Who Was Sariputta/Śariputra? (Life of the Buddha's Chief Disciple)

who was sorry putta well he was probably the buddha's most famous disciple but we want to get into that a bit in today's video i'm doug smith of the online dharma institute that's onlinedharma.org if you're new to this channel and interested in living a wiser and a kinder and a calmer life consider subscribing to this channel and click the bell down below if you want to receive notifications when i come out with new videos on today's video i want to discuss sariputta who is as i say perhaps the buddha's most famous disciple he was the disciple who was known as foremost in wisdom and as such he was sort of the lead disciple and so far as there were insofar as there was one and what we want to do in today's video is to go into a bit of his life now there's a lot to discuss and so what i'm going to try to do is to pair this video down to the most important highlights or some of the most important highlights anyway we'll try to at the beginning uh point out his beginnings with the sangha sort of where he where his ideas seem to have come from because we do have clues i think from the early texts about sort of what made him tick as a person and then in the middle portion here a second portion i should say we'll look at his role in the sangha sort of what role he played in the development of the dharma in so far as we can tell from the early texts and then last we're going to turn to developments that happened with him after he died because in in many ways some of the most famous developments about sariputta happened indeed after his death we'll begin with sariputta's early development sariputta was born as a man named upatissa upatissa was his given name and when we first meet ubatisa in the early texts he is a follower of a different leader a different guru a man named named sanjaya sanjaya the wanderer this is almost certainly a man named sanjaya balati putta who we know because the buddha actually discusses sanjay abellatiputta's views in several texts i have a video about sanjaya and other competitors of the buddha at the time i'll put a link to that video down below in case you want to know more but basically sanjia balati putta seems to have been somebody who was what we might call an arch skeptic somebody who was not willing to come out with any positive views of his own who may have been something of an argumentative sophist that is to say somebody who delighted in perhaps cutting down the the views of other people showing how the views of other people were not able to be established but who was not willing to establish his own viewpoints was not was not willing to come out with his own uh positive beliefs perhaps because he believed that they could all be in some sense demolished now all of this is to a certain extent a question because we don't know a whole lot about sanjaya's views but at least it makes some sense in the sense that upatissa the man who would become sariputa seems to have been a very deep intellectual and many intellectuals are indeed taken in by these kinds of viewpoints of argument arguing and skepticism seeing how they can argue with other people and overcome them and the buddha indeed termed sanjaya balati putta an eel wriggler he wriggled like an eel he was able to get out of having to make any positive claims at all the buddha obviously did not like that and his his name of ill wriggler for sanjaya was intended to be a kind of a put down now at the time upatissa was in the company of his good friend kolita who would later become known as mogallana the two sariputta and mogallana are the two buddha's chief disciples or would become the buddha's chief disciples but in any event at this time before they've even met the buddha they're here with with sanjaya and seem both of them seem to be somewhat disappointed that is to say they've gotten as far as they can get with sanjat seems like and yet neither of them really feels that they have not only have not achieved anything like enlightenment but they are not really clearly on the road to anything like enlightenment so they both seem somewhat uh at loose ends and they've made a pact that they're going to tell each other if they find the road to enlightenment and at one day upatissa says that he he's runs across somebody a a person a a follower of a different guru a different teacher a man named asajji who seems to have a very clear and pure countenance that is to say he seems to be very serene and calm which is what upati says looking for and dupatis is very struck by this person and asks him who his guru is who he's studying under and asaji says that he's studying under the buddha and upatissa asks what does the buddha teach and here asaji doesn't want to give an enormous discourse first of all because although he is himself at this point enlightened he isn't it seems a great scholar perhaps and so he may not have a scholarly kind of understanding of all the dharma also i don't think he necessarily wants to go into a long discussion in front of somebody who may be a skeptic you know who may try to tear all of it down he may think that that's sort of not a very good way to spend his time so in any event asaji says i'm not going to give you a long discourse i can't give you a long discourse but i can give you a short synopsis of the dharma and upatissa's very interested in that and so asajji gives one of the most famous short synopsis of the dharma that we find in early buddhism what he says is that his teacher the buddha gives this teaching that of those things that arise from a cause the tatagata has told the cause the tata to being the buddha and also what their cessation is this is the doctrine of the great recluse now this short passage here seems to distill the dharma down into an example of causation of cause that everything comes up due to a cause and falls away due to a cause and for whatever reason that particular this particular description made something click in upatissa's mind and he it said gained a glimpse of enlightenment he gained a glimpse of nirvana he he attained what in the later tradition will be