Dussīlasutta — Parisāvagga — the twenty-second chapter of the Fours
Setting
None stated; the Parisāvagga gives no location for this discourse, and it is addressed to the mendicants directly
Speakers
The Buddha alone, addressing the mendicants
Form
Two full paragraphs, hell and heaven written out in full, closing the chapter's elided run
Length
~1 minute to read
Northern parallel
This reading guide does not assert a specific matching sutra number for this discourse
Difficulty
★☆☆☆☆ — the chapter’s close, and a good place to look back over its whole run
Why this discourse
After five discourses compressed to single elided lines, this one closes the chapter the way AN 4.210 closed the last one: written out in full. Its four terms — faithless, unethical, lazy, witless — draw once more on the pool of qualities AN 4.202 assembled sevenfold, taking two different items this time than AN 4.219 did, and closing a chapter that has spent its length showing how far a handful of recurring qualities can be resorted.
Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Faithlessness, lack of ethics, laziness, and witlessness deliver a person to hell as if placed there; faith, ethics, energy, and wisdom deliver them to heaven, closing the chapter.
Full form, after a run of elision
Assaddho hoti, dussīlo hoti, kusīto hoti, duppañño hoti — the sequence is written out completely, both the hell half and the heaven half, with none of the …pe… compression that carried AN 4.214 through AN 4.219. This matches the pattern already seen at the close of the previous chapter, AN 4.210, which likewise returned to full form after a run of shorter discourses.
The effect is to mark the chapter’s ending clearly, giving the final discourse the weight of complete statement rather than allowing the reader’s last impression to be an ellipsis mark. Whether this was a deliberate compositional choice or simply what happens when a vagga’s closing discourse also carries the colophon material that follows it, the result read on the page is the same: a firm close.
Two more terms from the same pool
Kusīto, lazy, and duppañño, witless, are the fifth and seventh qualities of AN 4.202’s sevenfold list — the two items that discourse shared with neither AN 4.219 nor this discourse until now. Between AN 4.219 and AN 4.220, the chapter has drawn on all four non-overlapping quarters of that sevenfold list’s content: shameless and imprudent went to AN 4.219; lazy and witless come here; faithless and unethical appear in both. Little learning and poor mindfulness, AN 4.202’s remaining two terms, appear in neither tetrad, left unused by this chapter’s compressions.
A colophon with a small discrepancy
The running heading that opens every discourse in this chapter names it the Parisāvagga, the assembly chapter, after its first discourse. The closing colophon that follows this discourse in the source text names it instead the Parisasobhaṇavagga, the chapter of assembly-grace — a slightly different name, drawing on the second half of AN 4.211 rather than its first. Both point at the same ten discourses; the two traditional indexing devices simply chose different words from the same opening discourse to name them by.
What ten discourses accomplished
The chapter opened by carrying a vocabulary across from the one before it, then spent its middle stretch introducing and running a new formula — placement in hell or heaven ‘as if delivered there’ — across content old and new: compressed conduct, a divided eightfold path, a fourfold epistemic formula borrowed from AN 4.24, and finally a return to the untrustworthy-person pool first assembled at AN 4.202. Read end to end, the Parisāvagga is less a single new teaching than a demonstration of how thoroughly this collection’s existing material can be resorted, recombined, and delivered through a new formula without needing anything genuinely new to say.
Key terms
kusīta / āraddhavīriya — “lazy” and “energetic” — drawn from the same sevenfold list as AN 4.219’s terms, filling the tetrad’s third slot here.
duppañña / paññavā — “witless” and “wise” — the fourth slot, closing both this discourse and the chapter.
assaddha / dussīla — “faithless” and “unethical” — the two terms this discourse shares with AN 4.219, appearing in both of the chapter’s closing tetrads.
Parisāvagga / Parisasobhaṇavagga — the two names the source text gives this chapter — the running heading’s “assembly chapter” and the closing colophon’s “chapter of assembly-grace”, both drawn from AN 4.211.
yathābhataṁ nikkhitto — “placed as if delivered there” — the formula this chapter has run since AN 4.212, given here one final time in full, unelided form.
The text
The discourse in full: faithless, unethical, lazy, and witless, closing the chapter. Translation: Bhikkhu Sujato (CC0, SuttaCentral).
Placed in hell
§1“Mendicants, someone with four qualities is placed in hell as if delivered there. What four? They’re faithless, unethical, lazy, and witless. Someone with these four qualities is placed in hell as if delivered there.
Placed in heaven
§2Someone with four qualities is placed in heaven as if delivered there. What four? They’re faithful, ethical, energetic, and wise. Someone with these four qualities is placed in heaven as if delivered there.”
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Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.
Question 1 of 10
What four qualities does this discourse name?
Correct: B. Two terms shared with AN 4.219, and two more drawn from AN 4.202’s sevenfold list.
Question 2 of 10
How does this discourse’s form differ from the five discourses immediately before it?
Correct: B. Matching the pattern seen at the close of the previous chapter, AN 4.210.
Question 3 of 10
Which two of AN 4.202’s seven terms appear in this discourse but not in AN 4.219?
Correct: B. The fifth and seventh items of that sevenfold list.
Question 4 of 10
Which two of AN 4.202’s terms appear in neither AN 4.219 nor AN 4.220?
Correct: B. Left unused by this chapter’s two compressions of that list.
Question 5 of 10
What discrepancy does the guide note between this chapter’s running heading and its closing colophon?
Correct: B. Both point at the same ten discourses, naming them from different parts of the opening discourse.
Question 6 of 10
How does the guide summarize what the Parisāvagga accomplished across its ten discourses?
Correct: B. Compressed conduct, a divided path, a borrowed epistemic formula, and a reused quality-pool, all through one new formula.
Question 7 of 10
What formula does this discourse use, one final time in full form?
Correct: B. Introduced at AN 4.212 and run through the whole chapter.
Question 8 of 10
What earlier discourse in this chapter shares two of its four terms with this one?
Correct: B. Faithless and unethical appear in both discourses’ tetrads.
Question 9 of 10
What earlier chapter first assembled the sevenfold list this discourse and AN 4.219 both draw from?
Correct: B. Describing an untrue person and an even more untrue person.
Question 10 of 10
What comes immediately after this discourse in the traditional source text?
Correct: B. Structural material this reading guide does not display, since Sujato’s translation leaves the uddāna verses untranslated.
