TALK PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTER ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2014, AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2024 (REVISED)

The Discourse to Ambattha

Digha Nikaya 3

Country: Kosala

Locale: Icchanankala

Speakers: Pokkharasati, Ambattha, the Buddha

Date of Composition: c. 3^rd cent. BCE

Icchanankala was a monarchy. Northwest of Magadha, Kosala corresponds to modern Awadh in Uttar Pradesh in northeast India. Kosala was a great power, but a series of wars with Magadha weakened it; Magadha annexed Koala in the fourth century BCE, after the Buddha’s passing. Kosala dominated and eventually destroyed the Buddha’s home country of Shakya, for which reason some discourses refer to the Buddha as a Kosalan. King Pasenadi of Kosala was a lay follower of the Buddha who built many monasteries. A palace coup eventually overthrows him while he is visiting the Buddha and he dies of exposure outside the capital city of Magadha while trying to get help from his powerful neighbour.

Icchanankala was a sacred centre of the Brahmans, who gathered here twice a year to recite the Vedas and discuss their interpretations of the meanings of the scriptures. Icchanankala is near Ukkattha, the territory of the Brahman Pokkharasati, to whom the king made a gift of the town. The Pali Canon frequently mentions this kind of political arrangement, which was common at the time.

The Buddha is living in the dense woods outside of Icchanankala, a rich agricultural area, when Pokkharasati hears of him, so he sends his pupil, Ambattha, to test the Buddha. Ambattha is a young student of the Vedas who knows the mantras; expounds the rules, rituals, lore of sounds and meanings, oral tradition, philosophy, and physiognomy; his teacher regards him as fully educated. The test is to evaluate the marks of a great man.

One of the more curious traditions of India, fully accepted and recited in the Pali Canon, is the marks of a great or superior man. These bodily signs appeared on the body of Gotama when he was born.  They are irrespective of age.  As Pokkharasati says, a man with the marks is destined to become either a “wheel turning righteous monarch of the law,” if he remains a householder or, if he renounces the household life, he will become a fully enlightened Buddha “who draws back the veil from the world.”

There are thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks of a great man. In Buddhism, thirty-two is also the number of the parts of the body. In Cabala, it is the number of the “paths of wisdom,” which together describe the structure of reality, both macrocosmic and microcosmic.  In the Mahayana tradition, these signs refer to the Buddha’s subtle energy body, not the physical form. Though much is made of the incongruity of the marks with physical facts, most of them are not hard to visualize. The thirty-two major marks include flat feet; long, slender fingers; pliant hands and feet; finely webbed toes and fingers;  full-sized heels with arched insteps; thighs like a royal stag; long arms; a penile sheath or foreskin; dark, curly hair; a clear, golden hued complexion; soft, smooth skin; rounded soles, palms, shoulders, and crown of the head; a leonine torso; upright and erect; full, round shoulders; white, even, closely spaced teeth; leonine jaw; ample saliva; long and broad tongue; deep and resonant voice; dark brown or deep blue eyes; long eyelashes; a tuft of white or grey hair between the eyebrows; and a topknot or other protuberance at the top of the head.

One cannot explain a few of the marks naturalistically. These include a thousand-spoked wheel sign on the feet, a ten-foot aura, and forty teeth.

Mostly this list summarizes the ideal qualities of a male based on the best possible karma according to the Indian aesthetics of the Buddha’s time. In other words, the Buddha’s body conforms to the contemporary Indian standard of male beauty. According to the classical description, the Buddha has a long, beautiful face and ears; large, rounded forehead; arched eyebrows; soft, smooth, golden skin; blue eyes; dark curly hair, long eyelashes, with a mole between his eyebrows; fine body hair; a rounded, large, or protuberant cranium; and a strong nose. The eighty minor marks give additional details regarding the hands, feet, gait, torso, skin, body, strength, head, hair, breath, etc. in much the same vein. The Law of Moral causality dictates that the being ready to be reborn takes on an ideal body with characteristics corresponding to their karma. Today we would say that they have “good genes.” Thus, Buddhism supports the idea that some people are better born than others, but this is less impressive than it sounds when one realizes that almost everyone is a stew of good and bad karma. In fact, a good birth may exhaust one’s good karma and thus expose one to the risk of a bad rebirth if one does not augment one’s merit in the current life. We are essentially free in terms of our volition, and it is intention that generates karma. Therefore, the fact of a good rebirth is less karmically significant than one might think, certainly far less significant than in Hinduism, where caste is a lifelong and unchangeable characteristic, which strongly emphasizes the essential differences between the castes.  The Buddha, on the other hand, admitted all castes to the order and recognized all people as one family, for which the establishment of his time severely criticized him.

Therefore, Ambattha, with all the pride and arrogance of youth, seeks out the Buddha. He travels by carriage with an entourage of young men, then dismounts and walks into the dense jungle where the Buddha is living.

