Sutrasthana 2.22 — The Remaining Four Sins and the Threefold Renunciation

Incoherent or frivolous speech (sambhinnālāpa), malice (vyāpāda), covetousness (abhidhyā), and wrong views (dṛk-viparyaya) — these (together with the six named in verse 21) constitute the tenfold (daśadhā) wrong action (pāpaṃ karma). One should renounce them through body, speech, and mind (kāya-vāṅ-mānasais tyajet). (22)

Translation: Prof. K.R. Srīkaṇṭha Murthy, Ashtanga Hridayam Vol. I (Sūtrasthāna), Chowkhamba Krishnadas Academy, Varanasi. This verse completes the classical ten-sins list opened in verse 21 and gives the signature Indian ethical formula — the threefold renunciation through body, speech, and mind (kāya-vāk-manas) — that anchors the Sadvṛtta teaching and appears across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions.

Note: The three-fold formula kāya-vāk-manas (body, speech, mind) is one of the most widely shared ethical frameworks in classical Indian thought. It appears in the Bhagavad Gītā (17.14–17.16) as the axes of tapas (austerity), in the Buddhist Aṅguttara Nikāya as the three gates of action, and in the Jain classification of kāya-vāk-mano-gupti (guarding of body, speech, mind). Vāgbhaṭa's use of the formula here places classical Āyurveda squarely within the pan-Indian ethical consensus.

Verse 22 completes the classical ten-sins (daśa-pāpa) teaching that verse 21 opened, names the four remaining items (one speech act and three mental acts), and gives the injunction that binds the whole list: these ten should be renounced through body, speech, and mind together. The threefold formula is the signature ethical architecture of classical Indian thought, and its appearance here places Āyurvedic ethics firmly within the shared pan-Indian tradition.

Sambhinnālāpa: incoherent or frivolous speech

The first named in verse 22 is sambhinnālāpa, the fourth of the speech acts. The compound parses as sam- (together) + bhinna (broken, split) + ālāpa (talk, conversation). The literal reading is "broken-together-talk" or "scattered talk." The Buddhist Pali cognate is samphappalāpa, usually rendered "idle chatter" or "frivolous speech," and the two traditions agree on the act's content: speech that lacks coherent purpose, speech that wastes the time and attention of the hearer, speech that scatters the speaker's own mind by flowing without direction.

The category covers several specific patterns. It covers the gossip that occupies time without producing knowledge anyone needed. It covers the nervous chatter that fills silence out of discomfort with silence. It covers the social talk that performs being-engaged without engaging. It covers the content-consumption pattern of reading, watching, or listening to material that occupies attention without leaving anything behind. The common feature across these patterns is that the speech (or the speech-listening) is not serving a purpose the speaker or hearer would, on reflection, endorse.

Classical Sanskrit literature treats sambhinnālāpa as a subtle vice because it does not appear to harm anyone directly. The pattern is social, common, and often pleasant. The harm, however, is measurable: the hours consumed by sambhinnālāpa are not available for work, for relationships of substance, for contemplation, or for rest. The mental state produced by sustained sambhinnālāpa is one of scatter, low attention, and reduced capacity for the sustained focus that any real task requires. The classical tradition sees these costs clearly and places sambhinnālāpa in the list of renunciations because the costs, though diffuse, are real.

Vyāpāda: malice, ill-will, wish to harm

The first mental act named is vyāpāda, malice or active ill-will. The word comes from vi- (apart) + ā-pad- (to go toward, meet), and carries the sense of "going-against" or actively directing one's intent against another being. Unlike simple irritation or momentary anger, vyāpāda is the settled disposition of wishing harm to another. It is the sustained inner state from which harmful acts proceed.

Buddhist psychology develops vyāpāda analysis to its greatest depth. The Pali cognate byāpāda is listed among the five hindrances (pañca-nīvaraṇa) that obstruct meditative progress, and the Buddhist path includes specific antidotes (brahma-vihāra practices of mettā and karuṇā) to counter it. The classical Hindu tradition treats vyāpāda similarly as a core affliction (kleśa-related state) that requires active cultivation of the opposite (goodwill, compassion) to overcome.

