Sariputra

Sariputra came to the Buddha already looking. He and his friend Maudgalyayana were students of another teacher and had agreed that whichever of them found the deathless first would tell the other. Sariputra met a monk named Assaji in the street, was struck by his bearing, asked what his teacher taught, and received a single verse: of things that arise from a cause, the Buddha has told the cause and also the cessation. He is said to have understood immediately, and went straight to fetch his friend.

His characteristic gift is analysis. Where other discourses report what the Buddha said, a substantial number report Sariputra taking a compressed statement and unfolding it, sorting it into its parts, defining the terms and putting it in order for the community. He is the named speaker of several of the most systematic texts in the canon, and the Abhidharma tradition, which arranges the teaching into an exhaustive analytical scheme, treats him as its origin. The Buddha is recorded as saying that Sariputra could turn the wheel of the teaching exactly as he did.

He died a few months before the Buddha. Having asked permission, he went back to the village of his birth to die in the room where he was born, so that his mother, who had never accepted his going forth, could see it, and the tradition says she was converted at the end.

Buddhist tradition pairs Sariputra with Maudgalyayana as the two chief disciples, and the pairing is a statement about what the path requires. Sariputra is foremost in wisdom, the analytical understanding of how things are. Maudgalyayana is foremost in supernormal powers, the psychic abilities that arise from deep concentration. Between them they cover the two wings of the practice, insight and concentration, and images across Buddhist Asia place them on either side of the Buddha for exactly that reason.

Their relics were recovered in the nineteenth century from a stupa at Sanchi, in caskets inscribed with their names, and their subsequent travels are a small history of the colonial period: taken to London, held in a museum for decades, and returned to India in the 1940s, with portions given to Sri Lanka and to Burma, where they were received by enormous crowds.

Sariputra's standing differs sharply between traditions, and the difference is worth stating. In the Theravada he is the model disciple and the fountain of the systematic teaching. In several Mahayana sutras he is the figure who has understood only as far as the earlier teaching allows and is corrected: it is Sariputra who is addressed in the Heart Sutra and told that form is emptiness, and Sariputra who is made to look foolish in the Vimalakirti Sutra. Being the exemplary analyst made him the obvious person for a later movement to argue with.