Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Four things visible from inside tell a practitioner which way they are going.
Who is speaking, and to whom
The speaker is Sāriputta, not the Buddha, and he addresses the mendicants as āvuso, reverends — the form used between equals, where the Buddha uses bhikkhave.
That matters for how the discourse reads. Sāriputta is not issuing a teaching of his own; he is telling colleagues what the Buddha calls decline, and the phrase for this is what the Buddha calls decline appears at the end of each half, twice.
The address is also explicitly to both: any monk or nun, bhikkhu vā bhikkhunī vā. That is worth noting in a collection whose formulations are frequently male by default, and it is worth noting two discourses before AN 4.159, which is a story about a nun.
The Fours contain both kinds of formulation and neither cancels the other. Where the text is explicit, as here, a reading guide should say so.
The four
Three of the four are the roots: much greed, much hate, much delusion. The fourth is different in kind — their wisdom eye doesn’t go into the many deep matters.
Paññācakkhu, the eye of wisdom, and gambhīresu ṭhānesu, deep matters or deep cases. The image is of an eye that does not penetrate: it works at the surface and stops where things get difficult.
So the diagnostic has three items about what is present and one about what is not reaching. That asymmetry is the useful part, because the fourth is the one a person can check without any honest self-assessment of their own defilements.
The question it asks is answerable: when the teaching gets hard, does anything happen? A mind whose greed and hatred are increasing loses interest in depth long before it notices that greed and hatred are increasing.
Decline, and what it is not
Parihāni is falling away, diminishing. The conclusion the discourse tells a person to draw is precise: my skillful qualities are declining.
It is a statement about direction, not about position. Nothing here says the person is bad, or lost, or has fallen below some line. It says the trend is downward, and the same is true of the positive half: my skillful qualities are not declining — not that they are excellent.
That restraint is the discourse’s best feature. A test that reported a person’s standing would invite either despair or complacency; a test that reports a direction invites neither, because a direction can change tomorrow.
AN 4.135 did something similar with conduct, grading people by the proportion of blameworthy acts rather than by kind. Two discourses, two refusals to tell anyone what they fundamentally are.
What is not in the test
No mention of meditative attainment. No mention of years ordained, of learning, of reputation, or of what anyone else thinks.
That is a short list of absences and every item on it is something practitioners habitually use to assess themselves. The test Sāriputta gives cannot be passed by sitting longer or knowing more.
It is also entirely internal — sees four things inside themselves. Nobody else administers it, nobody else is told the result, and the discourse gives no instruction about what to do afterward.
That last absence is worth naming. The discourse ends with the conclusion and does not continue to a remedy. What a person does having concluded that their skillful qualities are declining is left entirely open, and the collection has supplied answers elsewhere — AN 4.157 immediately before this one, with its training instruction, is one of them.
The symmetry
The two halves are word-for-word mirrors, and the mirroring is exact enough to be worth using in teaching. Nothing is added on the positive side; the four are simply reversed and the conclusion negated.
That formal choice has a consequence. There is no separate description of a flourishing practitioner in this discourse — only the absence of the four marks of decline and the presence of a wisdom eye that does go in.
It is a modest picture of doing well, and consistent with the rest of the collection. AN 4.37 named four conditions for non-decline; AN 4.160 will name four things that keep a teaching from disappearing. In each case the good state is defined as the failure of a bad one.
Whether that is a limitation of the form or a deliberate reticence is not something the text settles. What can be said is that it recurs often enough to be characteristic.
Key terms
The text
Sāriputta addresses the mendicants
§1There Sāriputta addressed the mendicants: “Reverends, mendicants!” “Reverend,” they replied. Sāriputta said this:
Four marks of decline
§2“Reverends, any monk or nun who sees four things inside themselves should conclude: ‘My skillful qualities are declining. For this is what the Buddha calls decline.’ What four? They have much greed, much hate, and much delusion; and their wisdom eye doesn’t go into the many deep matters. Any monk or nun who sees these four things inside themselves should conclude: ‘My skillful qualities are declining. For this is what the Buddha calls decline.’
And their mirror
§3Any monk or nun who sees four things inside themselves should conclude: ‘My skillful qualities are not declining. For this is what the Buddha calls non-decline.’ What four? Their greed, hate, and delusion grow less; and their wisdom eye goes into the many deep matters. Any monk or nun who sees these four things inside themselves should conclude: ‘My skillful qualities are not declining. For this is what the Buddha calls non-decline.’”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.