Bride of the Buddha Read online

  I tried to keep up with my meditations, but the more I meditated, the more I saw what needed to be done around the Sangha. At first this worked out well for me; even Devadatta could see my usefulness. To this end, I took up Naveen’s offer to teach me to write—a strange process of trapping words on birch bark, using a wing feather to apply markings made of a mixture of soot, crushed nuts, and myrobalan dye. I was glad I hadn’t engaged in this activity until now. Otherwise, I might never have bothered to learn how to keep words locked in my mind, although of course words describing the Dharma could never be written down, because they would always mean different things to different people and had to be spoken with care.

  Even back then, I was beginning to worry about who would preserve the Dharma after the Tathagata was gone. I couldn’t bear the thought that the likes of Devadatta would be in charge. For this reason alone, I was determined to remain in this Sangha and exert as much influence as I could when the time came.

  As the years went by, I became more and more dedicated to the truth as I ascertained it. I had no idea that it might well require a personal falsehood far worse than the concealment of my sex, one that many might argue would send whatever remained of me after my death to the deepest realms of hell or at the very least, ban me from the Sangha for life. But this choice was many years in the future.

  For now, I figured out a schedule for everyone’s use of the washhouse (this had the added benefit of guaranteeing my privacy). With the help of writing, I communicated (sometimes through scribes) with merchants and other laypeople who supplied firewood, cleaning materials, and eating utensils, including begging bowls, and kept them informed about our actual needs, so we wouldn’t end up with, as we had the year before, privy brooms enough to supply the entire Magadhan kingdom. Also, I instructed doctors and herbalists and even prescribed medicines and treated patients on my own. There were few hard-and-fast monastic rules against this yet. Finally, I kept up with my studies, getting proficient enough to lecture laypeople and the younger monks on basic Dharma.

  I was also the one who asked the Tathagata questions that others were afraid to ask, often because the monks thought they should already know the answers. Many years later, my manner of asking these questions, like so much else, would be distorted to make me sound like an idiot who thought he knew all the answers in advance. “The Chain of Dependent Origination is easily understood,” I’ve been quoted as saying, when everyone knew this doctrine was unfathomably complex, describing in minute detail how the ignorant mind creates worlds of suffering out of merely pleasant or unpleasant experiences. As the story goes, the Tathagata reprimanded me: “Never think such a thing, Ananda!” Although I’d never thought it in the first place.

  But these distortions happened long after the time I’m describing. For the first few years of my life in the Sangha, things went smoothly, even with Devadatta, who spent days on end meditating in the forest—when he wasn’t trying to impress King Bimbisara’s family with magic tricks, which he declared were supernatural powers. The Tathagata seemed to ignore him, and I did likewise, concentrating on meditation, my Sangha duties, and refining my role as a male. Fortunately, a monk doesn’t have to learn a prince’s strut or a warrior’s swagger, and my year in the hills had deprived me of my courtly femininity. I kept up the practice of hauling buckets for the sake of a masculine physique, carrying water from the river to the washhouse, one of the few worldly tasks that monks were still allowed to perform. My willingness to do this was favorably received by the other monks, who were thereby spared it, although occasionally I feared I saw some monk, especially among the older ones, studying me with slitted eyes, but nothing ever came of it. Except for Devadatta, the monks seemed to like me, partly, I’m sure, because I made it my business to be of use to all—much as I had learned to do in the women’s compound at Suddhodana’s household so long ago.

  Yet as my mind became clearer as to what I needed to do, the more my sense of injustice gnawed at me, especially when it came to women’s ordination. Since my one argument with the Tathagata, I had done nothing to further its cause. In my travels with the Sangha I met plenty of women who would have given anything to join us—not only aristocrats such as King Bimbisara’s wife but also ordinary women and girls ground down by poverty, brutal husbands, or demanding relatives and who, unlike their male counterparts, had no hope of freedom of any sort. I began to wonder whether I’d been deceiving myself about why I joined the Sangha. Perhaps I’d done so for selfish reasons after all—out of a need to escape death rather than to help others awaken.

