Bride of the Buddha Page 13

Unless she was a vengeful old hag who delighted in tormenting the Sakyans who’d sold her to be killed.

  “We’ll have breakfast first,” Stick Woman said as Bahauk disappeared into the forest, filling me with both disappointment and relief. “Dried rabbit and water.”

  I thought about offering up the last of my apricots, but I didn’t. I rationalized that hauling buckets was enough recompense, and I’d need the nourishment myself, especially considering the trek I faced. I munched on a rabbit haunch, which splintered in my mouth. No wonder Stick Woman was so skinny.

  After this all too brief meal, Stick Woman started off through a forest of scrub trees and I followed. On three sides of us, green ridges fell away into blue distances. Over the ridge on the fourth side, the sun was rising steadily, dazzling through twigs and leaves and directly into my eyes. I tried not to take the sun’s behavior as a personal attack.

  The old woman turned around and peered at me, as if I weren’t supposed to be following her.

  “You said you’d show me where you lived,” I said.

  “Where I sleep. I live everywhere.”

  I found this spiritual-sounding statement heartening. I’d begun fearing she wasn’t the teacher Ama had told me about, the one who traveled in the unknown. “What do you mean?” I asked, in the tone of a respectful student.

  “Everyone lives everywhere, even you.”

  “You mean because we’re all facets of the Atman?”

  By now we’d reached her hut, which was little more than a straw shelter, barely high enough to stand in. “You’re thinking too much about atmans,” she said. “And not enough about water.” She pushed aside a faded blue rag of a curtain and disappeared. “Wait here,” she said. In the space of a breath or two she emerged with two wooden buckets attached by ropes to a wooden yoke. “Here you are,” she said. “You saw the trail from back at the fire. You should be able to make it to the river by mid-morning and be back by noon.”

  I heaved the contraption on my shoulders. It felt heavy even without water, and the yoke dug into my flesh; I could already feel the grooves forming, the tender skin of my shoulders flaking away. “How can I defend myself, alone on the trail?” I tried to make this sound like a reasonable query and not a whine.

  “You can’t, so you might as well not worry about it.”

  I stared at her. “Is this kind of test really necessary? Isn’t there another way I can learn what I need to know?”

  “You want to seek out the spirit. To do so, you may have to lose your body. Or at least take the risk.” She looked at me with those black, crinkly eyes. In the morning sun, her creased skin looked varnished. “Do you think you can pay for wisdom with a couple of bangles?”

  “I thought you could teach me meditation techniques. Which could include austerities,” I added.

  “Why waste my time when I need the water? Of course, had you offered up your apricots, I might have considered them as payment, but it’s too late now. You’d better start. It’s getting hotter with every heartbeat.”

  I felt small and selfish, then resentful. They were my apricots, after all, and she must have discovered them by snooping around my bag while I was sleeping. No matter, she’d shamed me, making me fear that a life of deprivation could reveal my true self as petty and spoiled, unworthy of my son. I started walking, telling myself that this chore was part of a benevolent plan to train me in patience and humility.

  The trail started out rocky and dusty, the brush coming up only to my waist and offering no protection from the sun, heating up more and more as the air thickened with buzzing black flies that landed on my arms and the back of my neck and crawled up my legs and under my yellow robes, already sodden with sweat and rapidly turning the color of dust. My sandals, the kind worn by all the members of Suddhodana’s female household for those rare occasions they needed foot protection, were deteriorating even more rapidly than my bleeding feet, still sore from yesterday. By the first switchback, stinging blisters competed with the heat, insects, and shoulder pain to dominate my awareness and blot out all thoughts of humility and patience. It didn’t help that I stumbled every ten or so steps as I taught myself to balance the yoke.

