Killing the Buddha

by Peter Manseau

  The stone for her first child, a boy, had been obsidian, and she had found it in a pool where over millennia We had allowed it to roll against the sand. We put it there for her before the dawn of time, as some of Us like to say with a wink. (Ask her if time had a dawn.) The second stone, for a girl who died of a fever after what you call two years of perfect health, was coral. The third was gray. A sad, gray pebble. She sat at the edge of the sea, still burning from the delivery (she would never fully recover, she knew, We knew), and rolled the stones. The first child had been on time, and big; she remembered the watery burst of him into the midwife’s hands, how for a moment she had seen stars on the ceiling of the cave, constellations she had named after dead elders and old loves. We cannot repeat the names. She saw the boy’s head, well-formed, his blue lips, the cord tight around his neck. Her people believed the baby’s father had been X, but really it was Y. No harm there.

  The coral stone had been prescient, for that daughter had loved the water, had danced like sunlight on water, laughing, for two years. Our Beloved had been pregnant a third time when the coral-colored girl died in the fever that swept through them like a hot wind, and in her grievous rage Our Beloved had poisoned the baby she was carrying, too, lost everything, or so she believed. There is no such poison. Even geniuses are wrong about many things. She rolled the stones a foot or so in front of her, then picked them up and tossed them again; they weren’t in a race as such, but she was interested in the way the little gray pebble always fell behind. But of course, she thought, it would be last because it is the smallest, and without the weight to propel it, it would give way much faster to inertia. These weren’t her exact words; the task of the Translator is formidable. Energy = mass X a constant, squared. If there is a constant, and We aren’t saying yes or no, one candidate is this grief of mothers; why, it has hardly changed at all, and some of Us can barely stand it, we have formed a Committee. To no avail. We watched her sitting there, They tell Us it was long ago, and We felt her wretchedness, her sinking, the burning tear between her legs, she rolled the first stone and imagined her first child, the boy, had lived, the way things might have been different for her, she saw him growing up and older and away. (We felt for her, We admit that at one point We raised a wing, just slightly—We thought to offer her comfort—and accidentally swept clean an entire civilization, one that had been struggling for a thousand years and was just about to really get going. Very sorry; entirely Our fault.) She rolled the second stone not quite as far and saw the second child, her daughter, reaching the climacteric, aged seven, then fourteen. The third stone was the furry baby licked clean, her head recovered to some unknown perfect state, and the three children stood a moment in front of their mother, then turned and walked into the sea. Our Beloved thought: They are both living and dead. She thought, It is as if the world is made of parallel lines, and here I live with my dead babies, but if I could merely step over…And at that moment We called the Others, We felt something tick like the wheel in a watchworks, and the Others were already gathered. (How many rational creatures can exist in one place if They do not occupy time and space? A tricky and well-organized question, much belittled of late.) She looked at the stones and thought of the babies, and just like that, she thought, Three. And from there it happened so quickly, she thought of the seven elders who carried the sacred fire, she looked up at the sky and recited the names of the twelve caves:

  The Cave of Running.

  The Cave of Dreaming.

  The Cave of Sex.

  The Cave of Loss.

  The Cave of Hunger.

  The Cave of Plenty.

  The Cave of Remembering.

  The Cave of Rain.

  The Cave of Winter.

  The Cave of War.

  The Cave of the Dead.

  The Cave of…

  …she paused, it was the last one, some in her tribe couldn’t speak the word because it had no correlative except itself, her grandmother had passed it to her…

  …of Becoming. Oh, for Us it was a majestic moment, the way she held the little round stones and looked at the sky, and realized that there were three, seven, twelve, and that the universe was turning according to a principle within her grasp, because the universe was outside, in the form of the stones, and inside precisely the same, the Self is infinitely expanding and infinitely receding, which direction We are not at liberty to say.

  We said, “Let it be this one, she is the One!” But the Others shook their heads, after a fashion, and said no, and for quite good reasons. The circles she drew in the dirt were not enough, your world was too young to change. But some of Us could not resist, and We breathed into her ear, The Kingdom of Heaven is Before You. We have tried every combination in every language, we have rolled Time up like a blanket and shaken it out again, We mean to say We have made the Holy Effort, and finally The Kingdom of Heaven is Before You is the absolute best We can do. The numbers add up, it translates well, it is both concise and true. But We said it wrong to her, Our Beloved; for one thing we called her John, and that was a muddle. And We lost her. The fire took her, we’ll say no more. Her husband was to carry her to the Village of the Dead, miles from the caves, or he was to give her to the sea, but in his grief he began instead to dig, and he dug for days, and he placed her in a hole and buried her, and later a rockslide covered her ever more finally. To the tribe he made the gesture of ascension, she simply flew away.

