Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  The depiction of the Buddha’s nirvana is one of the most popular themes in Buddhist art. I had seen it in almost all the caves and museums along the Silk Road. I remember in particular one mural in Kucha: on the entire back wall of a cave, an elongated body of the Buddha lay in the centre of a forest; around him were a circle of mourners, some looking very sad with tears pouring from their eyes, some clutching their chests and collapsing with grief, others touching the Buddha’s feet and saying prayers; the flowers on the ground bent their heads, and the birds on the tree branches stopped chirping. The perfect composition and the vivid expressions, albeit in faded colours, combined to create a masterpiece, not unlike Da Vinci’s Last Supper. This was the image I had of Kushinagar.

  But it was not what I saw when I stepped out of the house. The road between the guesthouse and the Nirvana Temple was the high street – the only street – of Kushinagar. There were a few shops and restaurants that served pilgrims, but they looked deserted, unusual for Indian towns or villages, which were always full of people milling about. The pilgrims had postponed their trips; the locals were perhaps all huddled somewhere watching their election votes being counted. But I was not the only one to feel let down. Ananda was devastated when he arrived with the Buddha: ‘O Lord,’ he cried, ‘do not go to your Final Rest in this dreary little town, with mud walls, this heathen, jungle outpost, this backwater.’ Xuanzang was also disappointed when he saw it: ‘The capital of the country is in ruins, and its towns and villages lie wasted and desolate. The walls of the city have collapsed and the streets are deserted and ghostly, with very few inhabitants.’

  But the statue of the Nirvana Buddha was enough to compensate for any disappointment. It lies on its side in the centre of the temple, just as Xuanzang saw it, with a huge red ceremonial robe draped over the body. A caretaker was wiping the dust from the statue. He was so gentle and careful, as if he was afraid to wake the Buddha. The expression on the Buddha’s face is one of supreme tranquillity and unearthly detachment. You feel he has not a care in this world. This is what the Buddha preached all his life and what the best of Buddhist art so successfully conveys, like the statue in Sarnath. The longer I looked at it, the more I began to understand what Xuanzang and every Buddhist strives for – the ultimate goal of nirvana, a departure, ni, from those defilements that are called vana.

  Nirvana is not paradise, as is popularly supposed. There are two nirvanas, one in this life, the other after death. The Buddha achieved the first one under the Bodhi Tree: he had extinguished the fires of greed, hatred and delusion, and achieved absolute equanimity and compassion for all beings. But what is the final nirvana, or the greater nirvana as the Buddhists call it? How is it different from the first? If it is liberation from samsara, does it mean extinction? If so, why is extinction such a glorious achievement? If it is not Nothingness, where does the liberated being go thereafter? I know Xuanzang would not have asked these questions. The Buddha positively discouraged monks from speculating on the nature of the final nirvana because it was no help for their final emancipation. ‘One thing only does the Buddha teach, namely, suffering and the cessation of suffering,’ said the Buddha. There was a monk who kept asking about it; the Buddha compared him to a man who was wounded by an arrow but refused to have treatment until he learned who had shot it at him, what village he came from, what caste he belonged to, and what the arrow was made of and how it was decorated. The Buddha told his disciples, ‘If anyone says, “I will not follow the holy life under the Blessed One till he answers these questions,” he will die with these questions unanswered by the Teacher.’

  As I stood there trying to navigate my way through these difficult thoughts, a group of Indians walked quietly into the shrine. There were nearly forty of them. The women’s saris had lost their bright colours from years of wear; the men’s garments were clean but almost worn through; and the teenage boys and girls with them were neat but quite threadbare too. They had only a small garland, a few flowers and incense sticks, which they placed reverently by the statue’s head. Then they knelt down and started chanting a slow, solemn prayer. Their eyes were shut, as if in a trance; their voices were deep and resonant, each word uttered with yearning.