Arriving at the clearing, Ambattha finds some monastics walking up and down in the open air, perhaps practising the Buddhist walking meditation.  The monastics, thinking that the Buddha might enjoy conversing with “such a young man,” direct him to the Buddha’s hut; he has closed and latched the door. The Buddha may have been taking his customary nap, lying on his right side, or he might have been meditating. Therefore, Ambattha goes quietly to the door, coughs, and knocks on the bolt.  The Buddha answers the door himself, and Ambattha enters along with his retinue of young men.

His friends sit down politely, but Ambattha paces up and down before the seated Buddha, and utters some conventional but insincere words of politeness. The Buddha is not impressed, and rebukes him with the words, “Well now, Ambattha, would you behave like this if you were talking to venerable and learned Brahmins, teachers of teachers, as you do with me, walking and standing as I am sitting, and uttering vague words of politeness?” Not one to be rebuked, Ambattha, replies, “No, Reverend Gotama. A Brahmin should…sit with a sitting Brahmin… . But as for those shaven little ascetics, menials, black scourings from Brahma’s foot, with them it is fitting to speak just as I do with the Reverend Gotama.”  The Buddha is not popular with everyone! However, the Buddha does not take the bait. Rather, he says, “Ambattha, you came here seeking something. Whatever it was you came for, you should listen attentively to hear about it. Ambattha, you have not perfected your training. Your conceit of being trained is due to nothing but inexperience.”  The Buddha’s comment infuriates Ambattha, who curses and insults the Buddha. Ambattha relates his interest in physiognomy to race, for he next attacks the Shakyans, the Buddha’s clan, as fierce, rough spoken, touchy, violent, and menial, and he complains that they do not respect Brahmans. This last comment is a reference to the fact that the caste system had not taken root in Shakya, which had not assimilated the notion of western Brahmanic superiority.

The Buddha recognizes that the Shakyans have offended Ambattha, so he asks him what happened. Apparently, while on a trip to Kapilavastu on some business for Pokkharasati, he went to the meeting hall of the Shakyans and, rather than honouring him and offering him a seat as he expected, it seemed to Ambattha that they were mocking him, and he formed the grudge that Shakyans do not honour Brahmans, which may also be rooted in historical fact. The Buddha suggests to Ambattha that he is overreacting and that the Shakyans can do what they want in their own place. Ambattha reminds the Buddha that the Brahmans are innately superior, a fact not established in Shakya. This is the crux of the issue, so the Buddha decides to turn the tables by asking about Ambattha’s own ancestry, which, as he tells the Buddha, is Kanhayan.

The Buddha points out that the Kanhayans were subject to the Shakyans in the past and that Ambattha himself is descended from King Okkaka, as are the Shakyans, but through a slave girl named Disa, who had a black child, named Kanha (‘black’), by the king. Hence the name of his family. The name of the Shakyans, on the other hand, means, ‘strong as teak.’ The Shakyans descend from the four elder legitimate sons of King Okkaka, who intermarried with their sisters to maintain the blood purity of the Shakyan line. In this way, the Buddha shows Ambattha that his birth is inferior to the Buddha’s, based on Ambattha’s own prejudice. This is an excellent example of how the Buddha uses common ground as a basis for converting his audience.

At this stage, Ambattha’s friends erupt in anger, entreating the Buddha to honour Ambattha as his equal, for he is well-born. However, the Buddha tells the young men to allow Ambattha to speak for himself.  Intimidated, the young men shut up. When pressured by the Buddha, Ambattha acknowledges that Dasi, the king’s slave, is in fact his ancestor, at which his friends exclaim in shock that he is ill-born.

Mission accomplished, the Buddha now defends Ambattha to his friends, pointing out that Kanha became a great and powerful seer in the south, where he learned the mantras.  He asks King Okakka for the hand of his daughter, Maddarupi, but the king is outraged by the impertinence of the request.  Kanha, now revealed as a powerful sorcerer (similar to the story of Milarepa), curses the land, and the king relents, allowing him to marry his daughter. This story also shows that any theories of race superiority are completely alien to the Buddha’s thinking, who clearly uses these arguments to ambush Ambattha, not because he believes in them.

The Buddha concludes by quoting the Brahma Sanankumara (Pali; Skt. Sanat Kumara, lit. ‘eternal youth’), who appears in Janavasabha Sutta (DN 18) as an advocate for the Buddha: “The Khattiya’s best among those who value clan; / He with knowledge and conduct is best of gods and men.”  The Buddha declares that this is his view also.  The Buddha’s reply to Ambattha sounds like a parody of Sanat Kumara, who we will discuss further in the 18^th discourse.

Having annihilated Ambattha’s arguments, Ambattha seems to be finally chastened and simply asks for the knowledge and conduct that makes one best in the spiritual realm. This is the turning point in the conversation. The Buddha says that one attains knowledge and conduct by abandoning all notions of racial and class superiority and inferiority. Rather, it is identical with the teaching of a tathagata. Referring to this teaching as the “unexcelled attainment,” the Buddha observes that there are four ways that one can fail to achieve it, depending on getting one’s food by windfalls, digging tubers and roots, tending the flame of a fire hearth at the edge of a village, or by building a guest house at a crossroads for those who have attained. The implication seems to be that a true spiritual aspirant does not gather food for himself, not even windfalls, referring presumably to the Buddhist practice of alms, since even arhants must eat. In other words, one must offer one’s body as an opportunity for others to earn merit as an act of compassion (an alternate interpretation might be that one must make no effort toward the gathering of food, but if it is about effort why are windfalls less meritorious than alms gathering?).