  Self-pity, which I thought I’d overcome after losing my husband, welled up in me. I swallowed it and swallowed it again as I staggered onward for what seemed like the whole morning, even though the sun was still staring mercilessly into my eyes. I tried to find things to be grateful for. Well, I’d yet to encounter signs of predatory animals or humans—or any humans, for that matter. Also, the flies, although tracking dung and decay-slime all over my body, didn’t bite, and the trail was too dry for mosquitoes. Or so I thought until it dipped into a boggy grove where thousands were waiting, the atmosphere threaded with their high-pitched whines. I was soon seared with itching welts and sobbing with misery—who cared if I displayed my weakness? There was nobody here to judge me but myself. No Rahula to be upset by his mother’s lack of self-control. The thought of my son made me sob all the more. By now I hardly cared if a tiger or a pack of wild dogs jumped me and ended my suffering, at least in the worldly realm. Surely, a hell realm wouldn’t be worse.

  Then, all at once, I entered a cool grove of huge sal trees, liquid birdsong, and the distant rush of water. I breathed in a smell of fresh greenery. I was almost at the river. I tried to focus on patience and humility.

  The trees became smaller and closer together and the trail narrowed, forcing me to shove my way through underbrush of sharp green leaves and even sharper twigs. But the river roar was mounting, drowning out the birds and insects, filling me with hope and the anticipation of soothing water cascading over my seared and aching body. I caught a glimpse of dazzle between the trees. I pushed forward and finally stopped at the water’s edge, my heart pummeling. From where I stood, the green river was an immense shining serpent, sliding and heaving its unfathomable weight of water past me at a terrifying speed. Forget any gentle immersion into a refreshing bath; even if I knew how to swim, the current would hurl me downstream and over the falls thundering just around the bend. I glanced down at my feet, planted on a margin of mud the width of a hand span. I hardly had room to move, let alone take off the yoke and fill my buckets. Legs quivering with exhaustion, I leaned out over the water to get a sense of its depth.

  The next thing I knew I was somersaulting through green translucence and pounding cold, the river booming in my ears and blocking my breath. I was plunged into shock, followed by total terror.

  I was surely dead. I’d never see my son again.

  Suddenly, I flew into white sunlight, slamming down on my back, then rolling over and over on rough sand. Choking and gasping, I heaved myself to my knees, terror still hammering inside me. What if I could never catch my breath? I coughed out globs of phlegm, gasped some more, and my mind came back to me.

  That old woman had tried to murder me.

  Of course! She wanted revenge on the Sakyans. She’d set me on this trail, knowing how dangerous it was, figuring I’d probably fall in the river and die. What I had taken for a holy woman was nothing but a gristly husk of cruelty and spite.

  Meet the god of death, indeed.

  But when I stood up, I noticed that the bushes parted to reveal a trail leading to this far safer bank than the one I’d fallen from. I couldn’t exactly blame Stick Woman for my wrong turn. Still, the trail was dangerous, and I’d almost drowned.

  By now it was almost noon. I was hungry, but when I reached for my sash I discovered the water had taken my apricots.

  No, I told myself, I couldn’t blame Stick Woman for this, much as I wanted to.

  The trudge back up the ridge was worse than the way down, with the steep upward slope, my back bruises from the sand bar, the added weight of water on my back, and the ongoing dread that I’d spill it and have to return to the river. My consolation was that the numbness of exhaustion dulled my pains, mental as well as
physical. At times, I marched in a trance, counting my steps. But I couldn’t bear the prospect of making this trek again.

  It must have been mid-afternoon when I staggered up to the fire circle. The fire was dead, and Stick Woman was squatting at its rim, doing nothing. “I thought you’d get here earlier,” she said, pushing herself up between the brown garlic bulbs of her skinny knees and rising to her feet.

  Panting, legs jittering, I put down the yoke and my shoulders flew to the heavens. Waves of release shuddered through me.

  Stick Woman unhooked one of the buckets. To my horror, she lifted it up and tossed its water into the bushes. “Some spirits need appeasement,” she said.

  If only I could fling myself on top of this scraggly hell-being and pummel her ten fathoms into the earth! But I told myself that such a flagrant act as tossing away the water confirmed that this all was a test.

  Stick woman eyed me. “You’d better do some meditating while you have the chance,” she said. “It’s too late for you to make another trip.”

