At about the same time that Prince Siddhattha, the future Buddha, married—and thus for the time at least stepped more deeply into worldly life—the two friends Kolita and Upatissa left behind their homes and embarked upon the difficult quest for inner peace and salvation. Together with their retinues, they began a period of training under a spiritual teacher, just as the Bodhisatta did later.

At that time, northern India teemed with spiritual teachers and philosophers  whose  views  ranged  from  the  demonic  to  the Super divine. Some taught a moralism, others fatalism, still others materialism. Both friends realized the hollowness of such teachings early enough and thus felt no attraction towards them. In Rājagaha, however, there was one teacher who appealed to them. His name was Sañjaya, who, according to tradition, was identical with Sañjaya Belatthaputta, mentioned in the Pāli Canon as one of six non-Buddhist teachers. Under him the group of friends were ordained, which added considerably to Sañjaya’s reputation.

The texts do not give us detailed information about Sañjaya’s teachings, but from a number of brief indications we can roughly reconstruct the substance of his doctrine. Unlike other ascetic teachers who made definite dogmatic statements about specific topics, Sañjaya maintained a rigorous scepticism in regard to the deep existential problems with which the thinkers of the period wrestled. He formulated this scepticism around the chief questions debated by his philosophical contemporaries: Is there another world beyond the visible order? After the death of this material body, does one appear in the world beyond by way of a purely mental birth process as a spontaneously arisen being? Will the good and bad actions one has performed in this present existence bear good and bad fruits in the next life? What, finally, is the destiny of a Tathāgata or Perfect One after death? How are we to conceive and describe his post-mortem condition?

Whenever such questions were raised by the Indian thinkers of this period, four alternative types of answers were thought possible: affirmation, negation, partial affirmation and partial negation, and neither affirmation nor negation. Sañjaya, however, taught that with regard to the questions mentioned, none of those four positions was acceptable as a solution; they all contained unresolvable contradictions or antinomies, and therefore, he held, one should refrain from any judgment about these problems. Here it may be noted that, of the four sets of antinomies which often occur in the Pāli, only the fourth set is identical with Sañjaya’s problems, namely, the one concerning the after-death state of a Perfect One.

While other ascetic teachers always advocated one of the four logical alternatives as a solution to these problems—yes, no, yes and no, neither yes nor no—Sañjaya did not commit himself to any of them.

He especially did not commit himself dogmatically to the unprovable assertion (made, for instance, by popular natural science) that there is no world beyond, no mind-made (astral) body, no law of kamma, and no survival after death. In that attitude, he clearly differed from the materialists of his time. He taught rather that, in view of the unresolvable nature of these problems, one should keep to a stance of detachment and impartiality, not tolerating the slightest bias toward approval or disapproval of any of these theories and their consequences. From this we can see that he was a confirmed agnostic who tried to develop a consistent scepticism built upon a recognition of the dialectic tensions inherent in speculative thought.

In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, the king of Magadha, Ajātasattu, reported to the Buddha the following talk he had with the ascetic Sañjaya. Although this account may reflect the way the Buddhists understood Sañjaya rather than his own way of formulating his doctrine, it offers us a glimpse into his philosophical stance:

“One day I went to Sañjaya of the Belattha clan and I asked him: ‘Can you, sir, declare to me an immediate fruit, visible in this very world, of the life of a recluse?’

Being thus asked, Sañjaya said:

“If you ask me whether there is another world—well, if I thought there were, I would say so. But I don’t say so. And I don’t think it is thus or thus. And I don’t think it is otherwise. And I don’t deny it. And I don’t say there neither is nor is not another world. And if you ask me whether there are beings reborn spontaneously; or whether there is any fruit, any result, of good or bad actions; or whether a Tathāgata exists or not after death—to each and all of these questions do I give the same reply.”

Thus, Lord, when asked about the immediate fruit and advantage in the life of a recluse, Sañjaya of the Belattha clan showed his manner of prevarication.”

Kolita and Upatissa initially must have felt that Sañjaya’s philosophy was something more than mere evasion. Not having met a better teacher, they were probably attracted to him because of his apparent freedom from dogmatism and his dialectical skills.

