Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
There is no position of the body in which the same question is not being asked, and the answer is either tolerate or do not.
Why four postures
Iriyāpatha, the four postures, is one of the collection’s standard ways of saying ‘always’. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying down while awake exhaust the waking body: there is no fifth thing a person can be doing with their frame.
That is the whole reason the list is here. The discourse is not teaching a technique for each posture, and nothing in it varies from one to the next. It is closing an exit. A practitioner who thinks of practice as what happens on the cushion has three postures left over, and the discourse takes them away.
Note the qualifier on the fourth: lying down while awake. The tradition is precise about this. Sleep is not covered, and the discourse does not pretend it is.
The three bad thoughts
Sensual (kāma), malicious (byāpāda), and cruel (vihiṁsā) — the standard three unskillful kinds of thought, and they map onto greed, hatred, and a particular sharpening of hatred into the wish to injure.
Cruelty is separated from malice on purpose. Malice wants someone gone or diminished; cruelty wants to watch them suffer. Keeping them apart lets the list catch a state that does not feel like anger at all, and which people are correspondingly less likely to recognize in themselves.
‘Tolerate’ is the operative word
Adhivāseti is to put up with, to accommodate, to let stay. The fault is not having the thought — the discourse assumes it arises, in both halves — but in what happens next.
This is worth stating plainly to students, because the opposite reading causes real damage. The discourse does not say a good practitioner has no cruel thoughts. It says a good practitioner does not house them. The two versions of the person in this discourse differ only after the thought has already arrived.
The four verbs of the response — give up, get rid of, eliminate, obliterate (pajahati, vinodeti, byantīkaroti, anabhāvaṁ gameti) — are a fixed formula and their force is cumulative rather than sequential. They do not describe four stages of removal; they say the same thing four times, with increasing finality.
What the labels mean
One who tolerates is called not keen or prudent, always lazy, and lacking energy; one who does not is keen and prudent, always energetic and resolute. The Pāli pair is anātāpī anottāpī against ātāpī ottāpī.
Ātāpī, keen, is from the word for heat — ardent, burning. Ottāpī is from ottappa, the moral dread that shrinks from doing wrong. So the pair is warmth and recoil: enough energy to act and enough conscience to want to. Neither on its own produces the response the discourse asks for.
The verses and the domestic life
The first verse specifies what the bad thought is ‘to do with’: gehanissita, dependent on the household, domestic. The prose said sensual, malicious, cruel; the verse names the whole family of them by their orientation.
That is a useful gloss for lay readers, who might reasonably ask whether a discourse aimed at mendicants applies to them. The verse suggests the criterion is not the subject matter but the direction: thought that returns a person to the concerns they have set down. Everyone has something they have set down, and the test transfers.
Key terms
The text
Tolerating the thought
§1“Mendicants, suppose a mendicant has a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought while walking. They tolerate it and don’t give it up, get rid of it, eliminate it, and obliterate it. Such a mendicant is said to be ‘not keen or prudent, always lazy, and lacking energy’ when walking.
§2Suppose a mendicant has a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought while standing … sitting … or when lying down while awake. They tolerate it and don’t give it up, get rid of it, eliminate it, and obliterate it. Such a mendicant is said to be ‘not keen or prudent, always lazy, and lacking energy’ when lying down while awake.
Not tolerating it
§3Suppose a mendicant has a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought while walking. They don’t tolerate it, but give it up, get rid of it, eliminate it, and obliterate it. Such a mendicant is said to be ‘keen and prudent, always energetic and resolute’ when walking.
§4Suppose a mendicant has a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought while standing … sitting … or when lying down while awake. They don’t tolerate it, but give it up, get rid of it, eliminate it, and obliterate it. Such a mendicant is said to be ‘keen and prudent, always energetic and resolute’ when lying down while awake.”
The verses
§5Whether walking or standing, sitting or lying down, if you think a bad thought to do with the domestic life, you’re on the wrong path, lost among things that delude. Such a mendicant is incapable of experiencing the highest awakening.
§6But one who, whether standing or walking, sitting or lying down, has calmed their thoughts, loving peace of mind; such a mendicant is capable of experiencing the highest awakening.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.