Greedy

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four kinds of person, three of them named by the roots of unskillful action and the fourth by conceit.

The fourth item

Sarāgo, sadoso, samoho, samāno — with greed, with hate, with delusion, with conceit. The first three are the standard akusalamūla, the roots from which unskillful action grows.

Māna, conceit, is not one of them. Its inclusion here makes a four out of a three, which is the Aṅguttara’s ordinary reason for adding an item — but the choice is not arbitrary. In the standard analysis conceit is among the last fetters to be abandoned, remaining after the three roots have been weakened.

AN 4.38 made this explicit: the conceit ‘I am’ is what a withdrawn mendicant has finally cut off, and it goes after the views and the searches. So the four here are not four parallel faults. Three name what drives ordinary unskillful action, and the fourth names what survives their reduction.

The verses on becoming

The line to stop at is in the third verse: If you act out of these qualities, that’s what you become.

That is a stronger claim than the prose makes. The prose sorts people into four kinds; the verse says the sorting is produced by the acting. A person is not greedy and therefore acts greedily — on this line, acting greedily is what makes a greedy person.

This is one of the collection’s clearest statements of a view that runs through it everywhere without often being said outright: character is the residue of action. AN 3.2 in the Threes said a person is characterized by their deeds because wisdom shines in its traces; this says the deeds do not merely reveal the person but constitute them.

For teaching, the practical consequence is worth drawing. If character is produced by action then it is also alterable by action, and the four labels in the prose describe current conditions rather than kinds of people. That reading is available in the verse and it is the one that makes the discourse usable.

‘Beings veiled by delusion only tighten their bonds’

The first verse gives the mechanism: full of desire for desirable things, enjoying what seems pleasant, beings veiled by delusion only tighten their bonds.

Only tighten is the operative phrase. The image is of someone struggling in a knot that responds to pulling by closing further, and it names a specific problem: the activity that feels like relief is the activity that binds.

That is why delusion is the veil rather than one of the pulls. Greed and hate do the pulling; delusion is what makes it look like the right thing to do. The three are not arranged as equals in the verse even though the prose lists them as parallel.

The closing line

But men shrouded by ignorance are blind, with no eyes to see, and they never imagine that this could be so.

The discourse ends on the unavailability of its own content to the people it describes. That is a recurring and slightly awkward feature of this material: the diagnosis is addressed to an audience that by the diagnosis’s own terms cannot receive it.

The honest thing to say is that the verse is not making a logical point but a rhetorical one, and that its force lands on the listener rather than on the described. Anyone who can hear the line is by that fact not entirely in the condition it describes, which is presumably why it is worth saying to them.

Its place in the chapter

The Pattakammavagga has been running a sequence on discernment: AN 4.65 on the four grounds of confidence, this on the four conditions a person can be in, and then AN 4.67 and 4.68 on two very concrete cases — a monk killed by a snake, and Devadatta destroyed by his own success.

The chapter is not tightly unified but this stretch of it is. Having asked how one judges another person, it asks what kinds of person there are to be judged, and then gives two examples of what happens when the judgment goes wrong in each direction.

Key terms