called stream entry that is to say he doesn't become himself enlightened at this point but at least he begins to understand that there is a road to enlightenment that he now can follow and so upatissa and indeed later mogallana as well or i should say kolita as well decide to become to decide to leave sanjaya and become disciples of the buddha and at this point they changed their names upatisu becomes sariputta which means son of sari i believe sari was his mother's name and kolita becomes mogallana and so both of them then undertake the the dharma the practice of the buddha now having become a disciple of the buddha sariputta's enlightenment then his enlightenment experience then is actually quite interesting because in some ways it sort of follows or mirrors or deepens shall we say the experience we've already seen it's said to have occurred two weeks later in some documents some early documents it says that this enlightenment experience happened two weeks after he became a a monastic under the buddha it said that he sariputa is fanning the buddha at one point and the buddha undertakes a discussion with a potential follower of his a man named diganaka now in some texts it said that diganaka is actually a relative of sariputta which is quite possible given his beliefs diganaka has a belief that that he expresses by saying this is my doctrine and view i believe nothing and of course this view will remind us of sanjia bellatiputta's view that i've just described this eel wriggling of of not willing to accept any positive kind of claim so it may very well be that deganaka is as well a a follower of sanjaya or at least somebody who believes the same things as sanjaya in any event the buddha when he hears this seems to have thought it rather funny because he responds by putting digonica into a kind of a bind degonica i should say the buddhist says well digonica this view of yours do you believe it that is to say by saying that you have a view that you believe nothing the question is well do you believe that do you believe that you believe nothing if you do then you're contradicting yourself and if you don't then what is it that you are asserting here it's not clear that you're asserting anything digonica doesn't really have much of a response there he basically says he doesn't care but the point is that in a very very short back and forth the buddha has basically poked a hole in this kind of extreme skeptical stance and having caught diganaka in this kind of trap the buddha then goes on to describe his own approach to views basically he says that whether you profess to believe everything or profess to believe nothing or profess to believe some things and not others in all of these circumstances you can get yourself into into problems and the problems are dispute argument uh conflict with other people and that is the issue that is the real problem here is argument dispute conflict hatred the kinds of things that uh make us unhappy that that creates strife and damage in the world danger in the world and so what the buddhist says basically is that the the problem isn't so much having beliefs or not having beliefs but rather the attitude that we take to those beliefs that is do we cling to them do we hold to them with a kind of passion that tends to promote argument or alternately do we cling to our lack of beliefs with passion that tends to promote argument and dispute so what the buddha does here is to skillfully change the discussion from one of whether we have beliefs or not to how we approach beliefs and the buddha ends his discourse with digonica basically by saying that one who is properly enlightened doesn't side with anyone or fight with anyone they speak the language of the world without misapprehending it that is they understand the the beliefs and the language of beliefs beliefs after all the kinds of things that we can discuss with language they use this language language of beliefs without clinging to it in other words they'll assert a belief and they won't cling to that belief or they'll assert a lack of a belief without clinging to that lack of a belief it's a an emotional standing back from the quality of our beliefs so that we don't involve ourselves in arguments disputes conflict and it's said that after hearing this discussion between the buddha and diganaka sariputa became enlightened now the exact way that that happened is something of a question because it's described different ways in different texts that is to say how exactly what exactly happened in sariputa's mind in one of these texts the one that i've been discussing here of the step two enlightenment seems to be quite immediate that is to say that he became enlightened while he was listening to this discussion there are other versions of this in the chinese in particular in which he went into a meditation it went into meditation afterwards or it seems to be afterwards and became enlightened during that meditation there's one quite famous early text in the majaminikaya majjimanikaya 111 which discusses sariputa's enlightenment in terms of enormous number of different meditations and his skill at them and so on however that text doesn't have any known parallels and appears to be quite late it seems to be influenced by the abhidharma and so probably is not a text from that time period so in any event there are questions now as to how this actually happened i think one interesting other clue however is that there is a poem among the poems of the early monastic monks where which purports to be the poem that sariputa himself composed that discusses among other things his enlightenment experience and in that poem he simply says that he became enlightened after listening or while listening to this discourse that the buddha had with a follower a potential follower and then i think it's interesting to add that sorry puto goes on to say that he had no particular interest in the what are called five sort of supernatural knowledges that came after that enlightenment or just before at any rate around the time of it traditionally it's said that when you attain enlightenment you gain certain kinds of