Sarah Shaw, on page 115 of Buddhist Meditation: An Anthology of Texts from the Pāli Canon, refers to Venerable Ānanda as a “foil.” It occurred to me that, perhaps as the downside of his perceived accessibility due to his mediatory role between the Buddha and junior mendicants, the bhikkhu and the bhikkhunī saṅghas, the monastics and the laity, etc., he does quite often serve as a sort of “straw man,” a caricature of things unbecoming of a mendicant.
Other than Shaw’s book, can anyone recall any other scholastic publications referring to this unfortunate role Ānanda has been cast in?
Nothing off the top of my head in terms of publications, but the depiction of Ananda at the First Council in many traditions is very negative. Mahakasyapa accuses him of a series of failings as the Buddha’s attendant and then locks him out of the council until he becomes an arhat. Then he leads the recitation of the sutras with the other arhats. I believe their are a few other incidents between Mahakasyapa and Ananda, like the one involving the nuns, in which Ananda is treated badly. I’ve always wondered about this theme in Theravada and Sarvastivada sources that deprecates Ananda quite a bit even though he was also the reciter of the sutras and the teacher of important missionaries who established schools in other regions.
If there’s been a study of this in the literature, I’d be interested in reading it too.
Hillside Hermitage had a video where a lay person visited and asked about motivation and the Hillside Hermitage cited Ananda’s situation. They were saying the Buddha and the arhats were telling ananda for decades to finish the practice and not waste time and would refer to him as young pup even when he was old with white hair. It sounded to me like at the council they were just trying to motivate him to finish the task because the reasons they gave for his shortcomings were pretty minor.
My take on that is that, as ven ananda was kind of junior in realisation (stream enterer only and not yet arhat) and almost all monks around him were arhats and my belief is that, arhats, while engaging with juniors, most of the times if not always, behave in a way that juniors will progress more on the path to arhatship. So may be that was the reason why some of them treated him the way they did. For example ven mahakassapa locking him out of council maybe motivated him even more to attain arhatship.
Thanks to all respondents, but I may have solved my own query.
It seems the Venerable Yin Shun has a publication called 阿難過在何處？(roughly, “What Were Ānanda’s Faults?”). There’s even an English translation called, I think “Ānanda’s Faults.” It draws from Northern and Southern EBT sources.
Liberal people, because they are willing to consider and adapt to the other person’s opinions, are always an easy target for hardliners who are far too inflexible to even consider the faults in their own selves.
