Reading guide
One word changed: person to world
The entire discourse is a near-exact repeat of SN 3.2, with ‘a person’ (puggala) replaced by ‘the world’ (loka) throughout — the question, the threefold answer, and the closing verse all otherwise unchanged.
A move from individual harm to collective harm
The substitution is not merely verbal; it reframes the same three roots as operating at a different scale — not just damaging the individual in whom they arise, but constituting a source of harm for the world as a shared whole, without needing any new vocabulary to make that shift.
The same verse, doing the same work at a new scale
The bamboo simile — a plant destroyed by its own fruit — is repeated word for word from SN 3.2, applying unchanged even though its subject has widened from ‘a person of wicked heart’ to something closer to the world's own collective condition.
A pairing this book has used before
This discourse joins SN 2.13 and other instances of verbatim or near-verbatim repetition across unrelated discourses already noted in this collection, here inside a single saṃyutta rather than across two different books.
What the repetition itself suggests
That the identical teaching applies without modification whether the subject is one person or the world entire suggests these three roots are not scale-dependent — the same greed, hate, and delusion said to harm an individual are, in aggregate, exactly what harms the world, with no separate explanation required for the larger case.
Key terms
The text
§1At Sāvatthī. Seated to one side, King Pasenadi said to the Buddha, “Sir, how many things arise in the world for its harm, suffering, and discomfort?” “Great king, three things arise in the world for its harm, suffering, and discomfort. What three? Greed, hate, and delusion. These three things arise in the world for its harm, suffering, and discomfort.”
§2“When greed, hate, and delusion, originate inside oneself, they harm a person of wicked heart, as a bamboo is destroyed by its own fruit.”
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