Ugga — The Book of the Ones · Chapter Eight · Poem 10 of 10
Setting
A retrospective declaration, closing this chapter's tenth and final poem
Speaker
Ugga, in the first person
Form
One four-line verse, followed by the chapter's formulaic double closing
Length
under 1 minute to read
Northern parallel
This reading guide does not assert a specific matching text for this poem in other Buddhist literatures.
Difficulty
★☆☆☆☆ — plain, direct vocabulary
Why this text
Ugga closes Chapter Eight with the plainest possible declaration: whatever deeds he has done, much or little, are all now ‘completely exhausted’, and ‘there'll be no more future lives’. It is the third such closing declaration in a row — after Thag 1.78's fallen-away ‘mass of suffering’ and Thag 1.79's ‘cooled, quenched’ — before the chapter's own formulaic close.
Reading guide
Karma exhausted, no more becoming
The verse's structure is simple: whatever deeds (kamma), large or small, once existed, are now parikkhīṇa, ‘completely exhausted’; therefore natthi dāni punabbhavo, ‘there is now no more renewed existence’. This is the third poem in a row to close Chapter Eight's back half with a declaration of this general kind — suffering fallen away in Thag 1.78, cooled and quenched in Thag 1.79, and now karma exhausted here.
The chapter's double closing
As in every chapter so far, two more lines follow the poem itself, both left untranslated by Sujato: vaggo aṭṭhamo (‘the eighth chapter [ends]’), then an uddāna, a summary verse listing all ten names for easy memorization. This chapter's uddāna shortens Hatthārohaputta to Ārohaputta to fit its metrical line — the same kind of compression seen in earlier chapters' closing summaries — and adds one small detail not found in his own verse: it calls Māṇava isi, ‘the sage’, an epithet this reading guide notes only as it appears in the summary, not as a claim Māṇava's own poem makes about himself.
Ten poems, no single mold
Looking back across the chapter: an impersonal teaching on nibbāna (1.71) beside a wife left behind (1.72); the three sights that trigger renunciation (1.73) beside an unglossed doctrinal list (1.74); a maxim about good company (1.75) beside a four-line paradox (1.76); a verse shared word for word with the Dhammapada (1.77) beside one borrowing only its opening from the Dhammapada's most famous couplet (1.78); and finally three closing declarations in a row (1.78–1.80). Unlike Chapter Six, built almost entirely around a single image, Chapter Eight moves through nearly as many different kinds of verse as it has poems.
A name shared with a well-known lay disciple
Ugga is also the name of a celebrated lay follower, Ugga of Vesālī, listed elsewhere in the canon among those foremost for giving agreeable gifts. This reading guide does not assert that this monk and that lay disciple are the same person — the name is common, and nothing here confirms the connection — only notes the shared name, in keeping with this collection's usual caution about such cases.
Key terms
kamma — “deed, action” — what the verse says is now completely exhausted.
parikkhīṇa — “completely exhausted, finished” — describing all of the speaker's past deeds.