  By then I’d been in the Sangha for five years. Rahula was almost fourteen, as tall as I was, and although I still couldn’t imagine him as just another monk, I no longer wept in secret after every casual encounter. Kavi, aged eleven, had turned from a wispy to a sturdy little friend, as well as a receptacle for my motherly feelings, disguised as fatherly affection. Around this time, I made my first big mistake.

  It started with the matter of the monks’ robes. Most of our robes were donated by the lay community, with us responsible for hemming them and keeping them in repair. However, many of the monks—particularly the ones from higher varnas—had never picked up a needle in their lives. I decided to organize a group where monks could sit together in the evenings and learn to sew seams and patches—something the Tathagata wanted done, for he felt it important to respect the laypeople’s gifts. Even so, to prevent anyone from wondering how I had such skills, I took the precaution of telling everyone that I’d learned them as a teenager, enlisting a local tailor’s help as soon as I knew I wanted to ordain.

  At first, everyone seemed to delight in these meetings, sitting under the trees in one of the many pleasure parks we stayed at during those times, listening to evening birdsong, smelling the jasmine, and talking of whatever the monks needed to talk about as I demonstrated sewing knots and cross stitches. It turned out many monks, young and old, missed their wives and mothers, and I was happy to give them a place to vent their feelings. Then one evening not long before the rainy season—we were currently staying in a deer park belonging to a local Sakyan leader—about fifteen of us were sitting in a circle on one of his smaller stone pavilions. We’d brought lamps burning citrus oil to discourage mosquitoes as well as to provide light for our work. It was a soft black night, with the moon nowhere to be seen.

  The youngest monk in the group spoke up. He was ten, small for his age, with deep brown downturned eyes. “I miss my Ama,” he said.

  “I miss mine, too,” said Kavi. “But it helps if you meditate on the Divine Abodes, the way Ananda teaches.” He smiled at me. Over the years I’d taught this meditation to him and others, having used it myself to dissolve the pain over the superficiality of my relationship with my son.

  “The loving-kindness Abode belongs to everybody and nobody,” I said. “So when you enter into it by wishing every being well, you can remember that your Ama’s love is part of it. By feeling love, you can know that your Ama is with you.”

  “And then you don’t have to be sad anymore,” Kavi said.

  “Good, Kavi,” I said, “but we also can’t ignore these emotions of sadness.” I looked over at the younger boy. “Only when we admit sadness is inside us are we able to let go of that feeling and watch it fly away. But if you still feel sad, you can always talk about it to me.”

  “Talk?” The furious voice came from behind me.

  I whirled around. It was Devadatta, back from the forest and flickering like a demon in the collective lamplight, his face taut with rage. “What’s going on here? A ladies’ gossip fest? This is precisely the kind of chattering social group that the Tathagata abhors! Any monk who derives his happiness from this sort of insipid togetherness will never know the bliss of solitude, or of awakening. Trivial social concerns will bog down your every meditation—you’ll obsess over what others think about you rather than contemplate the Dharma. You might as well simply disrobe now
and go back to your Amas and your big fat beds.”

  Silently the monks began to disperse, their shame thickening the air. I lacked the authority to call them back, let alone raise objections to Devadatta’s views, and to some extent I shared the monks’ shame. Perhaps my efforts to make our monastic life easy had damaged my solitary quest, blunted my once keen dedication to the truth.

  “We were simply repairing our robes,” I said.

  “That’s nothing to be proud of, monk,” Devadatta said. “Personal vanity to go with your idle chatter! The townspeople are spoiling this Sangha by plying it with cloth suitable for princesses—you should be digging for your robe material in the trash, the way I do.”

  Kavi, who’d remained seated, wrinkled his nose. “At least our robes don’t stink,” he muttered.

