San Mu Bu Pm GBM 3 Ss 4Encouraging Someone to Serve One’s Desires
Pāli / Sanskrit:Attakāmpāricariya
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The Attakāmpāricariya Sūtra: Encouraging Service to Desire
Background
The Attakāmpāricariya Sūtra (Pāli: Atta = self, kāma = desire, pāricariya = service) appears in the Vinaya Piṭaka of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. The sūtra belongs to the Suttavibhanga section of the Vinaya Piṭaka, where rules of conduct and situations of violation in the community of monks and nuns are recorded.
The compositional background of this sūtra is connected with issues of pure discipline within the community of monks and nuns. The sūtra records wrongful conduct, specifically encouraging others to do things contrary to the fundamental mind, or to serve personal desires. This is regarded as a violation of the basic ethical principles of renunciants. Studying this sūtra helps us better understand how early Buddhism viewed internal discipline and the nature of mistaken actions.
Main Content
The Attakāmpāricariya Sūtra points out that encouraging others to serve personal desires, whether one’s own or another’s, is an offense in Buddhism. Specifically, the sūtra rejects cases in which a person submits, though outwardly for the reason of "service," while in reality being incited to violate the precepts or depart from the path of practice.
The forms of violation recorded in the sūtra include: encouraging someone to accept improper desires, enticing others to abandon their resolve to practice, or exploiting authority in order to make others submit to one’s desires. In the context of monks and nuns, these are clear violations of the spirit of the Patimokkha.
The sūtra emphasizes that in the eyes of early Buddhism, no reason or motive can justify such actions. Even if the other person is willing or both sides "benefit," encouraging service to desire remains a fundamental wrong because it directly contradicts the principle of the holy life (brahmacariya).
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