Insight into Hate, and So On

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same three six-item lists, developed for the same ten ways of relating to a defilement, are now run against sixteen further defilements beyond greed: hate, delusion, anger, hostility, disparagement, rivalry, jealousy, stinginess, deceit, fraud, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence.

The complete list, and where it has been seen before — twice

Dosa, moha, kodha, upanāha, makkha, paḷāsa, issā, macchariya, māyā, sāṭheyya, thambha, sārambha, māna, atimāna, mada, pamāda — sixteen defilements, running from the two remaining root poisons through increasingly specific interpersonal and characterological faults, closing on negligence. This is not a list composed fresh for the Sixes. Together with greed, this identical seventeen-item roster, in this same order, already closed both the Threes at AN 3.183–352 and the Fours at AN 4.304–783 — the same list, reused wholesale for a structurally identical closing device in a third nipāta running.

Ten verbs, three lists, sixteen targets

Each of the sixteen defilements is developed against the identical ten-verb sequence already run against greed across AN 6.140–169: direct knowledge, complete understanding, complete ending, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go. Each of those ten is in turn crossed against the three six-item lists given in full at AN 6.140–142: the unsurpassable things, the recollections, and the graduated perceptions. Sixteen times ten times three is four hundred eighty — the largest single combinatorial block in this entire series to date, and it survives in the source as one sentence.

The Book of the Sixes, finished

The final line of this block, following the formula's own close, is “Rāgapeyyālaṁ niṭṭhitaṁ” — “the Rāgapeyyāla is finished” — immediately followed by “Chakkanipātapāḷi niṭṭhitā”: “the text of the Book of the Sixes is finished.” This is not merely a chapter closing, of the kind this series has met twelve times since AN 6.1. It is the close of the entire Chakka Nipāta — the collection this build-out has read since AN 6.1, one discourse and then one chapter at a time, now complete from its first page to its last, including the final five hundred ten discourses this page and its two predecessors represent in compressed form rather than as individual pages.

A closing without the earlier puzzle

Unlike the Fours' own closing block at AN 4.304–783, whose colophon carried a genuinely puzzling repeated paṇṇāsaka marker this series left honestly unresolved, this block's close is comparatively simple: no paṇṇāsaka marker appears here at all, only the chapter-closing and nipāta-closing lines in sequence, with nothing requiring a similar caveat.

Key terms