Maha Moggallana: The Disciple of Psychic Power

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-08-13

Mahā Moggallāna was the Buddha’s second chief disciple, declared foremost in psychic power (iddhi). If Sāriputta, his inseparable friend, represents the summit of wisdom, Moggallāna represents the summit of meditative attainment — the deep concentration from which, the texts say, extraordinary abilities arise. Known in Sanskrit as Maudgalyāyana, he is, with Sāriputta, one of the two chief disciples at the centre of the early community.

Foremost in psychic power

In the Buddha’s list of outstanding disciples, Moggallāna is named foremost among the monks in psychic power (iddhi, AN 1.190). It is worth being careful about what this means. The iddhis the texts describe are not stage-magic but the reputed by-products of very deep meditation (samādhi): the “divine eye” that sees beings passing away and reappearing according to their deeds, the “divine ear,” knowledge of others’ minds, memory of past lives, and the power to travel to other realms.

The Moggallāna Saṁyutta (SN 40) preserves his own accounts of the meditative absorptions (jhānas) that underlie such attainments. And here the tradition is instructive: for all Moggallāna’s powers, Buddhism ranks them firmly below the liberating wisdom that ends suffering. Psychic ability is impressive but not the point; a person can have it and still not be free. Moggallāna matters because he paired that meditative mastery with full awakening — power in the service of a liberated mind.

Two friends, one search

Moggallāna’s story cannot be told apart from Sāriputta’s. By the traditional accounts the two were born to neighbouring brahmin families near Rājagaha, grew up as friends, and set out together as young men to find a teacher who could show them the end of suffering. They made a pact: whoever reached the “deathless” first would come and tell the other.

So when Sāriputta met the monk Assaji and glimpsed the truth of the Buddha’s teaching, Moggallāna was the first person he told — and Moggallāna, hearing it, saw it too. The two went to the Buddha together and were ordained side by side. From then on they shared much of the day-to-day leadership of the growing order of monks, Sāriputta guiding by wisdom and exposition, Moggallāna by the authority of his attainment. Their bond is the tradition’s favourite picture of spiritual friendship (kalyāṇa-mittatā) — the admirable companionship the Buddha praised again and again as central to the whole path.

A voice in the canon

Though remembered for silent attainment, Moggallāna also speaks in the texts. The Anumāna Sutta (MN 15, “Inference”) is a discourse he gave to the monks on a strikingly practical theme: how to make oneself easy to admonish — examining the qualities that make a person hard to correct, and resolving to drop them. It is a humble, self-searching teaching from a man of great power, and a reminder that the early community prized teachability above all displays of ability.

A violent death, calmly met

The end of Moggallāna’s life is told without softening. He died shortly before the Buddha, about two weeks after Sāriputta — the canonical Ukkacela Sutta (SN 47.14) confirms that both chief disciples passed away not long before their teacher, at a place traditionally named as Kālasilā near Rājagaha.

How he died is a commentarial story, and we mark it as such. According to the Dhammapada Commentary (on verses 137–140), Moggallāna was set upon and beaten by hired bandits — the working-out, the commentary says, of grave kamma from a distant past life that even his powers could not simply undo. Read this way, his death becomes a sobering teaching in the tradition’s own telling: that actions set in motion long ago run their course, and that awakening frees the mind without exempting the body from consequences already sown. Whether one takes the account as history or as parable, its lesson is the one Buddhism returns to again and again — the inescapable law of cause and effect.

What Moggallana represents

Between them, the two friends complete a picture. Wisdom without depth of meditation can be dry; meditative power without wisdom can be a dead end or even a danger. Sāriputta and Moggallāna together — insight and attainment, the clear eye and the still, powerful mind — show the path needing both, carried by two people who loved each other.

To meet the friend he was never parted from, see Sāriputta; for the disciple who remembered and preserved the teachings, Ānanda; and for the wider circle around the Buddha, the chief disciples and the great teachers of the tradition. A much later East Asian story of Moggallāna using his sight to rescue his mother from the realm of hungry ghosts became the seed of the Ullambana festival of the dead. Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.