The Temptation of the Buddha: A Fictional Study in the History of Religion and of Aesthetics
Page 20
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
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“Historical writing is fiction.”
Oswald Spengler
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Like a Novel
Myths are tales anyone can tell. A myth isn’t a story itself in a particular form or with a particular style or finish. Based on the germ of only a very few accepted historic facts, the myth of the Buddha has been growing and filling itself out in the collective imagination for more than two thousand years, in much the manner that a village may grow up, or a town or city, developing, for the convenient use of its people, around a few distinct land marks in certain ways for good reasons.
This account, though diverting the reader in all manner of directions, in form, most suggests or resembles a modern novel. Our narrative has followed a young hero, Gotama Siddhartha, the privileged son of a most distinguished and loving family. Filled with an indefinable longing, life is simply too much for him. He can neither endure his own lot nor any part of the entire social system into which he has been born and raised.
Despite his comparative advantages, when certain realities of the human condition dawn upon him, he finds existence cramped, limited, and unacceptable. Of politics, power, wealth, marriage, he wants no part. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, who goes to sea, or like Kerouac’s hero, Sal Paradise, in On the Road, even a little like the great patriarchal character of the modern novel, Don Quixote, who leaves a reasonable existence to become a knight errant, Gotama wants to find some remedy for what is baffling him. And maybe he too longs for adventure and peril in far away and unknown places.
In each of these famous renunciations is a protest; a direct action against, and a flight from the burdens which the prevailing social structure has placed upon the development of individuality.
It seems significant that neither Ishmael, Sal Paradise, Quixote, nor Gotama sets out alone. Ishmael finds a whaling vessel and joins its crew. Sal Paradise becomes of member of a hip fraternity. Quixote has himself “knighted” and must also go “on the road”. And Gotama joined a forest school.
Each, identifying at first with what might symbolize rebellion, associates himself with a group of social outcasts to live apart from the world. Each will come to experience the nearly fatal implications of his revolt.
Ishmael, despite his own advantages of education and understanding, subjects himself to all the whaling protocols. Likewise Sal Paradise will attempt to absorb the ‘beat’ protocols of Dean Moriarty. Quixote, who has given up the quiet comfort of his home and retirement, subjects himself to the rigorous codes of conduct of knight errantry. Gotama, though born a prince, agrees to follow the dictates of his forest master in any and whatever designs, submitting like all the rest.
Most obviously Ishmael, but each soon finds himself immersed in something like a totalitarian social movement and serving under a tyrant. Sal Paradise kept a comparative independence but yearned for something like servitude and avidly sought it in the inferred commandments of the loose brotherhood of jazz musicians and hipsters to whom he was drawn. Quixote’s group identification is, of course, imagined, but the demands placed upon him are no less real.
Gotama is most like Ishmael, who will only barely escape (on a coffin) the disaster that engulfs the whole crew. Eventually, to save himself, Gotama will need to go beyond the limitations and prescriptions set for him, to basically throw himself overboard and swim for it. When he does he will come to resemble—no longer Ishmael—but Captain Ahab, whose self appointed mission lay totally outside the bounds and conventions of not only the “whaling industry” but of even the renegades and castaways who formed the usual class of whaling men.
Gotama’s transition to this maniacal state comes when, like Ahab, he is finally no longer able to identify with any of the concerns of the group. Gotama, like the profoundly intelligent Ahab, with all the resources of his craft and occupation, will follow his own most pressing inner needs. Prepared and sustained by his practice and his mastery of the technology of yoga, Gotama enters an actual and metaphoric wilderness of jungle solitude comparable to Ahab’s vast Pacific. Far out of and beyond convention, both attract followers.
We cannot be on certain grounds, imagining what, if anything, might correspond to the white whale, Moby Dick, for Gotama, but we do know that the traditional Vedic philosophy of Aryavarta did not solve his inner concerns, but rather amplified them, and impressed upon him their limitations, nor did it provide the techniques to transcend those concerns.
The austere knowledge that his own being, his own personal living self (Atman), was a manifestation of an infinite, and infinitely greater self (Brahman), and that the two were identical could not solve for him in a satisfying way his fundamental anxiety about life. A complex of ideas surrounding this conflict possessed him, and must have become an obsession,
Our story imagines that this is the “great white whale” which would have dragged Gotama down to destruction had it not been for the efforts of Kama Mara and his daughters. The deep and natural affections which spontaneously arose upon contact with a healthy group of individuals became the bridge which allowed Gotama to return to life, to a practical humanity.
Through contact with these fully integrated personalities Gotama comes to understand his fixation upon experiencing a lasting “union with Brahman” as an expression of spiritual isolation and of revulsion against the world. “Suffering” which he had elevated and had allowed to dominate his being he came to see as a mere nothingness, which he had filled with many meanings.