Chapter 6: Bodhisatta, Buddha, and the four fruits¶

With the map of the three realms rolled up, we turn to the people who walk on it. This chapter takes stock of the identities supplied by the Sutta Piṭaka: bodhisatta, Buddha, paccekabuddha, arahant, and the four fruits. The inventory follows two lines. The first continues Chapter 5's question: in what settings are these accounts of identity given, to whom, and where do they direct their listeners afterward? The second is this chapter's own main thread: in the Sutta Piṭaka, is awakening repeatable? This will determine whether the names designate castes or mark a path.

We begin with the Acchariya-abbhuta Sutta. Ānanda publicly recites the marvels of the Tathāgata's entry into the womb: he enters with clear comprehension; while he dwells there, light shines everywhere and deva guardians stand on all four sides; he emerges unstained by impurity and takes seven steps on the ground. Having heard him, the Buddha says only: then, Ānanda, remember this further unprecedented marvel. The Tathāgata knows when feelings arise, knows when they persist, and knows when they cease; likewise with perceptions and thoughts.¹ A whole catalogue of miracles has its center of gravity shifted by the final addition. Everything on the list concerns the womb; the addition concerns awareness. Remember this move. We will meet its counterparts repeatedly in this chapter: as the tradition crowns the Buddha, the Buddha takes the crown back off.

Before full awakening. First, the term bodhisatta in the Sutta Piṭaka needs to be set in its proper register. Its most common use occurs in an autobiographical formula: before I was fully awakened, while I was still a bodhisatta. The Bhayabherava Sutta uses it to introduce past experiences of fear in the forest; the Dvedhāvitakka Sutta, the exercise of dividing thoughts into two kinds; the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, the course of going forth and studying under teachers; the Mahāsaccaka Sutta, the detour through asceticism.² The grammar is the same in all four: in this formula, bodhisatta denotes Gotama before awakening in this very life, not a practitioner running a marathon across lifetimes. The setting is also the same. Speaking to practitioners, he offers his former difficulties as a handrail: I too was like this; I too took wrong turns. Strictly speaking, this stratum narrates an earlier phase, not an earlier life. It is more a device for teaching than a display of wonders, more humility than coronation. Scholars have systematically studied how the meaning of bodhisatta grew from this stratum into one spanning lives, and then into a system of predictions and perfections.³ A comprehensive search of the four Nikāyas can locate this stratification more precisely. The stratum spanning lives does not have to wait until texts outside the four Nikāyas; it is already present within them, but crowded into two discourses.⁴

That person then was I. The other stratum does concern another life. At the end of the Ghaṭīkāra Sutta, the Buddha reveals to Ānanda the identity of the youth in the time of Kassapa Buddha whose potter friend seized him by his topknot and dragged him to see the Buddha: do not think he was someone else; he was I.⁵ The Makhādeva Sutta first tells how the ancient King Makhādeva established a rule: when a white hair appeared on his head, he would hand over the throne and go forth. This family practice continued for tens of thousands of generations. The ending delivers two strokes: that Makhādeva was I; and the path of that time reached only the Brahmā world, whereas my present path reaches nibbāna. The Buddha then entrusts the new continuity to Ānanda: do not let yourself be the last person.⁶ The Mahāgovinda Sutta has the same structure. The brahmin Mahāgovinda directed seven kingdoms and taught beings the path to Brahmā; he was I, but that path stopped at the Brahmā world, while this one ends in the ending of suffering.⁷ In the Velāma Sutta, the great donor Velāma of the past gave away his wealth; he was I. The story is told to the householder Anāthapiṇḍika to calibrate the scale of giving: such a great gift is worth less than feeding one stream-enterer; feeding a hundred stream-enterers is worth less than one person cultivating loving-kindness; and a moment's cultivation of the perception of impermanence surpasses that in turn.⁸ Set these scenes side by side, and a conclusion from their settings emerges on its own. Identification with someone in another life is never narrated to satisfy biographical curiosity. It either displays an old path for comparison (the path that stopped at the Brahmā world setting off the path that ends in the ending of suffering), hands down a lineage (do not be the last person), or calibrates the donor's scale. Past lives are all tools here, and each tool's use has its own setting.

Seven Buddhas, dhammatā, and a biography that moved. The genealogy in the Mahāpadāna Sutta presents seven Buddhas from Vipassī onward, each with the same complete pattern: entry into the womb, birth, going forth, awakening, and turning the wheel of Dhamma. Throughout, the text marks the pattern with the same term: this is the regular nature of things for Buddhas, dhammatā.⁹ Repetition, not bloodline, forms the genealogy's backbone. The simile of the ancient path and city, cited in Chapter 4, is its gloss: the discoverer is not the builder of the city; becoming a Buddha means finding the old city once again.

