Bride of the Buddha Page 20

  His smile widened. “She did it for me! You see, otherwise I would have yielded to my worldly loneliness and returned to my grandfather’s house. Because I missed her so terribly, you see.” He hesitated and my heart stopped. Then he smiled again, even more widely than before, as if he gladly accepted any sadness that remained. “But my Ama knew my destiny, and she didn’t want to tempt me to abandon it, because that would have been the will of Mara.”

  I pretended to be arranging my robes so he wouldn’t see the tears that it took all my strength to keep from overflowing. A year ago, I’d berated myself for my self-centered blindness to the possibility of endangering Rahula by taking him on the road with me as a seeker, but now it seemed that this self-judgment had enabled me to hide behind another, far more pernicious, blindness. I’d never considered the chance that he’d want to return to me. And why hadn’t I? Perhaps because part of me wanted an excuse to embark on a spiritual journey of my own.

  “So you’re saying that your mother sacrificed herself?”

  “Of course. But her spirit is always with me, along with the devas.”

  Devas. Had loneliness driven him mad? No, I told myself. Many people saw devas. Maybe I was the mad one. What did I know about anything?

  And how would I learn, living a pampered existence confined in King Bimbisara’s court, squeezing meditations between formal dinners and beauty routines? And how would Rahula feel, his mother suddenly returning to his life, to tempt him back to his childhood?

  “So you’re happy in your life here?” I said. “And you don’t regret your choice?”

  “How could I? Even more than the bliss that comes down on me when I meditate, each day is clearer than the last. I’m so grateful to both my Ama and my father for allowing me to learn the Dharma in this way.”

  He had the same luminous skin as the Tathagata. And I thought I saw in his open face his father’s clarity and joy. Yet whether this clarity and joy belonged to this world, another world, or no world at all, I couldn’t say.

  “Just tell me one last thing,” I said, trying to keep my voice from buckling. “When you were in the charnel ground with the devas, were there also monks?”

  “Oh yes, including the Tathagata.”

  I had to settle for relief.

  “Thank you so much,” I said to my son, “for showing me the benefits of ordination.”

  As he took his leave, smiling and bowing in the way he would to any other unrelated grownup, I was transported back to the desolation of our little room on the day he left me to become a monk—the silence, the empty windowframe, the dangling ropes. If I ordained, I would lose my son all over again, in the sense that he would never know who I really was, and no matter how often our paths crossed, never would I see a son’s love for me in his eyes.

  I covered my face with my hands.

  The next evening, I met with the Tathagata in the little wooden hut where we’d had our first talk. The weather had turned; a slow rain ticked on the hut’s thin walls, and the smell of damp sandalwood soothed my nostrils, if not my mind. For half the day I had been standing in line for the opportunity to see him in this little room where he met with everyone from senior monks to street sweepers in bad weather. Near the front of the line a woman carried her white-shrouded dead child in her arms, hoping the Tathagata would restore it to life.

  Now I finally was sitting opposite him, both of us cross-legged on the polished wooden floor. “I met with Rahula,” I said. “He speaks of hundreds of devas that swarm around him like so many gilded gnats—how can these devas be real?”

  The Tathagata’s eyes were both sympathetic and remote. “I could reassure you,” he said, “but you have no more reason to trust my words than you do Rahula’s. The only way is to find out for yourself. This requires faith.”

  “Faith in what?” Not in devas, I hoped.

  “In the possibility of awakening. In the glimmers of truth that you experience as you cultivate the Way.” He paused and for just a moment, we merged again into the Dharma conversing with itself, the small wooden room dissolving and simultaneously expanding—as much mental as physical and beyond both these concepts. I blinked, and this sense of truth—and the peace that went with it—evaporated. Or was it a form of madness? “Faith,” I said. “But not certainty.”

  He nodded.

  “What did you say to the woman with the dead child? I asked.

