Bride of the Buddha Read online

  “But you don’t,” I said.

  He clutched his bare shoulders. “I look back at our time together, and it’s like all time—insubstantial as a clot of foam on a river. It dissolved even as we enjoyed it. We were always chasing after something new.”

  “So what? It was worth it! We always knew about impermanence! Why can’t you get past this?” As I stared at his hunched-over form I saw him as I’d once feared he was, spoiled and weak. I also saw that his face, although freed from its artificial expression, no longer radiated the benevolent innocence I’d loved. “You used to care about things, about helping the world.”

  “I don’t know what the world is anymore, beyond death. I’m afraid I just make everything worse by creating false paradises, which only raise expectations and in the end cause more suffering.”

  “That about sums up what you did to me,” I said.

  Suddenly, the being inside me gave me a kick. I was overwhelmed with tenderness, then rage. The little soul-body I was carrying didn’t deserve such unhappy parents. “You deflected me from my path! You seduced me! Now what?” I knew I shouldn’t blame him for my own decision, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me.

  He was dry-eyed, despairing. “Yasi, I’m sorry.”

  Once again, I saw the world through his eyes. In his memory, our loving moments had been swallowed up by the in-between times of doubt and discontent, which had for whatever reason expanded to enormous proportions. The past that I cherished amounted to little more than a scattering of sequins in a vast desert.

  He was as miserable as I was, and we were unable to comfort each other. This only fueled my anger. “You’re of no use to me now,” I said. “Now that you’re so disillusioned with earthly life, you’re fit only for the spiritual one. You should be the one to go forth. Find out what’s what and forget your so-called duties to your father.”

  He buried his head in his hands, and I walked away, remembering the time when, to avoid thoughts of sickness, he had burst into song. Now singing was impossible, and all I heard was the bellowing of the cows.

  The Durga festival was the last time I would appear in public before giving birth, and I had no desire to be there. The field, big enough for horse racing, contained an arena surrounded by tiered wooden benches occupied by hundreds of brightly clad Sakyans of all ages, cheering, laughing, and fanning themselves in the springtime heat. Cooking fires and food pavillions surrounded the field, and the early afternoon air was smoky with grilled lamb, trout, and venison. Everywhere, banners flapped, bells rang, and children dashed around, making me think sadly of Deepa and her ebullient spirit, the memory of which I had abandoned for Siddhartha. These days I hoped that my sister hadn’t reincarnated inside me, for she would only share my loveless life. At least I hadn’t burdened my family with my feelings. My parents, my sisters and their children—all at the festival—were overjoyed like almost everyone else that the clan was about to produce an heir, praying, of course, for a boy.

  Only my mother seemed to notice that I wasn’t steeped in happiness. Earlier that morning, she’d looked in my eyes. “I know,” Ama said, “you want a daughter.” I let her believe this was the only problem.

  Siddhartha and I occupied a place of honor in the stands, front and center, surrounded by others of our generation, including my brother and my cousin Devadatta, who had prevailed in the wrestling and fencing contests. Four years ago—before I met him—Siddhartha had won every competition; this time he was begging off, saying that the younger warriors needed a chance. But I knew he had no more heart for any of this than I did. Not that we spoke of our feelings. After that day under the rain tree, our pattern of never being alone together continued, and I made no more effort to break it.

  As Devadatta and Jagdish took their seats, my husband congratulated them.

  Devadatta glared at Siddhartha. “My victory means nothing, Cousin, as you have placed yourself above competition.” Devadatta had yet another version of the Sakyan face, narrower, and with higher cheekbones. His black hair was tied back with a leather strip.

  “I’ve done nothing of the sort.” My husband smiled, keeping up his own facade of normality. “You’re the unqualified winner.”

  Devadatta squinted at the spectators, his cheekbones crowding out his eyes. “Not according to them.”

  “Let it go, Cousin, I’ve lost all interest in anything to do with killing. You’re the premier warrior, not I.”

