His name means one who loves truth. He went to the teacher Haridrumata Gautama and asked to be received as a student in the Vedic tradition. The first question any teacher asked was: what is your lineage? Whose son are you? In the system of the time, the answer determined everything — what you could study, what rituals you could perform, what place you would occupy.
Satyakama went to his mother and asked her. She was honest with him in a way that mothers in his situation were not always honest. She said: I was young when I moved around a great deal as a servant. During that time I conceived you. I do not know whose son you are. My name is Jabala. Your name is Satyakama. You are Satyakama Jabala.
He went back to the teacher and said: my mother does not know my lineage. She told me she was young and moved around a great deal as a servant and she does not know whose son I am. I am Satyakama Jabala.
The teacher looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: no one but a true brahmin would speak so honestly. Fetch firewood, my son. I will initiate you as a student.
He was accepted — not on the basis of birth, not on the basis of claimed lineage, but on the basis of the truth he had spoken about the absence of lineage. The very quality that disqualified him by the rules of the system was the quality that qualified him by the standard the system was supposed to produce.
The Chandogya Upanishad embeds this story in its sixth chapter because it is demonstrating what the entire chapter is about: that Brahman — the ultimate reality — is truth, and that the person who has truth in them has Brahman in them, regardless of the social category they occupy. Satyakama's mother had nothing to give him except an honest answer. The honest answer turned out to be the lineage. He had been born from a woman who could not afford to lie. What he inherited from her was more valuable than any brahmin lineage — not despite the uncertainty of his birth but because of the specific truth that the uncertainty required. The brahmin nature is not a lineage. It is a quality. The quality is the willingness to say the true thing, even when the true thing is uncomfortable, even when it costs you what you came to obtain.
The Upanishad goes on to describe Satyakama's education — the teacher sends him to tend cattle and says he will send four hundred cattle back when there are a thousand. Satyakama lives with the cattle for years. The bull teaches him one quarter of Brahman. The fire teaches him another quarter. A flamingo and a cormorant each teach him the remaining quarters.
He returns knowing. The teacher looks at his face and says: you look like someone who has known Brahman. Who taught you? Satyakama says: non-human beings. But I wish you would teach me. For I have heard from people like you that knowledge learned from a teacher serves best.
The teacher taught him everything. The boy who had no lineage received the fullest teaching available — because he had come with the only qualification that the teaching requires: the willingness to say the true thing about himself.
What would you have to say honestly if someone asked you your lineage? Not the lineage of your family — the lineage of your soul. Where did you actually come from? What was the honest account of how you arrived at what you are?
The teacher who receives that answer is still present. The initiation is still available.