  She’ll be found, it’s not so long now, and there will be some academic careers solidified over her remains, certainly so. What to make of that cranium in light of the carbon dating? What of her eloquent bones?

  In every language there are names that add up to seven. You are very good at figuring such things out, at zeroing in on them and clinging to them without ever knowing why you do so. There are other things you suspect as well but cannot prove. For instance, humans love to sit facing enormous bodies of water, and one of the things they invariably do is pick up a handful of sand and let it sift through their fingers. Why? Because there is a point, midway between the gathering of the handful and the sifting back to the infinity below you, when you are holding a number of grains of sand, and it equals the number of times the average dog wags his tail in an average life. You are a clever species.

  For a while there were variations in your heritage: Jonah, Joan, Joshua, Yeshua, Jesus, Miriam, Esther, these are all sevens. But at some point you settled in and decided to give a single name to many prophets: John the Baptist, John Who Was Jesus’s Favorite, John at Patmos, countless saints, priests, men and women of the cloth, John Keats, John Lennon, John Crowley, John the Mechanic up the Road (who is a man of few words and all of them uncanny), not to mention John your favorite horse, who carried you seven miles through a blizzard in the jubilee year. One of Us, Who is Funny and Too Clever, thought of introducing into your population (randomly! through dreams and the media!) some of our other favorites: Ain Soph. Kether. Chokmah. Binah. Chesed. Geburah. Tiphereth. Netzach. Hod. Yesod. Malkuth. Da’ath. Finally We agreed they wouldn’t work well on a playground.

  So much water under the bridge, or so they tell Us, and you have come to believe the Books were written as they appear, and they were written in a certain order, and that order was preordained. Matthew Mark Luke John. A lot of letters from Paul, who was also a seven but troubled. John John John, Jude, John. In the Beginning was the Word. But what was given to John on the island of Patmos, wracked with fever and unable to hear Us clearly, was not the end, and had it been up to some of Us it wouldn’t have been included at all. He moved Us to Love and Pity; We could not intercede, even when he misunderstood and got it all wrong, and threatened the course of human history. But it makes for a good story, the way he told it. Beasts! Whores! The Rising of the Dead! The End of the World! (Ask her if the world has an end.)

  There is The One, but The One does not speak. It is We Who do all the work, Who adore you, We hover, you sense Us again and again. How else to explain this feeling, so common among you,
that everything you do is seen and recorded and treasured as if in a Holy Book in which you are the main character, the sole point of view? You are the hero, the victim, your parents didn’t love you enough, the traffic conspires against you, your little acts of kindness, when you can afford them, seem so significant. Who indulges you so? The One? You cannot imagine and We cannot describe the distance between you and what you seek, Him, Her, The Father God, The Mother. Is He so close to you that you cannot see Him? Is She so far away that your most brutal metaphors couldn’t carry you there? Beyond the Dark Matter, beyond the expanding and contracting limits of the universe, imagine a photograph taken in an easy time, when your land was prosperous, perhaps between wars. The photograph is of a dance floor (black and white diamonds), and two people are laughing and dancing, he in a slim, black, perfectly tailored tuxedo, she in ivory silk that spills down her narrow shoulders like a bright, liquid accident. Their affair has endangered them, has separated them from their clan, but it has brought them here, to this beautiful night, and their bodies are in motion (little is more pleasing to Us). The shutter of the camera opens and closes, the moment is captured on a delicate slip of film, the photograph is given to the couple as a gift. They marry, have a family, they grow old, the photograph is placed in a box and tucked away in a closet under the stairs. They die, the wife first, the husband soon after; before their children can decide what to do with the remnants, a fire consumes the house, a fire will take everything. The ground is razed.

  Where is that dancing couple? That is what you must decide, that is what you all have to contend with, because once you know it, you know the way to The One, the mansion with many rooms. Close? Or Far?

