Brahmin Saṅgāravaperson

Saṅgārava was the brahmin who kept bringing his tradition's premises to the Buddha and leaving with less of them. Sacrifice benefits many, he argued; the Buddha showed him that many tread the path he realized, and the three demonstrations of psychic power, revelation, and instruction, the last the finest (AN 3.60). When he believed ritual bathing washes away wrongdoing, he was taught the true bathing pool, its banks of ethics, where the wise bathe and cross to the far shore (SN 7.21); when he wondered why memorized mantras fade, he heard the five hindrances as waters dyed, boiling, overgrown, rippling, and muddy (AN 5.193); and to his question of near shore and far shore, every wrong path factor was the near shore, its abandonment the far (AN 10.117).