2 + 250 Students
If it was true that Sariputta and Moggallana took 250 students with them when they left Sañjaya for the Buddha, then there was a considerable contingent of his students in the early Buddhist Sangha. One of the reasons I was able to discover threads of Sañjaya's method in the Pali Canon is that many of the poems that have a Sañjayan influence are not marked with the usual statement indicating Ananda’s recollection of the Buddha’s words (Evaṁ me sutaṁ: “Thus have I heard”).
It may be impossible to completely excavate Sañjaya philosophy, considering how it got fused with passages and ideas attributed to the Buddha. I suspect that the original compilers of the Pali Canon needed to steer readers in the direction of attributing these poems to the Buddha because they could not erase traces of Sanjaya's philosophy in them. In fact, these poems have long been considered to be some of the earliest Buddhist texts, and there have been scholars who have questioned whether these are pre-Buddhist compositions that found their way into the Pali Canon, quite possibly from monks who were former students of other contemporary teachers. Sañjaya and the Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta are two of the main teachers of that time period who had students leave them for the Buddha (Nātaputta's prominent lay disciple, Upāli), and the Pali Canon records both of them spewing blood at the loss.
But, back to the main point of this article. None of the scholars have suspected Sañjaya as the possible author of these poems (or, alternatively, one of his students). Why do I think that Sañjaya is behind these ancient, revered poems? Once I decoded Sañjaya’s five-arm method, I used it as a "key" to examine various verses. The translations I was able to get using Sanjaya's method are different from the common translations, and, frankly, resolve certain issues and inconsistencies found in those translations.
If this was merely a work of scholarship for me, I would not have been interested in researching it beyond my initial discovery. This is a project of excavating a philosophy that got intertwined and fused with Buddhism in such a way that no one has been able to apply it correctly. Its applications go far beyond providing coherent translations of certain Early Buddhist poems, however, re-translating these verses reveal key elements of Sañjaya's philosophy not found anywhere else. I honestly doubt that I will be able to arrive at a completely unmixed, absolutely pure version of Sañjaya's philosophy presented throughout any of these poems. They have apparently undergone minor editing and redaction soon after their time of composition, as well as having been subjected to later commentarial interpretations, and, in one poem, with an added background narrative not found within the poem itself. I will be focusing on that particular poem first.
The simple fact is that Sañjaya's method could not have survived on its own. The loss of his two heirs, the absence of a doctrine with a compatible institutional structure to support its transmission, along with its inability to compete for attention with the predominant teachings of the time period are known factors that doom a philosophy's survival over the ages. It would have been irretrievably lost had it not been for the monks who carried his method into the Pali Canon. We are indebted to them for bringing Sañjaya's philosophical method into the Pali Canon at an early period of composition, where it had to be accurately stated (otherwise, the 252 monks who were once Sañjaya's students could recognize the errors), and then preserved for twenty-five centuries as the confusing, though easy-to-memorize, phrases of a supposedly inconsequential contemporary of the Buddha's.