The renunciation of vyāpāda is the inner counterpart of the renunciation of hiṃsā. Where hiṃsā is the external act of harming, vyāpāda is the internal disposition that drives such acts. A practitioner who renounces hiṃsā but continues to harbor vyāpāda is engaged in partial practice at best; sooner or later the disposition will produce the act, or will produce subtler acts of harm that fall short of overt hiṃsā but damage others through tone, withdrawal, or passive aggression. The full practice requires the renunciation of the inner state from which the outer act springs.

Abhidhyā: covetousness, greedy desire for others' possessions

The second mental act is abhidhyā, the sustained desire for what belongs to another. The word parses as abhi- (toward) + dhyai (to think, meditate), and literally names the pattern of one's thinking directed toward another's goods or situation with the wish to possess them. The Buddhist cognate abhijjhā is similarly placed in the lists of unwholesome mental states.

Abhidhyā is the inner counterpart of steya, just as vyāpāda is the inner counterpart of hiṃsā. Where steya is the outer act of taking what has not been given, abhidhyā is the inner disposition of wanting to take. A practitioner who does not steal but nonetheless spends mental hours comparing their possessions to others', fantasizing about what they would have if they had another's circumstances, or calculating how to get what belongs to another, is cultivating the disposition from which steya grows.

Modern consumer culture actively produces abhidhyā as a feature of its operation. Advertising teaches the viewer to want what they do not have, and specifically to want what others have that they do not. Social media algorithms present curated images of others' possessions and experiences in formats optimized to produce comparative hunger. The practitioner of dinacaryā in the modern context therefore faces a more abhidhyā-dense environment than Vāgbhaṭa's classical reader, and the practice of renunciation requires specific attention to the channels through which abhidhyā is being trained into the mind.

Dṛg-viparyaya: wrong views, perversity of perception

The third mental act, and the final item in the ten-sins list, is dṛk-viparyaya. The compound parses as dṛś (seeing, view) + viparyaya (reversal, inversion, perversion). The literal meaning is "the reversal of sight" or "perversion of view," and the act is the holding of views opposite to the truth. Classical commentaries specify the content: faithlessness toward the testimony of elders and scripture, the belief that there are no consequences to action, the belief that virtue and vice make no difference to outcome, and more broadly, the settled cognitive position that the moral order is not real.

The Buddhist parallel is micchā-diṭṭhi, wrong view, which the tradition treats as the gravest of the mental sins because it undermines the motivation to renounce the other nine. A practitioner who holds right view recognizes the ten sins as harmful and renounces them accordingly. A practitioner who holds wrong view does not see the sins as sins, and therefore does not undertake the renunciation. Dṛg-viparyaya is therefore the root of the other nine, and its renunciation is the precondition for the renunciation of the others.

The modern reader often encounters this item with some resistance, because the specific content verse 22 and its commentary traditions prescribe (faith in scripture, confidence in karma, deference to elders) is not automatically shared by a contemporary non-Hindu audience. The underlying principle is translatable. The renunciation of dṛk-viparyaya is, in its general form, the cultivation of a correct relationship to reality: not believing what is false, not denying what is true, not holding that consequences do not follow from actions, not holding that one's conduct is unrelated to one's well-being. A modern practitioner can recognize the force of the injunction without committing to the specific classical metaphysical positions. What the item asks is that the practitioner's views be aligned with how things work, and that they not be willfully deceived about the connections between conduct and consequence that the ten-sins teaching describes.

The ten sins complete: body, speech, and mind

With dṛk-viparyaya the list is complete:

• Body (kāya-karma, 3): hiṃsā (injury), steya (theft), anyathā-kāma (unlawful sex).
• Speech (vāk-karma, 4): paiśunya (divisive speech), pāruṣya (harsh speech), anṛta (untruth), sambhinnālāpa (frivolous or incoherent speech).
• Mind (mano-karma, 3): vyāpāda (malice), abhidhyā (covetousness), dṛk-viparyaya (wrong views).

The ordering is significant. The list moves from the most outer (physical acts, most directly observable by others) to the most inner (mental states, observable only by the person themselves). The movement inward is also a movement toward the root: the physical acts proceed from the speech and mental states, the speech acts proceed from the mental states, and the mental states stand at the origin of the whole pattern of wrong action. A practitioner who renounces only the outer acts and leaves the inner states untouched has partial practice; a practitioner who renounces the inner states produces the outer abstention as a natural consequence.

