The Nine Epithets: The Format the Buddha Left Behind

1.2 The Nine Epithets: The Format the Buddha Left Behind

At the close of the last chapter, a question was left standing: the "qualities of the Buddha" to be recollected—which ones, exactly?

The Buddha did not leave His disciples to imagine them. He left a ready-made format. The Pāli discourses call the string itipi so, after its opening two words, and count out nine: the Worthy One, the Rightly and Fully Enlightened, Perfect in Knowledge and Conduct, the Well-Gone, the Knower of the World, the Unsurpassed Tamer of Persons, the Teacher of Gods and Humans, the Buddha, the Blessed One. In the Saṃyukta Āgama, what the Buddha taught Mahānāma to recollect is this same string—"the Tathāgata, the Worthy One, the Rightly and Fully Enlightened, Perfect in Knowledge and Conduct, the Well-Gone, the Knower of the World, the Unsurpassed One, the Tamer of Persons, the Teacher of Gods and Humans, the Buddha, the World-Honored One."

Recited aloud, the string sounds like a sequence of honorifics. But it is not a certificate of merit, not a listing of the Buddha's titles for the sake of praise. It is one doorway after another.

In recollecting the Buddha, the mind does not run the string through in one breath and call it done. At each word the mind is to pause, step in, look—letting the quality that word points to unfold in the mind, soak in—and then move to the next doorway. The doorways together form a map covering the whole of the Buddha: from what He accomplished, to how He walked, how He sees, how He receives and trains people, to what He is in this world.

Following the order of the Pāli nine, we push them open one by one.

The First Group: What He Accomplished

Worthy One (arahaṃ, also transliterated as "arahant"). It means "one worthy of offerings." Why worthy? Because He has severed craving, hatred, and delusion—the defilements—completely. Recollecting this epithet, what rises in the mind is not the sentimental tribute "the Buddha is great, worthy of my worship," but a very clear positioning: He has severed; I have not yet. He is free; I am not yet. This comparison does not crush anyone, and it is not a contest. It simply marks your position, clearly and cleanly—here stands a reference point that has already walked to the end.

Rightly and Fully Enlightened (sammāsambuddho, also rendered "Perfectly Awakened"). It means "one who has awakened rightly and completely." Two points matter. First, "awakened by Himself"—not taught by another; He realized it Himself. Second, "awakened completely"—suffering, its origin, its cessation, the path: the Four Noble Truths penetrated through and through. Recollecting this epithet, what is to be held is not the boundless myth that "the Buddha knows everything," but the concrete scope: "the Buddha sees this road to liberation with total clarity." Hold the latter, and every recollection reconfirms one thing: the road is still there, still open to return to.

Perfect in Knowledge and Conduct (vijjācaraṇasampanno). Three parts, three things: knowledge, which is wisdom; conduct, which is virtue; perfect, which means both are complete. Of the nine, this doorway is the one that shines most directly on the practitioner herself. Recollecting it, the mind sets up a rule: wisdom and conduct must walk together. Wisdom without conduct is flighty; conduct without wisdom is blind.

The Second Group: How He Walked, Saw, and Received

Well-Gone (sugato). It means "one who has gone well." The Buddha walked the noble path, walked it without regression, and the place He reached is nibbāna. To recollect this epithet is not to recollect "a Buddha who has departed," but a person who walked the entire road through. That He could walk it through means the road goes through. That He has arrived means the road has an end. This is a proof of possibility: someone has already walked there.

Knower of the World (lokavidū). It means "one who has seen through this world." The crucial point: the Buddha did not see the world clearly by escaping it and standing somewhere else. He stood within the world and saw straight through it. So recollecting this epithet pulls one's buddha-recollection back—from "recollecting in order to flee the world" to "recollecting right here within the world." This joins exactly with the last chapter: recollection was designed for the household life from the start, not for escape from it.

Unsurpassed Tamer of Persons (anuttaro purisadammasārathi). The Pāli is one single compound: "the unsurpassed charioteer of persons to be tamed." The Chinese tradition splits it into two names for recitation—"the Unsurpassed One," meaning none compares with Him, and "the Tamer of Persons," meaning He can tame the hardest to tame. The Buddha does not sidestep evil people or detour around the unruly; He has the means to tame them, one by one. Recollecting this doorway opens up the side of one's own mind that can be tamed: He sees the difficult places in me, and He knows how to tame them.

The Third Group: What He Is in This World

Teacher of Gods and Humans (satthā devamanussānaṃ). It means "the teacher of gods and humans alike." Recollecting this epithet, what is recognized is the position "teacher": when I recollect the Buddha, I am not recollecting alone, nor blindly; I recollect within a teacher-student relation—He is the teacher, I am the student. The plain fact "I have a teacher" is itself enough to settle a panicked mind.

Buddha (buddho). Simply "the awakened one, the one who has woken up." This is the simplest of the nine, and the most central. The seven epithets before it are all, in truth, answering one question: why is He called "Buddha"? Because He is the Worthy One, Rightly and Fully Enlightened, Perfect in Knowledge and Conduct, Well-Gone, Knower of the World, Unsurpassed Tamer, Teacher of Gods and Humans. The seven together are the concrete content of this one word. So this doorway is the very center of the map: the seven before it are doors for entering; this one is the room behind the doors. If the nine feel like too many to hold, recollecting this one word alone will serve—"buddho, buddho, buddho…"—because it gathers all seven inside it.

Blessed One (bhagavā). It means "one endowed with all that is venerable," and it is the most common term of respect for the Buddha in the Pāli discourses. Its function is closure: the eight doorways before it open one by one, and this one draws them all together, returning the mind to a single landing point—"a complete, quality-endowed one." The Pāli sentence is arranged with quiet skill: its first word and its last are both "Blessed One"—the seven epithets between are held in the middle, like something cupped between two hands.

