Anuruddha: Foremost in the Divine Eye

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 8 November 2026

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Anuruddha was a Sakyan nobleman who went forth with Ānanda, Devadatta and the barber Upāli, and whom the Buddha named foremost of his monks in the divine eye (dibbacakkhu, AN 1.192): the power to see beings pass away and be reborn. The Pāli discourses also make him a teacher of mindfulness, with a whole collection, SN 52, under his name, and the calm voice at the Buddha’s death. Mahāyāna sūtras call him Aniruddha, one of the ten great disciples.

Who was Anuruddha?

The Vinaya introduces him as a Sakyan, brother of Mahānāma. He had three stilt houses, one for each season, and spent the four months of the rains in the rainy-season house “attended on only by female musicians, never descending from that house” (Kd 17:1.1.4–7, trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali).

That he belonged to the Buddha’s own family as a first cousin comes from later tradition, not from the Vinaya. G. P. Malalasekera’s Dictionary of Pali Proper Names calls him the “First cousin of the Buddha”, son of the Sakyan Amitodana; Bhikkhu Sujato’s note on MN 31 says it is “according to the commentary” that the Buddha is his cousin.

Going forth: the prince and the household duties

With other young Sakyans following the Buddha, Mahānāma wanted one of the two brothers to go forth (Kd 17). Anuruddha refused: “I’ve been brought up in great comfort. I’m not able to go forth.” So his brother offered to teach him the family business: plough, sow, irrigate, drain, weed, reap, thresh, winnow, store, “And next year you must do the same, and the next.”

“But when does the work stop? I can’t see any end to it.” Mahānāma: “While the work was still unfinished, our fathers and grandfathers have all died.” Anuruddha left the business to him: “I’ll go forth into homelessness.”

His mother refused twice, then set a condition she thought safe: he could go if his friend Bhaddiya, then ruling the Sakyans, went too. Bhaddiya asked for seven years, and Anuruddha bargained him down to seven days. Then Bhaddiya, Anuruddha, Ānanda, Bhagu, Kimila (also spelled Kimbila) and Devadatta left, “with the barber Upāli as the seventh”. At their request the Buddha ordained Upāli first, so that “our Sakyan pride will be humbled”. “During that very rainy season” Bhaddiya realised the three insights, “Venerable Anuruddha obtained clairvoyance” and Ānanda realised stream-entry (Kd 17:1.4).

Foremost in the divine eye

When the Buddha listed his outstanding disciples, he said: ”… with clairvoyance is Anuruddha” (AN 1.192). The Pāli word is dibbacakkhu; the Digital Pāli Dictionary on SuttaCentral glosses it “clairvoyance; supernormal vision; lit. divine eye”. In the suttas it means seeing how beings are reborn: “with clairvoyance that is purified and superhuman, I understand how sentient beings pass on according to their deeds” (SN 52.23).

The canon does not let the power stand in for the goal. Anuruddha once told Sāriputta that, for all his vision, energy and samādhi, “my mind is not freed from the defilements by not grasping.” Sāriputta replied:

He did, and “became one of the perfected”, an arahant (AN 3.130).

The eight thoughts of a great man (AN 8.30)

A second discourse tells his awakening differently. In retreat in the land of the Cetīs, seven thoughts came to him, beginning: “This teaching is for those of few wishes, not those of many wishes”. The Buddha, knowing his mind, appeared before him, praised these “thoughts of a great man” and gave him an eighth: “This teaching is for those who don’t enjoy proliferating and don’t like to proliferate” (papañca).

Anuruddha spent the rains there, “soon realized the supreme culmination of the spiritual path”, and spoke verses: “The Buddha who loves non-proliferation / taught me non-proliferation.” Malalasekera’s dictionary has Sāriputta give him all eight thoughts as a meditation subject; in the sutta the first seven simply come to mind.

Three friends in harmony (MN 31 and MN 128)

Anuruddha often lived with two companions, Nandiya and Kimbila. In MN 31 the Buddha visits them in the sal forest at Gosiṅga and asks whether they live “blending like milk and water”. Anuruddha answers:

Chores are shared without a word, even lifting a heavy water pot together: “But we don’t break into speech for that reason.” Pressed, Anuruddha admits step by step that they can enter each absorption and formless attainment, up to the cessation of perception and feeling.

Sujato’s notes argue that this opening scene first belonged to MN 128, set just after the Buddha left the quarrelling monks of Kosambī, when the three were still developing their meditation; in MN 31 they are already arahants. Anuruddha reports that “we perceive both light and vision of forms”, which soon vanish. The Buddha answers from his own practice before awakening: the light faded whenever a “corruption of the mind” arose. He names eleven, from doubt to excessive concentration on forms, among them excessive energy: “Suppose a person was to grip a quail too tightly”.

The Anuruddha Saṁyutta: mindfulness (SN 52)

The Anuruddha Saṁyutta (SN 52) holds twenty-four short discourses, every one about the four kinds of mindfulness meditation (satipaṭṭhāna, the subject of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta). In the first, Mahāmoggallāna reads his thought that whoever misses these four “has missed out on the noble path to the complete ending of suffering”, and asks him to explain. Later discourses have him credit these four with “great direct knowledge” (SN 52.3), with recollecting a thousand eons, with clairvoyance and with the ending of the defilements (SN 52.11, 52.23, 52.24).

