The 18 Arhats (Luohan): The 16, the 18 and the 500

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 5 November 2026

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The Eighteen Arhats (Chinese luohan, often spelled lohan) are enlightened disciples of the Buddha whom Chinese Buddhists honour as guardians of his teaching. The core group is sixteen. A text that Xuanzang translated into Chinese in 654 or 662, the Record of the Abiding of the Dharma, says the Buddha ordered them to stay in the world, protect the Dharma and be a field of merit for donors. Chinese temples later made the sixteen eighteen, and sources disagree about who the extra two are.

In Japan they are rakan and in Korea nahan; in Tibet the same sixteen are the Elders (sthavira). Behind them stands a larger company, the Five Hundred Arhats. This page belongs with our guide to the buddhas and bodhisattvas.

What is an arhat?

An arhat (Pāli arahant) is, in Access to Insight’s glossary, a “worthy one” or “pure one”: “a person whose mind is free of defilement” and who is “thus not destined for further rebirth”. See our guide to what an arahant is and the comparison of arahant, buddha and bodhisattva.

That is what makes the Sixteen unusual. JAANUS, a dictionary of Japanese art terms, notes that in Mahāyāna Buddhism arhats, as seekers of their own salvation, rank below bodhisattvas. These sixteen are given public work instead. Sylvain Lévi and Édouard Chavannes, who translated the text into French in 1916, read it, in Ruixuan Chen’s summary, as one which “assigns to the Arhats the rôle of the Bodhisattvas”.

Where the Sixteen Arhats come from

The names of the Sixteen go back to one short work, the Record of the Abiding of the Dharma, Spoken by the Great Arhat Nandimitra (大阿羅漢難提蜜多羅所説法住記, Fazhu ji). Thomas Watters called it in 1899 the text from which “all our knowledge of the names of the Sixteen Arhats … may be said to be derived”. Early Chinese catalogues, Ruixuan Chen notes in his 2018 Leiden study, date Xuanzang’s translation to 654 or 662 (the Kaiyuan catalogue of 730 gives 654, Daoxuan’s of 664 gives 662). Versions also survive in Tibetan and Khotanese.

The frame story is a deathbed. Nandimitra, an arhat living (the Chinese says) eight hundred years after the Buddha’s passing, is about to enter final nirvāṇa, and his monks and nuns weep. He consoles them: the dying Buddha entrusted his teaching to sixteen great arhats and their followers, to keep it from perishing. Because they were given the Buddha’s order, in Chen’s translation of the Chinese, “so long as the true teachings of the Blessed One shall endure, they will always follow, protect and maintain (the teachings); and become a veritable field of merit (puṇyakṣetra) for donors so that those donors will reap great rewards”. When patrons hold feasts for the Sangha, the arhats attend unrecognised. They come “in different guises”, in Chen’s translation of the Tibetan; the Chinese has them take various forms, hide their holiness and receive the offerings like ordinary monks.

The text also sets a timetable. In the Chinese version, when the teaching finally disappears, the arhats enshrine the Buddha’s relics in a stūpa of seven precious substances, pay homage and pass into final nirvāṇa. Many accounts, Watters’s 1899 summary and Britannica among them, say the arhats remain until the next buddha, Maitreya, comes. Read closely, the Chinese text, and the Tibetan in Chen’s translation, have them depart when Śākyamuni’s teaching ends; Maitreya comes later, after an age of solitary buddhas.

Scholars disagree about the story’s origin. Xuanzang’s version sets it in Siṃhala, Sri Lanka (Watters doubted the identification); Chen points out that the Tibetan sets it in Śibika, possibly in northern Pakistan, and the Khotanese in Surāṣṭra in Gujarat, and concludes that there never was a single Indian original. Himalayan Art Resources calls it “an early text possibly dating to the 4th to 6th century”. Jen-lang Shih (2002) argues that it began as a non-Mahāyāna text, though it now contains Mahāyāna elements.