supernatural abilities such as the ability to see past lives or the ability to have uh extreme hearing or seeing so you can see or hear things that are not near you that you're able to see the karmic consequences of people's actions it's interesting that sariputta who is perhaps the most wise and insightful of the buddha's disciples wasn't interested in these and from that context from that poem perhaps didn't even feel that he had achieved them he had achieved enlightenment on its own without any of these other uh concomitant apparent abilities claimed abilities now second i want to turn to sariputta's role in the sangha what role he played as an active monastic in the sangha now i think what i've what we've established here with his early career is his depth of interest in views in right view in the dharma in particular that seems to have been his motivation his his central motivation in in the rest of his career and as a result it's not surprising that many of the or some of i should say the most central uh discourses about the dharma are spoken by sariputta himself in particular one early suta which is the sutra on right view a right view being the first stage in the eightfold path the suit to on right view actually is spoken by sariputta and in that discourse sorry discusses to begin with the skillful and the unskillful which is we might say the basis of right view the very origin of right view without being able to make a distinction between skillful and unskillful we have no opportunity to really delve into right view and then from there sariputa discusses the four noble truths perhaps the foundational item of dharma in all of buddhism and from there he discusses dependent origination another very we might say abstruse complex kind of buddhist understanding of causation and i've done a video about now the dependent origination i'll put a link to that one also in in the show notes below in case you want to know more so in any event this is a lengthy suta where sariputta goes through all of these different aspects of right view and we may indeed even wonder to what extent sariputta may have been instrumental in the development of the concept of right view or in perhaps the development of some of these sub-concepts such as the four noble truths or the eightfold path if he was that development is lost to us because it's not discussed in the early suttas in the early sutras these are discussed pretty much solely as the discoveries of the buddha himself but we can wonder to what extent perhaps sariputta may have refined these concepts or may have been even instrumental in developing them in sariputa's later life in the sangha he seems to have worked very diligently to keep the dharma from being dissipated and forgotten one key event was the death of a man named nigantha nataputa who was the leader of the gian community the giants were a competit competing i should say competing sect at the time in india they still are around nowadays they had slightly different ideas they had been around before the buddha's lifetime but when niganthanataputa passed away it is said that the giants fell into argument and dispute among themselves as to what the correct teaching was and there was at the time or appeared to be at the time a real possibility that jainism would simply cease to exist because of the extent of disagreement among the followers of nigantanataputa and sariputta seems to have seen this or he discusses having seen this and saying to the disciples basically that this is what happens when the dharma is not well discussed and explained that is to say when people when when the dharma is not discussed in a in a very structured way everyone get begins to get their own idea and then you have disputes and arguments and differences of opinion about the dharma and when the dharma isn't properly explained people misunderstand it and the same thing can happen and so this is what led him or seems to have led him to try to organize the dharma in ways that made it easier to comprehend easier to memorize and easier to pass down so in particular organizing the dharma into uh into numbers so the all of the ones are put together and then all of the twos we can think of things like the four the four noble trues or the eightfold path there are many many many of these numbered lists in that we come that come from early buddhism some of this may have originated with sariputa himself who wanted to who felt that it's by numbering things in a list that we're going to remember them first they're easier to memorize also we know that you know if we have something called the eightfold path and we can only remember six of them that we've we know that we've we've left off two whereas if you simply try to memorize each independently without knowing that it's supposed to be eight you can you can end up with six without realizing that you have forgotten something so numbering makes a lot of sense when it comes to memorization we have to remember that nothing was written down in the day of the buddha it was all memorized there doesn't seem to have been any written language at the time written language came about a century or so later more or less so in any event in an early text called the sangeeti suta the suta of chanting together sariputa leads the monastics in a chant which appears to have been one of many many such chants where they chant the dharma together so as to be able to keep a check on one another they're all saying the same thing so they're all on the same page they're all memorizing these lists of numbers so they all know uh sort of the the basic building blocks of the dharma and i would argue that it's pretty clearly sariputa's lifelong interest in the role of views of beliefs that led him to that place that is he he went from a position of extreme skepticism perhaps following sanjaya of not believing anything to begin to understanding that the problem isn't about believing or having views but rather about how we attach to them or don't attach ourselves to them that that's the real issue and in later i should say later on sariputa's advancements on these fronts his organization