“Rahula will die, Yasodhara, as will you, as will I. All of us will die.”
“But while we are here, can we not live, husband?”
“What you are describing would be akin to pouring perfume onto a corpse.”
“Oh god.”
“Farewell, Yasodhara.”
With that, I turned and walked out of her chamber. It was the proudest moment of my life up to that point.
“Chandaka,” I whispered, five minutes later.
“ … My lord?” Chandaka responded thickly, half-turning to me in his bed.
“Wake up, we are leaving immediately. Get Kamthaka ready.”
“But my lord—”
“I said immediately, Chandaka. It is time for me to attain immortality.” (ASV 5:68)
“Yes, my lord.”
Kamthaka looked marvelous that night, decked out as he was all in gold, with little tinkly bronze bells all over him. Kamthaka was a very tall horse, chalk-white and powerfully built. When I say he was tall, by the way, I mean it; Kamthaka was twenty-five feet tall, an unusually massive horse and consequently very heavy. (ASV 5:3; NK) How would father’s guards not hear his mighty hoofbeats, especially because, as I said, he was covered with little tinkly bronze bells? That wasn’t going to be particularly helpful, I now realized. Still, I left them on him because they looked absolutely charming.
I mounted Kamthaka and stroked his mighty head, then leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “Your speed and energy will now help save the world, excellent steed!” A few moments later we went forth, me on Kamthaka’s back, Chandaka holding onto Kamthaka’s tail and being pulled behind. (ASV 5:78; NK) We stole quietly through the palace grounds, trying to avoid guards, me putting them to sleep when necessary. Luckily for us, the gods essentially “silenced” Kamthaka’s hoofbeats by placing their hands under his mighty hooves every step he took. (ASV 5:81)
Reaching the main gate, we stopped. It was not only closed but also extremely heavy; it would take a thousand men to open this gate. While I was as strong as a billion elephants (NK), I wasn’t in the mood to use my brute strength to open the gate. Instead, I remember thinking to myself, “If I cannot magically open this gate, I will have Kamthaka jump over it!” Kamthaka was apparently thinking along the same lines. “If this gate does not magically open, I will leap over it with my master on my back and Chandaka holding onto my tail!” Chandaka was thinking more or less exactly the same thing: “If this gate does not magically open, I will personally leap over it with my master on my shoulder and Kamthaka under my arm!” (NK) When I heard about Chandaka’s claim, I shook my head, slightly piqued. “First of all, I’m not the size of a parrot,” I remember thinking. “I couldn’t possibly ride on Chandaka’s shoulder. Second of all, Kamthaka is not the size of a house cat—he couldn’t fit under Chandaka’s arm!” It turns out none of these things were necessary, however, because the God of the Gate (and no, I hadn’t realized there was a God of the Gate, but there was and he turned out to be a very nice man) simply opened the gate for us and allowed us to exit the palace grounds that way. (NK)
It was at that moment that Mara, the god of death and delusion, first appeared to me. He manifested in the sky above me—he was tall, with a thick black moustache—and commanded me to turn back. “Stay at your father’s palace, young prince,” Mara hissed down at me. “If you do so, you will rule the entire world!” As this was the first time I had ever met Mara, I looked up and asked, “Who are you?” “I am Vasavatti,” Mara replied. (The truth was that he was from Vasavatti, so I’m not sure why he said he was Vasavatti, other than he was trying to confuse me, which he usually was.) Now that I understood who Mara was, I nodded coolly and announced, “I do not wish to be a king, rather I wish to be a savior.” Mara glared down at me for a moment, then snarled, “Every bad thought you ever have, young prince, I will know about.” (NK) Suddenly he was gone—then, just as suddenly, he was right next to me, invisible, but definitely present, watching over me and waiting. I found this slightly disconcerting; I won’t deny that it rattled me a little. It turned out, however, that “I am watching over you all the time” was Mara’s high-water mark of scariness. Everything he said and did from that moment on was, as you will see, breathtakingly feeble.
