Ethical

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A community that keeps ethical renunciates gains something through all three doors of action, including the one that requires no action.

Who supports whom

The sentence is about a place, not an individual: when ethical renunciates are supported by a town or village. The unit that generates the merit is the settlement, and the beneficiaries are the people there.

That collective framing is unusual enough to notice. Most of the Threes address a person — a giver, a listener, a mendicant. This one addresses a locality, and it assumes an arrangement in which supporting monastics is something a village does rather than something a donor does.

The qualification ethical, sīlavanta, is not decoration. AN 3.50, four discourses later, describes what an unethical mendicant does with the same relationship, and the two should be read as a pair: the village gets this benefit from ethical renunciates and something quite different from the other kind.

Three doors, and the third

Merit accrues by way of body, speech, and mind — the standard triad for action, used everywhere in this collection.

By body is the obvious one: food handed over, a hut built, a robe offered. By speech is nearly as obvious: speaking well of them, inviting them, telling somebody where they can be found.

By mind is the interesting one, because it needs no transaction at all. It covers approving, being glad that the arrangement exists, and rejoicing in what somebody else has given. On this account a person who owns nothing and says nothing still participates in the merit of a town that keeps good renunciates, simply by being glad about it.

That answers the objection AN 3.41 raises, where merit seemed to require having something to give. It does not require it here. The third door is open to everyone in the village.

Rejoicing, and where it went later

The mental participation this discourse leaves in one word became a major practice in the Mahāyāna. Anumodanā, rejoicing in merit, is the fifth of Samantabhadra’s ten great vows — 隨喜功德 — where the practitioner rejoices in the merit of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and ordinary beings alike, without limit and without end.

The line of development is easy to trace and worth showing a class. Here it is a villager glad that the monastery is fed. There it is a cosmological practice covering all beings in all worlds. The mechanism is identical: merit that arises in the mind, from somebody else’s good act, without the rejoicer having done anything.

It is also worth being honest that this can be abused, and that the tradition noticed. Rejoicing is not a substitute for giving in a person who could give; it is what remains available to a person who cannot. The Threes keep both discourses side by side and never suggest that one replaces the other.

Using it

The practical question this discourse puts to a community is uncomfortable and simple: who does this town support, and are they ethical? Both halves matter. A place that supports nobody gains nothing here; a place that supports the wrong people is described in AN 3.50.

For a class, the useful exercise is to apply the three doors to something they actually do — a school, a temple, a charity — and ask which door they use. Most people discover they are body-and-speech contributors who have never considered the third door as anything other than a consolation prize, which is not how the discourse presents it.

Key terms