Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The entire spiritual life is lived to give up and cut out the seven underlying tendencies — sensual desire, aversion, views, doubt, conceit, desire to be reborn, and ignorance — cutting them off at the root so they can never arise again.
A structural twin of AN 7.9, applied to a different category
Checked side by side, this discourse and AN 7.9 share their entire structure — the statement of purpose, the palm-stump image, the closing formula — differing only in whether the seven items being removed are named as fetters or as underlying tendencies.
A third appearance of this closing formula
“Cut off craving, cast off the fetters, and by rightly comprehending conceit has made an end of suffering” now closes AN 6.105, AN 6.106, and AN 7.9 in the previous nipāta and chapter, and this discourse makes a fourth appearance — the same formula applied across four discourses with different specific content in every case, spanning two nipātas.
Why fetters and tendencies each get their own pair
That this chapter gives underlying tendencies the identical bare-list-plus-elaboration treatment the previous chapter already gave fetters, rather than simply noting the overlap and moving on, suggests the tradition considered each technical category worth stating fully in its own right, even where the specific content named is identical.
Key terms
The text
The purpose of the spiritual life
§1“Mendicants, the spiritual life is lived to give up and cut out these seven underlying tendencies. What seven? The underlying tendencies of sensual desire, aversion, views, doubt, conceit, desire to be reborn, and ignorance. The spiritual life is lived to give up and cut out these seven underlying tendencies.
Complete removal, and the closing formula
§2When a mendicant has given up the underlying tendencies of sensual desire, repulsion, views, doubt, conceit, desire to be reborn, and ignorance—cut them off at the root, made them like a palm stump, obliterated them, so they are unable to arise in the future—they’re called a mendicant who has cut off craving, cast off the fetters, and by rightly comprehending conceit has made an end of suffering.”
Self-check quiz
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