Living Together (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A marriage is characterized by the ethical condition of each partner independently, and there are four possible combinations.

‘Zombie’ and what it translates

The Pāli is chava, a corpse or carcass, used as a term of abuse — roughly ‘wretch’ with the force of ‘dead thing’. Sujato’s ‘zombie’ is a deliberate and unusual choice; other translators have used ‘wretch’, ‘corpse’, or ‘wretched man’.

The rendering is defensible and worth understanding rather than either adopting or dismissing. What chava conveys is a living person described as a dead one, which is exactly the modern sense of the word Sujato chose; ‘corpse’ loses the fact that the person is walking around, and ‘wretch’ loses the death.

It is fair to say the English carries connotations from film that the Pāli does not, and a teacher may reasonably prefer to give both the Pāli and a plainer gloss. What should not be lost is the harshness. The discourse is not being gentle: it calls an unethical husband or wife a dead thing.

The criterion

For each partner the description is the same and it has three parts: the five precepts (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, intoxicants); living at home with the heart full of the stain of stinginess; and abusing and insulting ascetics and brahmins.

So: personal conduct, disposition toward one’s own household, and behavior toward the religious. It is a lay standard, appropriate to the audience, and it is the same for both partners without a single word of difference.

That symmetry is the discourse’s quietest and strongest feature. Nothing in it assigns a different standard to husband and wife, and the four cells of the grid are given equal treatment: a good wife with a bad husband and a good husband with a bad wife each get their own cell, their own definition, and their own verse. For a text of its period this is worth pointing out.

The verses and where the imbalance appears

The verses run the same four cases and here a small asymmetry does show. When the husband is unethical and the wife is not, she’s a goddess living with a zombie for a husband. When the husband is ethical and the wife is not, she’s a zombie living with a god for a husband.

Both verses are told from the wife’s position — she is the subject in each — whereas the prose named the husband first throughout. That is a difference of framing rather than of standard, and it is the kind of detail worth noticing without building much on it.

The fourth verse is the one usually quoted: when both are faithful and bountiful, disciplined, living righteously, then wife and husband say nice things to each other. The Pāli is piyaṁvadā, speaking pleasantly — and it is notable that what the discourse names as the result of shared ethics is neither prosperity nor rebirth but how the two of them talk.

The rest of the good outcome

The following verses do add the material results: needs amply satisfied, living at ease, enemies downhearted, and finally delight in the heavenly realm.

Their enemies are downhearted is an unusual line and worth pausing on. The assumption is that a household has adversaries and that a well-ordered one disappoints them. This is a discourse for people with property, obligations, and rivals, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The setting

The Buddha is travelling between Madhurā and Verañjā, leaves the road, and sits under a tree; householders travelling the same way see him and come over. The teaching is given on the roadside to whoever happened to be walking.

That is worth registering because it explains the pitch. There is no request, no question, and no prior relationship. The discourse is what the Buddha says to a group of married lay people he has just met, and its content — a simple grid, a memorable and slightly rude image, verses that can be carried away — is shaped for exactly that.

AN 4.54, immediately next, gives the same grid to mendicants with the ten courses of action in place of the five precepts. The pair shows the collection adapting one teaching to two audiences.

Key terms