Bride of the Buddha Read online

  I looked back at Pajapati. “I think I know how to change his mind.”

  Jagdish and I met in the same anteroom as before. It was even darker than the last time: clouds in all shades of gray swarmed in the sky outside the narrow windows, heralding another monsoon season. My brother arrived after I did and immediately folded his arms and began tapping his foot, as if I were the late one. “I don’t have much time,” he said.

  “I have one last favor to ask.” I kept my voice gentle and free of spite.

  “I’ve done everything you’ve requested.” He swept his gaze over me and then focused on the storm brewing outside, as if my altered appearance was too awful to bear scrutiny. I saw myself through his eyes, my female figure lumped over by robes, my face unimproved by cosmetics or jewels, my shorn hair standing out from my head like black bunch grass. To him, my looks had a moral dimension, affronting the universal order. “I have no reason to grant you anything more,” he said.

  “Why not do so out of loyalty to your youngest surviving sister?” I let that question hang in the air, but I don’t think my brother recognized the reference to our previous conversation. “I’m simply requesting a meeting with my husband—not only as a spiritual seeker but as the mother of his son.”

  Jagdish glanced at me, then looked away again. “When Siddhartha left, he abrogated his paternal rights. Suddhodana is now Rahula’s guardian.”

  “Just let me see my husband,” I said. “I need to know where I stand with him.”

  “Your former husband is not welcome here. Our clan has no more to do with him. I have decreed it.”

  “You decreed! What about our uncle? Has he died and no one informed me? It’s hard to believe my relatives wanted to spare my fragile feelings.” I admit, I was goading him.

  But my brother remained calm. “Suddhodana appreciates my wisdom regarding Siddhartha,” he said, his voice smooth as pearl. “I’ve witnessed Siddhartha’s unwholesome influence on the lower varnas firsthand.” Jagdish’s gaze finally rested on me, level and triumphant. “After all, I’ve spent a lot of time with the servants and field labor overseeing your husband’s projects—the ones you insisted I carry through. Now they have more houses and wells and free time—and it’s still not enough for them. I’ve seen for myself that the only thing these so-called improvements have done is breed more discontent.” The tiniest hint of a smirk tightened his upper lip. “Siddhartha’s presence would only make things worse.”

  I let the anger charge through my body before I replied. “You’ll have to tell Suddhodana that you’ve revised your wisdom on this matter. You might even find it wise to say that, in fact, Siddhartha’s presence will improve the morale of all the varnas, upper and lower.”

  “What! What’s wrong with you, Sister? I have no reason to poison my lips with such drivel. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve spent enough time here in this suffocating female atmosphere.”

  “Actually, you do have a reason to reconsider your view of the varnas, or at least change your reports to my father-in-law,” I said, abandoning the hope that I wouldn’t have to resort to blackmail again. “If I can’t see my husband, I’ll tell Devadatta exactly why I degraded my looks and took a vow of celibacy. Even as you yourself warned me—if he finds out that you were using me to undermine his power, he could well get Suddhodana to send you home.”

  “Devadatta wouldn’t believe you.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” Now it was my turn to smirk. “All he really needs is the suggestion that you are a potential enemy, and he’ll send you packing.”

  “I’ll deny everything.” His hand had traveled to the cleft in his chin; despite its maturity, he still had the habit of trying to deepen it with his thumbnail.

  “Well, good luck explaining why we met in semisecret in this little room,” I said. “Let’s see now, twice? There are plenty of witnesses, including the lower-caste guards you despise so much. And who, by the way, despise you back.” I shook my head. “Too bad, Brother, you used to be more skilled at not making unnecessary enemies.”

  “Which you were never any good at, at all.” He pushed past me to the door.

  An implied threat, but there was nothing I could do. “So you agree to talk to Suddhodana?”

  He turned back in my direction, the desperate fire in his eyes surprising me. “Don’t you even care about the honor of our clan? Don’t you see that if we start treating everyone equally, the gods will desert us? And without them to reward and inspire the godlike among us, everyone will live identical vulgar lives—breeding and feeding, and little more.”

