When Sañjaya Lost His Heirs
Sañjaya’s response to his two main followers leaving him for the Buddha is not a caricature of a confused and stupid sage, as it has been handled by the tradition, but a statement of his self honesty and knowing his limitations. Few teachers, if any, would admit that their teaching only works for some and not others. Such teachings should work for everyone. That is what the great religions promise. They will bring about benefit for everyone if only they could see. The Buddha even exclaimed that his Path was for those with little dust covering their eyes. But it turned into a Path for those whose eyes were caked with dust as well.
To Sañjaya’s credit, he knew that his teaching was not for everyone. He also knew that when Sariputta and Moggallana left him, it probably would not survive. He offered them both a place beside him, working as one, to continue his teaching, but they left him anyway. The fact that he was truly willing to give up his role as the principle teacher is evidence he realized that the survival of a teaching is often in the hands of one’s heirs. Without heirs who understand that teaching as well as the founder, it can degrade quickly, become less intelligible, and lose its emotional energy.
Sariputta and Moggallana, on the other hand, encouraged Sañjaya to follow them and learn from the Buddha, who they had yet to meet in person. Sañjaya’s response is recorded in a commentary, not the original discourses, so it may be a post-Canonical creation, but here it is anyhow, “Having been a teacher of the great multitude, I have gone about as such; for me, going about thus, to take up residence as a pupil would be like a storage-jar's coming to the state of a water-dipper. I shall not be able to live the life of a student.”
The simile of a “storage-jar not being able to turn into a water-dipper” is a self-aware statement of his predicament as a renowned teacher becoming another’s student. To me, Sañjaya was also saying he had a lot to teach, a jar full of teaching, and that he was not in a phase of his life where he could be an open receptacle to another person’s teaching. He could not go backwards and learn as if he had never created a teaching and a method. He could not abandon what he had been teaching. It was a valid teaching, a practice that can lead to peace and wisdom. Even if the Buddha had something to offer him that he had not already realized one his own, he could not sit at the Buddha’s feet.
From this story, some Buddhists believe that if Sañjaya had subordinated himself to the Buddha’s superior teaching, like so many other teachers from other sects, he would have become a stream-enterer, been converted through realization, though that was never explicitly stated. But it was true that Sañjaya missed his golden opportunity to learn from Buddha. Was it out of pride? Or was it from an honest self-assessment of his situation? We can’t say for sure, but his next reported response gives us something to think about.
When they left Sañjaya, perhaps seeing him for the last time, Sañjaya asked them, “Dear friends, in this world, are the simple-minded more common or the clever?”
They replied, apparently in unison, of the same opinion: “The simple-minded are more common -- the clever are rarer.”
Sañjaya then said: “Agreeing that only few people are clever and the majority are simple-minded, let the clever go to the clever Gotama. The simple-minded will still come to me, a fellow simpleton. Go your way, my students.”
It is practically unheard of for a teacher to call himself a “simpleton” at the Buddha’s time. Sañjaya not only accepted the appearance of being simple-minded, but he acknowledged that clever people like Sariputta and Moggallana might not be satisfied with his teaching. On an intellectual level, he could let them go study under a teacher who thinks like them, which is something that history bore out. Sariputta played a role in creating and developing the taxonomies in the Buddha’s early teachings, while Moggallana was revered for his mastery of meditative states and psychic abilities. They would not have reached the pinnacle of spiritual success, becoming arahants, nor would they be remembered and worshipped for 2500 years if they had not left Sañjaya. In hindsight, no one has doubted that their leaving Sañjaya was the right move.
At the moment of Sariputta’s and Moggallana’s departure, it is reported (in the Vinaya, probably composed directly right after the Buddha’s time) that Sañjaya vomited hot blood. Sañjaya was still capable of feeling shock, grief, somatic emotional reactions. His vomiting hot blood dramatically describes the pain of having lost his two closest students, his heirs, ostensibly ending the line of transmission for his teaching.
If we can keep in mind the humanity of Sañjaya and put aside the caricature, then we can see him as a person we would like to get to know, who has something valuable to offer.