Rahula was the Buddha’s son, born, according to tradition, just days before Siddattha Gotama left home and set out in search of “the deathless”. The name “Rahula” means “fetter”, and it seems that Siddhattha was horrified by having created, as a result of his craving for sensual pleasure, a new being, destined for a life characterized by Dukkha.

Six years after he’d left home, and shortly after having achieved the goal for which he set out on the homeless live and become the Buddha, he returned to Kapilavatthu, where he was received with honor and respect. It is said that his wife, Rahula’s mother, told the boy to go to his father and ask for his inheritance. Rahula did so, and the Buddha, in response, told Sariputta to give Rahula ordination as a member of the Sangha.

In the Vinaya, we’re told that the Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, was very upset by this: “First, we lost our son, and if that weren’t bad enough, now we’ve lost our beloved grandson Rahula to the holy life. It is not right that you should allow the ordination of young children without their parents’ consent.” The Buddha saw the justice in his father’s complaint, gathered the monks together, and pronounced a new rule for the Sangha: no one under 16 should be accepted as a novice, and no one under 20 should receive full ordination without his parents’ consent.

That rule, of course, was too late for Rahula, who entered the Sangha as an ordained bhikkhu, under the special protection and tutelage of Sariputta, the Buddha’s favorite disciple. We are told that Rahula was a model monk, constantly working on his practice, “the foremost of those seeking guidance in his practice.” There are several stories in the canon in which either the Buddha or Rahula seek one another out for special teaching. The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is the first.

The commentaries, as far as I am aware, give no back story to the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta, but, having been the father of a seven-year-old boy, it’s not difficult for me to imagine that word reached the Buddha that Rahula had been telling some tall tales, and that report occasioned the Buddha’s visit to the young monk.

Whatever might have occasioned it, it is a beautiful story, in which the Buddha shows himself, once again, as someone gentle, compassionate, and imaginative. This is not preaching, it is instruction, and it is, moreover, instruction that we all need at some point in our lives. And seven years old is probably not a bad point to receive it.

I hope that you have a chance, not only to read Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s exceptionally graceful translation of this sutta, but also to listen to his reading of it on the SuddaReadings.net website (click to listen; right-click or control-click to download as an MP3 file that you can import into iTunes). Thanissaro has a rich and resonant voice, and one can imagine that one is listening to the Buddha himself. The Sutta Readings website, while it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, has a rich variety of material on it. (One other reading you might want to listen to when you visit the site is Sally Clough’s reading of the Satipatthana Sutta (click to read; right-click or control-click to download the MP3 file), the discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness; that is the sutta we will be discussing next week, and Sally Clough does a particularly wonderful job of reading it.)

Finally, here’s a link to a website that has collected, it seems, just about every legend concerning Rahula that is recorded in the Pali texts. Despite the miraculous nature of some of these, and despite the fact that the very idea of a 7-year-old boy entering the life of an ascetic contemplative is foreign to our current notions of proper child-rearing, the accumulation of detail in the legends presented here give us a picture of a young man who was, while rather more serious than most, was still what we’d call today “well-adjusted” and successful in the pursuit of his goals in life.