Bride of the Buddha Read online

  Finally, dawn arrived, and as the forest fed on light and took on color and form, I made my way back to the Sangha’s encampment. At the sight of the younger monks hauling water to the washhouse, I saw that I wasn’t ready to disrobe. They needed me to impart the Dharma, however imperfectly, to them and to laywomen. Also, in the morning light I realized that even when doubt swept me up and had its way with me, my awareness returned faster than it had before I joined the Sangha, enabling me to observe doubt’s falseness—its flimsiness and the confusion that substitutes for thought. I had some freedom, after all.

  But the thought hammered me—I had left Pajapati stranded. At this point, what could I do? Teach the Dharma to as many women as possible in hopes that their sheer numbers would persuade the Tathagata that the female sex was not as repulsed by the monastic life as he believed? But Devadatta had already decided I was a womanizer, and flocks of women students would only confirm his delusion.

  To counter Mara’s other general, Despair, I spent the day making myself useful, inspecting all the huts and main buildings to make sure everything was ready for the approaching monsoon. My writing skills continued to prove valuable. I wrote on a piece of birch bark what repairs needed to be made and handed the list to the King’s messenger, who in turn gave it to an agent with reading ability who could assign laypeople to do the work. Writing saved time, sparing me not only having to help the messenger memorize the order but also from having to memorize it myself. So I had more room in my mind for Dharma talks, such as the one from Sariputta, who spoke that evening on the importance of developing tranquility as a prerequisite for meditation.

  I took his talk to heart. I had already decided to devote a good part of the following day to meditating in hopes that a way to change the Tathagata’s mind would emerge. But shortly after breakfast, my forest meditation was interrupted by monks’ voices.

  “It’s an insult to their clan,” came the voice I recognized as belonging to one of Devadatta’s most loyal devotees, an emaciated monk in his mid-thirties. “How can they degrade themselves in such a way?”

  “Mara has infected them with unnatural cravings,” came the reply.

  I stepped forward through the trees. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The gaunt monk bowed. “I apologize for my idle talk, which has produced this troublesome curiosity in your mind.” He mouthed a smile that had nothing to do with his sunken cheeks and blazing eyes, and I tried not to dismiss him as a typical Devadatta follower. “I will most certainly confess my speech transgression at the next Upasaka ceremony,” he said.

  “Rest assured,” I said. “What has arisen in my mind is not curiosity, but concern. It sounds like these beings are in the grip of suffering, which as I remember, we have a responsibility to alleviate.”

  “They’re just some beggars on the road,” the gaunt monk’s portly companion said. He was the opposite of the first monk, with trembling cheeks and frightened eyes, someone who most likely hoped the Discipline would change him into someone other than he was. “Hopefully,” he said, “they have not worsened their karma by continuing to create a disturbance.”

  “Do they need teachings?” I asked, “or perhaps physical assistance?”

  A third monk, oldest of the three, with mottled mud-gray skin and about as deep a voice as a human can possess, approached, raising his hand in an ambiguous blessing. “The Tathagata has provided for them. Please, monk, spare yourself the karmic consequences of further frivolous talk.” He nodded to himself, seeming to savor the authority of his bass rumble, and the three monks walked off, each in a different direction.

  I headed for the road.

  The main thoroughfare was at the bottom of the slope where forested foothills rose from the valley. On an expanse of pounded dirt wide enough for four tandem chariots, I spotted a group of at least fifty shaven-headed beggars in brownish gray rags, some kneeling and others stretched out in exhaustion under the roadside trees. They were surrounded by half a dozen yellow-robed monks and fifteen or so laypersons in bright-hued paridhanas, some carrying water jugs. The deep-voiced monk had been right; these people were being tended to. At this point I began to doubt the wisdom of risking Devadatta’s ire by snooping around and asking questions.

  A young layman, his face the color of bright copper, waved to me. “Do you know where we can get some ointment? These women have come a long way.”

  Women?

  A tiny girl in a crimson paridhana and carrying a bowl of rice approached. “They walked barefoot here all the way from Kapilavatthu!” she breathed.

  I broke into a run.

  The robes weren’t brown; they were white cloth coated with road dust. “Pajapati?” I said, trying to recognize her among the shaven heads. I was joyful, shocked, and terrified at the same time. Here were my clanswomen, exhausted, their feet blistered, a few of the younger ones weeping, others murmuring, “We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.”

  “Ananda.” Pajapati spoke from behind, her voice amazingly firm, considering. She limped toward me, bowing her head to the little girl and waving the bowl away. “Give it to Esha,” she said, gesturing toward a bald young woman whom I recognized as the angry girl who’d whipped me.

  I motioned Pajapati to sit down. “How…? Did you…?” What had she sacrificed to do this? Obviously, she’d started with her own body, which had spent the past sixty-some years confined in an area one could walk around in a matter of minutes. How had she managed to escape?

  Underneath the streaks of dust on her face, her skin looked like scorched brick. “Don’t worry. I didn’t blackmail Jagdish,” she said in a low voice, looking around to make sure no one overheard.

