Seven Kinds of Deeds

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same ladder of untrue and true, now measured by three bodily deeds joined to the full fourfold classification of verbal conduct.

Three plus four, not five plus one

Where AN 4.201 gave five precepts as a set including one item each for body, speech, and intoxicants, this discourse narrows to conduct alone and widens the verbal side: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct for the body; false, backbiting, harsh, and nonsensical speech for the voice. Seven items, three plus four, with lying replaced by all four kinds of bad speech rather than lying alone.

Readers of this chapter’s neighbor, AN 4.148, will recognize the four verbal items immediately: they are the identical set given there as the four kinds of bad conduct by way of speech, in the identical order. This discourse has not invented a new classification of speech; it has taken the one already given whole and attached it to three items of bodily conduct.

What is missing here, and what that predicts

A reader who has just read AN 4.201’s five precepts will notice this list drops intoxicants entirely and expands speech from one item to four. That is worth flagging because it signals what the rest of this chapter is doing: each successive discourse is not simply repeating the last with cosmetic changes, but building toward a larger and more complete classification.

That prediction is confirmed immediately by the next discourse, which takes this seven-item list and adds exactly three more — covetousness, malice, and wrong view — completing the classical ten courses of action. This discourse is best read as a way-station: the bodily and verbal two-thirds of a scheme this chapter is about to give in full.

Why speech gets four items and body gets three

It is worth pausing on the asymmetry itself rather than passing over it. Bodily conduct is sorted into exactly three courses across this whole family of classifications — killing, stealing, sexual misconduct — and never more. Verbal conduct consistently gets four: false, divisive, harsh, and nonsensical speech.

The asymmetry is not explained anywhere in this collection, and this reading guide will not invent an explanation the text does not supply. What can be observed is that the collection is consistent about it: wherever bodily and verbal courses of action are listed together, from this discourse through the fuller schemes that follow, the ratio holds at three to four.

The ladder, once more

Nothing about the escalation structure changes from the two discourses before this one. An untrue person does these seven things; an even more untrue person does them and encourages others to; a true person avoids all seven; an even truer person avoids them and encourages others to as well. The content is new each time; the shape carrying it is now, three discourses in, entirely familiar.

Key terms