Foremost Monks (III)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The community the Buddha actually had included poets, quartermasters, and people who understood everything in one sentence, and the list names each for what they were distinctively good at.

Rāhula, foremost among those who want to train (AN 1.209)

The Buddha’s son gets one line, and it is worth noticing what it says. He is not named foremost in wisdom, or attainment, or lineage — he is foremost among sikkhākāma, those who desire the training. That is a disposition rather than an achievement, and it is an unusually modest thing to be praised for.

The canon elsewhere shows the Buddha instructing Rāhula from childhood, sometimes with notable severity, and the placement here is consistent with those passages: what is commended in him is willingness to be taught. For anyone teaching this material to parents, the contrast between what the Buddha might have said about his son and what he actually said is worth sitting with.

The poet and the administrator (AN 1.212, 1.214)

Vaṅgīsa is foremost among eloquent poets — paṭibhānavantānaṁ, those with spontaneous inspired speech. He has an entire chapter of the Saṁyutta Nikāya to himself, and his verses are among the most personal material in the canon, including his own struggles with pride in his gift.

Two entries later, Dabba Mallaputta is foremost among those who assign lodgings. This is not a metaphor. Dabba’s job was allocating sleeping quarters and meal invitations to a large and mobile community, and the canon records him doing it by the light of his own burning fingers when monks arrived after dark. That the roster of foremost disciples has room for the person who ran the accommodation is one of the more quietly informative facts about the early Saṅgha.

Kuṇḍadhāna’s entry belongs with these. He is foremost among those who are first to pick up a ballot slip — the tickets drawn when a donor invited a fixed number of monks to a meal. Read cold this is baffling. Read as a note about a working community with a distribution problem, it is exactly as legible as the lodgings entry.

Bāhiya of the Bark Cloth (AN 1.216)

Foremost among those with swift insight, khippābhiññānaṁ. The story behind this line is one of the most famous in the canon and one of the shortest. Bāhiya, an ascetic who wore bark, intercepts the Buddha on his alms round and asks three times for a teaching. The Buddha refuses twice as inopportune, then gives him a single compressed instruction: in the seen there will be only the seen, in the heard only the heard, in the thought only the thought, in the known only the known. Bāhiya understands completely on the spot, and is killed by a cow shortly afterward, before he can be ordained.

The entry is a limit case for everything the collection has said about gradual training. Nothing in the Ones about developing the mind, guarding the senses, or arousing energy is retracted by it; but the list makes room for someone who did none of that in this life and arrived anyway, and it does so without explanation. Teachers who present early Buddhism as uniformly gradualist have to account for this line, and teachers who present it as sudden-awakening avant la lettre have to account for the hundred and eighty entries before it.

The rest of the ten

Raṭṭhapāla is foremost among those who went forth out of faith — his story, in which he starves himself until his parents consent to his ordination, is told at length elsewhere. Upasena son of Vaṅgantā is foremost among those impressive all around, a phrase covering deportment and bearing rather than attainment. Pilindavaccha is foremost among those beloved of the deities, and is remembered in the Vinaya for a habit of addressing everyone as “outcaste” that the Buddha excused as a linguistic reflex from a past life rather than contempt.

Kassapa the Prince is foremost in brilliant speech, and Mahākoṭṭhita in the four methods of textual analysis — the analytical knowledges of meaning, principle, language, and eloquence, the same set named at AN 1.175–186 as arriving in the world with a Buddha. Between them the chapter has three separate entries for different kinds of verbal excellence, which is a fair indication of how a tradition transmitted entirely by speech valued speech.

Key terms