Maudgalyayana

So

in the sutta after the one with the encounter with Brahma, Moggallana's got stomachache.

Moggallana was the Buddha's second disciple.

He's got stomachache.

Something weird's going on in my guts.

He's just guessing.

He can't possibly.

And then Moggallana, having the powers he does, He says, you just thought he can't know it's me.

Every year on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, families mark Vu Lan Day by setting food out at household altars and floating lit lanterns down rivers at night to help lost souls find their way.

The festival traces back to a Buddhist legend about a young man named Muc Kien Lien who performed a ceremony to free his mother's spirit from torment in the underworld.

The tradition of praying for trapped souls grew out of that story.

By the late 1960s, an estimated 300,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers remained missing in action.

Welcome to the crash course on Moggallana.

That's his name in Pali.

In Sanskrit, Madhgaliana, the Buddha's chief disciple in psychic power and the other half of the most famous friendship in early Buddhism.

The two belong together.

They sought as friends, woke up through the same verse, and the Buddha called them his most eminent disciples, an excellent pair.

This is Moggallana's turn.

And fair warning, where Sariputta's course was all analysis and quiet brilliance, this one has flying monks, shaking palaces, and a man who smiled at things nobody else could see.

We will take those stories seriously as text—the early texts really do narrate them—without turning them into claims about what you or I can do.

Foremost in longstanding, Kondana.

Foremost in psychic power, Moggallana.

And foremost in great wisdom, Sariputta.

That's the official job description, straight from the canon.

The wise one.

How did he get there? The Vinaya, the monastic code, tells the story of his conversion, and I read it in Bhikkhu Brahmali's translation.

Sariputta and Moggallana were two young wanderers, spiritual seekers, in the city of Rajagaha, and they had made a pact.

Whoever reaches the deathless first tells the other.