Blameworthy

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Conduct of body, speech, and mind can be wholly blameworthy, mostly so, mostly not, or wholly blameless.

A scale, not a grid

Every other discourse in the Puggalavagga crosses two variables and produces four cells. This one takes a single variable and cuts it into four degrees, which makes it the odd one out in the chapter.

The endpoints are absolute: sāvajja, with fault, and anavajja, without fault. Between them are vajjabahula, fault-abundant, and appavajja, little-fault. The Pāli marks the difference with quantity words — bahula, abundant, and appa, little.

So the vocabulary itself is doing the work. This is not a scale of severity, as though some faults were graver than others. It is a scale of frequency.

Why proportion is the interesting choice

The definitions of the middle two are worth reading exactly. The mostly blameworthy person does things by way of body, speech, and mind that are mostly blameworthy, but occasionally blameless. The slightly blameworthy person does things mostly blameless, but occasionally blameworthy.

Two consequences follow, and both are unusual enough to state.

The first is that nobody in the middle two categories is described as inconsistent, confused, or hypocritical. They are described as having a ratio. That is a notably unheated way to talk about ordinary moral life, and it is a long way from the language of a person being fundamentally one thing or another.

The second is that the discourse concedes something a stricter scheme would not: the mostly blameworthy person is occasionally blameless. Even at the bad end of the middle, the good conduct is real and is recorded. Nothing here says it does not count.

What is not said

The discourse does not say what makes an act blameworthy. It uses the word four times and defines nothing, which means it is relying on the reader already knowing — from the precepts, from AN 4.81 to AN 4.83, from ordinary sense.

It does not say what to do with the scale. There is no instruction to move up it, no warning about the bottom, no praise of the top.

And it does not attach destinations. Compare AN 4.81 and AN 4.82, where killing and lying land a person in hell and their opposites in heaven; that machinery is entirely absent here.

What remains, once all of that is subtracted, is a measuring instrument. The chapter is a catalogue of the ways people differ, and this entry says: they differ by proportion of blameworthy conduct, on a four-point scale.

Using it on oneself

The scale is more useful applied inward than outward, and the reason is the middle-two definitions again. Almost nobody who examines their own week finds either endpoint.

What they find is a ratio, and a ratio is a thing that can move. That is the practical gift of defining the middle by frequency rather than by character: it makes the question ‘how often’ rather than ‘what kind of person am I’, and only the first of those has an answer that changes with effort.

It is worth adding what the discourse itself would not. AN 4.121, four discourses earlier in the collection, described four fears that produce exactly this movement — bad conduct given up, good conduct developed, oneself carried clean. This discourse supplies the measurement; that one supplied the mechanism.

Where it sits

AN 4.135 is the fifth of the chapter’s ten and its halfway point. Before it: fetters, eloquence, learners, livelihood. After it: the threefold training twice, seclusion, and two more discourses on speaking.

The two that follow, AN 4.136 and AN 4.137, are a matched pair on ethics, immersion, and wisdom — fulfilling them, and then valuing them. Both are ladders rather than grids, which makes this stretch of the chapter the least grid-like part of it.

It is a reasonable place to point out that the Puggalavagga is not uniform. It looks mechanical from a distance, and up close it is running at least three different classification schemes.

Key terms