  “I told her I could grant her request if she visited the houses in this city and brought me a mustard seed from a family that had never known death.”

  “I don’t see what that will do.”

  “She won’t find the family. But her search will teach her that everyone knows tragedy and that no one can escape death. She will begin to follow the Dharma.”

  Yes, but. “What if she wants to ordain? She won’t have the opportunity.”

  He gave me a sharp look, no doubt remembering when I was his wife and he gave me his reasons why women couldn’t join the Sangha. “Surely by now you know the monks would never accept such a thing.”

  “But with more and more monks becoming enlightened, couldn’t they persuade the others?”

  He shook his head. “More and more monks are also entering the Sangha. It’s hard enough for these unenlightened beings to accept the lower varnas—and for monks of the lower varnas to accept the equality here. Not to mention that our supporters in the lay community would lose faith. I’d be accused of whoremongering, and the Dharma would be spurned by all.”

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed with my own inadequacy to the task before me, not the least of which was persuading him to change his mind about women. “I’m not sure I have the faith necessary,” I said.

  “The choice is yours.”

  “Very well,” I said perfunctorily—then all at once it seemed that Mara the Evil One was making one of his all-too-frequent visits to my mind. For I had the following conceited thought: I wasn’t going to let this or any other Tathagata defeat me. I winched myself forward. “I’ll stay and cultivate faith—I’ve heard you teach that this can be done, in the same way as we talked about fostering the growth of impersonal love.”

  He nodded, as if this was what he’d wanted from me all along.

  Which made me realize that, in my Mara-induced confidence, I’d forgotten my most crucial concern. What if he told me to speak against women’s ordination? “I have one serious problem,” I said. “Will I have to transmit teachings before I come to trust them? I don’t mean about the supernatural—I can always begin the discourses with ‘Thus have I heard,’ and I won’t be perjuring myself. But things that go against my sense of right and wrong are another matter.”

  He kept his eyes on me, his black pupils each with a single still point of reflected white light. Was this a warning look, I wondered. “I trust that as you mature in the Dharma,” he said, “you will find that none of it violates your morality.”

  “I will assume this to be true,” I said, but I wasn’t going to promise anything more.

  “I know that this path is difficult for you,” he said softly. He glanced out the narrow window, by now gone the color of slate, then turned back to me. “I’ll help you as much as I can.”

  I nodded, my heart clutching. Had I seen a flash of some personal concern in his eyes? I could not assume this. I was relieved, though, to observe that I wasn’t hoping for any sort of husbandly love from him. No, that hope and the self that went with it would stay buried with Bahauk. Yet perhaps there was something between me and this Blessed One, some humanness that one day would let us be together in an entirely new way.

  “I’m ready to ordain,” I said.

  Before I left, he explained some of the precepts I’d have to keep, which included eating only one meal a day and sewing and patching my own robes—we were permitted to own a maximum of three. The Sangha was completely dependent on the lay community. We weren’t e
ven allowed to serve ourselves food, let alone handle any sort of money. We simplified our lives so we could focus on awakening, but we were also responsible for teaching the Dharma to the laypeople so that everyone, monastics and otherwise, could live lives of both service and gratitude.

  After we agreed on a time for my ordination, the Tathagata rose to his feet, but not with his usual single, effortless motion as if he were temporarily without weight. His one extra heave showed his body’s strain as he ushered me to the door. Outside, the line remained, still waiting for him in the black fog. His conferences would continue far into the night.

  I was ordained after the Dharma talk on the following afternoon, in a very simple ceremony, which was the practice in those early days of the Sangha before the community’s growing popularity made it the target of, you might say, less sincere applicants. I climbed the five stairs to the Tathagata’s marble pavilion and stood before him and his disciples Sariputta and Mogallana, the four of us facing out over the assembled community. The night’s rain had moved on, and a white silk canopy shaded us from the damp sunshine while under the trees the rows of bowed shaven heads seemed immersed in a sun-fluttering lake of yellow robes, the monks looking like a single radiant being, the sun glorifying even Devadatta’s faded garment. Soon I would be immersed in this living light, I thought, and I recited the precepts and declared three times my desire to join the Sangha as a monk.

