Well, it is a slight variation of mutating table issue. The only difference BEFORE UPDATE FOR EACH ROW trigger needs to collect rowid + all :OLD values for the rows you do not want to be updated. Then AFTER UPDATE statement level trigger issues UPDATE agaist saved rows setting the old values back (see Tom Kyte's Case 2 - you need to access the :old values). What is different in your case is RECURSION. Tom Kyte's example 2 avoids the issue since triggers are DELETE triggers and AFTER DELETE statement level trigger issues an INSERT. In your case you have UPDATE triggers and AFTER UPDATE statement level trigger issues UPDATE. As a result, if you follow Tom Kyte's example you will end up in an infinite recursion (which will error out on level 50 - that is how many Oracle sypports. I will explain in more details.

1. User issues an UPDATE.
2. BEFORE UPDATE statement level trigger clears PL/SQL table
3. BEFORE UPDATE for each row trigger populates PL/SQL table
4. ATER UPDATE statement level trigger reads PL/SQL table and issues UPDATE. As a result we are back to step 2 - an infinite loop.

To resolve the issue you need:

1. Add a global package variable RECURSION BOOLEAN;
2. In BEFORE UPDATE statement level trigger use:

IF NOT RECURSION THEN clear PL/SQL table END IF;

3. In BEFORE UPDATE for each row trigger use:

IF NOT RECURSION THEN populate PL/SQL table END IF;

4. In ATER UPDATE statement level trigger use:

IF NOT RECURSION
THEN
RECURSION := TRUE;
loop through PL/SQL table and issue UPDATEs
RECURSION := FALSE;
END IF;

5. Add

EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
RECURSION := FALSE;
RAISE;

to all triggers. Otherwise RECURSION might not be reset back to true if one of the triggers raises an exception.

SY.