Bride of the Buddha Read online

  Suddhodana strode to the center of the room and signalled to his seventeen-year-old son, Nanda. I noticed how my father-in-law had aged over the past seven years—his nearly white mustache, the sagging flesh along his neck, the tentativeness in his gait. His voice, though, remained deep and powerful. “We men will stand to greet him and escort him to his dais. Nanda will kneel briefly, and I will bow my head, as a father should not kneel before his son, and give my formal greeting. The women and children will then approach, kneeling before him. He will speak whatever words he wishes, perhaps a short discourse on his Dharma. Then, once I have asked my own questions, Nanda and then the women may ask theirs, if he so permits.”

  All at once my nervousness exploded into outrage. I was being shunted aside as part of a group, when I was the guest of honor’s wife! I was to grovel and kneel and ask questions only about whatever the great man felt like discussing, which I suspected wasn’t going to be the abandonment of his wife and child. Oh, yes, I’d told him to leave, but he could have at least apprised me on the stages of his journey.

  I walked to the center of the room and faced my father-in-law. I spoke loudly so all would hear, including Pajapati, who would transmit my message to Siddhartha if no one else would. “You may inform my husband that if he wishes to see me again in this lifetime, that he may meet me tomorrow in this room, where we will speak together alone.” Next, I addressed Suddhodana. “Please send a guard to accompany me tomorrow to ensure propriety is maintained.” I knew this was the only way he’d permit me to leave the women’s compound on my own.

  When Suddhodana hesitated, Pajapati spoke up. “Of course,” she said, driving her gaze into her husband. He nodded at me, then looked away.

  As gently as possible, I released Rahula’s hand. “My darling,” I said, “go to your father when he arrives and receive your inheritance.”

  Not looking at anyone, not even Rahula, I headed for the door.

  Hours later, Rahula burst into my room, the one I still shared with him, with its little alcove for his bed. “Ama!”

  It was already dark; I’d spent the day closed in here, sitting on my single cushion trying to meditate, not planning to leave until I returned to the stateroom to meet my husband—or not—the following morning. Rahula had spent the better part of the day with his father.

  “I’m going to become a monk!” He was laughing with excitement.

  I was jerked into alertness. “When you grow up, you can decide,” I said in a measured voice, my heart hammering. With trembling hands I lit the oil lamp on the little table beside me. My son’s small eager face wavered in the orange light.

  “No! Today!” Rahula somersaulted across the room, bumping into my sleeping pallet. “And guess what! I’m not going to a bad realm for stepping on the beetle. The Tathagata says that—”

  “Who?”

  “The Tathagata—that’s what I’m supposed to call Papa now! That’s because he’s both the one who has ‘thus gone’ and also ‘thus come’!” Rahula smiled proudly, happy for the ability to teach his mother.

  “Oh, so we’re supposed to worship him now?”

  A look of dismay flashed across my son’s face, only to be banished by laughter, as if he’d just gotten the joke. “No, he’s not a god! But he said I wouldn’t go to a lower realm for killing the beetle, because I didn’t intend to do it.”

  The room seemed to go still and the light became steady, if only for a moment. These days, many people talk about the importance of intention, but back then, motivation made no difference. Only action counted. It didn’t matter how you felt about it, the karma was the same. So said the priests. There was even a sect of holy men who wore veils over their faces to prevent inhaling insects, to avoid killing them by accident. According to them, the most holy life one could lead was to starve to death.

  Had my husband truly come upon something momentous? It seemed so simple, yet no one had thought about it before, that the rightness or wrongness of something depends on whether you intended to do it, your attitude toward it.

  I couldn’t let my personal resentment get in the way of seeing the truth.

  But for my son to leave me and take on a life of abstinence at seven years old! Even his grandparents couldn’t possibly approve of this.

  “That’s a very nice piece of wisdom,” I said, “but tell me, what does your grandpa think of you ordaining?”

  He looked away. “Please, please, tell him I can. Please!”

  For once, my father-in-law was on my side. “I’m sorry, Rahula, but you are absolutely forbidden to even consider ordaining as a monk until you’re at least eighteen.”

  Rahula burst into tears. “No! I want to be a monk now! I want to go with Papa! He has teachers for me and everything!” He threw himself against my bed, sobbing.

  This was totally uncharacteristic of him. I took him gently by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I’m meeting with your father tomorrow. I think you’re probably mistaken about exactly when you’re supposed to ordain. Your father will inform me what you’re to do. Meanwhile, it’s time for bed.”

  My son, clinging to the bedcover, gave me a dubious look. I kissed his hot, wet cheek. “Truly,” I said, “everything will work out fine.”

  By the time his breathing became regular, I had decided on my plan. If my husband didn’t deign to meet me the next day—or if he insisted on ordaining my son—I would take Rahula to my mother’s house, telling Suddhodana that the best way to prevent his son from stealing his grandson was to remove Rahula temporarily from the premises. At Ama’s I would prepare him and me for a life on the road, never to return here again. Hopefully, there were female seekers remaining.

