Ethics (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

People differ not only in how far they have taken the threefold training but in how much authority they give it.

Two words for one idea

Garu is heavy. To be sīlagaru is to find ethics weighty, to give it weight, to take it seriously — and the same root gives the word for a teacher, someone whose word carries weight.

Adhipateyya is the stronger of the two. It is authority, sovereignty, the thing that rules. To be sīlādhipateyya is to have ethics as one’s governing principle, the thing referred to when a decision has to be made.

Sujato’s ‘values and submits to’ catches both halves: the first word is an attitude, the second is a chain of command. The pair is not redundant, and a reader can hold something weighty without letting it govern anything.

The same word adhipateyya gives its name to a well-known set of three in the collection — taking oneself, the world, or the Dhamma as one’s authority. The vocabulary here belongs to that family, and it is asking a question about what a person actually defers to.

What the pair distinguishes

Set AN 4.136 and AN 4.137 side by side and four combinations become visible that neither discourse states: fulfilled and honored, fulfilled but not honored, honored but not fulfilled, and neither.

The two middle ones are the interesting cases. Someone can keep a training precisely while treating it as an imposition, and someone can hold a training in the highest regard while not doing much of it. Both are common, both are recognizable, and neither is described in either discourse.

The pair supplies the vocabulary and leaves the combinations to the reader, which is consistent with everything else in this chapter. What the compilers preserved is a set of distinctions, not a set of conclusions.

It is worth saying which of the two the tradition generally treats as prior. Adhipateyya is a matter of what a person orients by, and orientation usually precedes achievement. On that reading AN 4.137 is not a supplement to AN 4.136 but the condition of it, though neither text says so.

The cumulative shape again

As in AN 4.136, only four of the eight possible combinations appear, and they are the cumulative ones: none, ethics, ethics and immersion, all three.

Repeating the shape does more than save effort. It asserts that the ordering holds for valuing as it held for fulfilling — that a person does not come to treat wisdom as authoritative before ethics.

That claim is more contestable than the first one, and it is worth flagging. Plenty of people arrive at a tradition through its philosophy and only later take its ethics seriously. The discourse does not acknowledge that route, and this reading guide notes the omission rather than defending it.

What can be said for the ordering is that it matches how the collection consistently presents the path elsewhere, and that these two discourses are a classification rather than a history of anyone’s conversion.

Reading the two as one text

The matched pair is this chapter’s and the last chapter’s favorite device. AN 4.123 and AN 4.124; AN 4.125 and AN 4.126; AN 4.136 and AN 4.137. Each time, one clause changes and the reader is expected to notice.

A recitation tradition can afford this and a reading culture cannot. Heard one after the other in the same sitting, the swapped word stands out unmissably. Encountered as two numbered items in a list, it is easy to read the second as a duplicate of the first and move on.

So the practical instruction for anyone teaching from the Aṅguttara is to look at the neighbors before deciding a discourse is thin. AN 4.137 alone is four lines. AN 4.136 and AN 4.137 together are a distinction worth an hour.

Where it sits

Seventh of ten, and the end of the chapter’s ladder section.

AN 4.138 returns to the two-by-two form, crossing bodily seclusion with mental seclusion, and it is the most vivid discourse in the chapter. AN 4.139 and AN 4.140 then close the Puggalavagga on public speaking.

After that the Fours move to the Ābhāvagga, the chapter of light, which opens with four kinds of radiance and then works through four kinds of splendor, of light, and of brightness — a chapter organized by image rather than by person.

Key terms