Regarded as Foremost

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Three beings hold the records for size, pleasure, and power, and the fourth item on the list is not another record.

Who the three are

Rāhu, lord of the titans (asura), is the eclipse figure of Indian cosmology — the being who swallows the sun and moon. He holds the record for size of body, which in this literature is enormous and precisely quantified elsewhere.

Mandhātā is a legendary wheel-turning monarch whose story is told at length in the Jātaka literature. He obtained everything a being can obtain, ruled the four continents, ascended to the heaven of the Thirty-Three, shared the throne with Sakka — and wanted more, which is what destroyed him. He holds the record for enjoyment.

Māra the Wicked holds the record for sovereignty (issariya). In the canon he is the personification of death and of the pull of sensuality, and the ruler of the highest sensual heaven. His power is real in this cosmology, not decorative.

Three worthless superlatives

The selection is deliberate and slightly mocking. Size of body is of no spiritual consequence whatever. The greatest enjoyer of pleasures is a cautionary tale whose appetite outran the largest supply the universe could offer. The greatest sovereign is the adversary.

So the first three items are not lesser goods arranged below a greater one. They are three superlatives held by beings the tradition regards, respectively, as irrelevant, ruined, and hostile. The list does not say the Buddha is more of what they have more of. It changes the subject at the fourth item.

The fourth is described differently

Notice the phrasing. The first three each get a short label: foremost in size, foremost pleasure seeker, foremost in sovereignty. The fourth gets a long formula — in this world with its gods, Māras, and divinities, this population with its ascetics and brahmins, gods and humans, a Realized One, the perfected one, the fully awakened Buddha is said to be the best.

The scope clause is doing the work. The other three superlatives are held within a category: among bodies, among enjoyers, among rulers. The fourth is stated against the whole of existence with no category named, and the word is simply aggo, best.

This is an acclamatory discourse and it should be read as one. It offers no argument and asks for none. Its interest for a careful reader is entirely in the construction: what it puts on the list, and what it declines to make the fourth item comparable to.

Paññatti, and what the title means

The title word means designation, description, what is made known or laid down. The discourse is about what these four are declared to be foremost in — a matter of reputation and title rather than of measurement.

That is a small but real qualification. The discourse does not say Rāhu is the largest being; it says he is the one designated as such. Read strictly, the discourse reports a set of standing titles and then adds a fourth of a different kind to the same sentence, which is a rhetorical move rather than a cosmological claim.

Using it

The discourse is a good teaching text for a specific question: what do you actually want to be foremost in? Set out plainly, the three worldly superlatives are physical scale, quantity of pleasure, and extent of control — which between them cover most of what ambition pursues, in this world as in that one.

The discourse’s answer is not that a smaller share of these is better. It is that the whole scale is the wrong one, and that its record-holders are a monster, a cautionary tale, and the adversary.

Key terms