verse compresses them into one. It is the same thing the verses do at AN 3.26 and AN 3.27, where a qualification stated carefully in prose disappears when the material is put into meter.

The right response is not to accuse the verse of error. Verse in this collection works by force rather than precision, and right here, not in any other place is doing rhetorical work: there is no elsewhere to send the consequences to. But a reader who takes the verse as the discourse’s doctrine of kamma will have a narrower position than the prose eight paragraphs earlier, and a teacher should point at the seam rather than smooth it over.

The final verse gives the practical upshot, and it is not a warning: a wise mendicant who arouses knowledge of the outcome of greed, hate, and delusion abandons all bad destinies. What ends the trouble is understanding where deeds come from — which is the discourse’s title.

Key terms