  The next day my monastic education began. After memorizing the afternoon’s Dharma talk, I sat in a bamboo grove to meditate. It was windy, the tree trunks ponging one another as I practiced “guarding the sense gates,” which mainly meant staying out of temptation’s way. In the simple world of monastic life, made even simpler by the stillness of the mind, the merest whiff of a curry or a handful of notes from a flute (or for that matter the prospect of relieving the pain of sitting for half a day or more) had the power to set off strings of fantasies. These in turn led to longings, regrets, and recriminations I thought I’d given up long ago. Over the weeks and months that followed, the mind’s Mara spewed forth empires of craving, which required selves to have these cravings. Some were trivial—the self craving sex or lusting after a rich pudding. Some were more profound—the mother devoted only to her son, the seeker demanding to know the origins of the cosmos, the sister crusading in the name of her sibling’s soul—and the judge who condemned all these selves as selfish. I understood the Tathagata’s statement that there was no enduring, essential self—but I’d had no idea there were so many temporary, non-enduring selves that in the heat of the moment I mistook for my soul. And once I did, that momentary craving self became Mara.

  This was the purpose of meditation: to develop my powers of concentration so I could watch my mind without being dragged into the worlds and personal identities it conjured up. Then I would understand how the mind was creating pain and misery when it grabbed on to what inevitably will cease. Once understood—yes, this grabbing and clinging is itself truly suffering, then I’d let go of the whole mess, the same way I’d drop a hot coal.

  But I found certain obsessions impossible to drop, especially the ones that revolved around injustice. Once they got hold of me, a sinkhole opened up in my concentration and dragged every shred of discipline into its murky depths, sometimes for days at a time. How I longed for my brother to pay for murdering Bahauk and his people! And what about the injustice when it came to women’s access to the Dharma? How could these monks, and male householders dare call themselves enlightened when it was women who kept their holy lives free from the drudgery of cooking and cleaning up after themselves?

  As I sat cross-legged in my hut, all sorts of fantasies engorged me, such as raising an army of women to demand ordination or take blood revenge on their male oppressors, starting with my brother. Fortunately, like all else, these scenarios were subject to the law of impermanence, eventually petering out until nothing remained but the outlines of their foolishness and cruelty. Have faith, the Tathagata had advised, and keep practicing until your mind is clear enough to see what truly needs to be done. Yet, as the days wore on, I feared that meditation would not be enough.

  Barely a month after I’d ordained, Kavi came up to where I was meditating under a lemon tree, the faint scent of blossoms tickling the air. He was accompanied by a pinched-face boy a year or so older than himself. The boy wore a filthy dhoti and had scabs on his feet.

  “This is Naveen, my new friend,” Kavi told me. “I met him on almsround. He wants to join the Sangha, but we’re afraid that the Venerable Devadatta will say no.”

  “I hear you’re the Tathagata’s cousin,” the older boy said to me, in a man-to-man tone. He gave me a quick wavering smile, making me think of a merchant trying to sell a barrel of moldy betel nuts on the cheap.

  “I’m one cousin of many, and a distant one at that,” I told Naveen, while giving Kavi, who had been beaming at me with pride, an admonitory glance. He was too young to realize that if I went over Devadatta’s head, it would only create more division in the Sangha—and put me under unwanted scrutiny.

  Kavi looked dubious, perhaps realizing he’d presumed too much. “Naveen’s family’s poor like mine.”

  “Not exactly,” Naveen said, picking at the black under his fingernails. “I come from a better varna. My father was a scribe, but he went blind.”