Inside this pattern lies a biographical case that reveals its power particularly well and answers a widespread misconception. Everyone today can tell the opening of the Buddha's life: the outings through the four gates. The prince leaves the city, encounters an old person, a sick person, a corpse, and an ascetic, and, shaken into awareness, goes forth. But in the four Nikāyas this story does not belong to Gotama. The Mahāpadāna Sutta tells the entire sequence of outings and encounters with old age, sickness, death, and an ascetic under the name of Vipassī Buddha.⁹ Gotama's own account of his motivation appears elsewhere and is far plainer. The Sukhumāla Sutta offers only three seasonal palaces, lotus pools, a pampered upbringing, and three reflections: I myself am subject to aging and am not free from it; I myself am subject to sickness and am not free from it; it would not be fitting for me to feel disgust and contempt on seeing others age or fall sick, since I too am subject to these things. Intoxication with youth, with health, and with life then goes out in succession.¹⁰ There are no outings, no four gates, no deities taking on appearances; those enter in later biographies. The realization occurs in introspection, not at a street corner. Attaching the four outings to Gotama is the work of later Buddha biographies: the Nidānakathā, Xiuxing benqi jing, Taizi ruiying benqi jing, and the Lalitavistara tradition.¹¹ A piece of biography thus migrated from a past Buddha to the present one. This migration was possible precisely because Buddha biography was a typological genre from the outset: seven Buddhas share one pattern, and its episodes are standardized parts that fit perfectly under any of their names. This book takes the migration as a confession by the genre itself. It writes about the type "Buddha," not the individual Gotama. Reading Buddha biography as reportage means mistaking its genre.

A single gate. Repeatability needs an epistemology, and the Sutta Piṭaka supplies one in the Sampasādanīya Sutta. Sāriputta makes a lion's roar: no ascetic or brahmin, past, future, or present, surpasses the Blessed One in full awakening. The Buddha asks in return: have you encompassed the minds of past Buddhas with your own mind? Of future Buddhas? My mind now? Sāriputta answers no to all. Why, then, make so great a claim? Sāriputta replies: I do not know the Buddhas' minds; I know the pattern of the Dhamma. Suppose a frontier city is strong and has only one gate. A gatekeeper patrols its walls and finds no gap through which even a cat could pass. He then knows that everyone entering the city must pass through this gate. All Buddhas abandon the five hindrances, establish the mind well in the four establishments of mindfulness, and properly cultivate the seven factors of awakening; only then do they attain unsurpassed full awakening.¹² The point of the exchange is this: what is corrected is not Sāriputta's conclusion but his source of evidence. After the correction, the equality of Buddhas is guaranteed by an invariant of the path, no longer by the power to read minds. The grammar of the stability of Dhamma in Chapter 3, knowledge of the stability of Dhamma in Chapter 4, the ancient path in Chapter 4, and the single gate here are four rivets along the same line. Awakening is repeatable because the path is a structure, not a miracle.

Extrapolation into the future follows the same line, but changes its manner of writing. In the four Nikāyas, the future Buddha Metteyya appears only once, in a brief prediction in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta: when human lifespans reach eighty thousand years, the Blessed One Metteyya will appear in the world.¹³ The Shuoben jing of the Chinese Madhyama Āgama already presents a full scene of prediction. The venerable Maitreya is present and receives the prediction that there will be a Buddha named Maitreya Tathāgata; Ajita receives a prediction that he will be the wheel-turning king Saṅkha.¹⁴ The familiar story of Dīpaṅkara Buddha predicting Gotama's Buddhahood is entirely absent from the four Nikāyas. It belongs to the stratum of the Buddhavaṁsa, Apadāna, and Mahāvastu.¹⁵ Arrange the strata, and the change in writing becomes visible. The earlier stratum guarantees the future by inference from a pattern: whoever follows this path arrives. The later stratum guarantees it by appointment: a specified person in a specified eon will become a Buddha. From a law to a list of names, the genre of prediction was already on the move in the sectarian period. Its next stop would be Mahāyāna literature on predictions.

Attributes and predication. The Sutta Piṭaka sets out a functional list of a Buddha's attributes: the Tathāgata's ten powers and four kinds of fearlessness, with which he roars the lion's roar and turns the sublime wheel.¹⁶ Every entry concerns ability or freedom from fear, not an ontological predicate. At the edge of the list stands a famous dispute: is the Buddha omniscient? It has three strata. First, the Sutta Piṭaka's own account. Vaccha reports what others say: the ascetic Gotama claims to be all-knowing and all-seeing, with knowledge and vision constantly present as he walks, stands, sits, or lies down. The Buddha replies: those who say this do not say what I say; they misrepresent me with an untruth. One should instead describe the ascetic Gotama as a person with the three knowledges: past lives, the divine eye, and the destruction of the taints, each known as he wishes.¹⁷ The Kaṇṇakatthala Sutta adds a limit: it is impossible for an ascetic or brahmin to know and see everything all at once.¹⁸ Second, the late Sutta Piṭaka: the Paṭisambhidāmagga places omniscient knowledge on its list of knowledges.¹⁹ Third, the reconciliation in the commentaries and Milindapañha: the Buddha is omniscient, but his knowing depends on adverting the mind; whatever he adverts to, he knows without obstruction.²⁰ The three strata make a short table:

