Foremost Monks (IV)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The tradition survived because someone remembered it, and this chapter says so five times in a row.

Ānanda’s five entries

Bahussuta, very learned — literally “of much hearing,” which in an oral culture is what learning is. Satimant, of good memory. Gatimant, of extensive range, meaning grasp of how things connect. Dhiti, retention, the capacity to hold what has been taken in. And upaṭṭhāka, personal attendant.

The first four are four angles on a single capacity, distinguished the way a tradition distinguishes things it depends on absolutely: taking in, holding, connecting, and retaining. It is the same instinct that gave the previous chapter three separate entries for kinds of eloquence. What a culture subdivides is what it cares about.

The fifth entry is different in kind and it explains the other four. Ānanda was the Buddha’s attendant for the last twenty-five years of his life, which meant he was physically present for what was said. The tradition’s account of the first council turns on exactly this: the discourses are recited by the man who was there, opening each with the words that still open them — evaṁ me sutaṁ, so I have heard.

Upāli and the monastic law (AN 1.228)

Foremost among those who have memorized the monastic law — vinayadhara, literally a bearer of the Vinaya. At the first council, in the tradition’s account, Upāli recites the discipline as Ānanda recites the discourses, and the two bodies of text the Buddhist world still has come down from that division of labor.

Upāli is also remembered as having been a barber before ordination, and as having been ordained ahead of the Sakyan nobles who came with him so that they would have to bow to him thereafter. Whether or not that story is historical, its placement is deliberate: the man on whom the entire law of precedence depends is the one whose own precedence was arranged to embarrass rank.

The rest of the sixteen

Kassapa of Uruvelā is foremost in having a large congregation — he came to the Buddha with a thousand followers already. Kāḷudāyī is foremost among those who inspire lay families. Bakkula is foremost in good health, an entry that gets a whole discourse of its own elsewhere in the canon. Sobhita is foremost in recollecting past lives.

Then two entries that sit interestingly together: Nandaka is foremost among those who advise the nuns, and Mahākappina foremost among those who advise the monks. The first of those is a formally appointed role, and the discourse in which Nandaka teaches the nuns is one of the more substantial teaching texts in the canon. Nanda — the Buddha’s half-brother, whose reluctance to leave lay life is told at length elsewhere — is foremost in guarding the sense doors, which is the practice AN 1.1–10 pointed toward. Sāgata is foremost in skill with the fire element, Rādha in inspiring eloquent teachings, and Mogharāja, last of the eighty monks, in wearing coarse robes.

What the four chapters add up to

Taken together the four monk chapters name roughly forty distinguishing marks, and it is worth looking at the shape of the whole. There are entries for meditative attainment and entries for administration. There are three for kinds of eloquence and four for kinds of memory. There is one for good health, one for a pleasant voice, one for coming from a good family, and one for receiving a lot of gifts. There is one for the man who could not learn a verse and one for the man who understood in a sentence.

No hierarchy will hold that together, and none is offered. What the list actually does is make a claim about community: that a functioning Saṅgha needs all of these, that they are not versions of one another, and that being foremost in something small and specific is a real thing to be. For a modern reader used to spiritual literature that recognizes exactly one axis of excellence, this is a genuinely different picture, and the four chapters are worth reading in one sitting for that reason alone.

Key terms