The Elaborator of Brief Statements

The Buddha honored the Venerable Maha Kaccana by naming him his foremost disciple in the ability to provide detailed expositions of his own brief statements. Maha Kaccana earned this distinguished title principally because of eight suttas found in the Nikayas: three in the Majjhima, three in the Samyutta, and two in the Anguttara. Besides these, we find in the Nikayas several other discourses that the Venerable Maha Kaccana spoke without basing himself upon a brief utterance of the Buddha as his text. All these discourses, taken together, have a uniform and distinctive flavor, revealing the qualities of the mind from which they sprang. They are thorough, balanced, careful and cautious, substantial in content, meticulous in expression, incisive, well conceived, and well rounded. They are also, admittedly, a little dry — unemotional and unsentimental — but with no wastage of words they never fail to lead us straight to the heart of the Dhamma.

The discourses of Maha Kaccana are bare of the rhetorical devices utilized by other renowned exponents of the Dhamma: we find in them no similes, parables, or stories; their language is plain but impeccably precise. In this respect his sermons contrast with those of the Buddha, the Venerable Sariputta, and the Venerable Ananda, all of whom were skilled in devising striking similes that impress the formal message of the discourse indelibly on the auditor's mind. The Venerable Maha Kaccana's discourses, it seems, owe their effectiveness entirely to their content and analytical exactitude rather than to literary embellishment.

As an analyst of the Dhamma, the Venerable Maha Kaccana most closely approximates to the Venerable Sariputta, and indeed the discourses of both exhibit similar traits. The difference between them is principally a matter of emphasis rather than of substance. Sariputta's analytic disquisitions, as seen for example in the Sammaditthi Sutta and the Mahahatthipadopama Sutta,[15] begin with a specified topic and then develop by dissecting that topic into its component strands and exploring each component in turn (often with still finer subdivisions). Within his own specialized sphere Maha Kaccana starts, not with a general topic, but with a short utterance of the Buddha, often one that is intuitive, poetic, or ex-hortatory in character. His exposition then unfolds by reformulating the gnomic or inspirational phrasing of the Buddha's statement in ways that link it up with established, more familiar frameworks of doctrine, usually with the six spheres of sense and the practice of sense restraint. Yet, despite their differences in emphasis, both these great disciples share a predilection for systematic analysis and both display the same concern for razor-sharp precision in their thinking.

For this reason, no doubt, within the Theravada tradition each has come to be regarded as the father of a particular methodology for interpreting the Dhamma, exegetical systems that rose to prominence in the early centuries of Buddhist intellectual history. Sariputta is, of course, viewed as the original systematizer of the Abhidhamma, which (according to tradition) he elaborated in detail based on the outlines that the Buddha taught him during his periodic visits to the human realm while expounding the Abhidhamma to the devas in the Tavatimsa heaven.[16] Maha Kaccana is regarded as the author of a method of exposition embedded in two post-canonical works that exerted an important influence on the early Buddhist commentators. About these two works — the Petakopadesa and the Nettippakarana — we shall have more to say below.

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