  My brother, on the other side of Devadatta, stared at Siddhartha as if he had just surrendered Suddhodana’s entire territory to the Kosalans. “How can you say such a thing? How can you abandon your gods? You were born to expand our uncle’s domain.”

  In spite of all my recent disillusionments, I couldn’t let this pass. “My husband has always preferred spreading happiness to spreading death. Let other clans ally with us when they see how we live in peace and prosperity. There are many ways to serve the deities, after all.”

  “Not for the warrior class,” Devadatta said. He made a point of addressing my husband. “As you know.”

  “That’s exactly right!” Jagdish’s eagerness made me wince. “By risking death, warriors alone can honor the gods with the greatest virtue of all: selflessness.”

  “Risking death?” I said. “If women didn’t risk death by giving birth, there’d be no warriors to risk anything. And as far as selflessness is concerned, most mothers could give lessons on it.”

  “Are you going to let your wife speak for you?” Jagdish switched his angry look to me, but he, too, addressed my husband. “Perhaps marriage has made you soft.”

  “Please don’t bait me,” Siddhartha said, his voice tinged with the weariness of an adult speaking to a child, even though Jagdish, at twenty-four, was only five years his junior. “The greatest virtue is conquest of the self, not of others. If you want to see selflessness, look to the holy men around you. And I don’t mean the priests.”

  “Perhaps you should go forth,” said Devadatta, tight-lipped.

  “There are worse things to do,” my husband said, looking straight ahead.

  Another silly tale I’ve heard over the years is that Siddhartha had never known that sickness and death existed until, at age twenty-nine, he had Channa drive him outside the family compound so he could see what he’d missed. More nonsense, as you have already seen. My husband had been trained in war. He knew full well that his mother had died shortly after his birth, and he had witnessed the deaths of grandparents, cousins, and servants like everyone else. However, there’s some truth to the story, in that Siddhartha’s parents had kept him out of the presence of sickness and death as much as possible to the point of refusing any servant over the age of fifty to work in any of the residences. And of course, Suddhodana had moved the hospital and the charnel grounds out of sight soon after his birth. In the days after the Durga festival, Siddhartha had Channa take him to these places, where he spent many hours contemplating mortality.

  One evening he entered our marriage chamber, but I knew by now it wasn’t to take me in his arms. He stood at the door, the full moon bluing the hall behind him and blanking out his face. “You were right, Yasi,” he said. “I should enter the holy life, and I want to do it.”

  I’m still not sure what possessed me back then, why I had so little sympathy for my husband. Perhaps I envied his freedom, but more likely I was bitter because it was he who had convinced me that the earthly life was all I needed. “Are you asking my permission?” I said, hearing the coldness in my voice. “Or do you need to be persuaded?”

  My husband’s silhouette shifted. “I’m not sure. I want to do my duty.”

  I felt my anger rising. “How dare you put this decision on me? But since you do, I want you to go. But I have a couple of stipulations. First, if you learn anything about how to meet with the souls of the dead, come back and tell me how to reach my sister.”

>   “That’s not what I’m looking for.”

  “Just promise me if you find out, you’ll tell me. I sacrificed my own holy path for your love, which you now deny me.”

  He stepped into the lamplight, his eyes seeking mine. “I do love you, Yasi. I’d never have another woman.”

  I stared into the clear gaze I once trusted would cherish me forever. Now it seemed as impersonal as water. “Your love for me—as you yourself said—is the love of one corpse for another. Please go.”

  “I’m so sorry.” With a rustle of his cotton garments, he knelt in the darkness. “If I survive, I’ll return. This I promise you.”

  My bitterness remained, immobile as an anchor in a dried-up pond. “One other thing. Delay your departure until after you see your child. I want you to know exactly what you are leaving.”

  Siddhartha nodded, his face as grave as if he expected a stillbirth. “Please don’t tell anyone until I’m gone.”

