Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
What a person lives off comes from present initiative, from the results of past deeds, from both, or from neither.
The two axes
Uṭṭhānaphala is the fruit of getting up. Uṭṭhāna is standing up, rousing oneself, and it is the ordinary word for enterprise and initiative — the same root that gives the ‘energy’ a mendicant is told to arouse. It means what your own present activity produces.
Kammaphala is the fruit of deeds, and here it means the results now arriving from what was done before. The verb attached to both is upajīvati, to live off, to subsist on — a livelihood word rather than a doctrinal one.
So the discourse is describing where a person’s support actually comes from. That is a plainer question than it looks, and everyone who has ever been employed or inherited anything can answer it.
The uncomfortable cell
One who lives off the fruit of deeds but not of initiative is a real category, and it is worth naming plainly: someone whose present circumstances are supplied by what came before, without their doing anything now.
The discourse does not criticize this person. It does not call them lazy, or fortunate, or a problem. It lists them second of four and moves on.
That restraint is worth pointing out, because a tradition that talks constantly about energy and diligence might be expected to say something. AN 4.116 makes diligence the thing to be practiced in four areas; AN 4.11 calls a mendicant who tolerates an unskillful thought ‘lazy and lacking energy’. Here, nothing.
The most likely explanation is the simplest: this is an observation about how people are supported, not an instruction about how to live. The chapter it sits in is a catalogue, and catalogues describe.
Effort and result, without a verdict
The two axes are the terms of the tradition’s longest-running argument. If everything now is the fruit of past deeds, what is present effort for? If present effort decides everything, what work is kamma doing?
The collection answers that elsewhere and firmly — the position that everything experienced is caused by past action is named and rejected as a wrong view, precisely because it makes effort pointless. But AN 4.134 does not gesture at any of that.
What it does instead is treat the two as independent sources of support that can be present in any combination. That is not a doctrinal answer, but it is a useful structural one: whatever the metaphysics, in an actual life the two arrive separately and a person can be living on either, both, or nothing.
AN 4.77 puts the theoretical question out of reach altogether by listing the results of deeds among the four things not to be speculated about. Read next to that, the flatness of AN 4.134 looks less like an omission and more like a policy.
The fourth cell
One who lives off the fruit of neither initiative nor deeds is the strangest entry, because it is not obvious what such a person lives on at all.
The discourse does not say, and no answer should be manufactured. The formal reason for the cell is that a two-by-two has four cells; the chapter fills grids completely whether or not each corner has an obvious occupant. AN 4.132 did the same with the speaker who is neither on topic nor fluent, and AN 4.138 will do it with the person on retreat in neither body nor mind.
It is worth telling a class that this is what is happening. A completed grid is a memory device, and its empty corners are structural rather than descriptive. Reading the fourth cell as a claim about a real class of destitute people is reading more than is there.
Where it sits
AN 4.134 is the fourth of the Puggalavagga’s ten grids and the only one that concerns material support rather than mind, speech, or attainment.
That is itself worth noticing. The chapter’s inventory of the ways people differ includes livelihood, and includes it without moralizing about it, between a grid on how fast people learn and one on how blameworthy their conduct is.
The discourse that follows, AN 4.135, will grade conduct on a four-point scale rather than a grid, and it is the only discourse in the chapter that does.
Key terms
The text
Four ways of living
§1“These four individuals are found in the world. What four? One who lives off the fruit of initiative, but not deeds; one who lives off the fruit of deeds, but not initiative; one who lives off the fruit of both deeds and initiative; one who lives off the fruit of neither initiative nor deeds. These are the four individuals found in the world.”
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