Untitled Discourses on Hate, Etc.

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same three seven-item lists, developed for the same ten verbs already run against greed, are now run against sixteen further defilements beyond greed: hate, delusion, anger, acrimony, disdain, contempt, jealousy, stinginess, deceitfulness, deviousness, obstinacy, aggression, conceit, arrogance, vanity, and negligence.

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

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 Sevens. Together with greed, this identical seventeen-item roster, in this same order, already closed the Threes at AN 3.183–352, the Fours at AN 4.304–783, and the Sixes at AN 6.170–649 — the same list, reused wholesale for a structurally identical closing device in a fourth 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 7.615–644: direct knowledge, complete understanding, complete ending, giving up, ending, vanishing, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go. The tenth verb, direct knowledge, is not omitted here — it is embedded inside the source's own peyyāla at the very end of the sixteen-item defilement list itself (“of negligence, for direct knowledge…”), easy to miss without checking the Pali directly. Each of those ten verbs is in turn crossed against the three seven-item lists given in full at AN 7.615–617: the awakening factors, and two lists of seven perceptions. Sixteen times ten times three is four hundred eighty — the largest single combinatorial block in this entire project to date, and it survives in the source as one sentence.

The Book of the Sevens, finished

The final lines of this block, following the formula's own close, record that the mendicants were satisfied and approved what the Buddha said, then give two colophons: “Rāgapeyyālaṁ niṭṭhitaṁ” — “the Rāgapeyyāla is finished”, left untranslated in the source data this project draws on — immediately followed by “Sattakanipātapāḷi niṭṭhitā”, which is translated: “The Book of the Sevens is finished.” This is not merely a chapter closing, of the kind this series has met ten times since AN 7.1. It is the close of the entire Sattaka Nipāta — the collection this build-out has read since AN 7.1, one discourse, then one chapter, then two vast peyyāla megachapters at a time, now complete from its first page to its last, including the final 1,030 discourses (AN 7.95–1124) this page and its predecessors represent in compressed form across only a handful of pages rather than as individual discourses.

A closing shared with three earlier nipātas, and what it suggests

That the identical seventeen-item defilement roster, run through the identical combinatorial technique, now closes four separate nipātas in a row (the Threes, Fours, Sixes, and now the Sevens) suggests this closing device is not incidental to any one collection's content but a standing feature of how the Numbered Discourses as a whole are assembled — a compositional template applied consistently across nipātas of different sizes, adjusting only the verb-count and list-count each nipāta's own number requires, while keeping the defilement roster itself untouched.

Key terms