  And so, it came to pass.

  4

  There are many unofficial stories about how I spent the six years before my husband’s enlightenment, some of which I occasionally wished were true—although not the tale that my pregnancy lasted the whole time! Many of the other rumors contain partial truths: my efforts as a seeker and the appearance of suitors during those times Suddhodana’s spies lost track of his son. But for reasons that will eventually become clear, I’m just as glad for my scant presence in the overall story. Less for people to think about, less to suspect.

  Some things I will reveal, however, as a way of deflecting obvious untruths. It’s been bandied about that I had many suitors. I had one, of a sort. I also supposedly practiced austerities to parallel my husband’s quest. Well, there’s no way I could have starved myself and remained sleepless while nursing a baby or caring for him as a young child. But I did resume my search for my sister’s soul by meditating and otherwise attempting to still my mind as much as I could. Not that I knew that much about meditation, only what the holy men of my childhood had said about sitting cross-legged and concentrating on my breath until my thoughts disintegrated in the silence surrounding them. In this stillness I looked into my son’s eyes, so like his father’s. They seemed to radiate their own light rather than merrily reflecting the light of the world, as Deepa’s had. I concluded that my son Rahula couldn’t be my baby sister’s reincarnation. No matter, I loved him; he was truly my bond to the earth. Yet it wasn’t easy.

  At times I became another person, besotted with my son and his needs. Other times, alternating waves of grief and anger pounded through me, washing away my meditational calm and making me curse the day I ever became a mother having no choice but to live on and bring up my fatherless son. Yet I also had to admit that I’d participated in depriving Rahula of a father by suggesting Siddhartha leave in the first place—and with this thought all other feelings sank into a swamp of guilt.

  The day after Siddhartha left, I was locked into the women’s quarters, which had its own private courtyard complete with gardens, carved benches, ornamental fish ponds, and gilt-painted swings— where we were free to gossip, tell tales, and fuel each other’s jealousy—all, I thought, to distract us from the fact of our captivity. We were about twenty in number—cousins, aunts, and their children—including Siddhartha’s sweet-natured, thirteen-year-old half-sister, Nandi. Suddhodana’s arrangement was somewhere in between what I’d experienced as a child and what I would later come to understand was a proper harem, where all the women existed to service a single male ruler. In the realm of Suddhodana, who was an elected head of our clan but not a king, the women’s quarters were a repository not only for my father-in-law’s wife and children but also for female relatives married or marriageable to other Sakyans.

  To ameliorate the blame, self-blame, and overall despair of my days, which included loneliness, I tried to make friends. The women of the compound cared little for my stories memorized from holy men, but they came to me for advice on beautification—alas, despite my holy aspirations, my mother had trained me well. What with her surplus of daughters to marry off, she’d used her excellent memory to learn as much as possible about transforming oneself into a talisman with the power to stop men in their tracks, dislodge their sense of space and time, and delude them into craving after female beauty as something eternal. She’d taught her daughters everything she knew, including hundreds of recipes calling for everything from saffron to cow’s urine to improve upon one’s looks.

  To my surprise, Pajapati approved of my strategy. “You can help your cousins distract themselves from their less healthy distractions, such as envy and hate.” She was sitting in her usual corner, tucking back palm fronds into a flower-offering, and she glanced up at me, her yellowish eyelids free of kohl, and almost smiled. She knew all too well, I concluded, the consequences of living as pampered prisoners with little to do.

  My loneliness eased once I became part of the women’s society. Rahula thrived, making friends with the toddlers in the group, and I found myself happy to babble away to anyone who’d listen about his little quirks and fascinating (to me) habits, such as running around the garden and through every room pointing at objects. “What this?” he’d ask, “What that? What this called?” He clapped his hands at my answers, whether “golden necklace” or “chamber pot.” During this time, I even came to appreciate gossip. It provided a way of making sense of life, not only for the women but for the men, as we wove them and each other into stories of loyalty and betrayal in ways that enlarged our lives, assigning them an importance rivaling those of the gods. But, unfortunately, stories require antagonists, which in our closed society meant one another. What helped me was my status as an object of pity; I let it be known that I grieved for the husband I’d failed to keep, and that I was resigned to virtual widowhood for the rest of my life.

