Parosata Jataka

The monks of Jetavana once fell to praising Elder Sariputta for his gift of drawing the full meaning out of the Buddha's briefest sayings. The Buddha, overhearing them, said this was not the first time Sariputta had shown this gift; in a past life too, he had grasped in a moment what a hundred others spent years failing to understand. This is Jataka No. 101, the Parosata Jataka, preserved in the Jatakatthavannana of the Khuddaka Nikaya. Its name means more than a hundred fools, and it is a companion piece to the Parosahassa Jataka, which tells the same story with a thousand disciples rather than a hundred.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was a brahmin ascetic who had renounced the household life, studied at Takkasila in his youth, and withdrawn to the Himalayas, where he lived with five hundred disciples, a teacher who had mastered the five higher knowledges and the eight meditative attainments. As he neared death, his disciples gathered around him, but his chief disciple, the most senior and most trusted among them, happened to be away at the time.

Asked by the remaining disciples what he had attained, the old teacher answered only, "Natthi kinci," I have won nothing. He meant this precisely: he had entered the formless attainment known as the sphere of nothingness, akincannayatana, the state in which the mind rests on the perception that there is nothing at all to grasp. But the disciples gathered at his bedside heard only the plain sense of his words, and concluded that their teacher had died having achieved nothing after a lifetime of practice. In their grief and confusion, they denied him the customary honors due a master who had died in attainment.

When the chief disciple returned and learned what had happened, he understood at once what his teacher had meant. He tried to explain it to the others: that to have won nothing was itself the highest winning, the dissolving of every object of clinging into the perception of nothingness. But though he explained it to them again and again, the other disciples, each as set in his own reading of the words as the last, would not be moved. A hundred minds, each sure of its own interpretation, could not be brought to the one understanding that had come to a single mind at once. Years of shared practice under the same teacher had given them the same words to argue over, but not the same insight, and the chief disciple found that repetition alone could not transmit what his own single hearing had grasped instantly.

Because of the attainment he had died in, the teacher was reborn as Mahabrahma in the Brahma world. Seeing his disciples still divided over his final words, he appeared before them from that realm to settle the matter himself. He praised his chief disciple's understanding and spoke the verse that gives the Jataka its name: "Though more than a hundred fools should think for a hundred years, they are not worth the one who, on hearing, understands the meaning at once." Hearing this from the departed teacher's own mouth, the disciples at last accepted what the chief disciple had told them all along, and the dispute that had divided the hermitage was settled. Only then did they perform the honors they had withheld, recognizing at last that their teacher's final words had announced not failure but the deepest attainment his path could offer.

The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the great Brahma of the story as himself in that birth, and the chief disciple who alone understood the dying teacher's words as Sariputta himself. Sariputta carried into this later life the same gift for drawing out meaning that a hundred others, circling the same words for years, could never quite reach on their own. The monks who had begun the conversation praising Sariputta's wisdom in the present day came away understanding that this gift was not a sudden talent but one he had carried, refined, and proven across many lifetimes, long before this one gave it a name.