  Devadatta glared at him. “What did you say?”

  I cleared my throat. “I think the Venerable Kavi was expressing his gratitude that his nose-consciousness is undistracted by the odor of bodily fluids and rat droppings. In this way, he can direct his attention to the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the contemplation of wholesome states of mind.”

  I couldn’t help myself. Yes, this was my mind-Mara judging Devadatta. But just then my mind was tired of judging me.

  Devadatta kept his hard gaze on Kavi. “Monk,” he said. “You need to confront your aversions, not escape them.” Devadatta switched back to me. “You are teaching these boys sentimentality, idle chatter, and cherishing the body, and I know why you’re doing it.”

  He raised his arms and announced it to the entire grove: “You are a woman!”

  My vision turned dark and mottled, and the ringing of a thousand insects filled my head.

  I have destroyed the Sangha was all I could think. The python around my chest made it impossible to breathe, much less speak in my own defense. Not that there was anything to say.

  Had he just guessed? Or had he somehow found out?

  I sat paralyzed in my cross-legged position, my hands limp in my lap, the yellow robe I’d been repairing crumpled in front of me. But even if I could have moved, I wouldn’t have known what to do. Try to lie my way out of it? And be publicly stripped and dragged to jail?

  One of the older monks, with mole-speckled ocher skin and deep grooves in his forehead, cleared his throat. “My humblest pardon, Venerable Devadatta, but you have violated the Precept of Right Speech. You have insulted the Venerable Ananda by calling him a woman. I suggest you apologize.”

  I stared at him numbly. Apparently, he hadn’t understood the accusation.

  But then Devadatta turned in my direction. “I apologize that your unmanly behavior resulted in my wrong speech,” he said, inclining his head in a bow that seemed more like a glance down at a pile of dung. “I am nonetheless going to report the unwholesome conduct of this group to the Tathagata.”

  I felt my ears pop. He didn’t know about me, after all. I inclined my head, my relief temporarily blotting out my fear of the Tathagata’s reaction. “Your apology is accepted.” Even though it was no real apology at all.

  “Be warned, monk,” he said, marching off into the blackness.

  Years later, many people claimed it was the Tathagata himself who had come upon our group. The division in our Sangha continued, you see, and perhaps the strict ascetics wanted to use the event to their advantage. By then there were many more monastics hoping to undermine me, who—ironically—had the reputation of being the monk liked by all.

  And the Tathagata did order me to disband my group. We were still camped near the Sakyan clan leader’s sprawling teak mansion, located on a flat plain where a ruffle of clouds on the horizon marked the distant mountain range, some of whose foothills I knew so well. Would that I could have been wandering in them, heedless and free, instead of retreating in defeat from the hut where the Tathagata had told me that although spiritual friendship was vital as a means to discuss Dharma and shore one up in times of doubt, I couldn’t draw attention to myself by alienating Devadatta.

  I understood his point, of course, but as I walked away it occurred to me how men always used the word “woman” as an insult, and I’d never given this a second thought, until now. But now the word flipped back on me, igniting the coal of anger I always hoped I’d meditated away. My anger had a new object: the world, samsaric or not, controlled by men. I couldn’t keep living in an all-male community, no matter how holy. I had to do something, although not in my current state. I sat under a tree to let my rage disassemble itself along with my underlying nostalgia for the hills, observing my tendency to gild memories with a perfection that never was. Gradually, a new clarity dawned, as if I’d camped in the darkness and awakened outside a city that had been there all along.

  And in that clear dawn, my mind presented me with an actual city: Kapilavatthu, my former home and that of my former mother-in-law, Pajapati. For the first time since I’d joined the Sangha, we were headed for Kapilavatthu—and Pajapati, I’d heard over the years, wanted enlightenment above all else. I would persuade her to plead her case with her stepson and prove to him the existence of women who wanted to live as ordained monastics. I would help her in whatever way I could, even if I had to go against the Tathagata—and my brother—to do it.

