Satyakāma wanted to go and study, and he knew what the first question at the gate would be. Not what he could do. Whose son he was.
So he asked his mother.
Jābālā did not soften it. She said: I do not know. I had you when I was young, and I moved about a great deal in those days, working in other people's houses. I am Jābālā. You are Satyakāma. Say you are Satyakāma Jābāla — say you are mine.
He walked to the teacher's house carrying that answer the whole way.
Hāridrumata asked the question. And Satyakāma said it — all of it, including the part where his mother did not know, in her words, without making anything up.
The teacher looked at him and said: no one who was not a brāhmaṇa could have spoken like that. Fetch the firewood. I will take you.
The thing he had been dreading saying was the thing that got him in.
Then he was handed four hundred thin cows and told to look after them. He said he would not come back until there were a thousand.
It took years. Nobody taught him anything. He was alone with cattle.
And then a bull spoke to him. And later a fire. And later two birds. Each of them gave him one quarter of the thing he had gone there to learn, and by the time the herd was a thousand, he had all four.
When he finally came back, the teacher looked up and said, before Satyakāma had spoken at all: you are shining like a man who knows. Who has been teaching you?
Satyakāma said: not people.
And then he asked to be taught it again anyway, by a person, because he had heard that what you learn from a teacher is the kind that holds.
He walked up to that gate with nothing to offer but the true answer, and the true answer turned out to be the only thing being asked for.