Bride of the Buddha Page 18

  Instead, my righteous rage, which I was always sure I had banished forever until it came back again, heated up in my heart. Why was my former husband subjecting me to this filth? What good would it do to spend the night wading through corpses and staring into their rotted-out eyes? I already knew death too well, and the gore of strangers’ bodies would certainly affect me far less than the image of Deepa’s lifeless form chewed up and digested by dogs.

  By now I’d reached the top of the steps overlooking the plateau, bruise-purple under the still pale sky, black hills looming in the distance. This charnel ground was better planned than the one in my village, and after walking briefly over suspicious-looking dust, I came upon a neat row of naked corpses—ten men, women, and children lying on their backs an arm’s length apart, mouths agape, ants flowing over faces and bellies. These bodies had been laid out recently, perhaps this very day. Beyond them, the rows were progressively more disorganized, flung about by dogs and wolves, noses pecked out by vultures. A black rat slithered out from under the body of a huge fat woman lying on her back, her bloated breasts and stomach half-devoured and looking like they’d exploded. I shuddered with revulsion, but the hideousness of the scene did nothing but amplify my anger about spending the night.

  Where would I sleep? The stench crawled down my gullet and sank into my lungs. I had half a mind to march back to the palace grounds, where the Tathagata was lounging around with kings and nobles, and tell him exactly what I thought of his disgusting so-called test. He knew I wouldn’t be terrorized by ghosts. And as for the god of death, hadn’t I already met Mara and known him as a part of myself? Even now I knew my rage to be Mara within, but I didn’t care. The injustice was real, that I had to spend the night in this putrid squalor for no reason, after having suffered so much from death already.

  If I couldn’t find a place to lie down where the odor wouldn’t overwhelm me, I wouldn’t stay. I looked out over the plateau. Beyond the corpse rows were scattered bones, and at the field’s far end, the rotted bones had been raked into piles, the grass around them scummed with bone dust. Obviously, the corpses were rotated, perhaps according to specifications of the Sangha.

  Before I had time for another bout of anger, I sensed a motion on the periphery. A dog? I peered into the twilight, the setting sun in my face, the dim shapes in front of me vague and flickering. A being was moving in my direction, wreathed in the faintest of whispers, as of incantations. No living human would move this way, make these sounds, I told myself. Could it be a corpse risen from the dead? It was too small for a man or woman. A child’s corpse! Deepa. I felt the dread as a blow.

  Perhaps I’d been wrong about spirits and about everything else in my life, and now Deepa had come to haunt me, to punish me for failing to find her. No, for causing her death. Or was I in some nightmare, unable to wake up?

  I stood there open-mouthed, the breath sucked out of my body as the corpse, head lowered and muttering its awful prayer, continued to approach. Then I noticed its head was shaven, and it was shrouded in a monk’s robe, the yellow color a dusty ocher in the twilight. The corpse wasn’t Deepa, but it was definitely a child.

  Oh, please, let it not be Rahula.

  Had he suddenly died? Had his ghost come to warn or reproach me?

  Or was he alive, and had he found me out?

  My throat and lungs paralyzed, I ran toward him—blindly, instinctively, needing to know, even if it meant he would hurl me into hell.

  The little monk looked up at me. I stumbled to a halt. His whispering continued. “This body is of the nature as these corpses,” he said, pointing his finger into his chest. “It will become like them, it will share their fate.”

  The monk wasn’t a ghost, nor was he my son. But he was a little boy, no older than seven, sent here to perform the same contemplation Mogallana had instructed me to do—instructions that in my righteous rage I had completely forgotten. I, who had so blithely assumed I knew all about how Mara operated inside me, had failed to see what the Evil One had been up to, which was to use anger to blind me to the fear of my own death—and thereby to prevent me from confronting the truth, such as this little monk was trying to do.

  I looked into his round dilated eyes, glazed with terror. He was too young to be facing this! “Greetings, my friend,” I said. “Are you a follower of the Tathagata?”