  Tomorrow I would order Rahula to wait for me in our room, and I’d make sure the guards wouldn’t let him out until I got back. Fortunately, what with all the guests milling around, every door in the women’s compound was locked as well as guarded.

  Yes, I was resorting to lies and deception. But I wouldn’t let my life or the life of my son be stolen again.

  After a sleepless night, I called for the guard, who accompanied me to the stateroom. I pushed through the heavy door, struggling to breathe through my nervousness, dreading the long wait, which would probably come to nothing. Then I saw the man who had been my husband, a silent silhouette in the dawn light.

  He was seated on the dais, apparently meditating. He wore a simple monk’s robe and his head was shaved. He seemed so still it was hard to believe he had ever been anywhere but where he sat now. I stood just inside the door until I was sure my bones would hold me up. Was it really him?

  The room seemed chilly and cavernous, darker than the day before—not only because of the early hour but also because only two or three of the oil lamps were burning. I needed to see him better. Without saying anything, I rushed over to the eastern windows and pushed away the tapestry, letting in the predawn light and a wisp of breeze, dispelling the scent of the burning oil. Then I stood before him, a beating in my chest, as if my breath were struggling to escape. He opened his eyes. “Yasi,” he said, his voice more resonant than I remembered. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  I felt a profound connection, then immediate doubt. In spite of his shaved head, he was still physically beautiful in the way he’d always been, although older and thinner. Yet something about him was not-Siddhartha. I don’t mean to say the face before me was cynical or world-weary; on the contrary, it seemed to emanate a luminous kindness. Yet there was an impersonal quality to the expression in his clear eyes. With a shock I realized I wasn’t sure if he was human. Tathagata.

  “Are you some god wearing Siddhartha as a costume?” I asked. I, who had never given credence to divinity, was now fighting the kind of terror more suited to holy crazies and mumbling old priests.

  He shook his head. “I’ve awakened from the dream that we take for life. That’s what I’ve come back to tell you.”


  I closed my eyes and called my familiar emotions back, especially righteous anger. I placed firmly in my mind the vacillating and evasive man my husband had become during my pregnancy. “Why were you gone for so long?” I demanded. “For all these years, you didn’t even let me know where you were.”

  “It’s what I had to do.” He spoke softly and deliberately, forming the silence that surrounded him. “The loneliness, the feeling that all was lost. As you yourself said, one of my most important teachers would be my own solitude. I had to go into that as deeply as I could.”

  “You make me sound like a spiritual exercise.”

  “I ask your forgiveness for any suffering I caused you.”

  “And when you returned? You’ve been back for months. You could have sent a message.”

  “But I did. You didn’t receive it?”

  Jagdish. My brother could very well have intercepted it.

  Yet I wasn’t sure I believed Siddhartha.

  “I never received any word from you at all,” I said. “Someone must have stopped it from reaching me.”

  “Then for that, also, I ask your forgiveness,” he said. “Please believe me that I intended to meet with you long before now.”

  “Never mind,” I snapped. I doubted that there was any way, at least not right now, he could prove whether he’d actually sent a message. “Just tell me this. Do you remember what you originally promised me? I want to know what happened to my sister’s soul.”

  His compassionate expression remained unchanged. “I’m so sorry, Yasi, but all I teach is how to penetrate the true nature of suffering and, in that way, end it.”

  I clutched my elbows. “I don’t care if I suffer. All I want is my sister. You promised!” My rage had taken on a new aspect, one of a child denied her childish dream.

  My husband—my former husband—remained completely calm, but now with the kind of sympathy you show a child. “First, you need to tell me what you mean by her soul. Is it some image you have of her?”

  “No, of course not.” His question made me uncomfortable. All my thoughts of Deepa’s soul included some picture in my memory. “It’s not an image,” I insisted. “It’s her essence.”

  “But what’s an essence? Wasn’t her body, now the dust of dogs’ bones, part of that essence?”

  “I’m talking about her mind.”

  “Her thoughts? Which come and go? Which thoughts are truly hers? Which thoughts are her?”

  I had no idea of Deepa’s true nature. “Stop playing games with me! Her soul is her eternal consciousness!”

  “And where could that consciousness be? One can’t be conscious without being conscious of something, and the something that determines consciousness is always changing. And how is her consciousness different from everybody else’s?”

  “Are you saying my sister has no soul? That nobody has a self? That we’re all nothing?” I stared at the man who had turned into my husband’s ghost. “Is that why you threw our lives away? To learn that?”

  My grief for those sun-washed times of my early marriage, which over the past few years I hadn’t wanted to admit to, much less feel, now shook me to the core. “We were happy,” I said, a knot tightening in my throat. “We had everything.”

  He looked into my eyes, his compassion just this side of sadness, yet his clarity was unnerving. “‘Everything’ never lasts,” he said. “Even back then, with all our wealth and our projects, we were trying to escape that fact. In fact, almost all of our actions were for that very purpose. You know that. You once knew it better than I.”

