Mula-Pariyaya Jataka

In the city of Benares, while King Brahmadatta reigned, the Bodhisatta was born into a brahmin family and grew up to master the three Vedas. He became a celebrated teacher of worldly learning, and five hundred young brahmins came from near and far to study under him. For years he taught them grammar, ritual verse, and the sciences prized by the learned of that age, holding nothing back.

As the pupils grew accomplished, a dangerous thought took root in them: "We now know everything our teacher knows; there is no difference left between him and us." Instead of gratitude, this thought produced arrogance. They stopped attending on him with the respect due a teacher, neglected the small daily services pupils traditionally owed their master, and began to treat him as an equal, or worse, as someone no longer worth honoring.

One day the Bodhisatta came upon his former pupils gathered beneath a jujube tree, laughing and mocking him openly, confident that they had nothing left to learn from him. Rather than rebuke them with anger, the teacher resolved to show them, through their own reasoning, how far their learning still fell short of true wisdom. He called them together and posed a riddle in verse, one that no amount of Vedic recitation could answer by memory alone.

The riddle he set before them ran: "Time all consumes, even time itself as well. Who is't consumes the all-consumer?--tell!" It was a question that reached beyond the Vedas the pupils had memorized, touching on a deeper principle their ordinary learning had never required them to consider. The teacher told them plainly that this single question lay outside anything the three Vedas could answer, and that if they could solve it, he would concede they had truly surpassed him.

Confident at first, the five hundred pupils dispersed to search their memories and consult one another, certain that their vast learning would quickly yield an answer. The teacher granted them seven full days to work out a solution. They debated among themselves, turned over every verse and formula they had learned, and tried every angle of reasoning available to them, but not one of the five hundred could produce an answer that satisfied the riddle.

When the week ended and the pupils returned empty-handed, admitting their defeat, the Bodhisatta did not simply hand them the answer. He posed a second riddle to drive the lesson deeper: "Heads grow on necks, and hair on heads will grow: how many heads have ears, I wish to know?" Seeing their continued bewilderment, he told them plainly, "Fools are ye; ye have ears with holes in them, but not wisdom," and only then explained both riddles to them in full.

Hearing the solutions and recognizing how completely their confidence had outrun their understanding, the five hundred pupils were overcome with shame. They cried out, "Great indeed are our teachers!" and fell before the Bodhisatta begging forgiveness for their discourtesy. From that day they extinguished their conceit, resumed their proper duties of service and respect, and applied themselves again to learning with humility rather than pride.

The Buddha told this ancient story while dwelling near the town of Ukkattha, in the Subhagavana Park, because a strikingly similar event had just occurred among his own followers. Five hundred brahmins who had mastered the Vedas and gone on to study the Three Pitakas (the three traditional divisions of Buddhist scripture) under the Buddha had grown proud of their learning, telling themselves, "The Blessed One knows only the Three Pitakas, and so do we; what difference remains between him and us?" They ceased attending upon the Buddha and went about gathering followers of their own.

Wishing to humble this pride for their own good, the Buddha recited before them a profound exposition on the succession of causes, adorned with the eight stages of knowing. Despite all their mastery of the Vedas and the Pitakas, the five hundred brahmins could not understand a single word of it. Their vanity, built entirely on recitation and recall, collapsed before a teaching that required insight rather than memory, and a deep humility replaced their former conceit.

Later, at a shrine in Vesali, the Buddha again took up this same chapter and expounded it before the chastened brahmins. As he spoke, it is told that a thousand world-systems trembled, so great was the discourse, and the five hundred brahmins, now truly receptive, attained the fruit of arahantship, full liberation, by its end. The monks of the monastery, marveling at this, spoke among themselves of how the Buddha had twice humbled proud scholars with a single teaching.

When the monks reported their conversation to him, the Buddha said this was not the first time he had subdued such pride, and told them the ancient tale of the teacher and his jujube tree. He then identified the birth for them: the five hundred humbled brahmin monks of the present had been those same five hundred conceited pupils in the far-off past, and the Buddha himself had been their brahmin teacher at Benares who set the unanswerable riddle before them.

The Mula-Pariyaya Jataka, No. 245 in the Dukanipata (the Book of Twos) of the Pali canon, endures because its riddles are still unanswerable by cleverness alone. "Time devours all things; what devours time?" and "how many heads have ears?" are not puzzles to be solved by memorization, but mirrors held up to anyone who mistakes information for insight. Across two lifetimes, the same teacher and the same pupils met the same lesson: learning without humility is merely noise, and only a mind willing to be humbled can finally hear the Dhamma it claims already to know.