  When they finished, I followed them out. I was curious to know who they were and where they were from. There was something different about them. I asked the monk who led their prayers, and the man who made the offering – he seemed to be their leader – told me they were from Maharashtra. ‘Are you Baba Ambedkar’s followers?’ I asked. Suddenly smiles appeared on their faces; they looked at each other, and then me. ‘You know Babasaheb too?’ they asked animatedly. ‘My name is Ramtirath Ambedkar,’ said their leader, a tall man in his late forties, who raised both his hands to me, while looking warmly at me with his large round eyes. ‘We are all from Maharashtra.’

  Maharashtra is home to Ambedkar, or Babasaheb, the Mahars’ endearment for him. He is credited with reviving Buddhism in modern India. By all accounts, he was an extraordinary man. He was the first dalit to get degrees from universities in the West, and three at that: in economics, law and politics. His father and grandfather had worked for the British army, which provided education for the children of all its soldiers. It made a tremendous difference to the lives of tens of thousands of dalits. But in the eyes of Hindus, Ambedkar was still a Mahar, traditionally a community of ‘inferior village servants’, such as watchmen or messengers, people who would run errands and do menial jobs. The Mahars were deemed Untouchable because it was their work to haul away dead cattle, and they ate carrion to save themselves from starving. At one time, they were compelled to go about with brooms tied to the end of their loincloths and earthenware pots hanging from their necks: the brooms were for covering up their footprints and the pots for spitting in.

  Ambedkar suffered the humiliation that his caste had to bear from very early in life. The Brahmin teacher in his school refused to teach him or mark his exercise book, telling him there was no point in educating him. Even after he returned from the West and obtained a job with the Maharaja of Baroda, he had to quit after only a few days: nobody in the city would rent him a room; his subordinates treated him like a leper, throwing files and papers on to his desk from a safe, unpolluting distance. His bitter experience and the plight of his people made him determined to challenge the caste system and fight for the rights of the dalits. He asked his own people to abandon the traditional Mahar work of removing animal carcases, to look and act like Hindus of the highest caste and send their children to school. He set up political parties to put pressure on the British government and the Congress Party. He met fierce opposition, from Gandhi in particular, who saw the caste system as divinely ordained, essential to social harmony. ‘One born a scavenger must earn his livelihood by being a scavenger,’ Gandhi said, ‘and then do whatever else he likes. For a scavenger is as worthy of his hire as a lawyer.’ Gandhi regarded Untouchability as a perversion of true Hinduism: the solution was a voluntary change of heart by caste Hindus. Ambedkar had no such illusion. He demanded equal constitutional rights for them, and this led to a dramatic clash with Gandhi.

  With his undisputed talents, Ambedkar did go on to become Minister of Law in the first government of independent India and was the man behind India’s new constitution. But he was bitterly disappointed with the lack of any real progress for his people, let alone a ‘change of heart’ by caste Hindus. ‘I was born a Hindu, which I could not choose, but I will not die a Hindu,’ he vowed. He finally decided to embrace Buddhism, a religion that would treat his people with respect, dignity and, above all, equality. On October 14, 1956 more than 400,000 men, women and children answered his call and arrived in Nagpur in central India, all clad in the spotless white shirts and saris prescribed for the occasion by their leader. Some had made it by train, bus and bullock-cart; the majority had simply walked, some of them over huge distances. The mass conversion was a remarkable moment: a great Indian religion, dormant for a thousand years, was reawoken, in a
n attempt to put an end to unspeakable suffering.

  Ramtirath’s father was one of those converts. He gave his son a new surname: Ambedkar. ‘Babasaheb is our father, our guru, our leader.’ Ramtirath remembered what his father often told him. ‘God did not make us suffer, it was the Brahmins. If God had intended us to be untouchable, why didn’t he make us look like monsters with three arms and four legs? And how could God be so cruel to his own children, forbidding us even to enter his temple to worship him? The Buddha is different: he is not a god. He makes us believe in ourselves. He makes us strong. Nobody has done that for us. Nobody, except the Buddha and Babasaheb.’

