Killing Living Creatures

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four acts deliver a person to hell and refraining from them delivers a person to heaven, in each case with nothing further required.

The chapter’s method

AN 4.81 through AN 4.84 share a single frame: someone with four qualities is placed in hell as if delivered there, followed by the mirror for heaven. Only the four qualities change.

And the four qualities are not new. This discourse gives AN 4.64’s four acts. AN 4.82 gives the four kinds of wrong speech. AN 4.83 gives AN 4.3’s four faults of praise and criticism. AN 4.84 gives AN 4.43’s four things valued above the teaching.

So the opening of the chapter is a systematic restatement: four lists already given elsewhere in the Fours, each now attached to a destination. That is worth naming plainly rather than reading each discourse as though it were fresh material.

What the frame adds

The lists in their original settings had different consequences attached. AN 4.3 said the untrue person keeps themselves broken and damaged and brims with wickedness. AN 4.43 said such a person does not grow in the teaching. Neither mentioned hell.

Attaching a destination is a change of register rather than of content. It converts a description of a condition into a statement about where it ends up, and it makes the four lists commensurable: all four now have the same units.

That commensurability is presumably the point of the exercise. A reciter who has these four discourses has four different lists with one consequence, which is a compact way to hold a large amount of ethical material.

The positive half

AN 4.64 gave only the negative. This gives both, and the mirror is exact: not killing, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct, not lying places a person in heaven as if delivered there.

It is worth registering that the positive is stated as four abstentions rather than four actions. Nothing is required beyond not doing the four things. Heaven, on this discourse, is the destination of someone who has simply refrained.

That is a low bar and the collection knows it. The four kinds of overflowing merit in AN 4.51 and 4.52, the four fitting deeds of AN 4.61, and the lay practice of AN 4.60 all describe more than abstention. This discourse names the floor, not the program.

‘As if delivered there’, both ways

The idiom yathābhataṁ nikkhitto is now applied in both directions, and the symmetry is informative. Heaven is arrived at in exactly the same manner as hell: carried and set down, with no further step.

That rules out one common way of thinking about the two, on which hell is a punishment and heaven a reward. Neither is described as awarded. Both are described as places one ends up, by the same mechanism, in virtue of what one has been doing.

AN 4.20 used the idiom of the meal assigner; AN 4.64 of these same four acts. This is its third appearance in the Fours and the first in the positive direction.

Why four and not five

As in AN 4.64, intoxicants are absent. The four are the bodily and verbal courses of action that directly harm someone, and the fifth precept is a training rule of a different kind.

The next discourse, AN 4.82, will take the verbal side and expand it from one item into four. Between them the two discourses cover the seven bodily and verbal courses of action of the tenfold scheme, which is the same material AN 4.54 used to assess a marriage.

The three mental courses — covetousness, malice, wrong view — do not get their own discourse in this group. What they get instead is AN 4.84, which names four things valued above the teaching, two of which are hostile mental states.

Key terms