Jhanasodhana Jataka No. 134

Jataka No. 134, the Jhanasodhana Jataka of the Jatakatthavannana's Ekanipata, is told at Jetavana after Sariputta alone answered a question that the Buddha put to the whole assembly, and the monks marveled at his wisdom; the Buddha remarked that Sariputta had shown this same gift of explanation in a much earlier life as well, and told the following story to show how.

In the very distant past indeed, when Brahmadatta reigned in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was born into a wealthy brahmin household. Having completed his education at Takkasila, the great center of learning, he renounced worldly life entirely. He won the five higher knowledges and the eight meditative attainments through years of disciplined practice, and settled in the Himalayas, where five hundred ascetics gathered around him over time, drawn by his reputation, to learn the same path to meditative absorption he himself had mastered.

The Bodhisatta himself progressed further in meditation than any of his students. He purified his own awareness beyond all material form, beyond the sphere of infinite space, beyond infinite consciousness, and beyond the sphere of nothingness. In time he reached the very summit of mundane trance, the base of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception, nevasannanasannayatana, the subtlest state the mind can enter while still bound to the cycle of becoming.

When the aged teacher lay dying at last, the chief disciple had gone with half of the ascetics down to the villages of men to fetch salt and vinegar. The students who had stayed beside the teacher asked what marvelous attainment he had reached across his holy life. He was seeking to describe a state so refined that it could truthfully be called neither perception nor the absence of perception. With only two words left in his final breath, he said simply: neither conscious, nor unconscious.

Upon his passing, those who had stayed behind, lacking any way to understand what they had heard, could make nothing of their teacher's last words, which seemed to them mere babbling. They wondered aloud, to one another, whether their revered master had attained anything of consequence after decades of patient austerity.

When the chief disciple returned from the villages and heard what the teacher had said at the end, he alone understood what his dying teacher had meant. He explained to the others that this strange, clipped phrase named the highest of the formless attainments, not confusion or failure at the very end of a long life of discipline. The ascetics who had stayed behind would not accept his explanation, however patiently he pressed it upon them.

Seeing from the Radiant Realm (Abhassara) how his former students doubted the one disciple who had understood him correctly, the departed teacher came back to settle the matter himself. Standing in the air before them, he recited a verse: those who are conscious fare badly, and so do those who are unconscious; abandon both, for the bliss of that attainment is spotless. Thus he confirmed that the chief disciple's explanation had been correct, and that "neither conscious nor unconscious" named the sublime peak of meditative purification rather than any failure of mind or speech. He praised his disciple and returned to the Brahma world, and the ascetics then accepted the chief disciple's reading of the teacher's last words.

At the conclusion of the discourse at Jetavana, the Buddha identified the birth: the wise chief disciple, who alone had grasped his dying teacher's true meaning, was Sariputta in an earlier life, and the Buddha himself declared that he had been Maha Brahma, the teacher who returned from the Radiant Realm to praise his disciple and settle the doubt of the others.

Buddhist teaching is careful to mark what the old teacher's attainment was and was not. Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception is the fourth and subtlest of the four arupa jhanas, the formless absorptions that lie beyond even the perception of infinite consciousness, and it is rightly honored as the summit of what sustained meditative concentration alone can reach. Yet it remains, in the Buddha's own later teaching, a state still bound within samsara rather than liberation from it: a being who dies having mastered it is reborn into the corresponding formless Brahma realm for an immense span, but is not thereby freed from the cycle of rebirth itself. The jataka's praise for the teacher's accomplishment and the Buddha's later teaching that something beyond even this summit exists are not in tension; they simply measure the same peak from two different vantage points, one within the mundane path of concentration and one from the far shore of full awakening.