Hell

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four acts, and a person who does them arrives in hell without any further step being required.

The four, and the missing fifth

Killing living creatures, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying. The five precepts drop their last member and the remaining four stand as the list.

This is not an oversight and it is not peculiar to this discourse. The four appear together throughout the canon as a group, and they are the four that constitute the bodily and verbal courses of action — three of body and one of speech — in the tenfold scheme of AN 4.54.

The difference is structural rather than moral. Abstaining from intoxicants is a training rule undertaken by lay followers; the other four name acts that directly harm someone. When the canon is speaking about consequences rather than about the training, it is the four that appear.

It should be said plainly that this does not license drinking. Other discourses, including AN 4.50 in this same collection, name it explicitly among the things that corrupt. What this list shows is that the two are being counted differently.

‘As if delivered there’

Yathābhataṁ nikkhitto evaṁ niraye — the same idiom as AN 4.20, where it was applied to the meal assigner who decides by favoritism.

The image is of something carried to a place and set down there, with nothing further needing to happen. It is not a sentence passed or a punishment assigned; it is a description of arrival.

That is the idiom’s point and it is worth teaching. This literature generally describes consequence as continuous with the act rather than as imposed on it afterward. The one who acts is already being carried.

Why so short

The discourse has no simile, no analysis, no positive mirror, and one verse. It is close to the shortest possible complete discourse and it is worth asking what such a text is for.

The answer is that it is a memory unit. Four items, one consequence, one verse that reorders the four for metre. It can be recited in twenty seconds and it holds a complete statement.

The Aṅguttara contains a great many of these, and reading them one at a time on a page makes them look thin. Encountered in sequence, recited, they function as the collection’s connective tissue: short statements of consequence between the longer discourses that do the analysis.

The verse and what it changes

The verse reorders the four — killing, stealing, telling lies, and visiting others’ wives — putting sexual misconduct last and naming it concretely rather than by its category term.

Paradāragamana, going to another’s wife, is narrower than kāmesumicchācāra, misconduct in sensual pleasures, which the prose used. The verse names the standard case; the prose names the class.

The closing line is also weaker than the prose: astute people don’t praise these things. From hell to the disapproval of the wise in four lines. That shift is common in the collection’s verse sections and is worth noticing rather than harmonizing — the prose states a consequence and the verse states a judgment.

Its place in the chapter

The Pattakammavagga is a lay chapter and this is its shortest discourse. It sits between AN 4.63 on honoring parents and AN 4.65 on the four ways people judge a teacher — household ethics, then family duty, then discernment.

Read in that context the discourse is doing a specific and limited job. The chapter has just told a householder how to spend money and how to treat his parents; this is the floor underneath both. Nothing in the chapter’s positive program survives if these four are being done.

Key terms