  “My name is Kavi,” he replied, nodding and raising his stubby little chin, perhaps to show me his courage.

  “I’m Ananda,” I said. “I also look to be a follower of the Awakened One. Tell me, did he send you out here?” Anger once again surged through my veins at the thought of my former husband doing such a thing.

  “No, it was Venerable Devadatta.”

  I should have guessed! I had to keep my anger in check. By now, surely I had learned how Mara used it to cloud my judgment. For one thing, if this little monk was anything like Rahula, he might have insisted on coming out here himself. “You are very brave to be doing this,” I said. “But perhaps you’ve meditated enough for tonight. Perhaps you and I could return to the bamboo grove and camp out there.”

  “No!” And now the terror in the little boy’s eyes made room for suspicion as if I were Mara himself tempting him from the Path.

  I took a step backward, raised my hands in a display of harmlessness. “I don’t mean to interrupt your practice,” I said. “But what do you think would happen if you returned to the grove?”

  He glanced around as if to make sure no corpses were listening in. “The Venerable Devadatta would send me back to my father.”

  Another jolt of rage; I swallowed it. “And what would be so bad about that? Perhaps your parents miss you.”

  Kavi stared down at the trampled grass, coated in bone dust. “My Ama’s dead. I have seven brothers. There’s not enough food for all of us.”

  So his father had left him off at the monastery. I knew that after Rahula became a monk, Suddhodana had exacted a promise from the Tathagata that all boys under eighteen would require their father’s or grandfather’s permission to join the Sangha. But this was the first I heard about taking in destitute children.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what’s your father’s occupation?”

  Kavi sank his gaze even further into the ground. “He’s a tanner.”

  One of the lowest varnas. I was sure this was why Devadatta sent him out here: either to teach him discipline or to have an excuse for getting rid of him if he failed. The other alternative, the possibility that he could be killed by wild animals, I could hardly bear to attribute even to Devadatta. And yet there it was. “I could stay with you here if you’d like, Kavi,” I said.

  He glanced up, his eyes soft with hope but quickly looked down again. “I think I’m supposed to do this alone.”

  There was no way I’d leave this little monk by himself. I peered down at him. “But where’s your stick?”

  “What stick?”

  “To protect yourself against the animals. All monks are issued a stick when they come here,” I lied. “Even I received one, and I’ve yet to be accepted into the Sangha.” In fact, I’d cut my own stick.

  “But how could the Venerable Devadatta have overlooked such a thing?”

  I shook my head, hoping that Kavi took my gesture for one of unknowing rather than one of disgust. “He probably intended that we should meet here,” I said. “Perhaps you are to instruct me in the contemplations. After all, you’re a monk and I’m only an aspirant.” I gestured toward my white robes, yet to be exchanged for yellow ones.

  Kavi gave me a doubtful look.

  Just then the last of the sun winked out below the horizon, and the forest began to rustle with night beasts. Kavi looked out at the eastern sky, whose ink-blue stain was rapidly spreading west, then at the darkness of the trees, where a dog fight had broken out, yaps and growls spilling into the night. He looked back at me. “You need to meditate on
each corpse,” he said in a pedagogical voice. “And know that one day you will be the same as it is now. We all think we are our bodies and we cling to them, and this causes suffering because we refuse to accept their impermanence.”

  He resumed his whispering, I joined him in the chant, and we walked for awhile, studying the dead bodies. But I couldn’t concentrate on the chants or the corpses, or even my repulsion, concerned as I was about Kavi. Once I got back to the grove, I’d talk to Devadatta about sending little boys out at night, especially to charnel grounds. If necessary, I’d go to the Tathagata himself.

  A greenish two-thirds moon, which had been in the sky all along, was whitening quickly as if desperately absorbing the last pale dregs of daylight. It illuminated the jackals crouching at the field’s edge, surveying their feasting grounds, ready to strike. Kavi walked as close to me as possible, while being careful not to touch me, and I wondered whether this was monastic fastidiousness or a result of being in a varna where touching anyone in a higher class was forbidden. Once again, I felt my anger rise that this child might consider himself so unworthy.