  They now saw themselves differently; they felt human again. But did the upper castes treat them differently? ‘You cannot straighten a dog’s tail,’ said an old man forcefully, his silver moustache quivering. ‘We have to free ourselves from the mental slavery we have grown up with. That’s our worst enemy. They cannot go on making us do the dirtiest work, paying us nothing, and taking advantage of our women. We refuse to take their orders unless they treat us properly.’ He was rapturously applauded by the women and the younger members of the group.

  I was touched by his words. But I felt sad too. I looked at the people around me closely and intensely, particularly the women. They were cleanly dressed, perhaps in their best clothes for the pilgrimage. They were beautiful, with high cheek-bones, large eyes and long slim necks and arms. Some of them wore jewellery and shoes, which were not allowed before. But they still lived in constant danger of rape – although the upper caste men would not touch them otherwise, they had no compunction about raping them. Their families still had to live outside the villages, with no right to visit the same temple or drink water from the same well as the upper castes. Progress has been made through the government’s reservation programmes, and their husbands, or even they themselves, might get jobs and their sons and daughters could go to school and even university. But every step forward for the dalits is deeply resented by many caste Hindus. When the reservation quota in education and employment was raised for the lower castes in the early 1990s, students from the upper castes went on hunger strike, some even burned themselves in protest. For most dalits life continues to be a daunting struggle.

  Did they not become impatient and want to do something drastic, like the dalits in Bihar?

  ‘No,’ Ramtirath said quickly. ‘All those years Babasaheb worked for us, he was always against violence. He knew what is best for us.’ The older man nodded his agreement. Ambedkar was totally convinced that non-violence and democracy were the only way forward for the dalits. Revolution might be quick, but its results could not last; change had to come from people’s minds – that was the only durable solution. As he told the caste Hindus: ‘Had my mind been seized with hatred and revenge, I would have brought disaster upon this land.’ He loved India, for all its injustices.

  The Buddhism which Ambedkar and his people embraced differs profoundly, however, from what other Buddhists believe. They do not accept karma and rebirth, the two fundamental principles of Buddhism. Ambedkar did not want his followers to have any crutches, any false hope. You must fight to improve this life, he believed, not some imaginary future one. Hinduism was based on karma and rebirth too, objectionable for that reason. Under it dalits were expected to perform their prescribed duties with humility and not to pollute the higher castes. The reward might come in some very distant future, after several incarnations; dalits could be reborn in some modestly better state, but not with any likelihood as a Brahmin. They were told extra rewards would come if they died defending Brahmins, cows or women. No wonder Ambedkar totally rejected the doctrine of karma, rebirth and the intervention of divinities on his people’s behalf.

  But those were exactly what my grandmother believed, I told Ramtirath. He looked puzzled. ‘Your Buddhism sounds like Hinduism, with gods doing everything for you,’ he said hesitantly. ‘What’s the point of being a Buddhist then?’ He was right – it was the same problem I had wrestled with myself until recently. But what he had to say next surprised me more. Given how hard they were struggling, did he not sometimes wish for the incarnation of Babasaheb to come back and help them? ‘No,’ he insisted firmly, without the slightest hesitation, ‘Babasaheb cannot come back. There is no rebirth, no god. Only we can help ourselves. That is what the Buddha told us. “Be your lamp unto yourselves. Hold fast to the Truth as a lamp. Look not for refuge to anyone but yourself.” ’

  Ramtirath spoke like a Zen Buddhist. He put me in mind of the famous Zen dictum: ‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’ There is no other Buddha except what is inside you. As the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, Huineng, told his disciples, ‘The Dharma is here in the world; enlightenment is not apart from the world; to search for Bodhi apart from the world is like looking for a hare with horns.’ But even Zen Buddhists believe in karma and rebirth. I supposed that in a belief system without a supreme creator, karma provides the only sanction: there must be some punishment and reward; otherwise the world would be an unjust place.

