SN 39.1–15 With Sāmaṇḍaka on Extinguishment

Foremost among the Buddha's disciples in wisdom, Sāriputta realized the four analytical knowledges just half a month after his full ordination (AN 4.172) and spent his life turning the Buddha's summaries into Dhamma the Saṅgha could live by. His expositions became classics: the unfolding of right view (MN 9), all wholesome states gathered into the four truths like an elephant's footprint into its track (MN 28), his exchange with Puṇṇa Mantāṇiputta on the relay of purifications (MN 24), and the unraveling of consciousness, feeling, and cessation with Mahākoṭṭhika (MN 43). When the Buddha's back was sore at Naḷakapāna he simply asked Sāriputta to speak in his place (AN 10.67), and it was Sāriputta who recited the doctrinal sets of the Saṅgīti for the assembled Saṅgha (DN 34).

His lion's roar was humility, not power: falsely accused of striking a monk, he likened his mind to the earth and the open road: how could it be soiled? (AN 9.11) And he declared that nothing in the world, not even the Buddha's passing, could raise sorrow in him (SN 21.2). He reported the absorptions, formless attainments, and cessation to Ānanda from his private retreats (SN 28.1–10), guided the dying Anāthapiṇḍika into non-clinging (MN 143), comforted the ailing Channa (MN 144), and gently dismantled Yamaka's annihilationism (SN 22.85). The one rebuke he carried came from compassion: he had taught the corrupt brahmin Dhanañjāni only the path to the brahmā worlds (MN 97). Not long before the Buddha's own passing, Sāriputta attained final Nibbāna; Ānanda's grief drew from the Buddha the truth that no meeting ends without parting (SN 47.13), and the Saṅgha was left to dwell with the Dhamma as its island and refuge (SN 47.14).

A wanderer who kept hermitages and teachers busy with questions, Jambukhādaka found in Sāriputta a guide who answered without appeal to the Buddha's authority. What is nibbāna? The destruction of greed, hate, and delusion, and the noble eightfold path is the way to it (SN 38.1). What is the goal, what is solace, what are the floods and taints, craving and the fetters, the aggregates and the self? (SN 38.4–15); each time the elder answered and the wanderer went away delighted. His sixteen questions, together with the parallel series of his fellow wanderer Sāmaṇḍaka (SN 39.1–15), stand in the canon as proof that the Dhamma lived in the disciple: Sāriputta could carry its whole weight.

The second of Sāriputta's wanderer catechumens: Sāmaṇḍaka's questions on what happiness and suffering are drew the elder's answer that rebirth is suffering and no rebirth happiness (AN 10.65–66), and his saṃyutta of questions on extinguishment, the goal, and what is hard to do stands beside Jambukhādaka's (SN 39.1–15, SN 39.16).