The four new items in Āyurvedic physiology

Āyurvedic physiology treats the four items verse 22 names as having specific doṣic signatures, and the mapping is instructive for the practitioner who is building the connection between the ethical teaching and the medical regimen that surrounds it. Each of the four items disturbs a specific constitutional tendency, and the disturbance is visible in the body when the mental state is sustained over time.

Sambhinnālāpa (scattered, frivolous speech) disturbs vāta. Vāta governs movement, and its balanced expression is the steady, directed movement that keeps prāṇa flowing smoothly through the body. Scattered speech expresses and reinforces the scattered vāta state: the speech jumps from topic to topic because the mind is jumping, and the jumping mind is also driving shallow breathing, restless limbs, disrupted sleep, and the dry, depleted quality that signals aggravated vāta. The practitioner who watches their sambhinnālāpa as a vāta-reading finds that reduction of scattered speech produces measurable settling in the vāta symptoms: deeper breath, steadier sleep, warmer extremities, less jittery energy in the nervous system. The speech practice becomes a doṣa-therapy in its own right.

Vyāpāda (malice, sustained ill-will) disturbs pitta. Pitta governs transformation and heat, and its imbalanced expression produces the specific signature of inflammation: heat, redness, acidity, sharpness of both physical and emotional response. Vyāpāda is the mental state that pitta recognizes as its own, and sustained vyāpāda trains the pitta-aggravation pattern into the body. Chronic hostility, held resentment, the specific pattern of lying awake replaying grievances — each of these produces the physiological pitta signature and is, over time, a cause of the specific pitta disorders (inflammatory skin conditions, gastric ulceration, hypertension, liver-heat patterns). The renunciation of vyāpāda is therefore also the classical Āyurvedic intervention in certain of these pitta disorders; the outer treatments for pitta (cooling foods, bitter herbs, reduced exposure to heat) are supported by the inner treatment of ceasing to cultivate the mental state that drives pitta upward.

Abhidhyā (covetousness, greedy desire for others' goods) disturbs kapha and rajas. Kapha governs mass, accumulation, and attachment, and its imbalanced expression produces the specific signature of excess holding: weight gain, congestion, lethargy combined with emotional heaviness, the inability to release what should be released. Abhidhyā is the mental state of wanting to accumulate, and sustained abhidhyā trains the kapha-holding pattern into the body. The specific pattern of comparative hunger (wanting what others have, never satisfied with what one has) produces the rajas-tamas interplay that Āyurveda treats as the mental analogue of the physical kapha pattern. The renunciation of abhidhyā supports the treatment of kapha disorders the same way vyāpāda-renunciation supports pitta treatment.

Dṛk-viparyaya (inversion of understanding, wrong views) disturbs sattva at its ground. The three guṇas of classical psychology name the three qualities of mind: sattva (clarity, balance, truthful perception), rajas (activity, agitation), and tamas (inertia, obscuration). Wrong view is the specific manifestation of aggravated tamas: the mind obscured to what is true, committed to positions that protect convenience rather than reveal reality. The practitioner whose views are systematically inverted is practicing a form of tamas cultivation, and the downstream effects are the characteristic tamas symptoms: mental dullness, loss of discernment, difficulty perceiving what is in front of one, susceptibility to manipulation, the specific patterns of depression that involve loss of contact with what matters. The renunciation of dṛk-viparyaya is the sattva-cultivation that underlies all other practices of mental clarity.

The four new items therefore map onto the four constitutional axes: vāta, pitta, kapha, and the guṇic ground that sustains all three. The mapping is not arbitrary; it reflects the structure of classical Āyurvedic psychophysiology, in which mental states and bodily states are not separate phenomena but expressions of the same underlying constitutional balance. A practitioner who learns to read their speech and mind patterns as doṣa-readings gains a diagnostic instrument that is available at every moment and that does not require external instrumentation. The ethical teaching and the medical diagnostic are, on this analysis, two angles on the same phenomenon.

Kāya-vāṅ-mānasais tyajet: renounce through body, speech, and mind

The final injunction of the verse is kāya-vāṅ-mānasais tyajet, "one should renounce by body, speech, and mind." The instrumental case on kāya-vāk-manas specifies that the renunciation is effected through all three instruments of action together. The verse is not asking the practitioner to renounce body acts only; it is asking for complete renunciation across all three axes of action.

