Insight into Hate, and So On

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same three fourfold lists, developed for the same ten ways of relating to a defilement, are now run against sixteen further defilements beyond greed — hate, delusion, anger, acrimony, disdain, contempt, jealousy, stinginess, deceit, deviousness, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence.

The complete list, and where it has been seen before

Dosa, moha, kodha, upanāha, makkha, paḷāsa, issā, macchariya, māyā, sāṭheyya, thambha, sārambha, māna, atimāna, mada, pamāda — sixteen defilements, running from the two remaining root poisons through increasingly specific interpersonal and characterological faults, closing on negligence. This is not a new list composed for the Fours. Together with greed, these same seventeen defilements, in this same order, already closed the Threes at AN 3.183–352 — the identical roster, reused wholesale for a structurally identical closing device in a different nipāta.

Ten verbs, three lists, sixteen targets

Each of the sixteen defilements is developed against the identical ten-verb sequence already run against greed across AN 4.274–303: direct knowledge, complete understanding, finishing, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go. Each of those ten is in turn crossed against the three fourfold lists given in full at AN 4.274–276: mindfulness, right effort, and the bases of psychic power. Sixteen times ten times three is four hundred eighty — the largest single combinatorial block this reading guide has encountered anywhere in the Fours, and it survives in the source as one sentence.

A number the source confirms directly

The colophon closing this block gives its own ordinal, Dasuttarapañcasatimaṁ, ‘the five hundred and tenth’ — the running count of every discourse this chapter has generated from AN 4.274 onward: three written out in full, twenty-seven more for greed alone at AN 4.277–303, and four hundred eighty here. Three plus twenty-seven plus four hundred eighty is exactly five hundred and ten, confirming the arithmetic this page has just laid out matches the tradition's own count precisely.

A colophon repeated, and left honestly unresolved

This block's closing colophon includes a line this series has now seen once before, at AN 4.253: Pañcamo paṇṇāsako samatto, ‘the fifth paṇṇāsaka is complete’. That AN 4.253 already carried this exact marker, closing what this series confirmed at the time was a five-chapter group running from AN 4.201, and that the identical marker now recurs here, after chapters whose own colophons (AN 4.263's chaṭṭho, AN 4.273's sattamo) showed the vagga count continuing rather than resetting, is a genuine puzzle this reading guide does not have a confident resolution for. One plausible reading is that the fifth paṇṇāsaka's traditional scope was always understood to include this entire final stretch, vaggas twenty-one through twenty-eight together, with AN 4.253's marker noting an internal milestone and this one marking the group's true close; but that reading is offered as a guess, not a settled fact, and is recorded as such rather than smoothed into false certainty.

The Book of the Fours, finished

The final line of this block, following its ordinal and its paṇṇāsaka marker, is Catukkanipātapāḷi niṭṭhitā: ‘the text of the Book of the Fours is finished’. This is not a chapter closing, of the kind this series has met many times since AN 4.7. It is the close of the entire Catukka Nipāta — the collection this whole series has read since AN 4.1, one discourse and then one chapter at a time, now complete from its first page to its last, including the final five hundred and ten discourses this page and its predecessor represent in compressed form rather than individual pages. What comes next belongs to the Pañcaka Nipāta, the Book of the Fives.

Key terms