Aniruddha
Who he wasA rebuke about sleeping, and seven days
He is a Śākya, a cousin of the Buddha, and he is the one member of the ten whose defining event is a reprimand he took far too seriously.
The Buddha rebuked him for sleeping too much during teaching. He wept, and vowed never to sleep again. He kept the vow, and after seven days his eyes failed.
What he got afterwards is Part 2, in his own words. What the anthology keeps about him is something else — three or four short episodes that have nothing to do with clairvoyance at all, and one of them is among the stranger things in this collection.
Aniruddha, already an arhat, had "such fine features that he resembled a woman." Walking through long grass, a young man saw him from a distance, mistook him for a woman, and approached to assault her. Discovering his mistake, the young man looked down and found his own body had become a woman's. Unable to face going home, he fled into the mountains and stayed there for years; his wife and children assumed he was dead.
Then the part worth the session. Aniruddha, out begging, happens to arrive at that very house. The wife, weeping, tells him her husband has vanished and asks for whatever merit might help her survive.
"Aniruddha said nothing in reply, but, moved by compassion, went into the mountains himself to seek the man out."
阿那律默然不應 — he said nothing in reply. He does not explain, does not tell her what happened, does not claim credit. He goes and walks up a mountain to look for a man who once tried to assault him, and stays until the man's remorse is genuine, at which point the body reverts and the family is reunited.
A second entry supplies the root of his fortune, and it rhymes with Session 5's Subhūti. In a past life at Vārāṇasī he was a hired porter during a famine. He noticed a pratyekabuddha who had gone out begging early and clearly had still not eaten, took his own portion home and offered it. The pratyekabuddha tried to take only half and leave him the rest; he refused — "Sage, I have my own household" — and insisted the whole be accepted. Seven lives as a king of gods and seven as a king of men followed, and then birth among the Śākyas.
In his own wordsWhich door he came in by
"Rebuked by the Buddha for excessive sleep, I wept, vowed never to sleep again, and lost my eyesight after seven days. The Buddha then taught me the vajra samādhi of joyful, luminous seeing — I no longer see the ten directions by means of the physical eye at all, but with a pure clarity like viewing a fruit in my own palm. Reverting seeing to its very source is foremost."
Read all twenty-five accounts →Three things, in order. He was told off. He overcorrected. And what he received was not compensation for the eyes but a different kind of seeing altogether — 旋見循元, reverting seeing to its very source.
Now hold on to his simile, because you are about to meet it again: like viewing a fruit in my own palm.
The Southern columnThin — but he is already in this course
In the Pāli list he is foremost in the divine eye, which matches exactly. The Visuddhimagga names him only a handful of times — in the chapters on the ascetic practices, the supernormal powers, and the direct knowledges — and tells no life-story about him.
But you have already met one of those appearances, in Session 3. When the Buddha spent a rains-retreat teaching on the summit of Mount Sineru and a crowd twelve leagues across camped below refusing to leave, it was Anuruddha they asked to find him:
"The people, wishing to know where the Blessed One was, requested Elder Anuruddha to find out. The elder, expanding his light, saw with the divine eye that the Blessed One had gone there for the rains-retreat, and reported it to them."
That is the divine eye doing what it is for, in one sentence, with no display attached: a crowd needs a fact, and he supplies it. Only then is Mahāmoggallāna sent to carry the message. The two foremost faculties in the tradition, used in sequence, as logistics.
Visuddhimagga · Iddhividhaniddesa → · Dhutaṅganiddesa → · his etadagga entry (linked, not quoted)
The rebukeHe is asked a reasonable question, and answers it correctly
Aniruddha is walking in meditation when a Brahmā king arrives with ten thousand others, bows, and asks a straightforward question: how far does the divine eye of Aniruddha see?
His answer uses the simile from Part 2, word for word: 如觀掌中菴摩勒果 — as clearly as one sees an āmalaka fruit resting in the palm of one's own hand. He is not boasting into a void; he is giving an accurate answer to a direct question, in the terms the Śūraṅgama itself records him using.
"Ah, Aniruddha — is what the divine eye sees a constructed mark, or an unconstructed mark? If it is a constructed mark, then it is no different from the five mundane spiritual powers of the non-Buddhist paths. If it is an unconstructed mark, then it belongs to the unconditioned, and there should be no seeing involved in it at all."
世尊！我時默然 — "World-Honored One, at that I fell silent."
Sengzhao's note makes the dilemma precise, and insists it is not a trick. A constructed mark (作相) is a faculty produced by past karmic formation, like the ordinary body's six senses. An unconstructed mark (無作相) belongs to the Dharma-body and is not produced by karma at all. So: if Aniruddha's clairvoyance is the first kind, it is structurally the same sort of thing the non-Buddhist adepts have — impressive, and not distinctively Buddhist. If it is the second, there is no seer and no seen, and "I see the trichiliocosm" is not a sentence that can be said.
Then the Brahmās ask the question the reader is by now also asking: who in the world truly has the divine eye? And Vimalakīrti, for once, answers rather than negating:
"There is one — the Buddha, the World-Honored One, has attained the true divine eye; he abides always in samādhi, and sees every buddha-land in its entirety, without ever making it into a dualistic mark of a seer and a thing seen."
不以二相 — without making it into a pair. The fault is not in the range of Aniruddha's sight. It is in the grammar of his sentence: I see it. The moment the answer has a seer at one end and a world at the other, the seeing has been made into a constructed thing, however vast.
And note the cost of the exchange, which the text records without comment: five hundred Brahmā gods raise the mind of unsurpassed awakening, bow to Vimalakīrti, and vanish. They had come to bow to Aniruddha.
One practice, for this week
Aniruddha's answer was accurate. What made it available for demolition was its shape: a claim with himself at one end of it.
This week, notice how often your true statements come with that frame attached — I noticed, I realised, I could tell, I saw straight away. Then try saying the same true thing once without it. Not false modesty, and not the passive voice as a dodge. Just the fact, delivered without the seer.
Five questions
Answer from what you read. One attempt each.
One question, left open
He was asked a direct question and gave a true answer. Where is the fault, exactly — and would you have wanted him to lie?
This is the rebuke in the chapter that most resists being turned into advice, and it is worth letting it stay awkward. Aniruddha did not volunteer his attainment, did not exaggerate it, and used the same words the tradition itself records him using. If the fault lies in having a self at one end of a true sentence, then almost every honest answer anyone gives is in the same condition, and the instruction cannot simply be "answer differently." Perhaps the useful residue is smaller: that the accuracy of a statement and the shape of a statement are two separate things, and that you can be entirely right and still be standing in the wrong place while you say it.
Session 9 · Upāli 優波離 · 持戒第一
A boy shaving the Buddha's hair, so absorbed in his parents' corrections of his posture and his breathing that he passes into the fourth dhyāna mid-task, and the Buddha simply has somebody else finish the job rather than wake him. He became the keeper of the rules, recited the entire Vinaya at the First Council — and is told by Vimalakīrti that he has just made two guilty monks worse.