Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The same ten courses of action already given at AN 4.204, now classified as bad, worse, good, or better rather than as an untrue or true person.
A grid, revealed
This discourse opens the chapter’s final movement, and it is worth naming the shape of that movement directly, because it has not appeared anywhere else in this collection quite this way. AN 4.204 gave the ten courses of action under the sappurisa vocabulary. AN 4.206 gave the tenfold path, also under that vocabulary. This discourse and the three that follow it take those same two content sets and cross them against two new vocabularies for describing the four levels themselves.
The result, once all four are read together, is a genuine two-by-two grid: content — the ten deeds, or the tenfold path — crossed with vocabulary — bad/worse/good/better as adjectives about a person, or bad/worse/good/better as a quality attributed to them. This discourse fills the first cell: ten deeds, person vocabulary.
A different word, the same content
The content is given in AN 4.207 exactly as it was at AN 4.204, with the abridgment marks compressed further since the reciter has already been through the full list twice by this point in the chapter: killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, the four kinds of bad speech, covetousness, malice, wrong view — and their positive opposites.
What changes is only the header vocabulary: pāpa, bad, and pāpatara, worse, replacing asappurisa and its comparative; kalyāṇa, good, and kalyāṇatara, better, replacing sappurisa. Where the earlier vocabulary named a kind of person — sappurisa is literally ‘with-person’, a good person — pāpa and kalyāṇa are plain adjectives, describing a quality without building ‘person’ into the word itself.
Why a discourse might exist just to rename its own content
It is worth asking directly what this discourse accomplishes that AN 4.204 did not, since the substantive content is unchanged. The honest answer is retrieval, in the same spirit as the synonym-series met earlier in the Fours: a teaching that could be reached for under the word ‘bad’ is not automatically reachable under the word ‘untrue person’, in a tradition organized around recitation and recall rather than a written index.
Filing the identical ten-item classification under a second vocabulary means a listener or reciter who thinks of the question as ‘what makes someone bad’ rather than ‘what makes someone an untrue person’ can still find the teaching. The repetition that can look, on paper, like padding is doing the same indexing work this collection performs throughout, at a smaller scale here than in the five-fold light series several chapters back.
What the next three discourses will do
AN 4.208 will take the tenfold path and give it this same bad/worse/good/better vocabulary. AN 4.209 will take the ten deeds of this discourse and give them a third vocabulary again — pāpadhamma, bad character, rather than simply bad. AN 4.210 completes the grid by giving the tenfold path that same third vocabulary.
Read as a set, these four discourses are less four separate teachings than one demonstration, repeated with the labels swapped: the classification survives being filed under any of several names, because what is actually being sorted — deeds, or the whole path, weighed on the same ladder of intensification — does not depend on which word introduces it.
Key terms
The text
Bad, worse, good, better
§1“Mendicants, I will teach you who’s bad and who’s worse, who’s good and who’s better.
Who’s bad
§2And who’s bad? It’s someone who kills living creatures, steals, and commits sexual misconduct. They use speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. And they’re covetous, malicious, with wrong view. This is called bad.
Who’s worse
§3And who’s worse? It’s someone who kills living creatures, steals, and commits sexual misconduct. They use speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. They’re covetous, malicious, with wrong view. And they encourage others to do these things. This is called worse.
Who’s good
§4And who’s good? It’s someone who doesn’t kill living creatures, steal, or commit sexual misconduct. They don’t use speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. And they’re contented, kind-hearted, with right view. This is called good.
Who’s better
§5And who’s better? It’s someone who doesn’t kill living creatures, steal, or commit sexual misconduct. They don’t use speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical. They’re contented, kind-hearted, with right view. And they encourage others to do these things. This is called better.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.