[greekbeast]

Just in case, like me, anyone else might find it helpful to read the sutta straight through to begin with, I looked at Access to Insight for a translation - and then also found this introduction to MN 136 (Nanamoli Thera translation) by Bhikkhu Khantipalo, followed by the sutta. There are also some notes after the translation.


This celebrated sutta shows some of the complexities of kamma and its results. Beginning with a strange view expressed by a confused wanderer and a confused answer given by a bhikkhu, the Buddha then gives his Great Exposition of Kamma which is based upon four "types" of people:

the evil-doer who goes to hell (or some other low state of birth),
the evil-doer who goes to heaven,
the good man who goes to heaven, and
the good man who goes to hell (or other low birth).

The Buddha then shows how wrong views can arise from only partial understanding of truth. One can see the stages of this:

(1) a mystic "sees" in vision an evil-doer suffering in hell,
(2) this confirms what he had heard about moral causality,
(3) so he says, "evil-doers always go to hell," and
(4) dogma hardens and becomes rigid when he says (with the dogmatists of all ages and places), "Only this is true; anything else is wrong."

The stages of this process are repeated for each of the four "persons," after which the Buddha proceeds to analyze these views grounded in partial experience and points out which portions are true (because verifiable by trial and experience) and which are dogmatic superstructure which is unjustified.

Finally, the Buddha explains his Great Exposition of Kamma in which he shows that notions of invariability like "the evildoer goes to hell" are much too simple. The minds of people are complex and they make many different kinds of kamma even in one lifetime, some of which may influence the last moment when kamma is made before death, which in turn is the basis for the next life.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipit....136.nymo.html