The names of the 16 arhats

Chinese, Koreans and Japanese “use the same system of names for the group of sixteen arhats”, Shin Kwanghee writes. The Sanskrit names below head Chen’s comparative list, with his reading of the Chinese spelling in brackets where it differs; dwellings and retinues are Xuanzang’s.

Some names are uncertain: JAANUS gives the ninth as Jīvaka. Watters took the eleventh to be Rāhula, the Buddha’s son, and thought the twelfth the Nāgasena of the Milindapañha. He also warned that the pictures and images “are not supposed to be faithful representations of the men indicated by the names”. Tibetan liturgy uses another order: the Praise to the Sixteen Elders, attributed to the Kashmiri teacher Śākyaśrībhadra, begins with Aṅgaja on “the great snow mountain of Kailash” and places Piṇḍola twelfth.

Piṇḍola Bhāradvāja, the arhat told to stay

In the Pāli discourses the Buddha names Piṇḍola foremost of his disciples “with a lion’s roar” (AN 1.195), and in the Udāna (Ud 4.6) sees him meditating nearby, “of few wishes, content, secluded” (both trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).

The story that made him famous is in the Vinaya, the monastic code. A merchant of Rājagaha hangs a carved sandalwood bowl high on a succession of bamboo poles for “any perfected monastic or brahmin who brings it down by supernormal power”. Piṇḍola is on almsround with Mahāmoggallāna, who tells him, “you too are perfected and have supernormal powers”. He “rose into the air, took hold of that bowl, and circled around Rājagaha three times.” The Buddha rebukes him:

Two rules follow: no displays of such powers to householders (see the jhānas), and no wooden bowls. In the Pāli account the story ends there.

Chinese tradition carried it further. The Method for Inviting Piṇḍola (請賓頭盧法), a short ritual manual whose translation is attributed to Huijian (fl. 457), says that because he showed his powers for a wealthy householder, the Buddha banished him, would not let him enter nirvāṇa, and ordered him to be a field of merit for the final age of the teaching. The host’s invitation, in Chen’s translation, begins: “O Reverend Piṇḍola Bharadvāja, you have been given the instruction and order by the Buddha to be a field of merit (puṇyakṣetra) for people [living] in the decadent period of the teachings.” In the old Indian custom, Watters wrote, “the door was left open for him”, and the flowers or his mat showed whether he had come. Ninth- and tenth-century manuscripts from Dunhuang invite him to memorial services for the dead, and Chen concludes that belief in the Buddha’s order to the Elders was “well established in Chinese Buddhism from the 5th to the 10th century”. Watters records his popular name, the “Long-eyebrowed Monk”.

In Japan he is Binzuru. At Zenkōji in Nagano his image has sat in the outer sanctuary of the main hall since 1713. The temple’s website describes a popular belief that a sick person who touches the part of the image matching their own affliction shares in his power and is healed, and notes that three centuries of hands have worn his face smooth.

From sixteen to eighteen

The texts know sixteen. Watters found “the number eighteen being apparently unknown even to the comparatively modern native treatises”. The earliest mention he knew is in the Fozu tongji, a Song-dynasty chronicle by Zhipan, which remarks that “at present eighteen are talked of”. In the Chinese (fascicle 33), Zhipan goes on to reject two additions already in use: a second Piṇḍola, who heads the sixteen anyway, and Nandimitra, who narrates the record rather than being one of those charged to stay. He takes the extra pair instead from the four great arhats of a sūtra on Maitreya’s coming, Mahākāśyapa, Piṇḍola, Rāhula and a fourth: two are already among the sixteen, so the other two make eighteen. Watters found the same four in another early sūtra, which has them stay in the world until Maitreya comes.

Temples went their own way. “In many old temples we find the 17th and 18th places given respectively to Nandimitra and a second Pindola”, Watters wrote. Elsewhere he found Emperor Wu of Liang, the translator Kumārajīva, Maitreya or the fat monk Budai (see why the laughing Buddha is fat), the lay devotee Dharmatāla, or Guanyin. His verdict: “these Eighteen Lohan have never received authoritative recognition”.

