by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER FIVE:
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“Actually it’s quite true that he’s not ‘waiting’ for anyone since he’s not made any appointments, but the very fact that he’s adopting this ultra-receptive posture means that by this he wants to help chance along, how should I say, to put himself in a state of grace with chance, so that something might happen, so that someone might drop in.”
Andre Breton—(Entretiens)
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Desire spent the next several days in a cocoon of contemplation.
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A Turning Point for Gotama
Desire spent the next several days in a cocoon of contemplation. Employed in mundane tasks, she considered this man about whom she knew nothing. There had been so few words, so few gestures even. But the simple sincerity and natural dignity of his presence had affected her… that such complete self absorption could coexist with such active sympathetic kindness…
Finally, her need overcame all considerations. Not bothering to change or even think about her everyday sari of thick greenish brown cloth, as she left her sisters to return to the grove she said only, “All the forest hermits I have seen up to now imitated renunciates. They were actors.”
When this story is presented today, (in legendary tradition) this is the part where Gotama, on the path to becoming the Buddha, in an act of symbolic of his decision to return to a more natural life, accepts a dish of curds from a village maiden.
Desire found him seated among flowers; scarlet hibiscus, sweet smelling spider-lilies, and bright butter yellow allamandas… in the same place and position—the exact same—in which she had left him.
Attracted to this singular human, Desire sought to comprehend him. As if offstage, observing with all her senses, she studied his motionless body with its skin stretched thin over protruding bone. With a feeling of sudden alarm she became aware of the extent of his physical weakness.
Possessing a ready compassion, she went directly then, as she had on their first meeting, and without introduction or disturbance, seated herself opposite Gotama, who, also as before, offered no greeting but accepted her presence with just that unspoken friendliness she had been missing.
I like to imagine her as Leonardo daVinci might have drawn her…
the high degree of perfection and virtuosity
with which line and light
are manipulated…
… the abstract grace of bounding arabesques traced from nature…
a three dimensional being
of exceptional sweetness
is revealed.
Trying to imagine Desire drawn in the style of the Italian Renaissance reminded me of the “David” in Florence by Donatello. Perhaps Desire is to be best imagined as she might have been sculpted by Donatello, Leonardo’s renowned peer.
A glow of health and strength,
youthful/ ancient mouth turned up
enigmatically …
a smile full of pleasant wonder …
thin limbed,
graceful and beautiful,
(shape revealing spirit)
A playful, but dignified stance …
no unnatural refinement..
Not till they had sat in intimate, silent proximity, sharing the experience of the sun crossing the sky above them, did Desire speak. Can the reader imagine her voice? Pitched precisely, soft, carrying her assured melodic articulation, expressing perfectly just those qualities caught by Donatello; her astonishing combination of naturalness and refinement.
As if they had been talking all afternoon, she said, “Only when a musical instrument is properly tuned can it produce a pleasant sound, one properly expressive of its nature. Too slack makes no music, too tense will break.”
Once the words were in the air Desire realized that they were the first words she had ever spoken to him. She felt their meaning, smiled again, and would have qualified or clarified, maybe even disclaimed. But the echo of their sound and meaning came back to her. Somewhat embarrassed, she explained, “I love music.”
Daylight sank deeper and deeper into darkness until down below the horizon the sun’s obscurity intimated the revelations of evening.
Beneath the trees where birds were quarreling over their roosts for the night, Desire and Gotama were silent.
The contemporary sense of time and its divisions are so different that it’s hard for us to imagine how long it may have seemed before inspired words were found again.
“Life,” she spoke as if the round world could understand and waited upon her, “if it is truly life, moves forward in time like the earth and the sun into the unknown, but it dislikes moving on alone. What it needs, what it can’t be life without is companionship, intimacy, the warming understanding of another life, and to be able to confide one’s depth. Nothing extraordinary or supernatural.”
