The six teachers

The list

The six are Purana Kassapa, who denied that action has moral consequence; Makkhali Gosala, the Ajivika determinist; Ajita Kesakambali, a materialist who held that a person is made of the four elements and ends at death; Pakudha Kaccayana, who posited seven eternal substances; Nigantha Nataputta, that is Mahavira; and Sanjaya Belatthiputta, the sceptic.

Their doctrines are presented in a fixed sequence within a narrative frame: King Ajatashatru recounts putting the same question to each — what visible benefit does the renouncing life bring — and receiving from each an answer he found beside the point, before coming to the Buddha.

Value and limits

This is the most important single source for the intellectual world in which Buddhism and Jainism began. It shows a crowded field of teachers with followings, arguing over causation, the soul, moral consequence and what can be known, and it establishes that the questions were live and the answers various.

It is also a Buddhist text with a purpose. The six are arranged to be inadequate, their positions are summarised in a few lines each, and the sequence exists to make the Buddha's answer the satisfying one. The summaries do not always match what other sources say of the same teachers, and in Mahavira's case, where an independent tradition survives, the fit is imperfect — which is a useful check on how the other five are likely to have been served.

What is lost

Five of the six left no literature and no surviving community. Everything known of Purana Kassapa, Ajita Kesakambali, Pakudha Kaccayana and Sanjaya comes from opponents, and of Makkhali Gosala from two sets of opponents. The one whose tradition survived, Mahavira, is the one whose doctrine can be checked against his own community's account — and the difference between the canonical summary and what Jain sources say is the best available measure of how much the rest may have been distorted.