Dictionary of Pali Proper Names v2.c35.428

v2.c35.428

Having discovered that, at Jetavana, his young relations came too often to see him, he obtained a formula of meditation and went into the forest to a distance of twenty leagues from Sāvatthi. At the request of the inhabitants of the village near by, he spent the rainy season in the forest hermitage, going into the village for alms. There, at the end of two months, he attained arahantship. Because he was so devoted to the forest, he was given the name of Vanavāsī. At the end of the vassa, all the Buddha’s chief disciples, with a retinue of forty thousand monks, visited Tissa in his hermitage, arriving there in the evening. The villagers, recognizing Sāriputta, asked him to preach the Dhamma, saying that Tissa, their teacher, knew only two sentences—“May you be happy, may you obtain release from suffering!”—which sentences he repeated whenever anyone made him a gift. Thereupon Sāriputta asked him to explain the meaning of the two sentences, and the novice preached till sunrise, summarizing the whole of the Buddha’s teaching “even as a thunderstorm rains incessantly upon the four great continents.”