Omniscience through adverting is an ingenious move. It recasts the problem of constant presence, a problem of tense, as one of capacity and activation, accommodating both the denial in MN 71 and the title "all-knowing." Whether it is historical fact cannot be decided. Yet the ingenuity is itself evidence of stratification: a reconciliation always comes after what it reconciles. The dispute about omniscience is ultimately a dispute about predication: what tense and scope of predicates may be used of a Buddha? We have already encountered this line in Chapter 1. The living Tathāgata can be described through the three knowledges and ten powers; the Tathāgata after death falls among the undeclared questions. These are two stretches of the same boundary.

Another ready-made scene plays out on that boundary. Following footprints marked with thousand-spoked wheels, the brahmin Doṇa catches up and asks: venerable sir, are you a deva? I am not a deva. A gandhabba? No. A yakkha? No. A human being? Not that either. Astonished, Doṇa asks: then who are you? The reply: my taints are destroyed. As a white lotus grows in water but is not stained by it, I am born in the world but am not stained by the world. Brahmin, regard me as a Buddha.²¹ Deva, celestial spirit, spirit, human: four predicates of classification fail in turn. The name "Buddha" fits no genus or species; it is established through what has been abandoned and realized. Taxonomy hands in a blank answer sheet before someone whose taints are destroyed. That blank sheet is the ground beneath the list of attributes.

The path-opener and those who follow. One of the Sutta Piṭaka's most direct answers to the difference between a Buddha and an arahant is this: the Tathāgata, worthy one, fully awakened one, having never heard the Dhamma before, awakens to it himself and penetrates unsurpassed awakening. He attains what was unattained and gains what was ungained; he knows the path, distinguishes it, teaches it, and penetrates it. The disciples follow the Dhamma and walk the path.²² The path-opener and the followers are equal in the ending of suffering, unequal in what they can do. The ten powers and four kinds of fearlessness belong to the path-opener; followers need not possess them. Yet the destruction of the taints is the same, and liberation has one taste. The texts establish an arahant's behavioral characteristics through impossibility. A bhikkhu whose taints are destroyed cannot do nine things: deliberately take life, take what is not given, engage in sexual intercourse, or knowingly lie, among them.²³ The genealogy also contains a third kind of awakened person: the paccekabuddha, who awakens independently but does not establish a teaching. The Nikāyas preserve a list of names, with little account of them.²⁴ Awakening independently and establishing a teaching; awakening independently without establishing a teaching; awakening after hearing a teaching: with all three slots filled, awakening's repeatability becomes still clearer. The path does not change with the person walking it. What changes is whether that person puts up signposts.

The four fruits mark distances along the same path. In the formula of abandoning fetters, a stream-enterer abandons three: identity view, attachment to rules and observances, and doubt. A once-returner also attenuates greed, hatred, and delusion; a non-returner ends the five lower fetters; an arahant ends the five higher fetters.²⁵ The three Sikkhā Suttas further subdivide the fruits themselves. Stream-enterers include seven-returners, those who go from family to family, and single-seeders; non-returners have five types, beginning with those who attain final nibbāna in the interval.²⁶ The list is expanding and contracting again. After elements, craving, links, and destinations, this is the fifth case. The genealogy of subdivision has already begun within the Sutta Piṭaka; its destination is the treatises' system of stages. The milestones and abandoned fetters are summarized in the table:

The distinction in this table requiring the greatest care is that between identity view and conceit. Identity view dies at the first stop; the lingering scent of conceit takes until the last stop to perfume away. The two times of death in Chapter 4's Khemaka Sutta now have coordinates on the table of fruits. The dispossessed owner's impulse really does lose its supply only at the path's end.

The two lines now meet. The inventory of settings is complete: the autobiographical formula offers a handrail; identification across lives provides comparisons, hands down a family practice, and calibrates a scale; a list of miracles is brought to its conclusion by one instance of knowing as things really are; prediction turns a law into a list of names. Not one of these accounts of past lives and identities is biography told for biography's sake. The line of repeatability is secure: the seven Buddhas walk the same path one after another; the single gate is its epistemology; the four fruits its milestones; the path-opener and followers its order of arrival. Finally, return to the brahmin who followed the footprints. He followed prints bearing thousand-spoked wheels, expecting a deity at the road's end. The owner of the prints declined each category offered and retained only a name established through abandonment and realization. The prints lie on a road, and the road can be walked. All the names counted in this chapter ultimately mark the depth of footprints.

References¶