Guilt

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four kinds of fear each stop a person from doing harm, and the discourse describes the same result following from all four.

The order they come in

Attānuvādabhaya is fear of one’s own reproach, and it is first. The reflection given for it is a question a person puts to themselves: if I were to do bad things by way of body, speech, and mind, wouldn’t I blame myself for my conduct?

Parānuvādabhaya, second, is the same question with the subject changed — wouldn’t others blame me? The two are a matched pair and the Pāli makes the pairing audible: attā and para, self and other, on the same stem.

Then the two external ones. Fear of punishment is fear of what the state does to a convicted body. Fear of a bad destination is fear of where bad conduct lands a person after death.

So the sequence runs from a private judgment, to a social one, to a legal one, to a cosmological one. It is a tidy arrangement, and it is worth noticing that the discourse does not say the first is better than the fourth. It says all four work.

The identical ending

Read the four definitions side by side and the last two sentences of each are word-for-word the same: they give up bad conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, and develop good conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, keeping themselves pure.

That repetition is the argument. The discourse is not interested in which fear a person acts on. It is interested in whether the conduct changes, and it reports that any of the four will change it.

This is worth stating clearly to a class, because it cuts against a common assumption that only the interior motive really counts — that a person restrained by law or by the fear of hell is doing something second-rate. This discourse does not make that distinction. Elsewhere the collection certainly does grade motives; here it does not.

The Pāli of the closing phrase, suddhaṁ attānaṁ pariharati, is worth a sentence of its own. It is not ‘becomes pure’ but something closer to ‘carries himself about clean’ — purity as something maintained in motion rather than achieved once.

The third fear, said plainly

The definition of daṇḍabhaya contains a catalogue of punishments, and it should be read before it is read aloud. Whipping, caning, clubbing; hands or feet or both cut off; ears or nose or both cut off; then a run of named tortures — the ‘porridge pot’, the ‘shell-shave’, the ‘Rāhu’s mouth’, the ‘garland of fire’, the ‘burning hand’, and the rest; then hot oil, the hounds, impalement, beheading.

None of this is figurative. It is a stock passage that recurs across the canon, and its presence here is doing a specific job: the fear in question is not an abstract dread of consequences but the memory of something a person has watched happen in public to somebody else. The text says so — it’s when someone sees that the kings have arrested a bandit.

The discourse does not criticize the punishments. It records them as a feature of the world and then uses them for moral leverage. That is worth saying rather than passing over: a collection that elsewhere lists kings among the four perils a household faces (AN 4.120) here treats royal violence as a useful deterrent, with no comment on whether it is just.

One more detail. This is the only one of the four whose conclusion names a particular deed — they don’t steal the belongings of others — before the general formula arrives. The punishments listed are the ones a thief could expect, so the example follows the crime.

Fear as a working motive

The word running through all four is bhaya, and the two discourses immediately before this chapter used it too: AN 4.119 for birth, old age, sickness, and death, and AN 4.120 for fire, water, kings, and bandits. Three lists of four fears in a row, and the chapter takes its name from the third.

What is different here is that these four are recommended. In AN 4.119 and AN 4.120 fear is a condition of being alive; in AN 4.121 it is a tool. Being afraid of guilt, they give up bad conduct — the fear is the mechanism, not the problem.

A modern reader may want the tradition to be more embarrassed about this than it is. It is not embarrassed. Fear of consequences is used freely as a support for conduct, here and in the ‘harsh’ method of teaching described to Kesi in AN 4.111, where the Buddha reports that one of his own ways of training people is to tell them where bad conduct leads.

What is absent is any suggestion that fear is the destination. The four fears operate on conduct, and the collection puts conduct at the bottom of a structure whose upper storeys have nothing to do with being afraid.

Teaching it

The four make a natural exercise if they are turned into questions. Which of these has actually stopped you doing something this month? Most people find the second one does far more work in their life than they would like to admit.

The chapter this opens is called Bhayavagga after this discourse, on the usual principle that a chapter of the Aṅguttara is named after whatever stands first in it. Almost nothing that follows in the chapter is about fear. AN 4.122 is about four dangers in water, and after that the chapter turns to rebirth, to the immeasurables, and to what is marvelous about a Buddha, an elder, and a king.

Key terms