  It was then I had the first glimmer of the course my life would take in the Sangha and why the Tathagata was considering my ordination. From what I’d seen, many of the monks were very young—teenagers, if not children. The young monks who’d teased me at the temple could all be my sons: helping them to adjust to sangha life was how I might start expanding my love for Rahula to eventually include all beings. Was this what the Tathagata wanted of me? And was it for my sake or for the sake of the monks? I also wondered how my motherly feelings would affect my own enlightenment. As I walked along, preoccupied with Kavi, my own meditations were perfunctory, sometimes fading entirely into the background.

  Two or three jackals were creeping toward us. “I do remember one thing Mogallana told me,” I said, hoping to distract Kavi, who kept glancing uneasily at the animals. “He said we need to keep watch on our minds. See how the mind craves for things to be different than they are, and how that craving causes suffering.” Such as had happened with me, I realized, especially when I’d first arrived here. My anger had come, at least in part, from not wanting to consider the corpses’ resemblance to my own condition. I’d seen them as other, as objects of disgust, and ignored the fear and the shame that came from the perception that I was indeed like them. As a result, I’d missed the opportunity to see through my fear of death and perceive the corpses as they really were, as simple matter in the same way as my body was simple matter, and not me or mine.

  But I didn’t have time to relish this insight. The jackals had stopped within three body-lengths of us, and more followed.

  Too late, I realized that the fear I’d temporarily escaped through anger was not only of my eventual demise but also of dying this very night. All around us, the jackals straddled corpses, plunging their heads into lumps of moonlit slime, crunching bones and every so often glancing up at us, their wet snouts wrinkled, their eyes and teeth flashing moonlight. By this point the fear-Mara inside me was assailing me with memories of the dogs trying to make off with my sister’s body. Yes, I was making my own fear worse, but the fear itself was no illusion.

  I raised the stick.

  Completely unexpectedly, Kavi jerked it away from me. “Devadatta said no harming!” he whispered and stepped back, his suspicion of me having returned. “No killing with sticks.”

  “Of course not,” I tried to reassure him, remembering when my son had said something similar back in the woman’s quarters when he’d accidentally killed a beetle. Even now, I had yet to decide how literally to take such rules. “The stick will harm the animals only if they run at us. I can hold the stick out, but I don’t have to thrust it at them.”

  Kavi gripped the stick with both hands, his small face clenched in despair. “Devadatta said no harming. He said that a monk should be willing to die at any time, knowing that it is only a body that dies.”

  “Well, perhaps Devadatta should be out here, and not us,” I said. That murderer. I couldn’t help myself. My anger had broken through.

  Ironically, Mara rescued me from fear once again, only to clutter up my judgment with another bevy of angry thoughts. I clutched my stick. I had no idea what to do next.

  Watch the mind, I reminded myself, and I saw Mara’s hatred trying to take hold, pelting me with every noxious memory I’d ever had of my cousin. Then fear reared up again, and self-reproach for my failure to find a solution.

  Watch without judgment.

  Then I understood. A part of my awareness, separate from the chaos, could see things as they are in themselves. This was the mindfulness put forth by the Tathagata.

  My emotions, impersonal as weather, were composed of parts: phrases, images, a squeezing in the throat, a hot crushing pressure in the heart and belly that intensified into a fiery craving for violent release, in turn requiring more thoughts of Devaddatta’s villainy to keep the fire stoked.

  As I saw the emotions for the hodgepodge they were, they seemed to shrink to a cluster of tiny wiggling snakes, which then faded altogether, leaving me with only one thought.

  I grasped Kavi gently by the shoulders. “The point is not to intend harm,” I said. “If we purify our intentions, we will not be abandoning the Path.”

  Kavi still clutched the stick. “But how?”

