Titans

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A person’s own conduct and the conduct of their following are independent, and there are four combinations.

Titans and gods

Asura and deva. The titans are the traditional adversaries of the gods in Indian cosmology, defeated and cast down from the heaven of the Thirty-Three; AN 4.15 named Rāhu as their lord.

Here the two are used purely as evaluative labels — unethical and ethical — with no cosmological content. That is the same move AN 4.53 made with corpses and goddesses, and AN 4.85 with darkness and light.

The collection reaches for these vivid paired terms whenever it wants a grid, and the definitions are always the same underneath: dussīla pāpadhamma, unethical and of bad character, against sīlavā kalyāṇadhamma.

What is new here

The variable that has changed is the second one. AN 4.53 paired a person with their spouse; AN 4.78 paired a giver with a recipient; AN 4.85 paired a person’s birth with their destination. This pairs a person with their parisā, their following or retinue.

That word covers a wide range — an assembly, a court, a company of students, the people who attach themselves to someone. The discourse does not specify, which makes the grid applicable to any of them.

So this is the collection’s statement about leadership and its company, and it says the obvious thing that is nonetheless routinely denied: the two are not the same and neither determines the other.

The mixed cells

As always, the mixed cells are the content. A person of bad character can have a following of good people, and a person of good character can have a following of bad ones.

The first of those is the more uncomfortable, and it is the one that matters for assessing an institution. The quality of the people gathered around someone is not evidence about that person. Good people can be assembled by someone who is not one, and the discourse says so without qualification.

The second cuts the other way and is a familiar defense: a leader is not automatically convicted by their followers. AN 4.70 said the country follows the king, and this says the correspondence is not guaranteed in either direction — which is worth holding alongside it rather than choosing between them.

Against AN 4.20 and AN 4.70

Three discourses in the Fours address the relation between a person in a position and the people affected. They do not say the same thing, and the differences are the useful part.

AN 4.20 said an assembly whose officers decide by the four prejudices is an assembly of the dregs — a claim that the officers characterize the body. AN 4.70 said the country follows the king down through every rank — a claim about transmission downward. This says the two are simply independent variables.

Read together they are not contradictory but they are differently weighted. AN 4.70 describes a tendency; this describes the range of what actually occurs. A tendency and a set of possibilities are different kinds of claim, and the collection gives both.

Using it

The grid’s practical use is in the two questions it separates. What is this person like? And what are the people around them like? Most assessment collapses these, in both directions.

For someone evaluating a community, teacher, or organization, keeping them apart is the whole of the discipline the discourse asks for. It is also consistent with AN 4.65, which said confidence formed on appearance, voice, or austerity is unreliable and only principle is a measure — the composition of a following is another external impression, and this discourse says it does not measure the person.

Key terms