The most human of them finds him “sick, suffering, gravely ill” in the Dark Forest near Sāvatthī. Monks ask what meditation keeps pain from occupying his mind:

“Reverends, I meditate with my mind firmly established in the four kinds of mindfulness meditation so that physical pain doesn’t occupy my mind” (SN 52.10).

At the Buddha’s passing (DN 16)

In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the Buddha passes up through the absorptions and formless dimensions into the cessation of perception and feeling. Ānanda asks, “Honorable Anuruddha, has the Buddha become fully quenched?” “No, Reverend Ānanda. He has entered the cessation of perception and feeling.” (Sujato’s note: Anuruddha can tell “due to his mastery of psychic powers”.) The Buddha comes back down through the absorptions, rises again to the fourth, and on emerging from it passes away.

Four verses follow, from Brahmā Sahampati, Sakka, Anuruddha and Ānanda. Anuruddha’s begins: “There was no more breathing / for the unaffected one of steady heart”, ending, “The liberation of his heart / was like the extinguishing of a lamp.” While some monks lament, he speaks to them:

He then sends Ānanda to tell the Mallas of Kusinārā. When they cannot lift the body, or later light the pyre, he explains that the deities have a different plan: the pyre shall not burn until Mahākassapa, still on the road from Pāvā, bows at the Buddha’s feet.

His verses in the Theragāthā (Thag 16.9)

Anuruddha’s verses stand in the Book of the Twenties. They recall his princely youth, “Surrounded by song and dance, / awakened by cymbals and gongs”, and the monk now “without defilements”. They repeat his AN 8.30 verses and his verse at the Buddha’s death, one line changed: “the Clear-eyed One was fully quenched”. One verse gives his discipline:

“For the last fifty-five years / I have not lain down to sleep. / Twenty-five years have passed / since I eradicated drowsiness.”

Malalasekera reads it differently: twenty-five years without sleep, then thirty sleeping only in the last watch of the night. In SN 9.6 Jālinī (Sujato’s “Penelope”), a goddess of the Thirty-Three and his partner in a former life, urges him to return there; he answers, as in the Theragāthā, “Transmigration through births is finished”. The last verse foresees his death: “In the Vajjian village of Veḷuva, / my life will come to an end. / Beneath a thicket of bamboos, / being undefiled, I will be fully extinguished.”

How the traditions remember him

In the Pāli canon and Theravāda commentary he is the meditator of mindfulness and absorption, whose divine eye is praised but not mistaken for liberation (AN 3.130); the commentaries add the family tree.

In the Chinese Ekottarika Āgama the story is different. In this collection, translated into Chinese by Dharmanandi and edited in 397–398 CE (its school is uncertain), Aniruddha (阿那律) falls asleep in the assembly while the Buddha teaches (EA 38.5; our paraphrase of the Chinese, which has no English translation on SuttaCentral). Rebuked, he vows never again to sit asleep in the Tathāgata’s presence, stays awake until dawn, and his eyes are damaged. The Buddha warns him that too much effort is as much a fault as laziness, and asks Jīvaka (耆域) to treat him; Jīvaka can, if Aniruddha will sleep a little. Told that sleep is the eye’s food, Aniruddha still will not break his vow. Sewing an old robe, he loses his sight and gains the divine eye, “without flaw” (天眼，無有瑕穢). When he cannot thread his needle and wishes an arahant would do it, the Buddha himself comes to thread it.

In the Mahāyāna sūtras he is Aniruddha. The Lotus Sūtra lists him in the opening assembly and, in Chapter VIII, among five hundred arhats predicted to attain complete enlightenment, who “will all have the same name, that of Samantaprabha”, the name it gives Ājñātakauṇḍinya (trans. Kubo and Yuyama). The Amitābha Sūtra names him in its assembly too. In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra he recalls telling a Brahmā that he sees the universe as a man “sees a myrobalan nut on the palm of his hand”; Vimalakīrti asks whether his divine eye is compounded or uncompounded, and he falls speechless. When the Brahmā asks who does have the divine eye, Vimalakīrti answers: “In the world, it is the buddhas who have the divine eye” (trans. Robert Thurman, 84000).

The Śūraṅgama Sūtra is a ten-fascicle Chinese scripture of disputed origin: it is ascribed to a translator, but Japan’s Nihon Kokugo Daijiten records that it is thought to have been composed in China. In it Aniruddha tells the blindness story himself: “For seven days I did not sleep, and I lost the sight in both my eyes” (trans. Buddhist Text Translation Society). The Buddha then teaches him a samādhi through which, without eyes, he sees the ten directions.

In East Asia he is one of the ten great disciples (十大弟子), known as 天眼第一, foremost in the divine eye. They are the same ten whom the Buddha asks, one after another, in the Vimalakīrti’s third chapter to visit the sick layman, Subhūti and Rāhula among them; each declines. Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia notes that the earliest period had no fixed set, that the name became fixed in the Mahāyāna sūtras, and that devotion to the ten seems to have begun in China; the statues at Kōfukuji in Nara are especially famous.

For the wider circle, see the Buddha’s disciples and famous Buddhist teachers.