Sanjaya Belatthiputta

The doctrine

Asked whether there is another world, whether there are fruits of good and bad action, whether a liberated being exists after death, Sanjaya is reported as answering in a fourfold negative: he does not say it is so, nor that it is otherwise, nor that it is not so, nor that it is not not so.

The Buddhist text calls this amaravikkhepa, endless equivocation, and mocks it with the image of a wriggling eel that cannot be caught. Whether the refusal was evasion or a considered scepticism about the possibility of metaphysical knowledge depends entirely on how much the hostile framing is discounted.

Reasons

The reasons attributed to him are those of the ajnanin current: that these matters cannot be known, that asserting a position leads to attachment, dispute and distress, and that a teacher who claims to know exceeds what is available.

Connection to Buddhism

Sanjaya's significance is increased by a detail the Buddhist tradition itself supplies: Sariputta and Moggallana, who became the Buddha's two chief disciples, are recorded as having been Sanjaya's pupils before they left him, taking a substantial part of his following with them.

That the Buddha's principal disciples came out of the sceptical school is a striking fact, and it bears on the long-running question of how far the Buddha's own refusal to answer certain questions relates to the scepticism of his contemporaries.

Sources

Nothing of Sanjaya's own survives. He is known from the Samannaphala Sutta's summary of the six rival teachers and from a handful of other references, all Buddhist.