This threefold formula is one of the most widely shared architectures in classical Indian ethics. The Bhagavad Gītā (17.14–17.16) organizes its teaching on tapas (austerity) along the three axes: śārīra (bodily) tapas of worship, cleanliness, and non-violence; vācika (verbal) tapas of truthful, beneficial, and pleasant speech; and mānasa (mental) tapas of serenity, silence, and self-control. The Buddhist Aṅguttara Nikāya organizes the courses of action (kamma-patha) along the same three gates. The Jain concept of gupti (guarding) is tripartite: kāya-gupti, vāk-gupti, mano-gupti, the restraint of body, speech, and mind.

The shared architecture reflects a shared classical observation that action has three seats, and that moral practice which addresses only one or two of them is incomplete. A practitioner whose body does not sin but whose speech does, sins with two-thirds of their instruments remaining. A practitioner whose body and speech do not sin but whose mind does, sins with one-third of their instruments remaining, and the mental sin will sooner or later surface in action. Only the threefold renunciation closes the loop.

Why this teaching appears in a medical text

The placement of the ten-sins teaching within a chapter on daily bodily regimen continues verse 20's argument that ethics is medicine by another route. The three sites of action are also, in Āyurvedic physiology, sites of health or disease. The body's doṣas are disturbed by hostile action. The speech's physical basis (breath, the throat marmas, the jaw musculature) is disturbed by harsh or deceptive speech. The mind's clarity is disturbed by the three mental sins, and the disturbance propagates downward into speech and body. To prescribe a regimen for the body without prescribing the regimen for the speech and the mind would be, on Āyurvedic understanding, to prescribe partial care for a person whose health is an integrated tripartite phenomenon.

The threefold renunciation also integrates with the ṛtucaryā (seasonal regimen) and the general prescriptions on mental equilibrium that Sūtrasthāna Chapter 3 will develop. The Sadvṛtta teaching that occupies the rest of Chapter 2 specifies the particular forms the threefold renunciation takes in daily conduct: how to speak, how to relate, how to think about prosperity and calamity, how to treat those in need, and more. Each specific Sadvṛtta prescription is an instance of the general architecture verse 22 has just given. Verse 23 begins the specific applications.

The threefold formula kāya-vāk-manas (body, speech, mind) is one of the most widely shared ethical frameworks across classical traditions, and the convergence across them on both the specific list of ten wrong actions and the three-axes architecture is remarkable.

Within the Indian traditions, the ten-sins list appears with minor variations across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources. The Manu Smṛti 12.5–12.7 gives the same tripartite structure (three body, four speech, three mind), and the list of specific items is nearly identical to Vāgbhaṭa's. The Buddhist Aṅguttara Nikāya (AN 10.176, the Cunda Kammāraputta Sutta) gives the ten courses of unwholesome action (dasa akusala-kammapatha) in the same tripartite arrangement, with the same items. The Jain tradition classifies violations into the same three gates, and the gupti concept of guarding body, speech, and mind is the direct Jain counterpart of Vāgbhaṭa's injunction. The three Indian traditions diverge significantly on metaphysics but converge almost exactly on ethical inventory.

The Buddhist treatment deserves particular attention because the Pali texts preserve one of the earliest surviving detailed analyses of how the three sites interact. The Aṅguttara Nikāya presents the ten courses of action as having both inner (intention, cetanā) and outer (act, kamma) components, and traces each of the outer acts back to one of the three root causes (lobha greed, dosa hatred, moha delusion). The mapping is instructive: the three mental sins Vāgbhaṭa names (vyāpāda, abhidhyā, dṛk-viparyaya) correspond directly to the Buddhist three roots (dosa ↔ vyāpāda, lobha ↔ abhidhyā, and moha (delusion) as the root of which dṛk-viparyaya (wrong view) is the chief cognitive manifestation). The Āyurvedic and Buddhist classifications are using different surface vocabularies for the same underlying psychological analysis.