Tibetan sets of the Sixteen add two figures, the lay attendant Dharmatāla and the patron Hvashang, who are, in the words of Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources, “commonly confused for arhats”. Watt is clear that they are not: “In the Tibetan system there are only sixteen elders”, and Dharmatāla “is not an arhat himself”. Watters, in 1899, thought Tibet had “also its Eighteen Lohan, imported from China apparently in modern times”, Dharmatāla among them. Whether Tibet has eighteen depends on whom you ask.

The Five Hundred Arhats

JAANUS says the origin of the 500 is unknown; the Chinese belief that five hundred arhats lived beyond the Stone Bridge on Mount Tiantai probably adapted Daoist legends of immortals, and “it is not clear” whether the number means five hundred individuals or simply a great many. Shin Kwanghee adds that no sūtra names them all, and that Korea developed its own list of names.

A hundred hanging scrolls by Lin Tinggui and Zhou Jichang, inscribed in 1178, are now divided between Daitokuji in Kyoto, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and others (JAANUS). A Korean set of 1235–36 gave each arhat his own painting and name; the Cleveland Museum of Art holds the 464th, Segongyang, luring a dragon into an alms bowl. Shin counts fourteen survivors; Cleveland says “about ten”.

Japan also carved them in stone. Kita-in in Kawagoe has “more than 500 stone statues”, carved between 1782 and 1825, “with no two statues alike”. JAANUS names other sets at Rakanji in Ōita and Sekihōji in Kyoto.

How the traditions differ

Theravāda. The Pāli canon honours Piṇḍola as an arahant, but we found no Theravāda text or rite that names the Sixteen. Chen describes Nandimitra’s record as “deemed an authoritative source for the cult of the Elders or Arhats in Central and East Asia”.

China. Watters described “two rows of large yellow figures—one along the east and the other along the west wall” of a temple’s chief hall, and observed: “They have incense burnt before their images, but generally speaking they are not worshipped or consulted like the gods and P‘usas [bodhisattvas] of the temples.” Surviving figures include the glazed luohans from Yixian in Hebei; the Penn Museum says its figure was “originally part of a group of sixteen or eighteen figures”. The Met dates its glazed luohans to the Liao dynasty, about 1000; Penn’s record says Liao or Jin, both “uncertain”. JAANUS credits the monk Guanxiu (832–912) with a distinctive ink style for the Sixteen; Britannica notes that the best known of the lohan paintings attributed to him are “a series of 16 in the Tokyo National Museum”. Shin records that people prayed before his Sixteen Arhats for relief from drought; a set attributed to him was carved in stone in 1757, and the Met holds rubbings (see Buddhism in China).

Korea. Goryeo rituals for the arhats were “widely performed”, Shin writes, and ordinary people “prayed to arhats for health and longevity”. In 1562 Queen Munjeong had two hundred arhat paintings made for, in the inscription’s words, “the King’s vitality” and “her own longevity”, among other aims. Temples may give the arhats a hall of their own, the Eungjin-jeon, “a building that houses images of arhats” (Philadelphia Museum of Art; see Buddhism in Korea).

Japan. According to JAANUS, the subject is said to have reached Japan from China in 982 with the monk Chōnen. Zen temples often placed painted wooden figures of the sixteen on the upper floor of the main gate, as at Tōfukuji, Nanzenji and Myōshinji (see Buddhism in Japan).

Tibet. Watt describes a full set as twenty-five figures: Śākyamuni with Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, the sixteen, Dharmatāla, Hvashang and the four guardian kings. Lotsawa House calls the rite attributed to Śākyaśrībhadra “the most famous rite of homage and offering” to the Buddha and the Sixteen Elders; Chen, citing Giuseppe Tucci, dates the introduction of the cult at Narthang monastery to the eleventh century (see Tibetan Buddhism).

These are records of what communities did and believed, not evidence that the arhats are present. To compare the goals behind them, see the four stages of enlightenment and Theravāda and Mahāyāna; for the halls, see Buddhist temples.