Hi Bhante!
While I generally find Ven Analayo’s analyses very sound, I am not too satisfied with how he has dealt with MN 117.
Firstly, he notes the divisions into wrong factor, mundane factor and supramundane factor. I would just point out that the text actually does not say “mundane” factor, but it merely predicates a factor as “sāsava puññabhāgiya upadhivepakka” (with effluents, partaking of merit, resulting in acquisitions). How he adduces the “mundane” is by contrast to the presence of lokuttara in the factors that are ariya anāsava lokuttara maggaṅga (noble, without effluents, lokuttara, a path factor).
But, does lokuttara in the suttas necessarily mean supramundane in the Abhidhammic sense? In the 2 occurrences I could locate in the AN (2.47 and 5.79), lokuttara could be easily read as “world-transcending”. In MN 48 and MN 122, lokuttara likewise carries the sense of “world transcending”. Ditto for SN 20.7.
This bifurcation of factors into sāsava and anāsava is quite a typical feature of the suttas. Although it does not explicitly use the sāsava and anāsava distinction, AN 4.123 makes the same point by contrasting 2 types of jhana-attainers. Ditto for AN 4.125.
I think MN 117 is probably a plain vanilla sutta about the Noble Eightfold Path leading to the ending of kamma per AN 4.235. There’s something quite unusual about that sutta. It posits 4 possibilities, the first 3 dealing with volition which a person generates (abhisaṅkharoti ). However, in the 4th option dealing with kamma that is neither dark nor bright with neither dark nor bright result, that passage does not contain the abhisaṅkharoti verb.
To my simple mind, MN 117 does not look in the least bit Abhidhammic, once we get past reading its lokuttara as “supramundane”.