  “Another…? I couldn’t breathe.

  “From now on, you’ll be making two trips a day.”

  From now on? My jaw dropped.

  She didn’t change her expression. “You can always go home. You know the trail. I’ll make sure the wolves protect you on your way down.”

  “I haven’t seen a wolf yet,” I said out of a defiance that didn’t even make sense.

  “Lucky you haven’t, considering you don’t believe in their god.”

  Or hers, I thought. But I still wasn’t ready to give up on her. Except for Stick Woman, I had no way to achieve the kind of transformation that would allow me to return to my son as a teacher in my own right. I’d have to return to Ama’s and live as a cast-off wife, an object of Ama’s pity and my father’s contempt, tending the altars of gods I couldn’t believe in. But something else kept me here. Stick Woman had been right when she said I wanted to show my former husband up. Or at least not fail where he’d succeeded. If he could endure trials, so could I. “Where should I meditate?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. Out of sight somewhere. Pick a tree and go sit under it.” Stick Woman sat down at the dead fire and resumed staring into space.

  For the next two weeks, this torture continued, with me still sleeping by the fire and hoping it wouldn’t rain. I alternated between fury at Stick Woman’s cruelty and determination to pass her tests, even if the only result was to show her she couldn’t break me. Then one afternoon, after a midday rain that turned the trail up the ridge into a treacherous gray slick—where I had slipped and fallen a third of the way up and spilled the water, requiring a trip back down to the river—I reached what had to be my final conclusion concerning Stick Woman’s intentions. She had dedicated her life to avenging herself against all Sakyans. By now I had ample evidence. First off, she wasn’t depending on me to supply water; she usually threw away most of what I brought up, and she’d kept Bahauk away from me after he’d offered to help me. And all this time she’d given me no advice about meditation or any other spiritual discipline. Then something else occurred to me: the reason why her reputation as a healer had spread among the Sakyans was that she had fostered the rumors herself in order to lure in gullible Sakyans to torture. How could I have been so stupid as to have been taken in?

  The late afternoon sun was breaking through the sludge of rain clouds when I heaved my exhausted body to the top of the trail. There sat Stick Woman, diddling by the fire as usual.

  I threw down the buckets and charged toward her, picturing my hands around her throat. “You deceived me!”

  Then, in a blinding silver flash, I was confronted by the god of death.

  It had the most horrific face I’d ever seen—not so much the shape of the features but the ugliness of rage yanking down the lower lip and wrinkling the upper one, exposing a row of savage teeth, the slick red-brown face one huge deformity of malice. Worse than the rage was the arrogance in its big eyes, whose uncompromising glare blocked all possibility that light might penetrate it. It was a face that killed off all hope that any world existed beyond the one it reflected.

  I jolted to a halt, but Mara kept coming to destroy me.

  Then Mara disappeared, and I was facing Stick Woman. She held a silver mirror, twice the size of the one my mother had forced me to look into so many years before. Mara’s face was mine. I’d worn it against everyone I blamed for my misery.

  Yes, I’d been wronged but all the while dressed in finespun clothes, waited on by servants, and fed the choicest delicacies. I wore the face when I’d cursed Stick Woman, refused her my apricots, and dismissed Bahauk as a primitive savage. It was the mask of beauty twisted into self-righteousness, far worse than mere ugliness, for it condemmed everyone, including me. My acts of blaming had closed off all chance of knowing the truth.

  “You don’t have to be the god of death,” Stick Woman said calmly. “You just had to meet Him.”

  “Him?”

  “Him, Her, It. Doesn’t matter. Let it be.”

  I stared at her, the earth swaying under my feet. I felt the same way as when I’d almost drowned in the river, only this time I’d fallen out of the world altogether and into death’s endless domain. Now I was back—or was I? “Where did you get that mirror?” I asked, my heart numb, my head still clogged with my earlier conclusions. A question formed on its own: Had she stolen this mirror from the Sakyans?

