Bride of the Buddha Read online

  No matter, I told myself. This would be my spiritual practice. Learning to master this fear, as well as the other unpleasant emotions that love entailed, such as the jealousy that sometimes seized me at the thought of Bahauk in the arms of some black-eyed Gorge tribe girl. Or the faint sadness I felt when drinking the spirit tea again failed to yield any more mystical experiences beyond lovely blendings of sounds and color. At least we could always repeat sex (eventually, as we’d vowed to abstain until after I’d made my journey), although I knew from my marriage that repetition could make the craving worse or else wear it down to a disappointed emptiness, such as had happened on Siddhartha’s part. But the key was appreciating the precious moments, no matter what they were. Because although the preciousness of the moments made fear worse, so fear made the moments more precious.

  By now I was actively preparing for my journey. Stick Woman assisted me, although in a wooden way, as if going through the motions. Still, she’d given me a bolt of white cloth, bartered from traders some years back, so I could travel as a spiritual seeker. She also handed me a half-dozen packets of herbs, for myself or others, for healing or bribery. I thanked her.

  “I hope you have reason to,” she said. We were standing in the rocky overhang shelter we’d slept in since the beginning of the monsoon. “Your monk husband—what does he call himself, the Tathagata?—might have had more to teach you.”

  “He teaches how to end suffering,” I said, folding the herb packets into a rag. “But I don’t need to be happy all the time.”

  Then one cloudy morning, the Sakyans attacked.

  Later, I learned it was my brother who engineered the invasion, raiding the tribe’s sacred grove of sal trees for lumber. I awoke just before dawn to male shouting in the distance. Across from me, for we had separate straw beds, Bahauk leapt to his feet, and before I knew it, he was pounding down the trail, disappearing into the remains of the night.

  I kicked aside deerskins, jerking myself into my clothes, the air under the rocky outcropping still dank and smoky. Stick Woman was standing in front of me, holding her wolf head. “You stay here. Only here can I guarantee your safety.”

  “Let me come with you.”

  “No. You’d endanger not only yourself but also Bahauk and possibly me.”

  She was right, of course. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You can wait,” she said, “and pray to something or other.”

  Then she, too, was gone.

  I closed my eyes to meditate, in hopes of clearing my mind enough to be of eventual use. Dawn must have come and gone; I opened my eyes to stony daylight. A hell-being was standing over me.

  A bow and arrows were strapped across its flame-red chest, a knife tied to its waist. But far worse was its face, crowned by a conflagration of oiled black hair and striped with vermillion across the cheeks and forehead, the blood-hued diagonals repudiating every emotion except rage.

  The wrathful being spoke. “The Sakyans have murdered the daughters of the Sun.”

  The voice belonged to Bahauk. As did the chest and arms I’d held against my flesh, the broad brow and cheekbones I had smoothed and caressed. With a jolt, I remembered how I’d once mistaken Siddhartha for a demon. It was happening again. I stared at Bahauk’s face, desperate to find him behind the war paint. His warrior’s eyes were narrowed, as if my brother’s violent soul had taken the place of my lover’s.

  I understood what he was saying. Bahuak’s people believed that the firstborn child of the Earth and the Sun was the ancient sal tree that grew in the center of their sacred grove. The sal trees formed a crucial link between heaven and earth, and the village had been entrusted from time immemorial to protect them. If anything happened to the trees, the bond between gods and humans would break, unless the village could make amends.

  “Are you here to kill me?” My horror at his transformation was greater than any fear for my Sakyan life.

  “Yasi, no. You’re not a Sakyan anymore. But the Sun must be avenged.”

  “You can’t!” I pleaded. “The Sakyans have horses and elephants. Their warriors outnumber you by hundreds.”

  “You would have me betray God?”

  “What good would it do any of your gods, your dying in some Sakyan cow pasture?” I didn’t dare say, “There are other sal trees,” because his language had no equivalent for one sacred object replacing another and he wouldn’t understand what I meant.