After a short time, however, they clearly realized that Sañjaya could not offer them what they were really searching for: a cure for the illness of universal suffering. Besides, we may suppose that by reason of their mental formations from past existences they must have intuitively felt that there actually was another world, that there were mind-born beings (e.g., deities), and that there was moral recompense of actions. In this respect their understanding went beyond that of their sceptical teacher. Hence one day the two friends approached Sañjaya and asked him whether he had still other teachings more advanced than those they had already learned from him. To this he replied:

“That is all. You know my entire teaching.”

 Hearing this, they decided to leave and to continue their search elsewhere. After all, they had not left their families for the sake of endless and futile agnostic arguments but to find a path to final deliverance from suffering.

Thus, for a second time, they took up the life of wanderers in search of truth. They walked across India for many years, from north to south, from east to west. They endured the dust of the road and the tormenting heat, the rain and the wind, spurred on by thoughts that moved deep within the Indian soul:

“I am a victim of birth, aging and death, of sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. I am a victim of suffering, a prey of suffering. Surely, an end to this whole mass of suffering can be discovered!”

In their travels they met many ascetics and brahmins who were reputed to be exceptionally wise. With them they had religious discussions on God and the world, on heaven and hell, on the meaning of life and the way to salvation. But with their keen and critical minds trained by Sañjaya’s scepticism, they very soon realized the emptiness of all those assertions and the learned ignorance of these philosophers. None of these teachers could answer their probing questions, while the two friends themselves were quite able to reply when questioned.

The records do not tell us who their other teachers were, but it would be surprising if the two truth-seekers had not met such mystics and sages as, for instance, Bāvari, a seer of great meditative power, or Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, the two teachers of formless infinity under whom the Bodhisatta had studied. From their life story, however, one thing is clear: until they encountered the Buddha the two had failed to find even the tracks of a path to the world- transcending experience of liberation. What may have been the reason? Spiritual seekers at the time of the Buddha pursued either of two aims: to gain inner peace and serenity by deep meditation (samādhi) or to acquire a clear view of the ultimate meaning of existence.

Those who sought to understand the nature of existence generally proceeded through speculative flights of the intellect and tended to spurn the path of meditative absorption. In contrast, those who had achieved inner peace through the meditative path for the most part remained content with their attainment, believing this to be the final goal. Lacking the guidance of a Buddha, they did not even suspect that this meditative peace, so tranquil and sublime, was still mundane and thus merely a force of kammic construction within the cycle of repeated birth and death.

Their meditative attainments would bring them a blissful rebirth in one of the super sensual Brahma-worlds, where the life span is inconceivably longer than in the sensual world; but eventually such kammic force would be depleted, followed by a rebirth elsewhere, leaving the meditators in the same saṃsāric imprisonment as before. In their former lives as meditating hermits, this must have happened often to the Bodhisatta as well as to Kolita and Upatissa. This is one aspect of existential misery, of prisonlike ignorance: either, like the mystics, one settles down at the gate, regarding it as one’s true home of peace and bliss; or, like the speculative thinkers, one bypasses it quickly and becomes lost within the labyrinths of the intellect. Though the two friends had no recollection of jhānic experiences from previous lives, they obviously had an intuitive feeling that meditative bliss and its rewards were not the final goal but only a temporary relief within the continuing cycle of suffering.

Hence their foremost quest was for clarity about the concatenation of existence, for understanding how things hang together in the complex web of saṃsāra. In ages devoid of a Buddha’s appearance, their search would have been as futile as the recurring attainment, enjoyment, and loss of samādhi. It may have been an undefinable inner urge within them that did not allow them to rest until they had found the Enlightened One who, like them, had gone forth in search of liberation during the last years of their own quest.

If even the Bodhisatta, the future Buddha, could discover how to integrate meditative absorption with penetrating insight only when he reached a critical impasse in his own spiritual search, it was not to be expected that the two friends on their own could find the subtle key to mind’s emancipation, for they had neither the wide meditative experience nor the far-reaching independent mental range of a Buddha.

In retrospect, the friends’ wandering in search of truth was just a running in circles, which would end only when their uncompromising integrity and insatiable thirst for truth finally led them to the feet of the Enlightened One.