Unprincipled

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The conduct of whoever is at the top propagates downward through every level of the society and, in this discourse, into the natural order itself.

The human chain

Four steps, and they are a description of how a society actually transmits conduct: king → royal officials → brahmins and householders → the people of town and country.

That sequence is worth reading as sociology before it is read as anything else. It runs through the people with the most to gain from the ruler, then the property-owning and religious classes who deal with them, then everyone else. Each group is corrupted by the group it depends on, and the discourse names the transmission without explaining it.

Nothing in this part of the chain requires any commitment. It is an observation about institutions, and it is the same observation AN 4.20 made at the scale of a monastery: the person distributing has more effect than their position suggests.

Where the chain leaves the human world

Then it keeps going: the courses of the moon and sun become erratic, the stars, the days and nights, the months and fortnights, the seasons and years; the winds blow chaotically; the deities are angered; the heavens withhold rain; the crops ripen erratically.

This is a cosmological claim and it should be named as one rather than quietly naturalized. The discourse says that human misconduct disorders the movements of the heavenly bodies. No mechanism is given.

Two things can be said honestly. First, this view was widespread in the ancient world and is not distinctively Buddhist; the correspondence between a ruler’s virtue and the regularity of nature is a commonplace of Indian and Chinese political thought alike. Second, the canon elsewhere is notably uninterested in this kind of correspondence, and several discourses go out of their way to deny that natural events are moral judgments.

So this discourse sits somewhat apart from the collection’s usual manner, and a reader is entitled to notice that without either rejecting it or building doctrine on it.

The last link, which is not cosmological

The final step is different in kind from the ones before it: when people eat crops that have ripened erratically, they become short-lived, ugly, weak, and sickly.

That link needs no cosmology at all. Bad harvests produce malnourished populations, and malnourished populations are exactly short-lived, weak, and sickly. It is the one step in the supernatural stretch of the chain that is straightforwardly true.

It is also the link that connects this discourse to AN 4.57 and 4.58, where a giver of food gives long life, beauty, happiness, and strength. The same four qualities, produced by the same cause. What a donor gives to one person, a well-governed country gives to everyone; what an unprincipled king takes away is the same thing.

The bull

When cattle cross a river, if the bull goes off course, they all go off course, because their leader is off course. And the mirror: if the bull goes straight, they all go straight.

The simile is doing something the prose chain does not. The prose described transmission through ranks; the simile describes a herd in a current, where the reason for following is not obedience but the physical fact that everyone is being carried and only the lead animal has a line.

That is a more forgiving picture of the followers than the prose gives. They are not corrupt; they are downstream. And it is a harsher picture of the leader, whose error is not merely their own.

The line that follows is the discourse’s best: when the one deemed chief behaves badly, what do you expect the rest to do? It is a rhetorical question with no interest in blame.

Sleeping badly

The whole country sleeps badly when the king is unprincipled — and sleeps at ease when the king is just.

That is where a discourse full of suns, seasons, and deities chooses to end, and the choice is worth noticing. Not famine, not rebirth, not the anger of the gods: whether people sleep.

It is the most concrete measure of a political order the collection offers, and it is a good one. Whether the people in a country can sleep is a summary of whether they are afraid, whether they are fed, and whether they expect tomorrow to resemble today.

The Pattakammavagga closes here. It began with Anāthapiṇḍika being told how to earn and spend, and ends with what happens to everyone when the person at the top is not principled — a chapter that starts with one household’s money and ends with a whole country’s sleep.

Key terms