A teaching that says so much about what to do also spends real space on what not to do — not as a side note, but with the same directness it uses everywhere else. Six habits are named and set aside, each one a plausible-looking shortcut that the teaching insists is not one.
1. Ritual performed for a reward
Not ritual itself — rites and offerings performed specifically to buy a result: a better birth, a comfortable heaven, a name remembered. The trouble is not that this fails. It works, in its narrow way — and then runs out, and the one who bought a heaven this way is sent back for another turn of the same wheel. A reward that expires was never the actual goal.
2. Mistaking idleness for renunciation
Sitting still and doing nothing can look, from outside, exactly like the peace of someone who has renounced everything. The teaching draws the line sharply: action is better than inaction, and giving up action altogether is not even as good as simply doing the work without attachment. A mind still full of old momentum does not become still by keeping the hands still; it only loses the one outlet — useful work — that might have worn that momentum down.
3. A world with no order and no witness
The view that nothing holds the world together, no truth and no lord behind it, paired with an appetite nothing can ever fill, is treated as a genuine danger rather than a harmless opinion — not because it is disrespectful, but because a person who believes nothing is finally watching tends to act as if nothing finally matters.
4. Nature running entirely on its own
A related but subtler claim: that the visible order of things needs no witness at all, that matter simply organizes itself. The teaching does not deny that nature does the visible work — only that it could do it unwatched. Nature brings forth all things, moving and unmoving, under My oversight, and the knower lights up the field the way the sun lights up a world it does not become part of. A thread running through beads is not one of the beads; that does not make the thread optional.
5. Austerity that punishes the body for show
Fasting until the body breaks down, standing exposed to the elements as a demonstration — the teaching names this directly as a distortion, practiced out of vanity and self-importance, torturing a body that never asked for the fight, without regard for what actually lives within it. The target was never the body. It was the old residue sitting in the mind, and starving the body does nothing to that residue at all.
6. Restraint on the outside, hunger still running on the inside
The sharpest of the six: someone who holds the body still while the mind keeps chewing on everything it was pretending to give up is called, without softening, a pretender. Of all six habits this is the one the teaching seems least patient with — not because craving is worse than the other five, but because it is the one dressed up to look like the cure.
None of the six is forbidden as a sin to be punished. Each is named as a shortcut that looks like the path and is not — a rite that expires, a stillness that is only postponement, a picture of the world with nobody finally watching, and a body punished for a debt the mind alone owes.