  11

  Except for the gentle hills surrounding Suddhodana’s former residences, the fields outside of Kapilavatthu were a green and yellow patchwork shimmering in the premonsoon heat and extending to a blur of the faraway mountain range. It was my first time in Kapilavatthu since I’d left for the hill country seven years earlier. In those days I’d been so caught up in my marriage and my immediate realm that I suppose I’d perceived little else. I’d never seen—as the Tathagata might say—things as they really are, least of all the terrain beyond my personal concerns. Not that I was doing much better now. At first, all I could do was lament the neglect of the gardens and groves I had so assiduously tended. They were either overgrown or desiccated, the lotus ponds clogged with weeds, the fruit trees skeletal and insect-gnawed—more reason to heap blame on my brother.

  Then I caught myself. My mind, like most unenlightened minds, was exaggerating the differences between then and now to create a Mara-self of outrage. The truth was that no one, even back then, cared as much as Siddhartha and I did about creating a deva realm on earth. Why was I pumping myself full of anger at my brother when he shared most people’s attitudes? He had plenty to answer to other than landscaping, and I had plenty to do other than grieve vegetation, which was impermanent in the best of circumstances. I had to find a devious way to meet with Pajapati. For, as my Ama had warned, Jagdish had all the women locked up. Only the Tathagata was allowed to visit his stepmother, and only once.

  I formulated a plan. I would approach my former mother-in-law during the one time the household women had some exposure to the outside world—in the breakfast hall, where they had their meal after the men left. I remembered that the door to the dining hall at that time of day was unattended, although that custom might have changed since then. But I couldn’t think of any other way to proceed than as a lone monk offering Dharma lessons to the older ladies of the household—this was before strict rules prohibited any monk to meet with any woman without another man present. In any case, I was ready to take risks, including the likelihood that Pajapati would realize who I was—or more accurately—who I once was. I just had to hope that if she recognized me, she wouldn’t give me away.

  The next morning, rather than go on almsrounds in Kapilavatthu, I made my way to the teakwood mansion where I had lived years ago. By this time of year, the flame trees had exploded into bloom, their scarlet flower-conflagrations massing around the residential complex and almost completely obscuring the separate kitchen building. I veered off the path, faded back into the shadows of the big trees and waited. Before I ventured anywhere, I had to make sure my brother was no longer inside the dining hall. Like Pajapati, he
’d known me close up; we’d glared into each other’s faces all too many times over the years. But unlike Pajapati, he would have no possible motive to keep my secret. Not only would he expose me, he would make sure that the Sangha would suffer the worst of consequences.

  Finally, I saw him, in an eggplant-black paridhana and his black hair in a warrior’s knot, striding off in his single-minded way toward the stables, in the opposite direction from where I stood. Relief washed through me. I headed toward the outside courtyard, where the smell of cardamom rice and the household’s particular kind of tamarind-infused dahl brought a rush of memories of my former life, good and bad. In those days, though, there hadn’t been nearly as many armed guards. Now they manned every entrance.

  But at least the one at the dining hall door looked bribable. In late middle age, he had vast sagging cheeks, and a butternut-colored paunch poured out over his dhoti. He also had a habit of knuckling his lower back when he thought no one was looking. I offered him four sprigs of apamarga, an all-purpose herb if ever there was one, good for mitigating the effects of all kinds of bad karma, from overindulgence in rice wine to impeding the flow of truth from monks to lay people.

  “I’ll let you in,” the guard said, “but you can’t stay long.”

  I entered the paneled room, draped in the same striped red and blue tapestries I remembered. A half-dozen men, mostly in dark, gold-edged paridhanas, remained at breakfast, reclining at one of the long tables, as servant women in blue-gray saris, much plainer than in my day, cleared the dishes around them, seeming to make every effort to avoid any physical contact. I shuddered and looked away. The varna system seemed far stricter now, and my brother was partly responsible.