  “Even if you had,” I said, “it’s mostly my karma, since it was I who suggested it.” Not that I’d had much hope that she’d take me up on it, given her strict principles.

  “However,” she said, “when I asked my nephew Mahanama where you’d gone, I did let drop the rumor I’d heard about Jagdish marrying off one of our servants to King Pasenadi.”

  “What?” She’d succeeded in surprising me. Certainly here was a sign of her desperation—even more than the arduous walk she and the others had just completed.

  “I didn’t implicate you or anyone else,” Pajapati said. “Many of our clansmen have been unhappy with Jagdish trying to take over. He was in no position to go against my request. In fact, Mahanama not only told me where you’d gone, he offered to accompany us with an entourage of litters, servants, and elephants, which of course, I rejected.”

  Jagdish deprived of his power? I couldn’t speak. If our cousin Mahanama took over as clan leader, this could benefit not only the confined women but the Sangha as well, as he was a known follower of the Tathagata. At the same time, the thought of a vengeful Jagdish thrust a cold sword through my vitals.

  I recovered myself. “Have you spoken to the Tathagata?” Surely this show of dedication would have proven to him that women did not dread the holy life.

  She was silent for a moment, long enough for me to guess what I should have seen at once. She had not smiled this whole time, and the posture of the entire worn-out, sun-blasted group was that of hopelessness.

  Pajapati gazed out over the yellow-stubbled fields. “He will not meet with us.”

  I stood dumbly, dazed by defeat. I couldn’t believe it. “But he has too much compassion to leave you out in this desiccating heat.”

  Pajapati nodded. “Of course he has. But it took awhile for the message to get to him. As soon as he found out, he sent his monks to help us.” She finally smiled, albeit ironically. “He’s arranged for Vesali’s oligarch to prepare just the sort of entourage to take us home that we refused when we traveled here. I know he cares for us, and I’m sure he intends his refusal as a way to help me let go of selfish desires.”

  A tremendous outrage roared through my blood, not so much against the Tat
hagata but against the male tyranny that deformed the minds of everyone, even those of enlightened beings. And even that of Pajapati, who was now using a distorted notion of the Dharma to rationalize abandoning her quest. “What about the desires of your kinswomen here?” I said. “Are they equally selfish?”

  Pajapati’s age-hooded eyes met mine. “It’s possible to say that all desires are selfish. Anyway, we can go home full of resentment, or we can treat this defeat as an opportunity for personal purification.”

  I would never be as pure as Pajapati—the proof arising right here as I felt myself once again chafing against the chains she insisted on viewing as ribbons. “Perhaps the Dharma itself needs to be purified,” I said.

  Pajapati shook her head. “Be careful, Ananda. You may have gone too far.”

  “Too far! He claims he won’t ordain women out of compassion for them. What a convenient compassion it is, allowing him to preserve his precious Sangha full of woman-hating monks. Someone needs to break through his blindness.”

  “Yas—Ananda!” Pajapati raised her hand, stopping herself from grabbing my arm, that of a monk forbidden all physical contact with women. “We have to trust he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He always says he’s not a god.” Yet I paused in the center of my anger, which my training had taught me not to obey blindly but to observe while it changed. And so it did, filling my heart and body with a sense of purpose, which immediately expanded into the purpose of my life. Or so it seemed. Was this delusion?

  No answer came, but the feeling remained.

  “Let me speak to him,” I said. “After all, I got you into this.”

  “That doesn’t matter—I’m grateful for your guidance. You’ve done enough. Don’t risk your own position.” Her sunburned face darkened with concern, probably because she suspected what I was going to do.

  “He will talk with you,” I said and headed off. “Just don’t leave.”

  Eyes straight ahead, I started down the clay road, nodding curtly at the clutch of yellow robes standing at the turnoff, presumably to protect their peers from female pollution. I wound up at the gabled agama where the Tathagata and other senior monks were staying. There was a porch on the second floor with a view of the road below where he would have been able to see the women, but he occupied a tiny oak-paneled room in the back, isolated so he could meet with individual aspirants in private. I entered without asking. The room barely had space for a sleeping pallet, a shelf for his sewing utensils, and a couple of cushions, used for the many interviews he so generously conducted when he might have spent his time in holy bliss. I made myself remember that fact.

  Otherwise, I was past thinking, except for the sense that I was acting out a role determined in a distant past and encompassing far more than my own life. I bowed, placing my kasaya respectably over my shoulder and ignoring my pounding heart. “I talked to Pajapati,” I said, “who traveled all this way on foot to meet with you. What sort of Dharma has you turn away the woman who brought you up—and loved you—as her own?”

  He looked at me once again with eyes as innocent as my former husband’s—or so was my perception in that dim little room. “I can feel how much she suffered on this journey,” he said. “Can’t you? Think how much more she would suffer if she took up the arduous life we live here—so much that she would learn nothing.”

  “That’s your view. Not mine. I’m here to ask you for the third time—allow women to be ordained.” Such was the protocol: important requests were to be repeated three times. The tradition was that they then had to be granted, but of course this was not always the case. My legs were shaking.

