Ten Kinds of Deeds

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same ladder of untrue and true, now measured by the complete ten courses of action — three bodily, four verbal, three mental.

Three doors, fully accounted for

This discourse takes the seven items of AN 4.203 exactly as given and adds three more: abhijjhālu, covetous; byāpannacitta, malicious; micchādiṭṭhika, holding wrong view. With these three added, all three doors of action — body, speech, and mind — are represented, and the classical count of ten, dasa kammapatha, is complete.

This is worth recognizing as one of the tradition’s central ethical formulas, not merely one more item in this chapter’s series. The ten courses of action recur throughout the early collections as the standard full account of what unskillful and skillful conduct consists of, and this discourse gives that formula in its complete ten-item form, for the first time in this nipāta, rather than in any of the partial versions met earlier.

Why the three mental items are different in kind

It is worth pausing on what changes when the list moves from bodily and verbal items to mental ones. Killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and the four kinds of speech are all things a person does, visible in principle to anyone watching. Covetousness, malice, and wrong view are not actions in that sense; they are states a mind can be in, with no necessary outward sign at all.

The discourse does not mark this shift or comment on it. It simply extends the same vocabulary — something a person is, or does, that makes them untrue or true — across a boundary between visible conduct and invisible disposition without pausing at the boundary. That is itself a claim worth stating plainly: this classification treats a mental state as continuous with an action, not as a separate category requiring separate justification.

The positive three, precisely named

The positive counterparts are given their own specific terms rather than simple negations: not anabhijjhālu, non-covetous, but anabhijjhālu is in fact what appears — yet Sujato renders the three positively as contented, kind-hearted, and holding right view, giving each a fuller English sense than a bare negation would carry.

That translation choice is worth noting because it matches something this collection does consistently: negations of a fault are regularly given positive content rather than left as mere absences. Not being covetous becomes contentment; not being malicious becomes kind-heartedness; not holding wrong view becomes holding right view — each a state in its own right, not simply the missing half of its opposite.

The completed classification, and its later echo

This ten-item list is the richest content this chapter uses, and it does not appear only once. Two discourses ahead, AN 4.207, and again at AN 4.209, this exact same ten-item list of deeds reappears, recombined with two entirely different vocabularies for the four-level scale itself. A reader reaching those later pages will recognize the content immediately as this discourse’s own list, reused whole.

That reuse is worth anticipating here rather than discovering cold later: this chapter, having assembled its two richest content sets by AN 4.204 and AN 4.206, spends its final four discourses recombining those two sets with new framing vocabulary, rather than introducing further new content. This discourse marks the midpoint of that arc.

Key terms