  Some call Ambedkar and his followers new Buddhists. Others question whether the Ambedkar movement is more motivated by politics than faith, which are increasingly intertwined in modern India. But I have every sympathy with Ramtirath and his people. More than that, with these people, I sensed a fellow-feeling. I felt I could be this kind of Buddhist, inspired by the rationality, the compassion and the self-reliance in the Buddha’s teachings. Since the Buddha denied the existence of a permanent entity or an immortal soul, then what is it that transmigrates from this life into the next one? It could not be the genes, which would be the most obvious choice, because one might be reborn as a sheep or a butterfly if one’s karma was not good enough for rebirth as a human being. Buddhists say it is the karmic force that is transmitted, which is neither material nor immaterial. There the theory loses me and I am still in the dark, waiting to be illuminated.

  They were leaving the shrine. I asked Ramtirath where they were staying. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘under the sky, under the trees.’ They were camping in the forest. I could imagine how hard their life must be – even on their pilgrimage they had nothing to spare – and they must have saved up all their lives for it. I asked if I could take their photo in a group, and have their address. I would have something to remember them by and I would send it to them. They rushed to sit on the steps and spruce themselves up. As I focused on them, I looked at them through the viewfinder for a long time. I could not help admiring them. Most of them were illiterate and Ramtirath, who was the village schoolteacher, taught them from The Buddha and His Dharma, which Ambedkar wrote to guide his followers – no monks had visited them. But wresting their own dignity and peace of mind from their circumstances and overcoming so much suffering was a kind of enlightenment. I hope they received the picture. I keep a copy in a frame on my desk.

  From the Nirvana Temple, I walked past fields dotted with monasteries to the Rambhar Stupa, which marks the place where the Buddha was cremated. The stupa is now just a large mound of bricks. A lonely Sri Lankan monk stood there with his palms pressed together, lost in thought. It was already in ruins when Xuanzang came here. He would have been saddened both by the death of the Buddha and by this further evidence of the decline of Buddhism in India in one of its most sacred places. But he remembered the Buddha’s last words to Ananda, who was inconsolable: ‘Do not be sad. Do not despair. Everything that exists is perishable. Take the Dharma as your teacher. Persevere and strive for your salvation.’ Xuanzang must have felt the words could have been addressed to him. The Buddha is dead, but the Dharma is with us. The Buddha is the Dharma, the Dharma is the Buddha. The two are the same. Spread the Dharma and the Buddha will live on. More than ever, Xuanzang was determined to propagate the Buddha’s teachings, not in the land of its birth, but in China. This was the task that awaited him.

  I arrived back at the hotel at dusk and found the old Sri Lankan couple sitting on a bench on the lawn, gazing towards the Nirvana Temple. They lo
oked a little dejected.

  ‘You’re looking unwell,’ I said to the husband.

  ‘No, I have a little stomach trouble.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I shouldn’t complain. The Buddha had the same thing in Kushinagar and he died of it. He was like us, just human.’

  That night I took a call from the travel agent. He was concerned. The Bihar election was now reaching its apex of horror. The Hindustan Times carried the headline ‘Body Counts on Final Day’. The Rapid Action Force shot dead seven people who tried to capture election booths; three policemen died in an ambush; one man lost his life in a bomb explosion, and the leader of one party was stoned to death by supporters of another. Par for the course in Bihar, it seems: the paper did not sound surprised. Every day I said to myself: ‘This can’t get any worse,’ and each time I was wrong. And now it was reaching a dangerous point; the travel agent said whatever the election result, there would be more violence. He advised me to get out of Bihar and skip Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, the last sacred Buddhist place identified in 1907, with the help of Xuanzang’s Record. He was going to cancel my hotel booking in Lumbini and send me on an early train from Patna to Madras. ‘We don’t want to lose you,’ he said. Regretfully, I followed his advice.