Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The identical ten courses of action, filed a third time under a compound noun naming a whole character rather than a single quality.
A third vocabulary, and what makes it different
Pāpadhamma is built from pāpa, bad, and dhamma, here in its sense of nature, quality, or state — something closer to ‘of a bad nature’ or ‘possessing a bad character’ than to the bare adjective pāpa used alone at AN 4.207. Sujato’s ‘bad character’ and ‘worse character’ catch that difference: not simply someone who is bad, but someone whose dhamma, their basic constitution, is bad.
This is a real semantic shift, however small, and it is worth naming rather than treating the three vocabularies — sappurisa, pāpa, pāpadhamma — as pure synonyms. Sappurisa names a kind of person. Pāpa names a quality a person has. Pāpadhamma names something closer to the underlying nature that quality expresses.
The same ten deeds, for the third time
Beyond the vocabulary, nothing here is new: killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, the four kinds of bad speech, covetousness, malice, wrong view, and their positive opposites, exactly as given at AN 4.204 and again at AN 4.207. By this point in the chapter the manuscript trusts the reciter completely, compressing to the barest skeleton of what a person listening would already know by heart.
A reader coming to this page after AN 4.204 and AN 4.207 will find nothing surprising in the content and everything to notice in the label. That is precisely the discourse’s function within the set of four it belongs to.
Whether the difference in word matters to the classification itself
It is worth asking directly whether this semantic nuance changes anything about how the four-level ladder works, and the honest answer is no. An untrue person, a bad person, and someone of bad character are all sorted by the identical structure: base conduct, then base conduct plus encouraging others, mirrored on the positive side.
What the word choice changes is not the logic of the classification but its connotation — whether the text is naming a person, a quality, or an underlying nature. That the tradition preserved all three ways of naming the same structure, rather than settling on one, suggests the ladder itself was considered portable across several different ways of talking about what it sorts.
One discourse left
AN 4.210 will do to the tenfold path what this discourse has just done to the ten deeds: apply the pāpadhamma vocabulary to it, completing every cell of the grid this chapter has been filling in since AN 4.207, and closing both the grid and the chapter in the same discourse.
Key terms
The text
Bad character, worse character, good character, better character
§1“Mendicants, I will teach you bad character and worse character, good character and better character.
Who has bad character
§2And who has bad character? 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 character.
Who has worse character
§3And who has worse character? 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 character.
Who has good character
§4And who has good character? 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 character.
Who has better character
§5And who has better character? 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 character.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.