  Except for shallow, nonvirile pleasures such as watching sunsets, making music, and loving each other, I thought, but I wasn’t going to let him drag me into one of his rants about warrior virtues forged on battlefields in wars often created mainly for that purpose. “You can convey Suddhodana’s reply through Pajapati,” I said, and he stamped out of the room.

  I got my answer two days later. I was weeding the flower beds, trying to distract myself among rows of orchids, white tongues of petals and sepals framing their flame-patterned sex, the rows of blooms bobbing in the breeze. The courtyard was pleasant enough, fresh with recent rain, the puddles shrinking as they mirrored the bright morning sun. Rahula was out beyond the compound walls, playing with his friends in a ball court where the older boys often gathered. My seven-year-old son had more freedom than I did.

  Pajapati approached from the other side of the courtyard, where she shared a suite of rooms that included a special entrance, seldom used, for Suddhodana. Although she wore her usual faded blue wrap, I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d always carried her shoulders high and a little crooked, and her habitual walk was stiff, as if slowed by too many thoughts. Now she moved smoothly as a ship on a deep river. Her eyes and skin radiated a new light, and even her hair, drawn back into its ususal braid, seemed more lustrous. “Yasi,” she said, her voice throaty with wonder. “I’ve seen him.”

  We’d been alone in the courtyard, but as if her words had the power to carry through walls, we were suddenly engulfed by almost the entire populace of the compound. Sparkling girls in their bright shifts, sober aunts in widow’s white, smooth-haired wives in dark-hued paridhanas and shawls assailed us with overlapping questions, their children dancing and jittering around the group, chasing each other around the ginkgo trees, everyone talking at once. “Where?” “What was he like?” “Is he coming here?”

  They must have been waiting for Pajapati’s news all along.

  My emotions were more turbulent than the crowd. Among other things, I was shocked at all this enthusiasm. “Tell us about your visit,” I said to my mother-in-law, finding myself barely able to speak. As Pajapati prepared to answer, everyone went silent, which I feared revealed the pounding of my heart.

  “He’s done what I never imagined anyone could ever do, god or human,” she said, her eyes aflame, as if to burn away the last of her lifelong cynicism. “He’s here to show us—all of us, not just the Brahmins—the way out of pain.”

  “So,” came the quaver of Pajapati’s aunt, the eldest among us, “has he brought gods to help him? Do we need to make sacrifices?”

  “I certainly hope not,” I said, recovering my speech. I found myself annoyed with Pajapati’s fawning attitude toward her son. What if my husband had turned into just another priest—or some charlatan beggar with power over gullible women?

  “No, no,” Pajapati said. “No sacrifices and no helper gods. To end suffering, he says, all you have to do is understand it for what it really is.”

  “Well, that sounds simple enough,” I said. “Most of us, especially if we’ve given birth, know all too much about pain.” I was surprised by the anger pushing itself forward through my emotional turmoil. He’d left me to languish for years in this spiritually stultifying atmosphere, and now he’d come home to bask in women’s awe.

  “What he teaches
is not simple,” Pajapati said. “This knowledge of suffering and its cause is nothing less than awakening from the cycles of life after life in this samsaric world. That’s what he does—he teaches people to wake themselves up.”

  Waking myself up indeed, while my sister’s soul could be languishing in hell. But why was I having such resentful thoughts? My husband had only done what I had urged him to, and his efforts to achieve liberation had almost cost him his life. I should be rejoicing in his enlightenment and eager to learn what he had to teach. Yet I found I didn’t trust him. He who had waited so long to visit his family and who had failed to send any message this whole time. “And how does he propose to instruct us?” I asked cooly. “Are we supposed to take ourselves to the brink of starvation?”

  “Not at all!” Pajapati said, a little breathless, suddenly sounding about sixteen. “He’s found a middle way between denying the body and indulging it. Everyone can practice, beginning by living an ethical life, which results in calmness and clarity, which allows us to meditate and come to understand that the cause of our misery has always been our thirst for what can never bring lasting satisfaction. Once we truly know the pain that clinging to these desires brings, we simply let go. And our suffering is extinguished.”

