At Isigili

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

On Isigili Mountain the Buddha tells the legend behind its name — “seer-swallower,” for the 500 Independent Buddhas who once entered it and were never seen again — and then recites the names of 103 of these forgotten awakened beings, an act of remembrance for those who attained without a teacher and left no teaching behind.

Five mountains, one that kept its name

The discourse opens with the Buddha pointing, one by one, at the hills that ring Rājagaha: Vebhāra, Paṇḍava, Vepulla, Vulture’s Peak. Each time he asks the mendicants, “Do you see that mountain?” — and each time, after they say yes, he adds the same quiet aside: it used to have a different label and description. Names change; even mountains are renamed as ages pass and the people who named them are forgotten.

Then he points to the mountain they are standing on. “Do you see Isigili?” This one, he says, has “exactly the same label and description” it always had. Four mountains lost their names to time. One did not — and the reason why is the story he tells next.

The mountain that swallows seers

It is a folk etymology and, the commentarial tradition suggests, a deliberate pun — the more mundane derivation is simply isi + giri, “seers’ mountain,” since Pali r regularly becomes l in the Magadhan dialect the Buddha spoke. But the legend the Buddha tells is the more vivid one: a mountain that seers walked into and never walked out of, because inside it, unrecorded, unnoticed, they attained final Nibbāna.

What is an Independent Buddha?

The Pali term is paccekabuddha, sometimes rendered “Solitary Buddha” or “Silent Buddha.” The concept fills a gap in Buddhist cosmology: the vast stretches of time when no sammāsambuddha — a fully Self-Awakened Buddha like Gotama, who discovers the path and teaches it to the world — is alive. In those ages, the tradition holds, certain beings can still wake up entirely on their own, unaided by any teacher. They are Buddhas in the sense that matters most — fully awakened, free of all suffering — but they differ from a sammāsambuddha in their relation to others.

“Independent” is the operative word, not “solitary” in the sense of living alone: this sutta has 500 of them dwelling on one mountain at the same time. What they don’t do is found a fourfold community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen bound by a shared teaching, the way Gotama did. They practice and awaken each on their own thread, independently of one another and of any Dhamma passed down. The tradition sometimes attributes verses to them — a number are preserved elsewhere in the canon — but no path, no Vinaya, no institution survives them. When they die, nothing is left to remember them by except, perhaps, a name.

A roll call of 103 names

Having told the story, the Buddha does the only thing that can still be done for beings like this: he says their names aloud. “I shall declare the names of the Independent Buddhas,” he tells the mendicants, “I shall extol the names… I shall teach the names… listen and apply your mind well.” Thirteen names follow immediately in prose — Ariṭṭha, Upariṭṭha, Tagarasikhī, and ten more. Then, switching to verse, he continues for some ninety further names, packed two, three, even four to a line, until the count (by the traditional reckoning) reaches 103.

Even ancient translators struggled with this list. As the commentary itself admits, it is often impossible to tell where a proper name ends and a descriptive epithet begins — is “Sudassana” a person, or just someone “good-looking”? Many names are common Indian words for virtues (Aparājita, “unconquered”; Anāsava, “undefiled”) or places (Gandhāra, Kosala, Sumbha) that could belong to any sage from that region or with that quality. The list is less a genealogy than an incantation — a naming so thorough it stands in for a biography no one preserved.

Echoes older than the Buddha

One detail makes the list more than a curiosity: as many as eight of these names match the names of Jain tīrthaṅkaras — the twenty-four great teacher-founders of Jainism across the ages — and several more resemble other revered Jain sages. Ariṭṭha and Nemi, side by side in the list, are elsewhere compounded into Ariṣṭanemi, the 22nd tīrthaṅkara’s name. Usabha (“bull”) matches the first tīrthaṅkara, Ṛṣabha. The sutta’s own title character — a sage named Isigiri — even turns up in a Jain scripture, the Isibhāsiyāiṁ.

Buddhism and Jainism arose in the same region of North India within a generation of each other, and both, it seems, drew on a shared, older memory of wandering ascetics and awakened sages — a common inheritance each tradition then folded into its own account of the deep past. Isigili is a rare place where that shared root shows through.

A chant of honor

The discourse closes with a verse of tribute — “honor these great seers who have slipped all chains, fully quenched, limitless” — and in Sri Lanka it is still recited today as a paritta, a protection chant. Its parallel in the Chinese Ekottarika Āgama preserves only the opening scene before diverging into an unrelated teaching, and shares just three names with this version (Ariṭṭha, Upariṭṭha, Sudassana) — a sign of how early, and how differently, this list of the forgotten was already being remembered across the Buddhist world.

Key terms