Bride of the Buddha Page 22

  Over the men’s banter and the clatter of knives and ceramic bowls, I heard rustling and murmuring at a far door—the ladies of the household had arrived, about thirty in number. Right away I recognized Pajapati, wearing widow’s white. She’d changed little. She had the same faded gray braid and patient, intelligent eyes. I also noticed that her habitual stiffness, which had melted when she’d first started practicing the Dharma, had not returned. Her movements still seemed buoyed by her faith, although perhaps with a slight tremulousness. By now she had to be over sixty. “Good morning, Madame,” I said, walking toward her in a stately manner, which belied my pounding heart. “The Tathagata wished me to impart some additional Dharma to you.”

  Her mask of politeness hardened and her pale brown eyes grew sharp with incredulity and then briefly dimmed with embarrassment as if even to entertain such a preposterous idea—that her daughter-in-law was masquerading as a monk—was an insult to her visitor. I bowed, ordering my knees not to give way.

  “I’m your cousin, Ananda, from the north,” I said, my voice in the lower register that by now was second nature to me. “I’ve been in the Sangha for over five years.” Under my robe, sweat crawled down my flanks, only partly caused by the day’s rising heat. “Is there a quiet place where we can talk?”

  She blinked, her mask of politeness solidifying once again as if my membership in the Sakyan clan explained my familiar appearance—or perhaps she was willing to go along with me for now. “We can use the main banquet room.” She nodded toward the door I knew led to the cavernous hall, unoccupied at this time of day but with yet another guard at the door. This grand room also had a separate door that opened on a corridor that led to the women’s courtyard. Even when I lived here, the courtyard had been guarded. My gut knotted. Pajapati and I would be closed in.

  The room we entered, large enough for a hundred people and two or three elephants to mill about comfortably, was where my former husband and in-laws had hosted vast entertainments. I remembered the oversized metallic-threaded wall hangings depicting pentagrams and other geometric patterns, the moveable pinewood stages for musicians and dancing girls, and the long banquet tables surrounded with cushions and set with goblets of silver and gold, even when they weren’t being used. Unlike the gardens, this room had been well-maintained, the morning light angling through the tall windows and delineating the room’s splendor, which to me had a ghostly quality, the air cool and still, every cup and cushion glinting with memories of the past. Yet now these memories belonged to a ghost of myself, a teenaged bride fluttering through a dream, having forgotten her earlier conviction that this sort of opulence had nothing to do with true happiness.

  My pleasure that I could view this former self with detachment and compassion shriveled into nothing when I glanced at the windows. Covered in openwork iron filigree, they were all locked, making any kind of quick escape impossible.

  Pajapati and I sat on a bench against the back wall, in the darkest part of the room. I had to resist the urge to embrace her. For all our differences, I’d come to love and respect her over my years of captivity—and how I missed female companionship! “Tell me, Madame,” I said, “I have heard that you wish to enter the Sangha and establish a woman’s order.”

  Once again suspicion flickered in her eyes, but she spoke softly, her slender, veined hands folded in her lap. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. The Tathagata has expressly turned me down.”

  I couldn’t let discouragement overcome me. “That’s because he fears most of his monks will disapprove. But I think he’s wrong. So many of our clansman have entered the Sangha by now. If their mothers, sisters, and grandmothers joined together and earnestly requested ordination, I think they’d convince enough monks to change the Tathagata’s mind.”

  She smiled in the resigned way I had always disliked, then glanced around at the walls, as if to indicate her confinement. “I’m hardly in a position for such a confrontation, I fear.”

  “Not true,” I said, depressed that I hadn’t progressed spiritually enough not to be piqued at her attitude. “You can gather all the women of our clan who believe in women’s ordination and meet with him outside of his quarters, all of you barefoot and in white robes. Then you can plead your case to him and the rest of the monks as well.”

  Her resigned smile vanished. “You’re asking me to defy my stepson, who is also an awakened Master.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” I said, afraid to look her in the eye, lest I betray myself. “His main consideration is that the Sangha will break up over the issue of women monastics. But if enough women ordained, the monks who disapprove of such women would constitute a far smaller proportion of the community as a whole, and they’d no longer pose such a threat.”

