Foremost Monks (I)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Each of these ten monks is named foremost in exactly one thing, and the things are not commensurable with each other.

What agga claims, and what it does not

Etadagga means “this is the foremost” — the top, the tip, the first of a set. What the formula does is name a person as unsurpassed in one specified respect. What it conspicuously does not do is rank anyone overall. Sāriputta is foremost in great wisdom and Mahāmoggallāna in psychic power; nothing in the list says which of those is the better thing to be foremost in, and the list makes no attempt to arrange its categories in order of importance.

That matters because the list is often read as a leaderboard, and it does not work as one. Bhaddiya the Dwarf is here for having a charming voice. Bhaddiya son of Kāḷīgodhā is here for coming from an eminent family — a fact about his birth, not his practice. Read as a ranking of spiritual attainment, entries like those are baffling. Read as what it is — a catalog of distinguishing marks, the way you would describe the members of a large community to someone who had to tell them apart — it is coherent throughout.

The ten in this chapter

Koṇḍañña Who Understood is foremost in long standing: he was the first of the five ascetics to grasp the first teaching, and his epithet Aññā, “who understood,” commemorates the moment. Sāriputta is foremost in great wisdom, Mahāmoggallāna in psychic power — the two chief disciples, always named as a pair. Mahākassapa is foremost among those who advocate austerities, which places the ascetic strand of the tradition inside the Saṅgha rather than outside it. Anuruddha is foremost in clairvoyance, the divine eye.

Then the less familiar half. Bhaddiya son of Kāḷīgodhā, foremost among those from eminent families. Bhaddiya the Dwarf, foremost in having a charming voice. Bhāradvāja the Alms-Gatherer, foremost in the lion’s roar — the canon’s image for a fearless public declaration. Puṇṇa son of Mantāṇī, foremost among those who speak on the teaching. And Mahākaccāna, foremost among those who explain in detail the meaning of a brief statement — a job description rather than a virtue, and one the canon illustrates repeatedly by having the Buddha say something compressed, leave, and let Mahākaccāna unpack it for the puzzled remainder.

A list that generated a literature

It is worth being clear about the direction of causation here. Later Buddhist literature is full of elaborate biographies of these figures — their past lives, their conversions, their deaths. Almost none of that is in the canon. What is in the canon is a single line each, and the commentarial tradition then wrote outward from those lines, explaining how each disciple came to be foremost in that particular thing.

This is worth saying to students because the stories are usually encountered first and are much more memorable than the list. Someone who learns about Mahākassapa from a commentarial biography and then reads AN 1.191 will find it thin. Someone who reads AN 1.191 first, and then the biography, can see exactly what the biography was built to explain.

The Mahāyāna answer to this chapter

There is one later text that engages this list directly and critically, and it is worth reading beside it. In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the Buddha asks each of the great disciples in turn to visit the sick layman Vimalakīrti, and each declines — because on a previous occasion Vimalakīrti confronted him on precisely the thing he is foremost in, and showed that he had understood it too narrowly. Śāriputra is corrected on sitting in meditation, Mahākāśyapa on the alms round, Subhūti on being worthy of offerings, Upāli on the monastic law, Ānanda on learning.

That is not a coincidence of plot. The chapter is a systematic response to the etadagga list, using its own categories against it, and it only lands if the reader already knows the list. Reading these four chapters of the Ones first and the Vimalakīrti disciples chapter second is one of the cleanest demonstrations available of how Mahāyāna literature works on the early canon — not by ignoring it, but by quoting it precisely and then turning it.

Key terms