  “If we have to die, we will. To condone this crime would be worse.”

  “I can’t bear the thought of you dying. I love you.” Even as I spoke them, the words seemed limp and pastel and my love trivial and selfish compared to his loyalty to his people.

  Yet my words seemed to give him pause. “How could you love anyone who betrayed his God?”

  “I love your true self, your soul. Your refusal to go out on a raid wouldn’t change it.” I reached out and touched the demon-painted cheek, perhaps to prove to myself I could do it, to prove that this manifestation of Mara had nothing to do with his soul.

  Bahauk’s fierce stance softened. “Yasi, my soul belongs to you. But without my people and without my gods it’s nothing.” And now a younger face emerged behind that of the warrior, a boy’s face, with a boy’s needs. “If I don’t do this, I lose all hope that my kinsmen will ever accept me.”

  “What about you and me in the spirit world? Does that not mean anything to you now?” I, too, sounded younger, even to myself, my arguments collapsing into a simple need for love.

  “Unless we avenge the Sun, he’ll destroy the spirit world and cast my people into darkness.”

  “I can’t believe that. The sun will go on shining.”

  He touched his painted chest. “Not here,” he said. “Your sun is different from mine.”

  It was then I realized that I’d misunderstood Bahauk when he called our experience in the palm grove a marriage. I’d thought he shared my assumption that our sense of mystical oneness had made our differences of language and belief irrelevant, but he’d meant a far simpler, emotional coupling. And now I began to doubt my own interpretation of the event. Although I’d clearly felt an eternal union with Bauhuk and all of existence, I also remembered disappearing into many selves and then into no self at all, implications that I’d chosen not to think about. Perhaps I’d used my mystical experience to hide from death, all the while thinking I was facing it.

  He placed his hands on my shoulders, and even now his touch was a comfort. “Please give me your blessing,” he said. “If I do this, the Gorge people might accept you as well. We still may have a chance. Perhaps the Sakyans will respect our revenge.”

  Whoever respected a revenge taken on them? But I knew he wouldn’t hear this reply. He needed to hope. “Don’t kill people,” I said. “Burn their shrines. Maybe then they might understand.” Or at least they might not be motivated to go to extremes in retaliation. Also, I admitted to myself, I did not want to be the lover, let alone the wife, of a killer.

  What did this say about his eternal soul? Or mine?

  “For you, I’ll try not to kill,” he said. “But I cannot guarantee what others will do.”

  Once again, he ran off, not waiting for my blessing.

  Stick Woman didn’t return for three days. I didn’t eat, I could barely make myself drink water from the cistern. When she finally arrived, it was past midnight in the dull light of the waning half-moon, the wayward lover/sister of the sun, according to the Gorge people. I hadn’t dared light a fire.

  She lifted off the wolf head, and in the weak light of the moon I saw her face, gaunt and wrinkled, and somehow ordinary, as though it could belong to anyone, including me in some possible future—a grief-stricken widow whose life had turned to ash.

  It was then I knew Bahauk was dead.

  “Only three men survived,” she said. “The survivors fed the bodies of the others to t
he sun.”

  “That’s impossible! I want to see him!” I said, once again a child in the charnel ground, desperate to believe what I knew could never be true.

  She had a fist-sized cloth bag around her neck. She took it off and emptied its handful of ashes into the dead fire. “This is all that’s left.”

  Sobbing, I threw myself on the ashes, smearing them over my face and arms. This time I wouldn’t leave the person I loved alone, I would not let the dogs get this last remnant of him.

  “You have to get out of here,” she said, her voice kind but firm. “I can protect you for only so long.”

  My grief had just begun. “I don’t want to leave you,” I said. The only thing I could see for my life was dedicating myself to her people, mindlessly gathering and grinding herbs and medicines to make up for what my people had done. Even the prospect of seeing Rahula failed to move me. In my despair, I saw my desire to be with my son as selfish. He had made his choice, and my presence—especially in my current state—would only upset him.