  Something black and fearful opened up beneath me. “So it’s true. My sister’s soul—or mine, for that matter—doesn’t exist. We die and that’s that. Nothing matters at all.”

  He shook his head. “I’m just saying that the self can’t be found in any of the places you can think to look. That you need to change the nature of your spiritual search.”

  I was having trouble keeping my focus, both visual and mental. I remembered what Pajapati had said of the Tathagata’s teachings about craving and clinging as the cause of suffering, then what Rahula had said yesterday about the importance of intention when it came to good and evil. This man seated in front of me had to have awakened to some deep knowledge, which enabled him to have these revelations.

  And perhaps he truly had tried to send a message to me, after all. Perhaps he really had wanted to see me.

  “If I can’t search for Deepa’s soul, what do I search for?”

  “The way things truly are. That’s what’s uncovered when we stop clutching at unreality.”

  The thought that a ground of truth existed comforted me. “How can I learn this?”

  “You could start by coming to the talks I’m giving over the next couple of weeks. I’ll make sure Suddhodana lets you attend.”

  “No, that’s not enough! I’ve already been meditating. I want to learn all your practices.”

  “I’ll explain some of them in the talks.”

  “No!” A sudden hope—the first I’d felt in a very long time—spiraled upward inside me. I now understood Rahula’s urgency. “I want to join your order. And devote my life to the Dharma.” I smiled into his clear eyes. “We can raise our son together.”

  My former husband’s shoulders dropped, and I had the strange feeling that his body, which the Tathagata now occupied, was reacting out of its own memory of the past. He spoke softly. “Yasi, that’s impossible.”

  “What do you mean? Surely you can talk Suddhodana into allowing me! Pajapati can help.”

  He shook his head. “Women can’t join the order.”

  A new darkness fell over me, as if someone had slammed shut every door and window in the room. “Can’t join? But all I’ve heard is that your Dharma is for everyone! That any member of any varna is welcome to ordain! And yet women can’t?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? You’ve betrayed me! You went off on the journey that you stole from me and left me to a life of triviality! I waited for you, brought up our son, endured the arrogance of your male relatives, and now I can’t even reap the benefits of what you’ve gained, except as crumbs tossed out every couple of years when you happen to be in the area. You’ve not only betrayed me, you’ve betrayed who you once were—someone who kept his promises.”

  His voice remained soft. “It’s true,” he said. “Siddhartha would have allowed it. But now I am one with the Dharma. With the eyes of Dharma I see that our society will never accept my teaching if women are allowed to live and travel with men in such a way. We’re attempting something that’s never been done before, gathering a Sangha, a community that will awaken on its own without priests or sacrifices but by its adherents banishing their own ignorance. The priests and the Brahmins will try to stop us in every way possible. The presence of women would give them a weapon to discredit us to the point of destruction.”

  I had the momentary thought that here was not any Tathagata or my former husband, but Mara himself, delighting in his clever excuses to exclude women—and me, in particular—from the truth.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “You’re not omniscient. You may have the eyes of Dharma, but they are in a human body. You’ve chosen to risk admitting pig farmers and vulture catchers, but women are to remain trapped in suffering. Because you see them as a ‘weapon.’”

  Through the windows, the sun had risen, backlighting him and concealing him in shadows. I stared at the spot where his face should have been. “You have nothing to teach me,” I said. “And I won’t let you take my child.”

  The blankness spoke. “You need to let him choose, Yasi. Suddhodana will train him as a warrior—is that what you want? And I’m his father.”

  “You’re not his father,” I said. I turned to leave. “You are the Tathagata, the one ‘thus gone.’”

  I reali
ze how different my version of this event is from the one that later became popular, even though it was never acknowledged by the official Sangha. In the popular rendition, the Tathagata graciously came into my presence after I proved by my virtue to be worthy of this honor. The Blessed One then praised my patience and sacrifice, and I entered into a life of serving him and eventually attained liberation.

  I’m touched by these efforts to restore my reputation, if only they were true! Although I’m just as glad for the falsity of some rumors, especially the one that I recently died. I can’t die yet. I still have certain tasks to perform.

  I returned to my room through the dining hall, where I hoped to encounter Suddhodana to inform him of my plan to take Rahula to my mother’s—although I’d omit my subsequent plan for my son and me to go forth as spiritual seekers. The men were just sitting down to eat, the room rumbling and buzzing with more than the usual plans and boasts. Everyone seemed to be discussing the Dharma and its ramifications on the life of the Sakyans. To my mild surprise, I noticed two or three shaven heads in the crowd. Were these cousins planning to join the Order? Well, they can have it, I thought grimly, as I scanned the room for my father-in-law. Instead, I glimpsed my brother coming toward me. I ducked away. Although I imagined that all this celebration of Suddhodana’s son was not to his liking and though his mood was probably as bleak as mine, he was the last person I wanted to talk to.

  Too late. He’d seen me, and I was shocked by the smile on his face. “Good morning, Yasi,” he said. “I suppose you’ve heard the news.”

  I shook my head, trying to look around him for my father-in-law.