Sariputta – one of Gautam Buddha’s chief disciples, and one of the few who became enlightened in Gautam Buddha’s lifetime – when he came to Gautam Buddha, he had come to argue. He was a well-known teacher, and many thought he was a master. He had come with five thousand disciples to argue with Buddha about the basic principles.
Buddha received him with great love and said to both his disciples and Sariputta’s disciples, ”Here comes a great teacher, and I hope that one day he will become a master.” Everybody was puzzled what he meant by it – even Sariputta.
Sariputta asked, ”What do you mean?”
Gautam Buddha said, ”You argue well, you are articulate, you are an influential intellectual. You have all the qualities of a genius teacher. You have five thousand very intelligent people as your disciples, but you are not a master yet. If you were a master I would have come to you, you would not have come to me. You are a great philosopher, but you know nothing. ”And I trust in your intelligence, that you will not lie: say before all these people that you are a thinker but you have not experienced anything. If you say you have experienced, I am ready to discuss with you. But remember, lying is not going to help. You will be caught immediately, because experience has so many things which are not available in the scriptures. So it is better you be clear about it.
”I am ready to discuss with you if you say that you have experienced the truth. If you say you have not experienced the truth, I am ready to accept you as my disciple. And I will make you a master, it is a promise – because you are promising. You can choose to lie and discuss with me, or to be true and be a disciple and learn with me, experience with me. And one day when you are a master if you want to discuss with me I will be overjoyed.”
For a moment there was immense silence. But Sariputta was really a man of truth. He said, ”Buddha is right. I have never thought about it, that he is going to ask about experience. I have been debating around the country, defeating many great so-called teachers, making them my disciples” – that was the rule in India. You discuss, and whoever is defeated becomes a disciple.
So he said, ”Many of these disciples were themselves teachers, but nobody ever asked me about experience. I don’t have any experience, so there is no question of discussing right now. Right now I touch the feet of Gautam Buddha. And I will wait for the time when I have experienced, when I am a master myself.”
After three years of being with Buddha, he became enlightened. The day he became enlightened, Buddha called him and asked him, ”Do you want to discuss now?”
Sariputta touched Gautam Buddha’s feet again and he said, ”That time I touched your feet because I had no experience. This time I touch your feet because I have the experience; the question of discussion does not arise. That time it was impossible to discuss; this time too it is impossible to discuss. There is nothing to discuss. I know, you know – and the knowing is the same. And I am your disciple. I may become a master to others, but to you I will always remain a disciple. You transformed my whole life; otherwise I would have died just arguing unnecessarily, wasting my time and other people’s time.