  “Your destiny is not with us,” she said, keeping her eyes on the dead fire. “It’s time you thought about giving up the world.” She glanced at my ash-smeared arms. “What happened to Bahauk and the others is part of the world, not an aberration. Love is followed by death, now or later.”

  A truth I’d thought I’d known. But all this time, I’d nourished the secret hope that love and death were separate.

  Stick Woman studied me, the normally sharp wrinkles around her eyes sagging as if swollen with tears of her own. “It’s time to forgive your former husband—for leaving you and for the pain that made him do it.”

  Something huge and heavy shifted in my heart, then broke open. The full image of Siddhartha’s face the day I fainted arose in my mind’s eye. What I’d seen as merely horror at my appearance was his realization of ultimate and inevitable loss. “He did love me, after all,” I whispered.

  Stick Woman continued to watch me closely. “You need to seek him out.”

  I wiped my eyes with my wrist and looked out over the hills, black cutouts under the half-moon, knowing that she spoke the truth. “But what about you?” I asked Stick Woman. “Now that Bahuak is gone, who will help you?” My voice broke. I knew how much Bahauk had done.

  She gave a snort, “You think these things matter to me? I was sacrificed. My life ended when I was a child.”

  “But you’re still alive. You still help people.”

  She shook her head. “Think of me only in terms of yourself. For you, I’m an agent of the Tathagata.” The sly sparkle returned to her eyes, and I had the uncanny feeling that this whole time she’d simply mirrored me and my needs with no interference from a self with desires of its own. “Your destiny with him needed preparation,” she added.

  I looked down at the mess of ashes and soil. Once again I would be leaving the dead behind. I bent over and more tears came.

  I felt her hand on my back. “Bahauk chose his own destiny. He will be married to you forever in the spirit world.”

  I shook my head. “The spirit world is empty,” I said.

  “Well, yes, but that’s not the end of the discussion. You’ll figure all of this out after you spend some time with the Tathagata.”

  I’d hoped to wait for daylight, but I had barely lain down in my skins when the night noises, which I hadn’t even noticed, stopped with an abruptness that jolted me awake. Stick Woman was standing over me. I scrambled to my feet. She shoved the robes and the herb packets, already bound in a cloth, into my arms. In the moonlight, she looked like a varnished effigy, her cheekbones thrusting out from her face, her eyes blank.

  “Go now,” she said. “If you stay, you jeopardize my life and yours.”

  As quickly as I could, I wrapped the bundle in a sling. I didn’t even have time to change into the robes. “The villagers hate me that much, that they would kill you as well?”

  “These aren’t Gorge people. It’s the Sakyans.”

  My heart froze. “They’re going to raid the village after all.”

  Stick Woman was pushing me in the direction of the lesser known trail to the overhang. “I’ll stop them.”

  I whipped around to face her. “You plan to sacrifice yourself. I won’t let you.”

  “Didn’t you hear anything I told you? I’ve already been sacrificed. Now leave, or they’ll either kill me or kill us both, after raping you. Without you here, there’s a chance I can talk them out of it. But not with a Sakyan traitor woman to rile them up. Now go!” She gave me one last shove.

  The trail tunneled through the barely moonlit trees. I stumbled forward, looking back only once, and I saw nothing but the corridor through the black trees leading into the dark. I half-walked, half-ran, the damp forest smells rising to meet me, the echoing crickets resuming. Then all at once they went silent again. I halted, my heart jammed in my throat, listening for warriors’ footsteps nearby or cries in the distance, but there was nothing. I started up again, aware of rustling in the underbrush on both sides of me. I looked around and saw what I’d never seen before in these hills: wolves. They were dim shapes, little more than shadows, perhaps a half dozen of them. Somehow I wasn’t afraid, and with them near, any warriors who had found this path would soon abandon it. I kept going, and after a time the wolves disappeared.

