Where Criticism Takes You

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Speaking well or ill of people without having examined them takes a person to hell; doing it after examining takes them to heaven.

The same four

Without examining or scrutinizing, they praise those deserving of criticism, and criticize those deserving of praise; they arouse faith in things that are dubious, and do not arouse it in things that are inspiring.

This is AN 4.3’s list word for word, including the crucial qualifier ananuvicca apariyogāhetvā — without examining or scrutinizing. As there, the fault is not the verdict but the missing work behind it, and the positive half has the astute person criticizing the blameworthy after examination.

Nothing in the content is new. What is new is what happens next.

Two reasons for the same rule

AN 4.3 gave three consequences in a specific order: the person keeps themselves broken and damaged; they deserve blame from sensible people; they brim with wickedness. Then verses about a losing hand at dice and an enormous span in hell.

This discourse gives one consequence: hell, as if delivered there. No self-damage, no blame from the astute, no dice.

The difference is a difference in the kind of reason offered. AN 4.3 said the act constitutes a condition of the person doing it — a claim about what the act is. This says the act has a destination attached — a claim about what the act leads to.

Both are in the collection and neither is subordinated to the other. A teacher who presents only the first has a more philosophically comfortable tradition than the one that exists; a teacher who presents only the second has a more transactional one.

Which reason is more useful

It is fair to have a view, and this page will state one. The AN 4.3 form is the more usable of the two, for a reason that is not about plausibility.

A consequence located in the act is available for inspection now. A person can notice that they are in the condition of someone who judged without looking, and the noticing is itself corrective. A consequence located after death cannot be checked, and its motivating force depends entirely on how firmly the framework is held.

That said, the two are not in competition. The Aṅguttara routinely gives both kinds of reason for the same conduct, and a reader who finds one inert may find the other lands. That redundancy is probably deliberate in a collection addressed to audiences of very different dispositions.

The title

Avaṇṇāraha — deserving of criticism, or literally deserving of avaṇṇa, dispraise. Sujato’s ‘Where Criticism Takes You’ renders the discourse’s function rather than the Pāli word, which is simply the first distinctive term in the text.

That is worth mentioning because discourse titles in this collection are usually taken from the first distinctive word rather than assigned as descriptions. A reader who expects a title to summarize a discourse will be regularly misled, and a reader who expects it to be a retrieval tag will be right most of the time.

Its place in the group

This is the third of the chapter’s four hell-and-heaven discourses, and the only one whose four items are about speech about other people rather than speech or action as such.

Read as a group the four cover: what one does (AN 4.81), how one speaks (AN 4.82), how one judges (this), and what one values (AN 4.84). That is a reasonable partition of a person, and the fact that all four now carry the same consequence makes the group a single compact ethical statement.

It is the most efficient piece of compilation in the Fours so far, and it takes about three minutes to read all four.

Key terms