Her silent companion’s complete acceptance of these words would precipitate a gradual, perceptible shift in everything; something neither of them had expected. Desire felt it right away, but it was not until the stars and the planets had begun to shine clearly against the delicious, cool blackness of the sky that Desire understood. “You no longer court suffering… Now you accept… With love… you transform everything with love…” She thought this… but did she actually say it? Looking questioningly at him she was not certain, maybe she had not… a smile crossed her face.
As the low lying sparkling of water is seen in a deep well, so in the eye sockets of this starving man a low-lying sparkle flashed as he caught her smile. Just the way she had surprised him when he first had seen her in an inner vision, she was, now, continually surprising him. Observing the pleasant change that had overtaken his expression, Desire remembered the bowl of rice milk she had brought along with her. With a spontaneous gesture of humble ceremony she uncovered it and offered it to him.
Observing the pleasant change that had overtaken his expression…
Without any ceremony, gesturing for her to come and sit beside him, Gotama accepted her kindness and the bowl of food. Opening his mouth to speak for the first time in several years, allowing utterance to a thought which arose from deep within, compelling his attendance, his voice, slowly, distinctly emerging from his belly, resonating through the skin stretched tightly over his thin dry frame, pronounced the single word, “Dukka—(suffering)”. Then, without stopping to wonder at the marvel of speech, he continued, “Dukka, the melodic theme of human experience, calls for a complete response,” he finished.
Desire laughed—he had heard her, or else had read her mind. “Our bodies must live!” she said taking hold of his thin shoulders. “Let your belly smile! It is not easy to reach a state of well-being with such an extremely emaciated body.”
Desire laughed, “our bodies must live.”
Gotama Siddhartha ate the food very slowly. He had begun to feel its effect, and, smiling inwardly, to savor, very gradually, the taste.
Looking up after a moment he noted that the other hermits around in the grove, in this forest of mortification, had come round and were staring, shocked and dismayed at these violations of procedures on the part of their fellow ascetic; the very one whose incomparable self denial had become legend among them, and in fact, had led them to him in the first place.
Desire, noting all this, took good advantage of dramatic possibility. Quite casually and with a sure confidence, projecting her own full beauty and the sound of her voice across the space of moist, cool, air, she said, “One who is really free may concede to his natural needs. It’s the inner state, isn’t it? that matters, not so much any outward renunciations.”
Gotama found words rising within him to complement hers. Echoing the warm, resinous and melodic tone that Desire had used, he addressed the shocked yogis. “We have been taught, and well know by our own experience, that meditations and exercise in self-submergence can lead to inner perfections, but … greater than these is compassion, a kindness.”
It was the first time they had heard his vo
ice.
When they did speak, if they ever spoke at all, this was not the kind of thing that the Holy Men of Aryavarta usually said. The ascetics were puzzled; even offended. They felt his power and authority and also his friendly good will, but they really did not know to what he was referring or about what he was speaking. But Desire knew. Her instinct told her that she had played a part in something of importance and that it had lain outside of her father’s direction. She felt fulfillment and regret and understood, with fresh insight, her sisters.
As she takes Gotama’s hand her dramatic words crystallize their astonishing mutual revelation;
“Love is the perfection of consciousness,
an ultimate meaning of everything around us.
Not mere sentiment, it is truth and the joy at the root of all creation.”
Every actor knows that at a given time the curtain will fall. Hurtling round the sun, the spinning Earth’s ritual experience, (from where Desire sat through the night with Siddhartha) of the eternal black sky’s deference, at dawn, to the morning’s light, signaled her cue to withdraw, and the end of the scene.
When Kama Mara saw her, later in the day, immediately he knew that everything had changed. “Haven’t you stepped outside your role; the role that you were born for? You are Desire.”
“Too late,” she answered. “Now you’ll see what Desire is made of. I was a coward. You must know I did the best I could. For the first time I felt my limitations. But you are right. I am Desire. I’ll make up for the poverty of my sufferings by the splendor of my passion.”
“Now we are certain of it,” Kama Mara said, with a bow and a smile, which rivaled each other in depth. We have found the one for whom we have been searching.”
Turning and leaving her, straightaway, he called his elephant, mounted and set off to find Gotama.