The Greek philosophical tradition gives a closely related analysis, though with different vocabulary. Plato's Republic Book IV develops the tripartite soul (logistikon, rational; thymoeides, spirited; epithymetikon, appetitive), and Platonic ethics locates virtue in the correct ordering of these three parts. The mapping to the Indian three-gates is imperfect but suggestive: the rational part governs right view (a counterpart of dṛk-viparyaya avoidance), the spirited part houses the malice and anger that vyāpāda names, and the appetitive part generates the abhidhyā-like desire for others' goods. Aristotle's treatment in the Nicomachean Ethics focuses more on specific virtues and vices than on a three-site architecture, but his analysis of the relationship between acts, habits, and character covers the same conceptual ground.

The Stoic tradition tightens the Greek analysis. For the Stoics, all ethical work happens at the level of judgment (hypolepsis) and intention (prohairesis), and the bodily and verbal acts are treated as downstream consequences of the inner states. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both stress the inner-outer integration that Vāgbhaṭa's threefold renunciation encodes: right action at the outer level requires right judgment at the inner level, and vice versa. The Stoic analysis differs from the Indian in its emphasis on cognitive therapy as the primary practice, but the target state (a person whose body, speech, and mind are aligned around right conduct) is the same.

The Islamic ethical tradition uses the three-part structure extensively. The ḥadīth "deeds are by intentions" (innamā al-aʿmālu bi-n-niyyāt, Bukhārī #1) makes the inner-outer integration foundational, and the classical Islamic categories of ʿamal (action), qawl (speech), and niyya (intention) map directly onto the Indian body-speech-mind. Al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn develops this architecture in extensive detail, with specific treatises on the diseases of the heart (the inner site, corresponding to mind) and their manifestation in speech and action.

The Christian tradition encodes the same three-axes structure through the formula "in thought, in word, and in deed" that anchors the Confiteor of the Roman Mass (Latin: cogitatione, verbo, et opere), which appears throughout medieval moral theology in the same tripartite form. The classical Christian analysis of sin treats the interior movements of the will as prior to and causally responsible for their outer expression in speech and act, and calls for the examination of conscience to cover all three sites. The correspondence to the Indian formula is close enough to suggest either shared inheritance or independent recognition of a common structure.

The Confucian tradition uses a different vocabulary but reaches similar ground. The cultivation of ren (humaneness) is understood to encompass right thought, right speech, and right action, and the Analects repeatedly emphasizes that these three must be integrated: "Hear many things, leave out what is doubtful, and speak cautiously of the rest; see many things, leave out what is dangerous, and act cautiously on the rest" (Analects 2.18). The internal examination practice of zi xing (self-reflection) addresses all three axes.

The modern empirical literature on moral psychology has re-discovered the three-axes architecture. Research on the relationship between implicit attitudes (mental site), expressed opinions (speech site), and actual behavior (body site) shows that the three are only imperfectly correlated, that interventions targeting only one often fail to shift the others, and that sustainable moral change requires attention to all three. The classical prescription that the practitioner must address the three sites together receives modern empirical support.

The convergence across traditions suggests that the three-axes architecture is not a culturally particular framework but a recognition of how moral agency operates. Humans act through body, speak through voice, and think through mind. Any ethical analysis that neglects one of the three leaves an important site of action unattended, and any ethical practice that neglects one leaves a substantial portion of the person's moral life unreformed. Vāgbhaṭa's placement of the three-axes injunction at the conclusion of the ten-sins list gives the reader a complete ethical architecture compressed into a single śloka.

The first universal principle of verse 22 is the completeness of the three-axes architecture. Human agency operates through three instruments, and moral practice that addresses only some of them leaves the others unattended. The body acts; the speech acts; the mind acts. Each is a site of wrong action, each is a site of right action, and each requires attention in its own terms. A person who polices only bodily conduct will find that speech and mind continue to produce patterns the body has been restrained from expressing. A person who polices only speech will find that body and mind continue to produce patterns the speech has been restrained from expressing. Only the three-axes practice, applied across all three sites, produces the integrated transformation verse 22 prescribes.

The second universal is that the mental acts are the source of the other two. The ten-sins list is ordered from body to speech to mind, but the causal direction runs the opposite way: the mental dispositions seed the speech acts, and the speech acts and mental dispositions together seed the body acts. A practitioner who works only at the level of bodily restraint is pruning leaves while the roots continue to send up new shoots. The practitioner who addresses the mental dispositions changes the state from which the speech and body acts proceed, and the surface acts are transformed downstream.

