Oxen

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A person can be frightening to their own people, to other people’s, to both, or to neither.

The verb

Ubbejetā, one who alarms, terrifies, or intimidates. It is from a root meaning to agitate or make tremble, and the same word is used of what a bull does to a herd.

That is the whole variable. The discourse gives no further definition, no motive, and no content — not what the person says or does to produce the effect, only that they produce it.

Defining a person by the effect they have rather than by their conduct is unusual in this collection, which normally specifies acts. It has the advantage of being observable by everyone except, often, the person concerned.

Own herd and others

Sagaṇa and paragaṇa — one’s own group and other groups. The word gaṇa is the same one used of monastic factions and of any organized body.

So the two variables are: are you frightening to the people who are yours, and are you frightening to people who are not?

The four cells that result are recognizable. Someone hard on their own and mild with outsiders. Someone charming at home and aggressive abroad. Someone hard on everyone. And someone hard on nobody.

The ordering puts own-herd-only first, which in this chapter’s pattern is the position of the worst cell — as thunder-without-rain was, and covered-but-hollow. The discourse does not say so, and the inference is from position alone.

What the simile assumes

A working ox in this economy lived among the same animals continuously and was handled by the same people. An ox hostile to its own herd is a permanent problem; one hostile to strangers is only occasionally a problem.

That practical asymmetry is presumably why own-herd-only leads the list. The harm is continuous and falls on those with least ability to avoid it.

Applied to a person, the parallel holds. Someone frightening to their own household, community, or students is frightening to people who cannot easily leave, and the same behavior directed outward would cost the target much less.

Against AN 4.91 and AN 4.109

This chapter contains two other discourses about a person and the people around them, and the three do different work.

AN 4.91, the titans, paired a person’s ethics with their followers’ ethics: both are assessed and the two are independent. AN 4.109, the trees, will do the same with softwood and hardwood.

This one is not about the followers at all. They are not assessed; they are the object of a verb. The variable is entirely on the one side, and what is being sorted is a person’s behavior toward two different audiences.

That makes AN 4.108 the odd one of the three, and the only one of the chapter’s grids where both variables belong to the same person.

The fourth cell

Doesn’t intimidate their own followers or the followers of others. Stated purely negatively, with nothing added.

The discourse names no positive quality — not kindness, not gentleness, not patience. What is commended is an absence.

That is characteristic of the chapter and of this part of the collection generally, and AN 4.72 made the same observation about the three right thoughts: two of the three are grammatically negative, and what constitutes the good state is the not-doing of something specific.

For a reader the practical consequence is that the fourth cell is not an achievement to be worked toward but a behavior to be stopped. Nobody has to become anything to occupy it.

Key terms