Living Together (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The four kinds of marriage again, assessed by the full tenfold standard of action rather than the lay five.

The ten courses of action

Kammapatha, courses of action: three bodily (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct), four verbal (false, backbiting, harsh, and nonsensical speech), and three mental (covetousness, malice, wrong view).

Set against AN 4.53’s five precepts the differences are exact. The tenfold list drops intoxicants, expands lying into four kinds of wrong speech, and adds three mental items that the lay list has no equivalent for.

That third change is the substantial one. AN 4.53 assessed a spouse by what they did; this assesses them by what they do and by whether they are covetous, malicious, and of wrong view. The standard has moved inward.

The dropping of intoxicants is also worth a note. It is not that drink has become permissible; the tenfold list is simply a different and older scheme, organized by body, speech, and mind rather than by the training rules a lay follower undertakes.

Why give a discourse about marriage to mendicants

The obvious question, and there are two reasonable answers.

The practical one is that mendicants advise lay people constantly, and a monk who is going to be asked about a household needs the teaching in a form he can use. The Aṅguttara contains a good deal of lay-facing material addressed to monastics for exactly this reason.

The other is that the grid is not really about marriage. It is about what happens when two people of unlike ethical condition share a life, and monastic communities are also shared lives. Nothing in the tenfold assessment requires the two people to be married, and a reader in any close and ongoing arrangement will recognize the four cells.

What is abbreviated

The verses are gone. The Pāli ends the prose with … and leaves the six verses of AN 4.53 to be supplied by the reciter, which is why this discourse is shorter than its predecessor despite having a longer ethical list.

This is the same convention as AN 4.40 and AN 4.46, and by this point in the chapter a reader should recognize it on sight: where two adjacent discourses share material, the second one keeps only what is new.

Reading the pair

AN 4.53 and 4.54 are best read in immediate succession, and the useful exercise is to hold the two standards side by side and ask which one is being applied when people assess a relationship in practice.

The lay version is externally checkable: one can see whether someone kills, steals, lies, or drinks. The monastic version includes covetousness, malice, and wrong view, none of which is visible from outside and all of which the person themselves may not have looked at.

That difference is not incidental to who each version is addressed to. A standard for assessing a household is necessarily one that can be applied by the people in it. A standard given to mendicants can afford to include what only self-examination reaches.

The grid’s durability

For all the harshness of its vocabulary, the four-cell structure is a genuinely useful instrument and it has outlived its setting. It refuses two comfortable simplifications: that a relationship has one moral character shared by both parties, and that the well-behaved partner in a bad match is thereby responsible for it.

The two mixed cells are the point. The discourse says plainly that a good person can be living with a bad one, names the situation, and does not tell the good one that they must have failed somewhere. In a body of literature much concerned with how conduct produces consequences, that restraint is worth noticing.

Key terms