  “And that’s what Siddhartha has accomplished for himself,” I said in a dead voice. He had achieved indifference to me, our son, and all we’d been together, because he had decided that we could never bring “lasting satisfaction.”

  Pajapati read my eyes. “It’s not what you think, Yasi! You have to see him to understand. He’s changed in a way I can’t describe—the very air around him seems clearer. He’s beyond an ordinary being, he’s … not even my son anymore, not in the old sense.”

  I could hardly bear to listen. I was halfway convinced that Pajapati’s transformation was a form of derangement. “And how will ordinary householders have time for all this meditation?” I demanded. “Let alone the lower varnas.”

  For the first time, a shadow of discomfort flickered across Pajapati’s face. “Well, of course, the best thing is to become a monk and give up the worldly life and all the temptations. But householders can start by making sure never to harm other beings, and even if they don’t achieve complete liberation in this lifetime, they greatly improve their chances to achieve it in the next.” She looked into my eyes, recovering herself. “But I can’t speak for him. You must go, visit him for yourself.” She smiled, her look of eagerness fully returned.

  “Well, now, that’s never really been an option, has it?” I was engulfed with fury—she got to meet with my husband before I did, and now she was luxuriating in her inside knowledge. “All these years, I haven’t even been permitted to send a messenger to him! I’ve just had to sit back and pray for shreds of gossip to inform me whether he was living or dead.”

  “Please, Yasi, don’t blame me for the men’s rules. Your brother’s, most of all!”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. But I did. I blamed all women, including myself, for our resignation, our complicity in what appeared to be an enslavement growing worse over time. “I should have run away,” I said. “Let their arrows shoot me down on the road.”

  “Yasi.” Pajapati gripped both my forearms. “You can see Siddhartha now. My husband will allow it. Your brother spoke with him, and now Suddhodana plans to build a pavilion for Siddhartha and his followers to visit after the rains. But you needn’t wait until then. I know he’ll give you permission to go at once.”

  “Permission,” I said. “And do I have my husband’s ‘permission’ to pay him a visit?” My anger turned back to its original object, my husband, who after promising to return, expected me to go groveling to him.

  I looked around; all eyes were on me. I had to get out of there. “Send Siddhartha a message,” I told Pajapati. “I wish him to come here and visit me alone.”

  The very next day the monsoons swept down on us in earnest, making travel impossible and giving Siddhartha an excuse to put off coming if he felt he needed one. Otherwise, life continued as usual but for the thrill of anticipation that seemed to penetrate every social class, even as I waited with alternating hope that my husband would eventually provide some magical explanation that made complete sense of my own sacrifice—and despair that such an explanation was impossible. I watched as Pajapati and the women attempted meditation and—much to my grudging gratification—made a point of treating the servants well, no longer slapping them for mistakes, making sure they were fed more than table scraps, and allowing them time off to visit relatives and linger over their meals. Yet none of my fellow inmates abandoned their golden bangles and elaborate hair arrangements; if anything, they labored all the more at their beauty routines. I feared they hoped to impress this great holy man they were soon to meet. I wondered, in my bitterness, if their techniques would work.

  I made one vow: not to poison my son’s mind against his father. At the very least, meditation had taught me over the years that hurt, anger, and envy were not dependable guides, and I wanted, above all, for my son to judge his father for himself. Meanwhile, I tried to teach Rahula what the holy men of my childhood and adolescence had told me about reuniting one’s small soul with the Ultimate one, assuming that the practices my husband taught worked to that end—especially meditation, nonharming, and avoiding sensual excess, which for my son meant gulping down a third honey cake after dinner. I wanted to familiarize Rahula as much as possible with the spiritual disciplines before he met with his father. Only then would he be able to tell if his father was a hypocrite.