  So even this child believed in the varna system and thought it might help his cause. “In this Sangha, we are all poor in the same way,” I said, an important concept to get across, had not my feeling of righteousness tightened like a strip of leather around my chest. There it was, dukkha, suffering.

  “So you won’t help me get in?” The boy had dropped his fellow-adult facade, his narrow little eyes filling with worry. He peered up at me. “I can teach you to write.”

  Write? Why would I want to learn the markings of scribes, used mainly to tally up crop totals and construction costs? Neither the Tathagata nor any of his enlightened disciples had ever written a word in their lives. Still, I supposed writing could serve the practical needs of the Sangha. Even more, this little boy reminded me of myself when I’d tried to offer my services to the Tathagata and before him, Stick Woman—all the while fearing that my services weren’t worth offering.

  The leather strap of my righteousness disintegrated. “Thank you for your offer,” I said and, even as I spoke, realized he had indeed offered me something valuable. Not so much the writing but the idea that I might perform concrete tasks for the Sangha. Generous acts were a practice in themselves, the Tathagata taught. Not only did they provide a respite from thinking of oneself, they were satisfying on their own, engendering the contented mind-state essential for concentration.

  “I’ll talk to the Blessed One,” I said.

  “You’re getting too attached to these boy monks,” the Tathagata said.

  We were standing in front of the King’s palace, its rose pink brick tiers mirrored in the long rectangular pool in front of its arched doorways. It was after the midday meal, and most of the monks had dispersed to meditation spots deep in the forest.

  I’d just told him about Naveen and his family’s poverty.

  “There will always be poor people,” he said, glancing soberly at a small bent man with a net and a cleaning brush leaning over the pool, the knobs of his spine shining bare and brown in the sun. “But there will not always be the opportunity to learn the Dharma. In this respect, Devadatta has a point. As a Sangha, we can do only so much.”

  “I can train the younger monks,” I said, hating to think of him and Devadatta on the same side against me. “And Naveen offered to teach me to write. This might be of use to the Sangha.”

  He shook his head. “What about your own training? At this point, your primary focus must be yourself.”

  “My meditations are clarifying my mind,” I said. “And because I’m not so fogged up with old identities the way I used to be, I can see ways to conduce
a better atmosphere for training everyone in the Dharma—including me.”

  “And the other monks, in their meditative clarity, have failed to see this?” This was the closest to sarcasm I would ever perceive in him.

  “Perhaps they lacked the opportunities I had in my former life.” I made sure not to give him a knowing, let alone accusing, look. “A lot of these younger monks don’t know how to live on their own—and even the older ones have spent much of their lives being waited on by women.” I held my neutral gaze. “And because they can’t tell one end of a broom from another, their kutis look like refuges for spiders and smell like privies for mice—hardly conducive for developing a pristine consciousness.”

  “Certainly you would not wish to have women waiting on them again.” And here, although he didn’t sound sarcastic, he did sound dry.

  “I’ll instruct them in ways so they won’t need anyone to wait on them,” I said, “such as how to use a dust rag.”

  The Tathagata lowered his eyelids, perhaps to contemplate all these mundane chores or perhaps to enter some meditative absorption to wait for a reply to arise by itself. Behind him, a peacock fanned out his teal-eyed tail, as if he’d been waiting to display his worldly splendor when the Tathagata wouldn’t see it. Or perhaps the bird’s glory was merely reflecting the meditative state my former husband was currently enjoying.

  “Very well,” he finally said, “I’ll admit Naveen.” He bowed in a gesture of dismissal. “Just make sure you keep on meditating. That’s my instruction to you. Life is very brief and you could die at any time. Meditate as if your head was on fire.”

  I looked out over the pond, with its reflected arches wavering in and out of themselves as breezes rose and fell. Although the shimmering duplicates hinted at the instability and impermanence of all things, the colors and shapes undulating on the water’s shining surface seemed clearer and richer-toned than the solidities they reflected. I could enjoy them for what they were, I thought, impermanent like all else.