When chanted

Chanted after its introductory verse, among the passages on novice discipline.

A note on this chant. The book prints this chant in Pali only, with no Thai translation. The English here is a working translation prepared for this edition — it is not the book's own, and has not yet been checked by a teacher.

Historical background

The list is enclosed at both ends by the same sentence — that a novice possessed of ten factors be expelled — with the ten set out between. Saying the frame twice, before and after, is how these passages mark a list as complete.

Expulsion here is นาเสตุง, a sending away. It ends a novice's standing rather than punishing them, and the book prints the milder alternative on the very next page so that the two are read together.

Meaning and purpose

The first five are the gravest of the training rules restated, and the grammar has changed in a way worth noticing. The rules say refraining from killing; this list says he is one who kills. It has moved from what a person abstains from to what a person is, and that shift is what makes expulsion the consequence rather than a penalty.

The next three are of a different kind altogether: he speaks in dispraise of the Buddha, of the Dhamma, of the Sangha. Speech against the three is placed at exactly the same level as killing and stealing, which tells you plainly what the community understood itself to be held together by.

The last two are wrong view, and seducing a nun — which is the offence the introductory verse has just finished describing. The list ends where its own story began, and a reciter who has chanted both pieces in order arrives at the tenth ground already knowing whose case it was.

The chant

As the book prints it: page 58 →