Ten Who Knew Him
English-language Buddhism talks about the Buddha as though he were alone. He was not. He spent forty-five years surrounded by a cast of people so distinct from one another that the tradition ended up keeping a list of who was best at what.
The wisest. The one with the powers. The ascetic who would not sleep indoors. The one who went blind and then saw everything. The one who understood emptiness. The great preacher. The debater. The keeper of the rules. The Buddha's own son. And the cousin who remembered every word and had to recite the whole canon from memory after the funeral.
Ten people, ten specialities. And then, in a Mahāyāna sūtra written centuries later, a layman named Vimalakīrti works through all ten in order, and tells each of them — politely, devastatingly — that the thing they are best at is exactly where they have stopped.
Being foremost in the world at one thing is an achievement. This course is about how it is also a place to get stuck — and about the ten people the tradition chose to make that point with.
Every session reads the same disciple three times, from three texts that do not agree about him — his life, his own first-person account, and the moment somebody told him he was wrong. All three are translated on this site.
Jīng Lǜ Yì Xiàng經律異相 卷 13–15
Where he came from, what he did, what happened to him — a sixth-century anthology of the tradition's best stories, arranged by person.
The Śūraṅgama Sūtra楞嚴經 卷五 · 二十五圓通
Each disciple stands up in turn and says, in the first person, which doorway he came in by and why it worked for him.
The Vimalakīrti Sūtra維摩詰經 弟子品
All ten, in canonical order, each recalling the day a sick layman told them their speciality was not what they thought it was.
The fixed list of ten is a Northern formulation — it follows the order of the Vimalakīrti chapter, and East Asia has counted it that way ever since. The Pāli canon does not have a list of ten. It has the etadagga, about eighty disciples each named foremost in one specific respect, and it includes monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen alike.
So each session carries a Southern column, and it is honest about its own thickness. Where the Visuddhimagga has material — and for Maudgalyāyana, Śāriputra, Ānanda, Kātyāyana, Rāhula, Aniruddha and Upāli it has a great deal — this course quotes it at length, from Ru-Yi's own translation made directly from the Pāli.
Where it has none, the session says so. Subhūti appears in the Visuddhimagga zero times, and session five is built around exactly that fact: how a minor entry on a Pāli list became, eight hundred years later, one of the most familiar names in East Asian Buddhism.
The Pāli discourses themselves — the etadagga chapters, the Theragāthā poems — are linked in every session but never quoted, because those pages carry Bhikkhu Sujato's translation rather than Ru-Yi's own. This course quotes only what this site translated.
- Name all ten, say what each was foremost in, and — more usefully — tell them apart as people rather than as epithets.
- Read a disciple's own first-person account of how he got in, and recognise that the tradition preserved ten different doorways rather than one.
- Follow Vimalakīrti's argument across all ten rebukes and see that it is one argument, made ten times, about the cost of a speciality.
- Say what the etadagga is, how it differs from "the ten," and why Subhūti is enormous in the North and unremarkable in the South.
- Explain where the scriptures came from — who convened the First Council, who was refused admission and why, and what "Thus have I heard" is actually doing at the start of every sūtra you will ever read.
Seven steps. The extra two exist because every session reads two traditions and two verdicts on the same man.
Sessions are being published one at a time.
- Nothing at all. No previous course, no background, no vocabulary. Every text quoted is on this site in Ru-Yi's own translation, with the Chinese or Pāli beside it.
- The stories are told in full here. You will not need to open another page to follow a session — though every quotation links back to its source, and the sources are better than the retelling.
- A companion course. Stories the Buddha Told sits at the same level: that one is about the stories he told, this one about the people standing around him while he told them. Either can come first.
- A tolerance for disagreement. The three sources used here do not present these men the same way, and the course does not smooth that over.