  Finally, the rains abated and serious preparations for the visit began. Trees were felled on the property and in the outlying forests; the rain-swollen rivers floated them to the site of the future festivities where the pavilions and bunkhouses were to be built. Both of the main residences would house visiting royalty—including the Kolyan king, Pasenadi, so disdained by Suddhodana and all my male relatives for his so-called vulgarity—yet whose powerful army remained a territorial threat. Ironically, King Pasenadi seemed to believe that the Sakyan clan reflected my husband’s attitudes of tolerance and peacefulness. To Suddhodana’s horror, it was even rumored that he hoped one day to marry a Sakyan woman.

  Pasenadi—another person who remains in my forgiveness meditations; I still ask his forgiveness each day. But I fear the dead cannot forgive.

  After six weeks of cleaning, painting, and tying multiple ribbons around everything from poles to trees to elephants, the full moon approached, the day for Siddhartha’s homecoming. (Here for once, the report of the moon’s phase is accurate. No one, not even a spiritual revolutionary such as my husband, could ignore the importance of the full moon Uposatha ceremony, which had been practiced for as long as anyone could remember. Siddhartha timed his major Dharma talks accordingly.) My own preparations were minimal. I would wear my yellow robes, although by now they felt a little silly. What was I trying to prove, and to whom? I was still a member of Suddhodana’s household, living as the wife of Siddhartha, who had yet to dismiss me formally from this position—and who had yet to grace me with a visit. He also had not invited me to join him on the path, and as the day of the gathering approached, I didn’t have it in me to cut my hair again, which had grown to almost shoulder length over the past three months, let alone shave my head in the way of his followers. I couldn’t identify my motivations for keeping my hair, and when reasons fluttered into my mind, I brushed them away, welding my attention to the task at hand, whether clearing the algae from the lotus ponds or reassuring my son that his father would forgive him for stepping on a beetle.

  “I harmed a being!” he cried one foggy morning, bursting into our little room. In his open palm was the squashed black shield of the insect’s back. “I didn’t see him in the rain.”

  His look of terror shocked me. “Darling!” I said. “Everybody steps on beetles. What’s important is that you’re kind to your friends and to the servants
.”

  “No! Grandmother says that one of Papa’s most important rules is not to harm any beings, not even mosquitoes, or you’ll go to a hell realm.”

  “I’m sure you heard her wrong, dearest.” I could only hope so. I was not ready to think my husband’s spiritual victory amounted to a kind of madness. “Or maybe Pajapati doesn’t quite understand what your father means. Anyway, I’m sure your father loves you no matter what, and I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to be upset over this. And you’re definitely, definitely not going to anything approaching hell.”

  Rahula just stared down at his hand. “I caused harm to a being,” he said softly, and went back outside.

  What had Siddhartha become? I was trying not to think ill of him, even though he apparently wasn’t planning to contact me at all. I would have to meet him formally, accompanied by the rest of the family.

  Finally came the long-awaited lightning bolt, the announcement of my husband’s arrival. He’d scheduled it two days before that of the other guests, so he could meet with his immediate family. And now Rahula and I—along with Suddhodana, Pajapati, and their two teenage children—awaited Siddhartha in a stateroom adjoining the grand banquet hall. The stateroom had the effect of generating both light and darkness. Silver- and gold-striped tapestries partly occluded the paired arched windows that normally opened to a view of the morning hills, while on the inside wall a five-tier arrangement of thirty oil lamps flickered, reflecting the tapestries’ metallic fabric. Divans draped in red and purple lined the walls, but we were to stand to greet Siddhartha when he entered the room.

  As I stood in my yellow robe, with my hair drawn up in a bun, I tried to ignore my frivolous worries about how I looked, which swarmed in my mind like a plague of gnats on a battlefield. Physically, I’d changed little from the day my husband and I met; my figure remained slim, and I still had those fine-cut Sakyan features that didn’t require cosmetics to show them off. I gave my head a shake to clear it, which only returned me to my nervousness, which soon reached the point of wooziness. The smells of the impending banquet—the melange of fried chapatis and stewed vegetables—served only to increase my nausea. Suddhodana’s voice seemed to fade in and out of my mind as he described the logistics of our meeting. Rahula was clinging tightly to my hand.