The Buddha’s Begging Bowl

Also Known As: Sanskrit patra, Pali patta, “vessel, bowl”; also the alms bowl, the almsbowl, the bowl relic, the patra-dhatu; Gandhari pado
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A stone alms bowl formed when the Buddha pressed four bowls into one, and which fills to the brim at a poor person’s handful of flowers while swallowing a rich person’s thousands of bushels without rising.
Role in Mythos: It is the vessel in which the Buddha received his first meal after the enlightenment, and it became the foundation object for the monastic alms round and the most venerated relic of Gandhara.
Relation to Humans: For centuries it was brought out twice a day at Purushapura so that monks and people of no rank alike could make offerings into it, and pilgrims walked from China to stand in front of it. It also refused to be carried off by a king who invaded the country specifically to take it.

Near noon the monks carried it out into the sun. Seven hundred of them lived at Purushapura in a monastery that existed around a single object, and twice a day, once before the midday meal and again in the evening when the incense was lit, the stone bowl was brought out and set down where anybody could reach it. Fa-hien, who had walked from China and arrived early in the fifth century, stood in that courtyard and watched what happened next. A poor man dropped in a few flowers and the bowl was full. Rich people came with flowers by the bushel, by the hundred bushels, by the thousand, and the bowl took all of it and did not fill.

Fa-hien then did what a good traveller does and wrote down the thing itself. It held rather more than two pecks. It was of several colours with black predominating, and it was about a fifth of an inch thick at the wall, with the bright glossy lustre that stone takes from centuries of hands. Around it, close under the rim, ran four clear seams, as though four vessels had been pressed into one and had not quite agreed to forget it.

Those seams are the whole account of where it came from. After the enlightenment the Buddha sat under a tree for weeks, taking nothing, and when two travelling merchants named Trapusa and Bhallika finally offered him barley gruel and honey cakes he found he had a problem no one had thought about: the buddhas before him had never taken food in their bare hands, and he had nothing to take it in. The four guardian kings of the quarters arrived out of the four directions, each with a bowl. Dhritarashtra from the east, Virudhaka from the south, Virupaksha from the west, Vaishravana from the north.

What they brought depends on who is telling it, and the disagreement is itself old. The Pali Mahavagga has them bring four bowls of stone. The Mahavastu has them arrive with gold, which he will not take, so the bowls turn through one precious metal after another until they come down to stone. The Lalitavistara runs the sequence longest, gold and silver and lapis lazuli and quartz and coral and emerald, all refused, until the kings finally offer stone and the refusal stops. The Nidanakatha has two rounds only, sapphire declined, then four bowls of plain stone the colour of green lentils, accepted.

Then comes the moment the seams record. Four kings, four bowls, one man who needs one bowl and four donors whose faith he will not diminish by picking a favourite. In the Mahavastu he touches them with his thumb and there is one bowl where there were four, with four rings standing around the rim as the leftover evidence. The Nidanakatha gives the same compression with lines near the lip. The Mahavagga, stubbornly, has him accept all four and merge nothing. Trapusa and Bhallika got their meal, took refuge in the Buddha and his teaching, and became the first lay followers in the world, which is a considerable return on gruel. The scene was popular enough to be carved on Gandharan pedestals for centuries, and the earliest surviving telling of it is a Gandhari manuscript in Kharoshthi script from the second century.

There was an earlier bowl and it is not this one. Sujata’s milk rice came in gold, and when the Buddha had eaten he set the golden bowl on the Neranjara and it went upstream, against the current, until a naga king drew it down into his palace to lie with the bowls of the three buddhas before him. That vessel is out of the world. The stone one stayed in it, and had to be looked after.

The stone one also settled a question the Buddhist orders cared about a great deal. Naked ascetics begged into their cupped hands. A monk with a bowl was visibly not one of them, and the bowl became a requisite rather than a convenience, which is why the Vinaya then had to rule on what a bowl could be made of. Jewelled bowls were out as luxury. Wooden bowls were out because grease will not scrub from wood, and because a wooden bowl was the mark of the wrong sort of renunciant. Iron and clay were what remained, and the stone original sat behind all of it as the precedent.

By the first or second century the bowl was in Gandhara, and a king of the Yueh-she raised an army and invaded the country to take it away. He won. Being a sincere believer he made his offerings first, on a great scale, and then had an elephant caparisoned and the bowl set on its back. The elephant knelt and would not rise. He had a four-wheeled waggon built and yoked eight elephants to it, and eight elephants could not drag it a foot. The king understood that his time with the bowl had not come, was ashamed, and built a stupa and a monastery on the spot with a guard left to watch what he could not lift.

So the bowl’s powers are small and precise and entirely about the giver. It is bottomless to a rich man’s vanity and instantly full at a poor man’s handful, which is a lesson about merit delivered as a party trick. It cannot be moved by force, by rank, or by eight elephants. What it cannot do is stay. Two centuries after Fa-hien, Xuanzang reached Purushapura and found the bowl gone, with a report that it had gone west through several countries and was now in Persia. The Lalitavistara had already removed it further, flinging it into the sky after the meal to be caught by the god Subrahma and worshipped in the Brahma heaven. Nobody knows where it went.

Something is left. In the ruins of old Kandahar, in the shrine of Sultan Ways Baba, there sat for generations a huge stone bowl that many take for the Buddha’s begging bowl carried out of a Gandharan shrine, and which was moved to the National Museum in Kabul in the late 1980s. In 2011 an Indian member of parliament asked the government to get it back. The reply noted that the bowl is rather large and carries an inscription in Arabic and Persian, and that its provenance is therefore in question. It is a broad shallow basin of grey stone, ringed with script that has nothing to do with the Buddha, and far too heavy for any man to have carried it on a round of alms.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Buddha’s begging bowl?

The Buddha’s begging bowl, called the patra in Sanskrit and the patta in Pali, is the stone alms bowl he used to receive food after his enlightenment. Buddhist tradition says it was formed when he compressed four bowls, offered by the four guardian kings of the directions, into a single vessel with four seam lines left showing under the rim. It later became the most venerated relic of Gandhara.

Who gave the Buddha his alms bowl?

The four Lokapalas, the guardian kings of the four quarters, gave it to him: Dhritarashtra, Virudhaka, Virupaksha and Vaishravana. They came because the Buddha had been offered his first meal by the merchants Trapusa and Bhallika and had no vessel to receive it in, since buddhas do not take food in their bare hands. He refused their bowls of gold and jewels and accepted only stone.

What happened to the Buddha’s begging bowl?

It was kept and worshipped at Purushapura, present-day Peshawar, where the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien saw it around 400 CE. By the time Xuanzang arrived in the seventh century the bowl had gone, and he recorded a report that it had travelled west and was then in Persia. No later sighting has ever been confirmed.

Is the bowl in the Kabul museum the Buddha’s begging bowl?

A large stone bowl from the shrine of Sultan Ways Baba at old Kandahar is now in the National Museum in Kabul and is widely said to be the Buddha’s begging bowl brought from a Gandharan shrine. Its identification is disputed. When the Indian parliament raised the matter in 2011, the government’s reply pointed out that the bowl is unusually large and carries an Arabic and Persian inscription, which calls its provenance into question.

Why do Buddhist monks carry an alms bowl?

The story of the four kings is the foundation account for the practice. A Buddhist monk receives food in a bowl rather than in his cupped hands, which visibly distinguishes him from ascetics of other traditions who begged with a “hand bowl”. The monastic rules then had to define what a legitimate bowl could be made of, ruling out jewelled bowls as luxurious and wooden ones as unclean and associated with rival renunciants.