Foremost Monks (II)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Foremost is a category with room in it for the slow learner, the well-provisioned, and the over-devoted, as well as for the quietly accomplished.

The Panthaka brothers (AN 1.198–200)

Cūḷapanthaka is named foremost in creating a mind-made body and in skill in the evolution of consciousness; his elder brother Mahāpanthaka is foremost in skill in the evolution of perception. The Pāli terms are technical and the English renderings vary a good deal; what is clear is that both concern advanced meditative capacity.

The reason this pair is worth stopping on is what the commentarial tradition says about the younger brother. Cūḷapanthaka, in the story cycle, is so incapable of memorization that after four months he cannot retain a single verse, and his own brother tries to send him home. He is given a piece of cloth to rub while repeating a phrase, and awakens by watching it soil. The canon does not tell this story here; it simply names him foremost in two of the most refined meditative skills on the list. But the tradition’s insistence on pairing that placement with that biography is not accidental, and the combination has kept him one of the most beloved figures in East Asian Buddhism — the patron, in effect, of everyone who cannot learn things by heart.

Subhūti, twice (AN 1.201–202)

Subhūti is named foremost among those who live without strife and foremost among those worthy of a religious donation. In the Pāli canon he is a minor figure; these two lines and a handful of appearances are nearly all there is.

What happened afterward is a striking case of a name outgrowing its text. In the Prajñāpāramitā literature Subhūti becomes the Buddha’s principal interlocutor on emptiness, and in the Diamond Sūtra it is his question that opens the whole discourse: how should one who has set out on the bodhisattva path stand, proceed, and control the mind? For most readers in the Chinese-speaking world Subhūti is the Diamond Sūtra, and the two lines here are unknown. Showing both is a good corrective in either direction.

The connection is not arbitrary, either. “Living without strife” renders araṇavihārī, and the later tradition read araṇa — without conflict — as pointing toward exactly the non-contentious, non-grasping stance the Prajñāpāramitā develops. The Mahāyāna choice of Subhūti was a reading of this line, not a disregard of it.

Sīvali, and the entry nobody expects (AN 1.207)

Sīvali is foremost among those who receive many possessions. In a collection that has spent a hundred entries praising few wishes and contentment, naming someone foremost in getting a lot of things is startling, and it is worth letting a class be startled by it rather than smoothing it over.

Two things can be said. First, the category is about what is offered, not about what is wanted — it describes the response Sīvali evokes in donors, not his own appetite. Second, and more importantly, it shows again that this list catalogs distinguishing features rather than ranking virtues. In practice Sīvali became, for exactly this reason, the figure invoked for material sufficiency across Theravāda Asia, which is a use the single line here neither authorizes nor forbids.

Vakkalī, foremost in faith (AN 1.208)

The last entry names Vakkalī foremost among those committed to faith. Read on its own it is straightforward praise. Read with the canon’s own story of Vakkalī it becomes much more interesting, because that story is a rebuke.

Vakkalī, in a well-known passage elsewhere, follows the Buddha constantly simply to look at him, and the Buddha tells him sharply that there is nothing to be gained by gazing at this foul body — whoever sees the teaching sees the Buddha, and whoever sees the Buddha sees the teaching. The disciple foremost in faith is the one the canon uses to show where faith goes wrong when it attaches to a person rather than to what the person teaches.

That the list names him foremost anyway is the interesting part. Faith is not withdrawn from him or downgraded; the correction is about its object. This is a useful entry to have ready for students who assume early Buddhism has no place for devotion, and equally for those who assume devotion needs no direction.

Key terms