  She raised one of her ungroomed eyebrows. “You forget. I, along with all the other women here, are locked in our quarters.”

  “Surely, if you all gathered at a meal and made your request to the men in the clan as a whole, your nephew would have to give in. After all, the majority of his male cousins already follow the Tathagata as laymen.”

  Now the suspicious glint in her eyes ignited, burning away, I feared, whatever was left of her embarrassment. “Who are you,” she asked, “that you’re so eager for such a thing to happen?”

  I had no choice but to forge on, even if I was headed off a cliff. “I believe that all human beings deserve the chance to fully awaken in this lifetime. I’ve witnessed all too many women, rich and poor, trapped in beaten-down lives with no chance of freedom of any sort, let alone ultimate freedom.”

  “I feel for these women,” she said, “but surely the Tathagata knows the best Dharma.”

  “The Tathagata knows that the Dharma is alive and can change. That’s why scribes are forbidden to write it down,” I said, and at that moment I felt a rush of what could have well been the Dharma inside me, because the words formed by themselves. “The Sangha needs women every bit as much as women need the Sangha. Without a female presence, men are like too many roosters confined in too small a cage. We peck and claw each other for dominance, and what suffers is truth and compassion. So much squabbling over minor rules and mistreating the younger members—some are mere boys! I’ve witnessed this firsthand.”

  She looked me up and down, all too knowingly, especially after I’d criticized “my” male sex. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I’ve never believed that women are all softness and virtue.”

  “No, but when women and men are in each other’s company as equals, they balance each other’s extreme tendencies. Men become kinder, women more resilient.”

  The lines around her pale mouth hardened. “And you know this, too, from experience?”

  Before she had the chance to name me directly or I had the chance to deny anything, the door opened, and another beam of light leapt across the vast tile floor. The guard spoke, his bass voice echoing. “Madame Pajapati, your nephew-in-law would like to speak to you.”

  My heart stopped.

  “I can’t let him see me,” I whispered. These words, if my former mother-in-law had any doubts left at all, were tantamount to a full confession.

  “I’ll be right there,” she called to the guard.

  “He will meet you here.” The guard left, closing the door behind him.

  Pajapati whirled around and stared at me, her braid loosened by the vehemence of her motion. “Hide behind the tapestry.”

  In three steps I was behind the suffocating folds of heavy striped fabric that half-covered the back windows. In the scratchy darkness, my panic mixed with exaltation. Pajapati hadn’t denounced me!

  I heard my brother’s footsteps; he spoke from in the middle of the vast room. “Aunt, what are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “I was meditating. I had no appetite this morning, and I took advantage of this empty room for my practice.”

  There was a silence. Was Jagdish glancing
around? Scrutinizing the tapestries?

  His voice cut like an axe. “Some of the servants reported seeing you enter this room with a monk.”

  I was dizzy with terror.

  Pajapati’s voice was steady. “He left some time ago, Nephew. He has a new way of breath counting he was teaching. Starting backwards from one-hundred while keeping the qualities of the breath in the foreground. Would you like me to instruct you in this technique?”

  “Keep it for the priests and the women.”

  I heard his footsteps, and they were moving in my direction. I held my breath, then realized I’d made a mistake, because now it was all I could do to keep from gasping for air, the metallic-threaded woolen textile pushing up against my face.

  Just as my chest was about to burst, the footsteps stopped. “You’d best hurry,” my brother said to Pajapati, “if you want any food at all. And I hope that monk left, because I’ve asked the guard to lock the front door.”

  The footsteps diminished; the door to the entrance hall opened, closed, and clicked.

  The only way out was through the women’s quarters.

  I remained behind the tapestry, my breath hot and damp on the cloth, until Pajapati pulled it back, the gleaming room and its furnishings blinking back into existence.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, glancing at the door my brother had closed behind him.