  There is The One, but The One does not speak. And We are manifold, indeed, We are Legion, and can agree on almost nothing, which causes no end of trouble. We apologize. Time, for instance, moves too quickly for you, the swiftness leaves you unhinged, and that was a mistake on our part, but there is no going back. Some of you perceive that there isn’t room enough between events to navigate the information contained within the moment consumed and the moment anticipated. We call this, among other names, The Dilemma of the Bullet. The contraindications of The Dilemma give rise to terror, dread, and nausea. But those of Us Who suggested slowing time down were outvoted, on the pretense that a perception of time moving thick and slow, manageable but sticky, would give rise to torpor, dread, and nausea. Oy. And We know that there are eras, there are, We might say, acres of time where the veil under which you live (and which protects you) grows very thin, it becomes little more than a scrim through which you glimpse the Ineffable, and amazing things happen in those years. We see it coming from far away, and We see, too, those Who carry the light that will lead you to safety. And those poor mortals! every day pricked by the quills of Our monstrous encouragement! That Magician, for instance, wandering through Palestine, performing His feats and rattling the bones of all who looked upon Him. He was great! He was fantastic and doomed, and He took it on the chin, We could hardly have loved a Man more. But every time He spoke or raised His hand, sometimes even when He blinked, the veil grew more sheer; sometimes a corner grew tattered and lifted off the earth like a circus tent in an electrical storm, the carnival of that man! All around Him people were puzzling over yeast or no yeast, cloven hooves (not good, they were right), what to do about beards and tattoos, the Law, the Law, the Law, and here He is, a sudden Baal Shem, and everywhere He steps the world flips! upside down. The sky becomes a bowl that men may fish in; love grows sharp as a sword; the unseen radiates up and outward, and no one can tell anymore the difference between speaking and singing, what they dream or what they hold. You like, We think it’s safe to say, for inheritance to have mass, but He says no. You may not keep your treasure, even from one moment to the next. The blind will see, yes, and the dead sit up in the stained chair, but what, bear with Us now, is the point of all that? Because the blind man, the soldier’s daughter, the hemorrhaging woman, crusty Lazarus himself, where are they now? Dead and gone as if He’d never touched them at all! Trickster! Look what He buried in the heart of His argument! Your own (at least We think he was yours) Emerson said that prayer for any commodity is vicious. Sight, health, wealth, a harvest, a son-in-law: vicious. But if that’s how you want it, He said, shrugging His shoulders. If that will get your attention, okeydoke. And He used His magic in the service of Our message, that song shaken off the wing: The Kingdom of Heaven is Before You.

  Not enough! shouted the fan club.

  Who could say such a thing? rumbled the gathered throng.

  Only the Messiah, was the decision; only some mess of finitude and eternity. “For Pete’s sake,” We said, rolling Our eyes. Fully Human and Fully Divine, like a cookie recipe. (You didn’t understand about Him at all then, you understand less now. He was an impatient man, driven. Imagine Him boarding a train right now, a train you are on, the sinister cut of His suit, the look in His eyes. Maybe He’s dangerous, or maybe He’s just the man to share a dry martini with: He passes you, you cannot say which He is, and then He’s gone. A sexy, impossible, impertinent man not prone to suffering fools.) But He listened to Us, in a way He was One of Us, and We said, “Fine, fine, stop trying to explain. Blend.” You know where that ended up. Sort of Our mistake. We might have pushed the envelope, as you say. We might have allowed Him to rumble the oversoul too much, too soon. Never in the history of You Know What have people grieved so mightily, and for so long. You’re grieving still, aren’t you?

  You wouldn’t know Him if He tipped His hat to you on the street. He would terrify you.

  Part Two

  Apokalypsis. Revelatio. The words sound so grave now, with good reason, but what We mean to give is simple as a sigh. The bridegroom lifts the gauze, and there She is. She was there all along. You’re rumbling around in your boxes, heartbroken, tooth-grinding, and you hate the way you spend your days and how you ruined your life by having healthy children and all the ways your mate does not understand you. A voice which is not a voice and doesn’t actually speak reminds you to eat your sandwich. Daily revelation, the most quotidian of all. And then there are the other ways it arrives. A heron sails close to a cold stream, a black cat leaps on windblown leaves. A tired woman rests her fingers on her face. In the words of one of your poets, The man in the black coat turns. Gracious, We love Poetry here, We take turns reading Our favorites, but one of the problems with you, We’ve been trying to say this for some time now, is the old vaticinia ex eventu. You conflate your personal history with Everything Else. For those of Us Who wish to give you a gift, this Kingdom-of-Heaven-is-Before-You token of Our esteem, no defect in your evolution could be more ironic. Imagine offering a treat to a dog with no mouth.