Outside the palace walls, I stopped and looked back. “Farewell, old life,” I cried out. “Farewell luxury, farewell privilege and indulgence, yes, farewell!” With that, I pulled off all of my jewelry. (ASV 6:12–13) (I was wearing rings, bracelets, earrings and toe-rings, not to mention my small tiara.) Before we left, Chandaka had draped a turban around my head filled with a thousand (or possibly ten thousand) layers of jewels and gems, which made my head look like a gigantic flower. (NK) I then stripped off my silken clothes. A monk passed by and I yelled over at him. “You there! Throw me your clothes! I cannot be a holy man while wearing silks!” (This monk turned out to be, no surprise at all, a god.) (NK)
“Hold up my mirror,” I commanded of Chandaka. Seeing my reflection in the bronze, I inhaled sharply, strangely moved by what I beheld. “I look so … holy,” I murmured to myself. Only one thing was wrong with the picture. Reaching up with one hand, I grabbed my long, luxurious hair. “No, my lord,” Chandaka whispered. “Not your magnificent hair.” “Yes, Chandaka, YES.” I yanked up my hair and diadem (the sort of mini-tiara I was wearing) and bellowed, “Who is fit to cut a bodhisattva’s hair? No one!” With that, I chopped my hair off and threw it, along with my diadem, straight up into the air. (ASV 6:57) “If I am to become a Buddha, let my hair and mini-tiara float in mid-air!” I proclaimed. “If not, let them fall to the ground!” I was confident that my hair and mini-tiara would float in mid-air obviously. I wouldn’t have made that statement otherwise. Still, I was slightly relieved to see my hair and mini-tiara floating in mid-air before me. (NK) (I later learned that the god Sakka—who had one thousand eyes, by the way—had sucked my hair and mini-tiara up to heaven, placed them in a jewel box and built a shrine to them.) (ASV 6:58) (I was Sakka in thirty-six different lifetimes, incidentally.) (ITI 12)
I crossed to Kamthaka and stared him in the eye. “You have served me well, gallant steed. I grieve at our imminent separation, but sadly, the time has come. You are an excellent horse and I promise that you will have an excellent rebirth! At the very least, the very least, Kamthaka, you will not go to hell. Is that a tear streaming down your face, noble friend? It is, and I know why you cry too, for I know what you are thinking: ‘Do not go, dear prince, for you are indeed my hero.’ Yet go I must, dear Kamthaka.” At this, Kamthaka burst into copious tears. (ASV 6:57) I held my webbed hand up to his face and spoke tenderly, “Be brave, dear Kamthaka, you must be brave.” “But how will I live with the grief of never seeing you again, master?” I saw in Kamthaka’s eyes. “You will be fine, my friend,” I started to say, but before I could get the words out, Kamthaka suddenly keeled over dead. He had died of a broken heart! (NK)
I turned away from Kamthaka’s corpse and glanced over at Chandaka. “In time, friend charioteer, my leaving the palace this night will come to be known as the ‘Great Going Forth.’”
“Excellent, my lord.”
“It is now time for me to begin attaining immortality, Chandaka. Farewell!” With that, feeling full of confidence and vigor, I strode manfully into the forest. “I look like the peak of a golden mountain,” I remember thinking to myself as I walked. “Or maybe more like a cross between a cloud and an elephant. Or possibly a lion and the moon—or some mix of those things in any case.” (ASV 5:26)
It was a dark night; consequently, it was quite helpful when some gods appeared and lit torches for me—a lot of torches, actually—a quarter of a million, to be precise. Less helpful but still nice was the way millions of musical instruments floated around me, playing songs in my honor as I walked. (NK) Not helpful in the least, frankly, was the way some bird-like gods sprinkled perfume and powder down on me. These bird-gods dumped so much perfume and powder on me that before long the trail was nothing
but a thick, gloppy mess. Still, the bird-gods wouldn’t stop. I finally decided the only way to get them to quit what they were doing was to stop walking, which I did. “What I have done this night is the single boldest step any human has ever taken,” I announced loudly. “I do it not for my own sake but for the sake of all humanity, so that they might not suffer! HEAR ME NOW, UNIVERSE, OH HEAR ME, I WILL NOW BEGIN TO CURE YOU!”
6
Somewhat strangely, it took me six years to actually discover the cure. Even in hindsight, I’m still not quite sure why things took so long. I already knew that life was suffering. I’d known that since the awful “Four Sights” day with Chandaka, when I’d first grasped that sickness, old age and death were parts of human existence. I also already knew by this time that all suffering stemmed from desire; that was the reason I had left Father’s palace and renounced all of my worldly goods. I further knew that the only way to escape suffering was to escape desire. What I did not yet know was how to escape desire. Could one escape desire, I sometimes wondered to myself? It seemed “built-in” to human nature. Could it actually be overcome? Years passed with no answer to this question.