  Pajapati stared at me. “Are you deceiving the Tathagata?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t believe that he would condone this.” She flashed a skeptical look at my yellow robe and shaven head.

  “He serves the Dharma. As I try to as well.”

  “But he always speaks the truth.”

  “He only speaks what needs to be said.” I took a step forward, holding her in my gaze. “I’m begging you, Pajapati. Take your case to the Tathagata. For the sake of the Sangha and all the beings that suffer on this earth.”

  Her penetrating eyes rounded with a kind of wonder. “You sacrificed everything—your sex, your position in society—and perhaps even your own chances of awakening. Oh, my dear…” She leaned forward as if to embrace me, but I raised my hand to stop her in spite of my own desire for her human touch. Whatever my sex, I had ordained, and monks were forbidden all physical contact with women. “My name is Ananda. Believe me, if I could have done this in any other way, I would have.”

  She nodded. “I can try to gather the women, but I have my doubts that Jagdish can be coerced to let us go.”

  I breathed in. “There’s a way to persuade him, but only as a last resort,” I said. I was about to make use of yet another deception—so many by now, that Pajapati was in all likelihood correct that I had seriously damaged if not destroyed my own chances for enlightenment. “Tell him you know he passed off the handmaid Vasa as a princess to marry King Pasenadi. Say you met a monk who saw this crime with the eye of Dharma.”

  Her jaw dropped. “How could Jagdish do such a thing, and how could you have found out?”

  “He told our mother,” I said. “And if the other Sakyan leaders get wind of it, they’ll roast him on a spit.” I was referring, of course, to what Ama had said to me in confidence when I last saw her. If the elders knew that Jagdish had risked the anger of such a powerful king, my brother could be deposed, even executed.

  Pajapati sighed. “The Tathagata is right. We all live like helpless puppets, jerked about by passions that we think belong to us, but which in fact are the spawn of Mara. Let’s just hope that I won’t have to resort to this threat, or I fear my own awakening will be greatly postponed.” She half-smiled. “I’ll meet with the other women and determine a strategy. It will probably take a couple of days, then we’ll visit the Tathagata en masse.”

  “When you arrive, I’ll do all I can to help,” I said.

  We stood facing each other, each taking the other’s measure, knowing now we wanted the same thing. “I need to leave,” I said, glancing at the locked door and windows. “But I’ll have to do it as a woman.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. I didn’t have to explain to her that if I got caught as a monk, it would badly compromise the Sangha, whether my sex was discovered or not. Better to be beaten as a runaway servant or even imprisoned as Yasodhara, the prodigal daughter-in-law who tried to sneak back into her old home. “But I don’t know how you can escape,” Pajapati said.

  “If you can get me women’s clothes, I can climb out a window.”

  Pajapati shook her head. “Since you left, the windows have all been barred.”

  I breathed into my fear. Still the mind and hope other possibilities will rise like lotuses in calm water. “Very well,” I said. “Get me a wrap and a couple of shawls belonging to a woman of the lowest varna in the household—oh yes, and a rag for my head.”

  Pajapati’s eyes bulged. “You can’t! Even touching such things will pollute you far more than your acts of deception.”

  “That’s not what the Tathagata teaches.”

  She nodded, suddenly haggard, as if exhausted from the struggle to understand all of what the Tathagata meant. “But why do you want them?”

  “Only one kind of woman has permission to leave this building,” I said. I nodded toward the door to the women’s quarters. It was the time of day, when the women were downstairs at their meal, that the servants belonging to the most despised class of all emptied the chamber pots. “I need to disguise myself as a privy servant.”

  Pajapati pressed her fingers into her forehead. “My mind understands,” she said, “but my body still recoils.”

  And—had it not been for my year with Stick Woman—so would have mine because, even back before the varna system solidified, everyone shared a dread of bodily impurity, which was believed to befoul and corrupt the soul as much as the worst forms of theft and murder. Of course, for the Tathagata the only real purity was purity of intention.

  “Can you exchange some castoff garment of yours?” I asked Pajapati. “You could say you need to wear rags as part of your spiritual discipline.”