This ordering of cause reflects a specific claim about human psychology: that acts are not free-standing but are expressions of underlying states. The claim is not novel in 2026 (modern psychology and neuroscience both support it) but it is foundational. It means that moral progress cannot be reduced to behavioral compliance with a list of rules. The rules are descriptions of the surface patterns that right inner states produce; the inner states are the object of practice; and the surface patterns are the readable sign of whether the inner state has been achieved.

The third universal is the interaction between speech and mind. Verse 22 lists one speech act (sambhinnālāpa) and three mental acts, and the placement suggests that the four share a common register: they concern what occupies the attention, the orientation of intention, and the quality of inner-outer expression that verges into speech. The modern category of "self-talk" captures some of this: the inner speech that shapes mood, attention, and subsequent outer speech. Sambhinnālāpa externalizes what the three mental sins do internally, scattering attention, fueling malice or covetousness, or reinforcing wrong views. The renunciation of the four requires attention to the feedback loop between inner and outer speech.

The fourth universal is the completeness criterion. The verse ends with tyajet, "one should renounce," a simple verb that admits no partial satisfaction. Classical ethics does not provide a gradient where the practitioner is credited with renouncing half the list. The injunction is to renounce all ten across all three sites. This is, admittedly, a demanding standard. No ordinary practitioner fully meets it at any given moment. But the standard functions as a horizon, not a threshold: it specifies the direction of the practice rather than the condition for passing a test. The practitioner progresses by reducing the ten acts and by extending the renunciation across the three sites, knowing that the full standard is the direction of travel rather than the stopping point.

The fifth universal is the integration of moral and medical practice. Verse 22's placement in a medical text is not incidental; it is structural. The three sites the verse names (body, speech, mind) are also the sites of health in Āyurvedic physiology. The body's doṣas are disturbed by hostile acts; the speech apparatus (breath, throat, jaw) is disturbed by harsh or deceptive speech patterns; the mind's clarity (sattva) is disturbed by the three mental sins. To prescribe a bodily regimen without prescribing the speech and mental regimens would be to treat only one-third of the person's medical situation. Vāgbhaṭa's integration of the three-axes injunction into daily regimen is the classical tradition's recognition that health is an integrated phenomenon across the three sites, and that the medical practitioner must prescribe across all three.

The last universal is the universality of the list. The ten items appear, with minor variations, across Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Greek, Christian, and Islamic ethical traditions. The cross-cultural convergence on both the items and the three-axes architecture suggests that the teaching is not culturally particular but is a recognition of patterns of conduct that reliably produce human suffering when engaged in and reliably protect human flourishing when avoided. A modern reader can recognize the force of each item without committing to the specific classical metaphysics the teaching was originally framed within. The items name observable patterns of harm, and the three-axes architecture names the complete set of sites at which moral work must be done.

The modern application of verse 22 requires the practitioner to attend to all three sites of action deliberately, because modern life offers abundant encouragement to treat only the surface behavior as morally relevant and to leave the inner states unexamined.

1. The three-axes inventory

Begin with a structured review of the three sites. For each of the ten items, note the current state of your practice at the body, speech, and mind levels:

• Hiṃsā (injury) — body: do you physically harm others or beings (including through consumption choices, institutional silence, economic extraction)? Speech: do you wound with words? Mind: do you harbor ill-will that has not yet surfaced in speech or act?
• Steya (taking-not-given) — body: do you take what has not been given, even in small institutional forms? Speech: do you misrepresent in ways that extract value (credit, trust, time)? Mind: do you spend attention calculating how to extract what is not freely offered?
• Anyathā-kāma (unlawful sexual conduct) — body: do your sexual acts violate consent, commitment, or honesty? Speech: do you speak about sexual matters in ways that damage others' reputations or violate confidence? Mind: do you cultivate sustained fantasy that violates the criteria the principle names?
• Paiśunya (divisive speech) — body: do you withdraw or take sides in ways that damage relational fabric? Speech: do you speak of absent persons to their detriment? Mind: do you mentally rehearse grievances against others?
• Pāruṣya (harsh speech) — body: does your tone and posture carry harshness you do not acknowledge? Speech: is your habitual register sharp, contemptuous, sarcastic? Mind: do you rehearse harsh responses that have not yet been voiced?
• Anṛta (untruth) — body: do your actions support impressions that are not accurate? Speech: do you lie in small matters, exaggerate, misrepresent? Mind: do you allow yourself to believe what is convenient rather than what is true?
• Sambhinnālāpa (scattered speech) — body: how much of your physical activity is purposeless motion? Speech: how much of your spoken and written communication lacks purpose? Mind: how much of your attention is consumed by content, thought, or imagination that serves no purpose you would endorse?
• Vyāpāda (malice) — body: do you act out of ill-will? Speech: do you voice ill-will? Mind: do you harbor it?
• Abhidhyā (covetousness) — body: do you consume in ways driven by envy of others? Speech: do you voice comparative longing? Mind: do you spend attention wanting what belongs to others?
• Dṛg-viparyaya (wrong views) — body: do your acts proceed from beliefs that are not true? Speech: do you voice positions you know are distortions? Mind: do you hold views that protect your convenience at the cost of your accuracy?