  Stay inside your skin and figure it out, We urge this upon you in your sleep. Be radically negative: not this, not this, not this. The Kingdom is not your clan, your country, your meetinghouse. The Conflict is not your government, your enemies, your struggle with entropy and degeneration. Use your history only as metaphor, koan, or parable.

  We chose John even though Exile was his middle name. We chose him to say a little something about the Magician, because we thought he Got It (not the Magician per se, but what the Magician pointed toward). John had been treasured by Some of Us from his youth, because he dreamed in numbers and had a keen eye. We spoke to him annually, beginning when he was small. We said, Look! And there, gathered around the well for just a moment, seven women bending from the waist at once, seven cats on the wall behind them. Delightful. Easy joy. He loved the light of a hard summer sky, the blinding crests of waves at midday. It seemed he was a natural follower (he took extensive notes), and so when We decided that perhaps a book could be written—We have a weakness for books—he naturally came to mind for one of the chapters. Not the last, for Heaven’s sake; perhaps the first. Perhaps he would provide a map for everything that followed.

  But by then there had been the storm in the desert, and the Magician was gone, the apostles s
cattered, some in prison. Domitian ordered John to the island, and We thought, That’s fine, he can use the time like a retreat. He was sick when his boat docked, and he grew sicker each day, and by then Some of Us thought We should turn Our Faces away. The ill invariably speak from their condition, and he was filled with rage and shame. Don’t judge Us for miscalculating how to treat him; We’ve seen mothers make similar mistakes every day. Of course you can have ice cream if your stomach hurts, they say, All Love. And so we sent him this: (log (K)) *666 = 25919.99787. The Platonic cycle. This seemed to go over so well with him, at least in sleep, that We got a bit carried away and sent him the values of harmonics, the Aztec equivalents of the Brahmic cycle, the height of the Cheops pyramid, the descending sums of stacks of square roots, do please understand that this was like play for Us, like showing a child a group of nesting dolls, infinitely nesting. All We meant to say is that the Root can be stripped of history, of mythos, of pathos, and will shine up bearing a remarkable resemblance to other things you know and love, and then the Root can be clothed again in particulars and We’re all the richer for it. Imagine Us giving this to him in the night, put your best spin on it, as you say. Imagine what it sounded like to him, an inflamed, dehydrated man.

  It is the case that, speaking mathematically here, all sacred texts are preserved, and none are. We maintain sangfroid easily in the face of this basic discrepancy. So we said to John that Inanna’s sacred number is 252, and he wrote, The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood. We shook Our heads, tried again. We asked him, What is the basic unit of truth, John? He groaned in his sleep. We said, What happens on the day that, hypothetically, others of your own kind begin forcing whole families into ovens? What is True on that day, on the days to follow? And he wrote: Then from the smoke came locusts from the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. We said, Sweetheart, do you remember the night years ago when you became so frightened, and you wandered out into the garden and found your mother there? She was weaving a dress for her sister, and had torches lit against the midsummer darkness? Do you remember what you saw in that moment? And he wrote: So he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. We said to Each Other, he doesn’t need Us, he needs a doctor. And as We talked among Ourselves, the volume not quite down far enough, John continued writing. He wanted to see, We realized, the earth as scorched as his own mouth. He wanted the world to end, he wanted to cease grieving and complaining, he wanted more power and liberty, to be less afflicted by the vagaries of this experiment; simple, childish things. All over your world, in every given moment, boys are knocking down blocks and log buildings, they’re smashing against dams built for good reason and against floods they can’t imagine. They are jumping up and down in fury and swinging their little fists. And if those children manage to grow up, they invariably run for public office, offering their lives to the world like a humble sacrifice. Inside, they are voracious. We are Pensive about this trend, and We’ve given it a name: TABB. We offer them a prophecy, but They All Become Bureaucrats.