  “I’ll give away one of my best saris,” she said, with a sudden wild girlish smile. “You keep yourself hidden here and pray no one comes to search the room.” She vanished into the hallway to the women’s quarters. There would be a guard at its entrance.

  In her absence, I retreated to my hiding place, mentally going over the building’s exits as I remembered them, including the narrow corridor used only by those responsible to rid the women’s quarters of pollution. It too was guarded, but I doubted that would present a problem.

  Pajapati reappeared, holding a wad of grayish rags away from her body. The bundle, limp as a corpse, was surprisingly light, the fabric almost diaphanous with wear. As quickly as possible, I pulled off my monk’s robes and rolled them into the shape of a four-months’ pregnant belly and, with the help of Pajapati, used my upper robe to secure the bundle around my waist. Then I tied a rag around my shaven head and settled a thin cotton scarf over the rag and followed Pajapati through the narrow room that led to the women’s courtyard. I kept my distance so the guard would rest assured I was not contaminating a woman of the upper varnas.

  The guard barely looked at us as we passed. Of course he would be far more interested in anyone headed in the opposite direction, although his glance flickered over both of us to make sure we weren’t amorous men in disguise. He recognized Pajapati, but he didn’t bother to identify me. He was confident that no man, no matter how randy, would wear my despised garments for any reason.

  The women’s courtyard had changed little since I last saw it: the same ornamental pools, gilded swings, sickle-shaped orchid and chrysanthemum beds, and the same brick interior walls, the color of dusty apricots glowing a rosy gold in the morning sun. Even the ginkgo and karanja trees looked to have been pruned or replaced to remain the same size, and a faint smell of floral incense hung in the air—a way o
f dispelling the cow-dung and woodsmoke odors from beyond the wall. The thought came to me that here was a stunted paradise for interchangeable princesses—an observation that reminded me that I hadn’t emptied myself completely of my old bitterness. Alas, even though these emotions from my past evaporated in the luminosity of meditative consciousness, they all too easily sprouted again in the fertile muck of worldly experience. Still, for now I had to trust I had trained myself to rise above my old aversions before they took on the power of a Mara-self and used me for their own purposes.

  Barefoot, I padded toward a recessed corner of the courtyard, where, in a large covered wooden box hidden by clumps of ill-tended kamini, the privy buckets were stored, eight of them, along with two wooden yokes. As I lifted the cover, the box exhaled the faint stench of feces and musty urine—yet another opportunity for a monk to practice detachment. I instructed myself to allow these disagreeable sensations to come and go, along with the thoughts and emotions that inevitably crowded in into my awareness, everything from petulant resistance to the chore ahead to a shuddering revulsion for the intimacy of these smells, inhabiting my nostrils and lungs as if they were my true self. I had to stop elaborating on these mental phenomena; if they stopped feeding on each other, they’d dissipate. Besides, I didn’t actually have to empty the chamber pots. All I needed to do was to carry the buckets outside the courtyard door before anyone returned from the dining hall.

  I took up one of the wooden yokes and attached four buckets, and the familiar framework eased onto my shoulders in an almost friendly way, rich in associations with my life in the monastery and earlier in the hills. I also enjoyed some satisfaction in my ability to balance all four buckets easily as I stepped out into the main courtyard.

  I was practicing well, I told myself. I even remembered to notice the pleasant along with the unpleasant, to see how quickly they changed places, underscoring their impermanence. Allowing myself to savor the enjoyable aspects of bucket hauling acted as ballast against disgust.

  A high-pitched shriek cut through my self-congratulation. “Why is my room still full of filth!” Standing behind me was a girl I didn’t recognize from my former life here, although perhaps I had known her as a child. About fourteen years old, she wore a rose-colored sari, her face imperfectly beautiful with thin arching eyebrows, a narrow hooked nose, and the kind of black hair that flashed blue in a tangle all the way down her back. Her raging black eyes dazzled with tears of frustration. “Where are the rest of you!” she demanded, meaning the other servants.