  But I needed to counter my guilt about encouraging primping. So I worked to realize what I considered my husband’s true vision—improving the lives of everyone. I expanded my beautifying efforts beyond the women to the courtyard gardens, planting ornamental shrubs and introducing new varieties of orchids and hibiscus into the flower beds, set off by drifts of white alyssum and lakes of blue delphiniums. I also made sure that the servants could take advantage of what I had to offer, tailoring my cosmetic advice for them. If they couldn’t afford saffron, they could substitute turmeric; without gold and jewels for their bangles and necklaces, they could use shells and beads to best effect. When the clanswomen objected to the time I spent on the servants, I reminded them that now these servants had the skills to help them with their own personal decoration. As I gained the women’s trust, I even tried to explain how my husband’s vision was for us all. In this way, I could make myself believe that in spite of everything he and I remained on the same path.

  This effort was futile in almost every respect.

  Suddhodana and his nephews—including my brother—were reversing many of my husband’s efforts to minimize the difference between classes. And all over, not only in our region, the new religion was solidifying these differences, stating that to protest one’s caste obligations would lead to a lower rebirth, perhaps even a hell realm. More and more, the lower castes became associated with vileness and filth, and even touching them required purifying oneself afterward with a ritual bath of milk. So far, our household hadn’t adopted such practices, but I feared it was only a matter of time.

  And I could do nothing, other than meditate and primp.

  By now I was twenty-four and Rahula was almost six, and we hadn’t any news of Siddhartha for over a year, not since he’d mastered the disciplines of Alâra Kâlâma and Uddaka Râmaputta, the two most esteemed sages in the land, and then turned down their offers to succeed them as the supreme master of their disciplines. Rumor was that he had become a strict ascetic, surviving on one mustard seed a day. I could only pray that these rumors were false. Suddhodana, though, apparently believed them,
and I learned through Pajapati that he was thinking about declaring his son officially dead and marrying me off—choosing, of course, one of his nephews, who would provide his grandson with a father and himself with a son-in-law he could control.

  Around that time, my brother paid me a visit. I dreaded to think he had a replacement for my husband in mind.

  We met in a small anteroom adjacent to the compound. It was intended for brief formal encounters, and as such had no furniture other than a woolen carpet over bare tile. The room had a varnished wooden door, which could be closed for privacy, but just outside it stood a sword-carrying guard to prevent abductions—and the possibility of escape, for its third-story location meant that its two arched windows were not a factor. Outside them, shifting layers of thin white clouds drained the color from the land.

  Jagdish had arrived before me. He stood in the room’s exact center, arms folded, wearing a black lungi with a thin gold border and a matching uttariya over his shoulder. Since my confinement in the women’s quarters, I’d seen him only from a distance, at festivals and other rituals as part of a group of young, unattached males who knew to keep their distance from the women, herded around like so many mares and fillies—you can only ride them if you pay the price. Up close, my brother looked older than I remembered, his chin cleft fully defined, his shoulders broader than Suddhodhana’s. He was almost thirty and in his prime, sporting a bright black mustache almost identical to his uncle’s.

  “I need to talk to you about our cousin Devadatta,” he said.

  I braced myself. I knew he and Devadatta had taken on many of my husband’s duties, and now I could only think that Jagdish had decided that I should marry Devadatta, or that my brother was acting under his—or Suddhodana’s—orders. Of all the cousins, Devadatta, with his rigid class views and contempt for my husband’s refusal to indulge in war games, was the last man I’d want to marry, had I wanted to remarry at all.