  Stick Woman peered into my eyes as if scouring them out. “You don’t have to keep grabbing onto those thoughts. Just let them fly away.” She raised her skinny arms, flapping them. “Off with you, now! Shoo!”

  I blinked, cast into a remarkable clarity, as if she’d wiped clean the atmosphere I’d been living in, one dulled by swarms of demons. I looked up at the late-afternoon, sunlit clouds spreading out their glossy plumage, filling an azure sky with splendor. The scrub trees beyond startled me with their delicacy and grace. I also noticed that someone had built me a small sleeping shelter, similar to Stick Woman’s, not far from the fire.

  “I know why I had to see Mara for myself,” I said. “The god of death, inside and outside and both and neither. I know now that I need to change the nature of my quest.”

  Stick Woman brushed off her boney shoulders. “Don’t think you’re done hauling buckets.”

  So began my stay with Stick Woman. I still had to carry water from the river, but only once a day. And the trip seemed easier. Not only was I growing stronger, but the flies and mosquitoes by and large left me alone. When I mentioned this to Stick Woman, she said she’d asked them not to bother me, the way she’d done with larger animals already.

  “You talk to insects?” I asked, while we were sitting at the fire circle late one day. The crust of cold ashes blended with the gray earth under whorls of pink sunset clouds.

  “I visit the spirits, insects included.”

  “I thought only evil people were reborn as bugs.”

  “In your Sakyan world, perhaps. Here, the spirit is shared in the very air we breathe. You need to see yourself this way.” She gave me a wicked smile. “You’ve already seen that Mara lives all over the place. So do you.”

  “Unlike Mara, I’m stuck in a body.”

  “You’re not stuck in a body. You’re stuck in your thoughts.” She raised her hand and gestured out over the successions of ridges, fading from black to pale gray in the mist. “Look at things and listen to them,” she said. “Don’t just think them.”

  To this end, she had Bahauk take me to sacred sites where I could learn the languages of animals, trees, and rocks. At least these were things to hear and look at, unlike the invisible gods and spirits back home who lived in a hierarchy of heavens and visited mainly the priests. At times I almost understood what Stick Woman was getting at—feeling the jagged cry of an eagle in my throat or sharpening my gaze in the glittering eyes of a sand fox, I was loo
king and listening from their points of view, which could only enter me when my own viewpoint, no longer shored up by thoughts, fell away.

  Not thinking was also the key to being with Bahauk, but for a different reason.

  Although he’d never spoken of marriage after that one time, his eyes seemed to quicken every time he looked at me. More disturbing, I felt a quickening inside me. He had that kind, broad face, eager to see the best in everything, and his muscles rippled and his rich brown skin flashed in the sunshine when he heaved my buckets on his shoulders, which he was now allowed to do at times. He seemed happy to teach me and answer my questions, although some of his answers upset me, especially when he spoke of sacrifice. Every year, he explained, the Sun—angry that the Earth Mother had stolen some of his light for her children—demanded a sacrifice or he would refuse to let her soothe his burning rage with the monsoon. Bahauk’s tribe had once had to sacrifice their own children, but Stick Woman had convinced the elders to replace the child with a white goat.

  I confronted her about this. She was sitting by the fire, grinding up turmeric and mixing it with soapy water, which turned the spice a brilliant scarlet; she was planning to give it to a sick little girl later in the day. What I’d used as a simple cosmetic she made into a medicine whose sacred fiery color supposedly helped restore balance between the little girl and the rest of the universe. “Bahauk has a point,” she said. “One way or another, sacrifice is the only way to save the world.”

  “I can’t believe that.” I tried not to say this in a righteous way.

  Stick Woman went back to squeezing the ground-up spice into the water. “You will. As long as you cling to your world, you’ll sacrifice your dearest possessions to save it.”

  I thought of Rahula. “No,” I said, and all of a sudden I wanted to cry. “I refuse to believe that sacrifice is the only choice.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand the world.” A red foam rose in the bowl as the speed of her hands increased. “But one day you will.”