A Fish Dealer

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Livelihoods built on killing — a fish dealer, a butcher of cattle, sheep, pigs, or poultry, a deer-hunter — have never, in the Buddha's own claimed experience, produced wealth, fine transport, or a large fortune, because the practitioner regards the beings led to slaughter with bad intentions; the discourse then states, starkly, that the same holds far worse for someone who regards human beings brought to slaughter the same way.

What the discourse actually argues, and what it does not

The argument is not that killing-based work is poorly paid as an economic observation; it is a claim about karmic consequence, stated through a rhetorical pattern of denial (“have you ever seen or heard… No, sir”) repeated across five kinds of livelihood. The stated reason each time is identical: “because when the [animals] are led to the slaughter he regards them with bad intentions.” The discourse locates the harm in the killer's own state of mind at the moment of killing, not in some external judgment about the trade itself.

The final line, read directly

The closing sentence — “how much worse is someone who regards human beings brought to the slaughter with bad intentions” — almost certainly refers to an executioner or a similar figure whose work is literally the killing of condemned people, a recognized occupation named elsewhere in the canon among livelihoods incompatible with the path. It is not a general statement about anger toward other people in ordinary life. Even read this narrowly, it remains a severe claim — that such a person is, on this discourse's own terms, reborn “in a place of loss, a bad place, the underworld, hell” — and this guide does not attempt to make that claim gentler than the text states it.

A note on what this discourse does not settle

Readers today reasonably ask harder questions than this short text answers: what of livelihoods that cause death indirectly, or unintentionally, or at industrial scale and distance from any single killer's state of mind? The discourse is narrowly built around a specific, visible act — a person directly killing an animal or, in the closing line, a person — and its reasoning turns on the killer's own regard in that moment. Extending it to other, less direct cases is an inference a reader might draw, not a claim this short text makes explicitly.

Continuing the chapter's turn toward mortality

Coming directly after AN 6.14, 6.15, and 6.17, all concerned in different ways with how a mendicant relates to death, AN 6.18 shifts the lens outward: not a mendicant's own dying, but the taking of life by others, witnessed on the road. The chapter's final two discourses, AN 6.19 and 6.20, return the lens fully inward, to a mendicant's own mindfulness of death.

Key terms