It’s not that I wasn’t searching for the answer; I definitely was. I became a “shamana,” a seeker of the truth. I wandered far and wide across the Ganges Plain, searching for wise men who I felt could help me find the truth. The gurus Alara Kalama and Ramaputta, between them, taught me to meditate. I was instantly gifted at meditation; literally no one had ever been as good at meditation as me before; people would come from miles around just to watch me meditate, dazzled by the extremely rarefied states of “jhana” (concentration) which I regularly achieved. (AP 1:160–167) Again, I say this not out of “ego,” because, again, I have no “ego;” it is simply the case that I was a meditation “prodigy.”
Alara Kalama and Ramaputta each asked me to continue on with them. “You are a meditating genius, Siddhartha,” they both said to me. “Won’t you please take over for me?” In both cases I demurred; I was not yet ready to be a teacher because I had not yet found the answer. “Life is pain,” my mind repeated over and over again. “But how to escape the pain?”
After leaving my two teachers, I went back to the forest and spent the next several years living with five other ascetics, Kondanna being the oldest and wisest of them. (Kondanna had actually been one of the seers who my father had brought in to predict my future when I was a baby—the only one who had predicted correctly, in fact.) (NK) The six of us spent our time trying to burn off bad “karma.” More on karma later, but the gist of it is this: You get what you deserve in this world. If you are sick, poor, crippled, ugly, stupid—well, you deserve that. If, on the other hand, you are a rich, handsome genius-prince—well, you deserve that too. (SK; SAL)
The five ascetics and I all believed that the way to eliminate bad karma was to suffer as much as possible in this lifetime so that we might suffer less in the next lifetime. An annoying question did occur to me once or twice during this difficult stretch: “If I am suffering this badly, does that mean that I ‘deserve’ it?” The answer to this question, however, was obvious: I was choosing to suffer and that was totally different.
The five ascetics and I practiced extreme self-denial. Our goal was to overcome our physical body, to free ourselves from hunger, from “appetites” of all kinds, in fact. Sometimes I ate nothing but rocks for days; other times I ate air, yet other times I ate cow manure. A few times I ate my own feces. (ASV 7:15–16; MJ 12) I remember thinking at one point, “What if I stopped eating entirely?” Immediately afterwards, however, some gods appeared before me and said, “Please, sir, do not cut off your food intake. If you do, we will have no choice but to inject food directly into your pores.” “Into my pores?” I replied. “How is that even possible? My pores aren’t the size of little mouths!” “Nevertheless, we will absolutely do it, sir.” (NK; MJ 12; MH 1:240–49) So I kept eating.
Sometimes I slept on thorns; other times I slept on the sharpest, pointiest rocks I could find. One time, I found a dead body and used its skull as my pillow. One morning I remember waking up feeling what I thought was warm rainwater sprinkling down on me, but when I opened my eyes it turned out to be some local boys urinating on my head. Afterwards the largest and most aggressive boy jammed two sticks in my ears and dangled me around like a puppet. (MJ 12) (I probably weighed all of seventy pounds by this time.) It was deeply humiliating. I remember pressing lightly on my stomach one day and thinking, “I can feel my spine. You’re not supposed to be able to feel your spine when you touch your stomach.” I remember stroking my hair not long after that and it instantly starting to fall out in dull, ragged clumps in my hand.
Years passed this way. I was thirty-three … then thirty-four … then thirty-five years old. My health began to falter. My skin dried up; I started to look like a piece of dried fruit. “There must be a better way of finding the truth,” I remember thinking to myself on one particularly uncomfortable day. “Starving myself cannot possibly be the path to enlightenment. I am literally destroying myself here and I don’t understand anything more about how to escape suffering than I did when I started.” I felt like I’d been beating my head against a wall for a very long time by this point.
One day I became so frail and exhausted that I fell face forward into a pile of my own excrement. (MH 1:240–49) I remember rising wobbily from my squat and looking down at the small brown pile, and at that point I must have blacked out because my next memory is waking up with my face half-buried in my own feces. As I lay there, semi-conscious, I heard the gods whispering worriedly about me. “He’s dead,” one of them said. “No no, he’s only resting,” replied another. (Why he thought I would rest facedown in a pile of my own shit, I do not know. One of these gods even went to my father and told him I was dead. “I don’t believe you,” Father instantly replied and not long afterwards the god had to return and admit, “Actually, he’s fine.”) (NK) Then I heard a third voice, thin and girlish, right next to me. “Are you alright, sir?” the voice asked.