of the dharma into categories and numbers and lists eventually developed into what became known as the abhidharma or abhidhamma in pali and the abhidhamma is basically a very large corpus of information that is intended to systematize the teaching that we find unsystematically in the discourses in the discourses it's difficult to really understand where we are with the dharma because the each discourse is about something different and they're not very well organized the abhidhamma intends to organize things and that seems to have begun with sariputta and so sariputa became known as the father of the abhidharma although the abhidharma really didn't develop in full until well after his lifetime and indeed eventually sariputta did pre-decease the buddha he died before the buddha died now third i would like to discuss some of the developments only some of them of course there are many but some of the key and interesting developments with sariputta after he passed away after he passed away of course the abhidharshin says of course but the abhidharma became more and more important for several centuries its development itself was of extreme importance and it became in certain circles at least as important as the sutas themselves and perhaps even more important because it was a distillation of the dharma it was the distilled purity of what the buddha had said and again sariputta was was held to be the father of this development of this abhidharma however with time also the abhidharma began to be viewed as somewhat ossified as somewhat old-fashioned as somewhat stuck in its ways as scholastic in the sense of being difficult to understand and abstruse and the sort of thing that really only was of interest to sort of intellectual geeks and not to a lot of people who are actually practicing buddhism and so the abhidharma went through a period of great flourishing and then through a period where it was very much out of fashion and during this period of the out of fashion of the abhidharma there became flourishing of a number of very important new ideas in buddhism and this was around the turn of the common era that is to say first century bc or bce for century of the common era and at that point sariputa became something of a foil to this new development these new thinkers composed new sutras new works describing their own viewpoint which would eventually became known as the mahayana and in several of them sariputa as i say serves as something of a foil so for example we have the vimala kiriti near desha sutra which is sutra which was composed sometime around the first century of the common era in which sari putra sariputta or shariputra as he's known in sanskrit these are written in sanskrit that comes across as somebody who is really quite ignorant he is stuck in the old the old ways he's being he's been left behind he needs to be he needs to be instructed in this new dharma in this new interpretation of the buddha's teaching because he himself is out of touch he's stuck in the abu abhidharma way of thinking of things and that's been bypassed that is old-fashioned that's out of fashion right now shariputra is also somebody who is he is described as sort of clinging to rules and rituals these kind of ossified rules and rituals from the past which are no longer useful anymore now and also in other sutras the so-called prajnaparamita sutras that is the perfection of wisdom sutras again sariputra is often depicted as somebody who is ignorant who needs teaching who does not understand the essential emptiness of all phenomena who clings to the categories of the abhidharma and isn't willing to leave them behind and perhaps most famously in the heart sutra which is one of the again the most famous sutras in all of mahayana buddhism the heart sutra is set up as a discussion between avaloki taishwara who was the bodhisattva of compassion in the mahayana and this bodhisattva of compassion is teaching prajnaparamita the perfection of wisdom to sariputta and many of us may therefore miss the subtext here the subtext is that sariputta is somebody who is known or was known at any rate as the wisest of all of the buddha's disciples and to have this person who is typified by wisdom as again the wisest of the buddha's disciples the wisest apart from the buddha himself somebody who the buddha said was basically as wise as anyone to have him to be in a position of learning wisdom from a mahayana bodhisattva is i think pretty clearly a polemical sutra and i think many of us may miss that polemicism when we read it nowadays we simply see it as a discussion between two people sorry putrand and avalokiteshvara but it's not just the any two people it's two people that are set up trying to get across a particular message that is that it's this new development of the mahayana which is superior to what went before at least in under the interpretation of somebody like sariputra who was known for the abhidharma that this is so important and so new and so advanced that even the best of the people from before the wisest need to be taught by someone and so this setup highlights these huge changes again using sariputta as a kind of foil i've done a longer video about the history of the mahayana where i go into more of this from within a context of the development of that school of buddhism and i'll put a link to that video up here on the screen if you haven't seen it thanks so much to all of my patrons over on patreon if you're getting something out of these videos take a look over there and see if there's something you wouldn't mind joining us about because we're doing a lot of interesting stuff over there thanks so much and we'll catch you on the next one and meanwhile all of you be well

Channel: Doug's Dharma

Views: 7,757

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Keywords: buddhism, buddhist, buddha, secular buddhism, doug's secular dharma, secular dharma, philosophy, secularbuddhism, onlinedharma.org, early buddhism, online dharma institute, sariputta, shariputra, śariputra, chief disciple, foremost in wisdom

Id: WcIdaTnraXM

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021