Untitled Discourses on Greed, and So On

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence, at enormous scale

The same five development lists established individually at AN 5.303–307 — two perception lists, one progressive perception chain, and the faculty/power pair — are each developed for the complete understanding, finishing, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go of greed, and then for insight into, and all nine further verbs toward, sixteen additional defilements: hate, delusion, anger, acrimony, disdain, contempt, jealousy, stinginess, deceit, deviousness, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence.

A defilement list and a verb sequence already met twice

This is not new material composed for the Fives. The same seventeen defilements, in the same order, already closed the Threes at AN 3.183–352 and the Fours at AN 4.304–783; the same ten verbs — insight, complete understanding, finishing, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go — governed both of those earlier closing blocks as well.

The arithmetic, and where it comes from

Seventeen defilements times ten verbs times five development lists is eight hundred fifty combinations. AN 5.303–307 already gave five of them — greed, crossed with insight, across all five development lists. This page represents the remaining eight hundred forty-five: greed's other nine verbs across all five lists (nine times five is forty-five), plus the sixteen further defilements across all ten verbs and all five lists (sixteen times ten times five is eight hundred). Forty-five plus eight hundred is eight hundred forty-five, matching this page's sutta-number range exactly.

A third dimension unique to this chapter

AN 4.304–783's own closing block crossed its defilements and verbs against three fourfold lists given once, in full, earlier in the Fours. This page's structure is the same in kind — a further multiplying dimension, drawn from material already given individually — but larger in that dimension: five development lists rather than three, established across five separate discourses (AN 5.303–307) rather than one shared set.

The chapter's own closing verse, and the book's own summary

Following the compressed formula, the source gives two summary verses this reading guide has not translated segment by segment, since Sujato's translation leaves them as untranslated mnemonic verse: a tassuddānaṁ naming this chapter's ten verbs in verse form, closing ‘Pañcakanipāto niṭṭhito’, ‘the Book of the Fives is finished’; and immediately after it, a vagguddānaṁ, a chapter-summary verse naming, in order, the twenty-six numbered vaggas that make up this book — from the Sekhabalavagga to the Upasampadāvagga — confirming, in the tradition's own words, the very chapter structure this project has followed since AN 5.1. The verse's own ordinals confirm two counts already noted along the way: aṭṭhamaṁ, ‘the eighth’, for the Yodhājīvavagga, and dvādasaṁ, ‘the twelfth’, for the Andhakavindavagga.

Twenty-six vaggas, not twenty-nine

The vagguddāna names only the twenty-six numbered vaggas, Sekhabalavagga through Upasampadāvagga; it does not include the three peyyāla chapters that follow them, the Sammutipeyyāla, the Sikkhāpadapeyyāla, and this Rāgapeyyāla itself. This is a genuine structural fact the source's own summary verse confirms: the tradition counts these three closing appendices as material appended after the book's vaggas proper, not as vaggas themselves — exactly the distinction this reading guide has followed throughout, treating chapters twenty-seven through twenty-nine as a different kind of unit from the twenty-six that precede them.

The Book of the Fives, finished

The final translated line of this page, following the compressed formula, is ‘The Book of the Fives is finished.’ This is not a chapter closing of the kind this project has met twenty-eight times already since AN 5.1. It is the close of the entire Pañcaka Nipāta — the collection this project has read one discourse and then one chapter at a time, from its first page to its last, including the final eight hundred fifty discourses this page and its five predecessors represent in compressed and individual form rather than eight hundred fifty separate pages.

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