I turned and looked up. “Sojata” (for that was the child’s name) gazed down at me, a concerned look on her sweet young face. “I fell face-forward into my own feces, child,” I whispered.
“You need food, sir, you are quite thin. Would you like some rice porridge?” I stared at the child, uncomprehending. “You must eat, sir,” she repeated.
My mind was feverish, disoriented. Rice porridge? How could I possibly eat that? I was an ascetic, devoted to suffering and self-abnegation. How could I indulge myself with milk and honey-infused porridge?
Sojata gently helped me to sit up and tenderly wiped the feces off my face with a rag. She removed a small wooden bowl from her basket and, kneeling next to me, dipped a spoon into the bowl and lifted the rice porridge to my mouth. “I cannot, child,” I whispered. “I have vowed to suffer.”
“Eat, sir,” the child said, tenderly touching the spoon to my lips.
“I will not open my mouth,” I thought to myself. “I will not, I will not, I will—” I opened my mouth and ate the porridge. It was warm, sweet, soft—almost indescribably delicious. I swallowed and opened my mouth again. Sojata refilled the spoon and fed me. Then she did it again—and again—and again.
Five minutes later the small wooden bowl was empty and Sojata, with a sweet, shy smile, turned and headed home. (MH 1:240–49)
“That little girl just saved my life,” I thought to myself as I watched her depart. “Someday I must find a way to repay not only her but her entire sex.” (I never did so because before long I realized that women were all dangerous crocodiles who should be avoided as much as humanly possible, but at that moment I did think it.)
After eating the rice porridge, I quickly felt more clear-headed. “What I’ve been doing has been madness,” I remember thinking. “Humans cannot live on rocks or their own feces—humans are meant to eat normally, like animals do. If you saw a tiger that only ate rocks or its own feces, you would think to yourself, �
��That is an insane tiger.’” Extreme asceticism was not the path to enlightenment, I now understood. I began to eat normally again and before long I didn’t look like a fleshtone-painted skeleton anymore.
When I rejoined my five ascetic friends, they were instantly appalled at the change that had come over me. “What have you done, Gotama?” Kondanna asked in a hushed, disbelieving voice as I approached them.
I told him the truth. “To start with, Kondanna, I ate some rice porridge.”
“Rice porridge,” Kondanna sputtered, as if these two words constituted the worst obscenity imaginable. The other ascetics shook their heads in horror.
“I feel better now that I am eating normally, friends,” I continued. “My mind is much clearer.”
“You are no longer an ascetic, Gotama,” Kondanna announced firmly. “You have broken the ascetic vow and therefore we want nothing more to do with you.”
“Kondanna, listen to me, there is another way, a better way, a middle way.”
But Kondanna wouldn’t listen. With a small dismissive wave of his hand, he and the others turned and hurried away from me. (At least as much as men who weigh sixty-five pounds can be said to “hurry,” that is. They “speed-hobbled” away from me is perhaps a more accurate description.) After they were all gone I stood for a moment in silence. “What next?” I remember asking myself.
Suddenly a fully formed thought popped into my mind: “The moment has arrived, Gotama.”
“What?” I remember speaking aloud.
“You have been asleep. Now it is time to wake up,” my mind proclaimed.
7
An hour later I sat down under a large tree and announced to myself, “I will not move from this place, nor will I urinate or defecate, until I have achieved my goal of defeating death!” (NK; ASV 12:118) In heaven, the gods burst into applause upon hearing that. One god, however, was not pleased that I was on the verge of, shall we say, “piercing the veil.” That god was Mara, the god of death and delusion, my old nemesis. “Why do you look so upset, Father?” his three daughters, Lust, Delight and Appetite, asked him. “This sage Siddhartha is about to conquer my realm, daughters!” Mara cried. “If he succeeds, my rule will come to an end!” (ASV 13:15) (Given that Mara’s “realm” was death and that the desirability of death was what I was just about to grasp, I’ve never really understood why he was trying to stop me; weren’t we basically on the same team?) “Before this sage’s vision is realized,” Mara continued to his daughters, “we must fly down to earth and STOP HIM!” (NK)
The Buddha's Story Page 3