The Buddha declares that since neither Pokkharasati nor Ambattha do this, they are incapable of attaining transcendent knowledge and conduct and belies their claims to superiority. The Buddha denigrates Pokkharasati and Ambattha as mere intellectuals, “yet you do not thereby become a sage or one practised in the way of a sage—such a thing is not possible.”  The implication is that the Tathagata’s knowledge and conduct meet this criterion; thus, the Buddha’s teaching, which elsewhere he declares to be archaic and long forgotten, is like the way of the ancient seers. He asks Ambattha whether those ancient sages were addicted to sensory  pleasures, eating fine foods, promiscuous, riding about in chariots, or guarded by soldiers in cities, like themselves. Therefore, the Buddha concludes, neither Ambattha nor his teacher are sages nor trained in the ways of sages. They are charlatans, and as such are not entitled to the veneration they demand.

At this point, the Buddha gets up, goes outside and paces back and forth so Ambattha can examine his body for the marks of a great man, which was his original purpose. All of these are visible to Ambattha except for two, for obvious reasons: the penile sheath and the large tongue. The Buddha obliges him by showing these to him as well! At this point, Ambattha, mission accomplished, withdraws.

Ambattha returns to the town and reports to Pokkharasati, waiting for him in a park with a group of Brahmans, that the Buddha has all of the signs of a great man. Then he tells his teacher the whole story, at Pokkarasati’s request. Pokkarasati is incensed that Ambattha has treated the Buddha so rudely, and is so angry that he kicks Ambattha, knocks him down, and wants to go to see the Buddha himself. The Brahmans note that it is too late to go to see the Buddha that day, and advise him to go the next day. Instead, Pokkharasati goes home, directs that a meal be prepared, and then leaves for where the Buddha is, assisted by the light of torches, first by chariot, and then by foot.

Pokkharasati asks the Buddha about the conversation he had with Ambattha. He begs the Buddha to excuse the rudeness of his young and foolish student; the Buddha accepts Pokkharasati’s apology. Confirming the marks of a great man for himself, Pokkharasati invites the Buddha to come to his home for his morning meal. By this time, the text implies, it is well past midnight, so the Buddha takes his robe and bowl and the entire order travels back to Pokkharasati’s house for the morning meal.  Since there is no suggestion of sleeping, it seems that Pokkharasati and the Buddha spend the early morning hours talking together.

After satisfying their hunger, the Buddha gives a “progressive discourse” followed by a brief sermon on the teaching. The progressive discourse is intended to lead from generalized religious teachings to a dharma talk proper, which is given when the hearer is ready, indicated by pliancy of mind, freedom from any hindrances, joy, and calm. Progressive talks concern general matters pertaining more to the household than to the monastic life, including the virtue of generosity, morality, the divine worlds, sense desires, and the value of renunciation—matters that we might call “religious.” The brief teaching often precedes a student’s going forth, sometimes accompanied by their spontaneous awakening.  In this discourse, the dharma talk in brief corresponds to a sermon on the Four Noble Truths, but it can be about any advanced topic. As the Buddha speaks, the “dharma-eye” spontaneously opens in Pokkharasati, accompanied by the intense realization that all worldly things are changeable. Pokkharasati becomes a lay follower of the Buddha.

Revised November 8, 2024

Notes 

1. “They are in part adaptations to a man of poetical epithets applied to the sun, or to the personification of the mystic human sacrifice; partly characteristics of personal beauty such as any man might have; and one or two of them – the little wart, for instance, between the eyes with white hair on it, and the protuberance at the top of the head – may possibly be added in reminiscence of personal bodily peculiarities which Gotama actually had.” T.W. Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1899), http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/dob/dob-03tx.htm.

2. It is also half the number of codons in the genetic code, which is similar among all organisms and can be expressed in a simple table of sixty-four cells.

3. This passage supports other passages and suttas that imply that the Buddha believed in the power of truth and the efficacy of mantras. Mantrayana (Vajrayana or Tantra) subsequently developed based on these premises.

4. “Hofrath Bühler has pointed out that in the Mahâbhârata III, 185 (Bombay edition) there is an interesting passage where Sanat-kumâra (the Sanskrit form of the name Sanam-kumâra) is actually represented by the Brahmans themselves as having uttered, as referee in a dispute on a point similar to the one here discussed, not indeed the actual words here imputed to him, but others of a very similar import. See the whole article in the J. R. A. S., 1897, pp. 585-588. “ Op. cit.

5. A blue or “sky” race race is also referred to.

Bibliography

Levman, Bryan. “Cultural Remnants of Indigenous Peoples in the Buddhist Scriptures.” Buddhist Studies Review, 30(2) (January 2014), 145-80. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276914202_Cultural_Remnants_of_the_Indigenous_Peoples_in_the_Buddhist_Scriptures.