  I looked out at the animals, innocently eating, and I remembered Bahauk and his ability to adopt animals’ points of view, he said, by entering into their souls. “We need to hold all these animals in compassion,” I said. “Like us, they get hungry, and right now they’re enjoying their dinner. They don’t want us to bother them, and if we don’t, they probably won’t bother us.”

  In a low voice, I started up the loving-kindness chant that I’d learned as a way of expanding my love to all beings. I spoke to the jackals: “May you be safe, happy, healthy, and may you achieve liberation.” But I had to do more. Imitating Bahuak, I let the jackals fill my mind and heart. I saw the scars on their nappy coats, their half-starved ribs, their frightened eyes shifting around, knowing that larger carnivores, wolves and dogs, would soon arrive from the forest and take over.

  My jackal soul saw a broken path leading through areas where the animals had already worked over the corpses. I took Kavi’s hand and led him to the edge of the woods. “We can meditate here,” I said. “We still have a good view of the bodies. And we can also wish loving kindness for whoever comes to eat them.”

  10

  I stayed awake most of the night, although my meditation was not very successful, my mind fumbling through a murky daze filled with worry over Kavi and my son. Around midnight Kavi fell asleep, slumping against me and filling me with tenderness and grief. I put my arm around him, grateful for his warm, small presence. Tonight was the first time since I’d said goodbye to Ama that I’d touched another human being.

  I jolted into full wakefulness at dawn, and my movement woke up Kavi, who immediately began his whispered cemetery chant. I joined him in a rote kind of way, thinking of how I’d confront Devadatta about his practice of sending little boys to the charnel grounds. Once the sun was all the way up, I told Kavi it was time to leave. “We should probably return separately,” I said. “Devadatta might want to see us meditating in solitude.”

  “But I thought he wanted me to teach you.”

  “He probably intended us to separate afterwards.” I smiled in an artificially confident way, and then l left, wanting to encounter Devadatta without getting Kavi in trouble.

  I spotted my cousin as hundreds of monks were silently lining up to embark on their daily almsround. The morning sun dazzled through the bamboo trunks, casting splintered light that rippled over the monks’ robes, ranging from ocher to bright yellow, and a hush hung in the chilly morning air, as if the tree-dwellers were exhausted from yesterday’s feast. Devadatta, in his robe that looked like it had spent its previous incarnation as
a pile of cleaning rags, had yet to take his place in the still-forming line. “Venerable Devadatta,” I said, “I encountered a seven-year-old monk in the charnel ground last night who’d mistakenly believed you sent him there.”

  Devadatta’s narrow face, raw and nicked from his unmerciful razor, remained unchanged. “It was no mistake,” he said. “It’s a requirement for all monks, no matter what their age, to face death in this way.”

  “Ah, I see. He was a little confused. He didn’t seem to think other monks were supposed to accompany him, but of course he would need protection from the animals.”

  Devadatta skimmed his gaze over my new white robe, as if pained at having to view such a pristine garment on a mendicant. “Friend,” he said, “it is clear that you still live in delusion about what life and death actually are. If a monk, meditating in the forest or some other dangerous area, meets his physical demise, he is actually fortunate. His meditation will have given him the clarity of mind to understand death as a simple threshold to be crossed, and with this understanding he will pass into a better incarnation, or perhaps leave the endless round of suffering forever.”

  “This boy did not seem to be of an age to achieve this clarity.”

  Devadatta shook his head. “As I pointed out to you yesterday, many unqualified aspirants have entered the Sangha. For them, accidental death is far superior to failing as a monk, for their subsequent life will be far more benign. But outsiders, with their untrained minds, will never understand this.”

  A knell sounded in my heart, similar to the one that I’d felt when the Tathagata told me that women couldn’t enter the Sangha. Be mindful, I told myself. Don’t fly off into all sorts of conclusions. I had no idea whether the Tathagata condoned what Devadatta was saying. Also, I couldn’t afford to turn Devadatta into an enemy, someone who might spend too much time studying me for possible flaws—and in that way begin to suspect my sex. So once again, I held my anger at him in check, not having the time to wait for it to disintegrate in the elixir of mediation.