Recollecting Nine, or Recollecting Ten

What people in the Chinese world have recited since childhood is in fact the "Ten Names." The string in the Saṃyukta Āgama opens with "Tathāgata"—Tathāgata, Worthy One, Rightly and Fully Enlightened, Perfect in Knowledge and Conduct, Well-Gone, Knower of the World, Unsurpassed One, Tamer of Persons, Teacher of Gods and Humans, Buddha-World-Honored-One—one name more, at the head, than the Pāli nine.

This is the format the Chinese translations set down from the scriptural recension they transmitted; nobody recited it wrong. Nine or ten, the practice is one and the same: the mind stops at each name and lets that quality enter. The difference is only one more doorway—"Tathāgata"—to push open. For the one who recollects, what matters has never been the count. It is whether, at each doorway, one has truly stopped long enough.

Why the Nine Qualities Can Transform the Mind

The last chapter quoted that chain of change: when the noble disciple recollects thus, the entanglement of craving does not arise; his mind is straight; then gladness, joy, tranquility, ease, all the way to concentration. Now look at the nine epithets as an object, and why they so readily drive that chain.

First, every epithet is a borrowing of one quality. Recollect the Worthy One: borrow "freedom from defilement." Recollect the Rightly and Fully Enlightened: borrow "right awakening." Recollect the Well-Gone: borrow "gone well, without regression." Nine epithets, nine qualities; one circuit around them, and the mind has been covered over by nine good qualities in turn.

Second, the nine epithets are many-layered, so the mind always has somewhere further to walk. Fix on one word and grind it over and over, and the mind tends to jam in one spot and stiffen. Nine doorways keep giving the mind new room to enter; it does not stagnate.

And precisely because the mind must keep moving among the nine doorways, it cannot shrink to a single point and lock there unmoving. So this way of recollecting the Buddha can carry the mind to a very settled place—yet not into the deepest kind of concentration. It brings a person to the door of concentration. Why this is so, and how later generations crossed that threshold, is the business of chapter four.

It Was Designed for Messy Days

The Buddha set this recollection format in three teaching scenes. Of the three, not one is a quiet meditation hall.

The first is terror in the forest. The Saṃyukta Āgama records that the Buddha, dwelling in the Jeta Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's Park at Śrāvastī, told the monks:

If a monk dwelling in an empty place, at the root of a tree, or in an empty hut should at times feel fear, his mind startled and his hair standing on end, let him then recollect the Tathāgata, and the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. … When he recollects the Tathāgata, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha, the fear is at once removed.

And the Buddha told a story of the heavens to go with it. In an age past, when Śakra, lord of the gods, did battle with the asuras, Śakra told the gods of the Thirty-Three: in the fight, should fear arise, your minds startled and your hair on end, then recollect my enemy-quelling banner-top; recollecting that banner, the fear will subside. Then the Buddha turned the point home:

That Śakra, lord of the gods, still harbors craving, hatred, and delusion, and is not freed from birth, aging, sickness, death, sorrow, grief, and anguish; he knows fear, dread, flight, and the seeking of refuge—and yet he could tell the gods of the Thirty-Three to recollect his enemy-quelling banner. How much more the Tathāgata, the Worthy One, the Rightly and Fully Enlightened, down to the Buddha, the World-Honored One, who has left craving, hatred, and delusion behind, and is freed from birth, aging, sickness, death, sorrow, grief, and anguish, without any fear, dread, or flight—how could recollecting Him fail to remove all fear?

Even Śakra still carries craving, hatred, delusion; even he knows fear and flight—yet recollecting his banner could turn back terror. How much more the Tathāgata, who has left those three behind and has no fear at all: recollect Him, and how could the terror not subside? Why recollecting the Buddha drives back terror, the Buddha lays bare here Himself: whomever you recollect, what you borrow over is that one's qualities. Adhere to something that itself fears, and the shelter you borrow is slight; adhere to the Buddha, and what you borrow is fearlessness itself.

The second is the clamor of home. The Pāli discourse records that when Mahānāma, just recovered from a grave illness, came again to ask, the Buddha added a layer to the recollection He taught—develop it, in sum, while walking, while standing, while sitting, while lying down, while engaged in work, and even while at home in a house crowded with children. That line sets buddha-recollection squarely inside the householder's noisiest, least quiet moments. Why did the Buddha teach it just so? Because Mahānāma was a lay householder; teach only the meditation-hall version, and a householder has no way in. This format is designed for exactly such clamor—no crossed legs, no silence required: a string of epithets, recollectable at any moment.

The third is danger on the road. Still in the Nigrodha Park, Mahānāma pours out his worry to the Buddha: Kapilavatthu is secure and prosperous, its people thriving, yet every time he goes in and out, "mad elephants, mad people, and runaway carriages are forever with him"—he fears that one day he will die suddenly in such a melee, his mind in panic at the end, having forgotten to recollect the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha; where then would he be reborn? The Buddha sets his heart at rest: do not be afraid, do not dread. You have recollected the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha for long years; this saturation of the mind will not be wasted. Even if you should go in an accident, this mind, steeped through the long night, will of itself rise toward a place of peace. The full text of this exchange we will read closely in chapter three.

Three scenes, one message: buddha-recollection is designed for the disorder of ordinary days, not for ideal practice conditions.

But what the Buddha left behind is not buddha-recollection alone.

Recollection of the Buddha is only the first of the Buddhist "six recollections." Besides the Buddha there are the Dharma, the Saṅgha, virtue, generosity, and the deities—six objects, one same track. Why six? Why these six? And how do they stand to one another?

In the next chapter, we look at all six doorways together.