  The Tathagata closed his eyes, then opened them. “I’m very sorry to say no.”

  I looked into the eyes of my former husband, my beloved teacher, most likely my last hope for ever awakening in this lifetime, the only time on earth I was certain I had. “If you refuse your stepmother,” I said. “I will disrobe.” I must have known all along I was going to say this, along with what followed.

  “You have this choice,” the Tathagata said, his body as still as a corpse.

  “I will disrobe and let everyone know who I am.”

  His stillness took possession of the little room, changing it into an eternal twilight where I was utterly alone. Cut off from all love, I had only my memory of it and my sense of justice to keep me from contracting into nothingness. I would not abjure the words that had come out of me.

  The Tathagata finally spoke, his voice as impersonal as an edict. “You realize the consequences of harming a Buddha, not to mention the Dharma.”

  “I hope my intentions are pure.” Yet now, in this gray nonplace I sensed the hell realms, not so much opening up below me as spreading through my void of a self. I foresaw the hell of never knowing my motives’ purity and the far worse hell of looking into the eyes of Kavi and my other young students, once they found out that I had made them live a lie. And Rahula! How would he ever forgive me? How would anyone? I would end up isolated from everyone I loved for lifetimes to come.

  On their own, my fists clenched.

  The Tathagata continued, his voice both soft and clear as if he wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. “The Sangha could be lost forever.”

  “I trust that the Dharma would allow the true Sangha to survive.”

  “Have you not worried that I could try to discredit you? And what if I succeeded? You could spend eons in the hell realms for jeopardizing the Dharma—and all for nothing.”

  I nodded. Please, Stick Woman, be with me now. I am already dead.

  “You’re willing to suffer all this.”

  “It seems to be my destiny.”

  “Oh, Yasi,”

  There were tears in his eyes. Or at least so I would remember this impossibility—impossible because enlightened persons feel no grief, only compassion.

  He fell silent, and I have no idea how much time passed. Perhaps none. Or perhaps an infinity of time, as of that between one eon and the next. I had no power over the silence; I had said all I could.

  Finally, he spoke. “We’re lucky that all is impermanent,” he said, in a warm, dry tone that strangely resembled Stick Woman, “and that eternal truth continually gives birth to itself.”

  It was then the gray twilight seemed to shift to dawn.

  Not that I ever became certain of my moral correctness, but all at once he and I were together again in that undifferentiated state of peace, in a new way, as two halves of the same whole. Beyond male or female, we were the Dharma seeking and expressing itself. Awakening awakens.

  Perhaps the Tathagata’s tears were mine.

  “I’ll talk to Pajapati,” he said. “Women have proven their determination. I now understand we will all benefit if they enter this holy life.”

  There was a price to pay. Although the Sangha managed to remain one body, the Tathagata had to make concessions to appease Devadatta and his allies. These days, everyone has heard of these compromises: although women can take full ordination, all male monastics, even the smallest boys, are senior to them, standing in front of them in every line and authorized to admonish and reprimand them. Ultimately, men would have two hundred and twenty-seven rules, women over six hundred, many about restricting them in the vicinity of males—although nuns were expected, as were all Sangha members, to teach the Dharma to those who requested.

  In the early days, these rules rested lightly on most of us, especially in the presence of nuns who had attained full liberation. As soon as Pajapati announced she was founding a women’s order, women from all varnas poured into the parks and groves where the Sangha stayed—aristocrats and prostitutes, street vendors and farm wives. An astonishing number of nuns awakened over the next few years, starting with Pajapati. To my great joy, they began to teach the Dharma, and I memorized and passed along their teachings, some of which I could only wonder at. One nun (who wis
hed to remain anonymous) compared her defeated worldly passions to a pot of pickled greens boiled dry; another described attaining freedom from grief (inconceivable to me) over the death of her child (“What is there to lament?”). And then there was the famous story of the Venerable Subha, who to discourage a libertine trying to seduce her by praising her beautiful eyes, yanked out one of them and handed it to him. Such stories made me realize how far I had to go on my own spiritual journey.

  Well, my failures to swim against the worldly stream were part of the price paid for my lack of purity, perhaps the most severe consequence of my life of deception. No matter how many times I glimpsed enlightenment, no matter how many Dharma teachings I memorized and hours I meditated, I couldn’t shake the uncontrollable desires that these enlightened women had apparently left behind. My cravings often took the form of worry. I worried about my young charges’ safety, about the survival of the Dharma, about Devadatta’s sullen retreat to the forest where these days he spent much of his time meditating and (I feared) plotting revenge. I worried about the Sakyans’ secret—that they’d passed off a slave to marry a king—and one day the king would find out. And I of course worried about my son, now praised for his own precocious enlightenment. As someone who had not awakened, I could never know for sure. Was he truly in bliss or lost in a trance?

  I also worried about my own lack of enlightenment, but all I could do was work hard to train my mind and not create new karma. Fortunately, I remained ignorant of the future—and the transgressions that I might face if I wanted to prevent what I regarded as the true teachings, including those of the nuns, from falling into oblivion. For now, in spite of everything, I felt content.