Parosahassa Jataka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana after his monks gathered in the Hall of Truth to praise the venerable Sariputta. He had just unpacked the hidden meaning of one of the Buddha's own terse, cryptic sayings, something the other monks had puzzled over without success. When the Buddha learned what they were discussing, he told them this was not the first time Sariputta's penetrating mind had drawn out the sense of a pithy saying others had missed, and he told of a time long past when the same thing had happened.

In a former age, during the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born a brahmin of the north. Educated at Takkasila, he renounced the household life afterward, attained the five mundane knowledges and the eight meditative attainments (forms of psychic and contemplative mastery pursued by forest ascetics), and settled in the Himalayas, where five hundred pupils gathered around him as their teacher and guide in the hermit's life.

In time the Bodhisatta's own death drew near. Knowing the end was close, his pupils gathered at his side and asked him what spiritual attainment he had reached through his long years of practice, hoping to hear him name some high and describable state they might understand and revere.

The Bodhisatta answered simply that he had won Nothing at all. He meant by this the subtle insight into the Sphere of Nothingness, the formless attainment in which the mind lets go of every object it might otherwise grasp. But his pupils, taking his words at their plainest and most literal sense, understood him to mean that his lifetime of discipline had produced no result whatsoever.

Believing their teacher had died admitting failure, most of the five hundred pupils refused to grant him the funeral honors due to an accomplished hermit. They reasoned that a man who had gained nothing deserved no special rites, and prepared to treat his passing as an ordinary, unremarkable death.

The teacher's chief disciple had been away at the time of his master's death, and only learned of what had happened, and of the dismissive judgment the others had already formed, upon his return. Understanding at once what his teacher truly meant, he tried to explain to the others that "Nothing" named a genuine and exalted attainment, not an admission of emptiness or failure.

Even with the correct explanation laid plainly before them, the other pupils refused to believe the chief disciple, clinging instead to their first literal reading of their teacher's final words. No argument the chief disciple offered could move them to reconsider what they had already decided to believe.

At this impasse, the departed teacher himself intervened. Having been reborn in the Brahma realm on the strength of his formless attainment, he appeared in radiant form above the very hermitage where his pupils still disputed the meaning of his last words, settling by his own testimony what no argument alone had been able to settle.

From that bright appearance, the voice of the reborn teacher spoke the verse that gives this Jataka its name: far better than a thousand fools, though they cry out unceasingly for a hundred years, is the one person who, hearing a truth, straightaway understands it. The pupils, confronted with this proof from the teacher's own reborn self, recognized at last how completely they had misjudged both his attainment and his chief disciple's wisdom.

Closing the teaching, the Buddha identified the chief disciple of that ancient hermitage as Sariputta in this present life, and the teacher who died proclaiming he had won Nothing, and who was reborn as Maha Brahma, the great Brahma of that heavenly realm, as the Buddha himself.

The Parosahassa Jataka, No. 99 of the Ekanipata in the Pali Canon's Jataka collection, endures as a warning against mistaking a plain reading for the whole truth. Five hundred pupils heard the same four words their teacher spoke, and only one grasped what those words actually meant, a pattern the Buddha found repeating itself in his own Sangha through Sariputta's gift for drawing light out of what others had already dismissed as darkness. A single mind that understands at once outweighs a multitude content to argue forever over what they have not yet understood at all.