  As I reached the banyan forest, I heard them in the distance. Their cries rose into the night and echoed down the canyons, shrieks to tear the moon and stars from the sky.

  8

  I followed the common roads to my parents’ house; Ama was the only person I could trust to tell me the truth of my brother’s role in the Sakyan raid. Beyond the jungle, the fields were a full-fledged green, cinnamon-colored cows grazing peacefully, white cattle egrets foraging in the lime-colored grass and flying overhead, the smell of hay and mint hovering in the sunshine. The beauty of the post-summer season only made my grief bleaker, like a burned-up forest, desiccated and charred black. I’d exhausted all my tears. My life had once again pared down to coming to terms with the soul. My year with Stick Women had revealed facets of the truth, but every facet reflected new depths of an ignorance I hadn’t known I’d possessed—and which she implied could be dispelled only by the Tathagata. There had to be some way, I told myself, to persuade him to take on women students.

  On the way to Ama’s, I slept in fields and begged for scraps at kitchen doors of the big teak and sal wood houses of prosperous kinsmen, not revealing who I was. Although I spoke little and in low tones, I never denied I was a woman, but everyone presumed I was a man. I wasn’t surprised. I was far thinner than a year earlier, and I had knotty muscles in my calves and ropy muscles in my arms. My robes disguised what few curves I had left; my hair was twisted up in a beggar’s knot, my skin a deep mahogany from the sun, my face and hands scratched and dirty. For reasons of safety, I was glad my femininity was not recognized. But I assumed my father would know me.

  I reached the house of my childhood around midday. The addition I’d seen under construction the year before was now complete, a rambling structure that seemed to enclose a courtyard, making me fear that my father now confined my mother in a woman’s compound not unlike Suddhodana’s. At least the area around the kitchen door, where I’d spent long seasons with Deepa and the holy men, remained the same, a patch of packed dirt in front of a door half-opened to the dark, busy kitchen. I approached slowly.

  A middle-aged man in a brown paridhana was striding toward me through flickering shade of the nearby mango grove. With a mild shock, I recognized my father.

  As always, the sight of Suppabuddha scrambled my emotions into a confused mix of fear, guilt, and anger, along with a kind of shamed love that I immediately swallowed. Respectfully, I put my hands together and bowed from the waist. “Father,” I said. “I’ve come to visit.”

  My father peered into my eyes. “Young man, is that your new religion?
That you address your elders as father? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “You don’t recognize me?” I was more incredulous than hurt. I’d spoken in my normal voice and he’d looked deeply into my face, and yet he saw only some anonymous beggar, not even female.

  “Of course I recognize you. Like all men, you are a broken-off shard of the First Man, seeking out reunion with the eternal Soul,” he said. “But I have no time to converse with you today.” He nodded toward the kitchen door in the dismissive manner that he’d always had with holy seekers who struck him as lacking in power and influence. “Our servants will provide you with some repast.”

  Now I did feel like a hurt child, as I had years ago when my father ignored me, even when I tried to talk to him about holy matters. I prepared to plead with him, to beg him to see through my dirt and pain and acknowledge his daughter, but something stopped me. Or someone. I felt the presence of Stick Woman inside me, dry and watchful. Perhaps my visit here should be a secret one.

  “Thank you, good sir,” I said, straightening my spine while keeping my hands together. I waited for him to march off to wherever he was going, then I rapped on the kitchen door.

  A young, sad-eyed woman appeared from the kitchen’s depths. She was a stranger, for my beloved Cook had been taken by the water-fever during my time in Suddhodana’s household. She looked me up and down. “I can give you some rice-pot scrapings,” she said. Unlike Cook, she was slender, her stained blue sari pulled tight around her flat belly. Her hair was pulled equally tight into a flawless bun, a contrast to her sad eyes. It struck me that her nature was sad but far from resigned.

  “I thank you for your generosity,” I said, bowing to her. “But I would like to speak to the lady of the house.”

  She took a step back. “My mistress only speaks to the seekers her husband has approved.”