The inventory is three columns wide and ten rows deep: thirty cells total. Each cell is a specific site of the practice. Completed honestly, the inventory surfaces the specific places where the practitioner's current state diverges from the verse's prescription, and each is a location for deliberate adjustment.

2. Starting at the mind site

Because the mental acts seed the speech and body acts, the most efficient intervention is usually at the mind site. Specific practices:

• For vyāpāda — when ill-will toward a specific person or group arises, note it, do not indulge the rehearsal it invites, and practice brief mettā (loving-kindness) toward the object of ill-will. Classical Buddhist practice and the Hindu cultivation of maitrī share this pattern. The cultivation does not require the forgiveness of real wrongs; it requires the cessation of mental rehearsal of the wrong.
• For abhidhyā — when sustained desire for another's possession or situation arises, note it, turn attention to the specific goods and relationships one already has, and (if helpful) practice muditā (sympathetic joy at another's good fortune) toward the person whose situation was the object of desire. This directly inverts abhidhyā's direction.
• For dṛk-viparyaya — when views arise that conflict with what you have reason to believe is true, examine the views, locate the convenience they serve, and practice the uncomfortable acknowledgment that the inconvenient view is more likely correct. This is the core practice of intellectual honesty, and it is the most demanding of the three mental renunciations.

3. Speech site practices

Speech is the intermediate site and often the most visible to others. Specific practices:

• Before speaking — the classical teaching, developed in the Gītā and across contemplative traditions, recommends the test of whether the speech is satya (true), priya (agreeable), and hita (beneficial). Speech that fails all three should be withheld. Speech that fails one but the other two strongly support may proceed with care. This is a tight but workable discipline.
• Sambhinnālāpa reduction — audit the consumption and production of content. How many hours per week are spent on content (social media, news, entertainment) that serves no purpose you would endorse? How many of your own outgoing words are scattered across contexts that do not justify them? Reduce in specific increments; substitute with rest, relationship, or purposeful engagement.
• Paiśunya and pāruṣya discipline — do not speak of others' faults to third parties. Do not let your tone carry habitual edge. The single practice of refraining from speaking ill of absent persons, consistently held, substantially shifts both one's relational field and one's own inner state.

4. Body site practices

Body-site practices are often the most immediately visible and therefore the most tempting to treat as sufficient. They are not sufficient, but they are necessary. Specific moves:

• Reduce participation in systems that cause harm even when the participation is legally permitted (extractive industries, exploitative supply chains, services that depend on the harm of others).
• Do not take what has not been given: close the expense report honestly, give credit where it belongs, leave time and resources you did not earn untouched.
• Honor sexual commitments made; do not use power asymmetries to extract consent that would not otherwise be given; speak and act honestly about your intentions.

5. The review practice

Verse 47 will give the formal daily review practice. For the three-axes architecture verse 22 prescribes, a weekly review is useful:

• Body: where did I act in ways the ten items name? What triggered the action? What would the renounced version have looked like?
• Speech: what did I say, write, or send that fell under the list? What inner state was being expressed?
• Mind: what mental patterns surfaced this week? Which were renounced, which indulged, which are returning?

Over months, the pattern-level view emerges: the specific items, at the specific sites, that the practitioner is most prone to. These are the particular locations of practice. The verses from 23 forward will specify many particular conducts the Sadvṛtta teaching prescribes, and the practitioner can situate each within the three-axes architecture verse 22 has given.