10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  Old Uddaka was frozen, every muscle rigid, as if he had turned to hard clay; the naked blade in his hand was stopped a hair’s breadth from the prince’s forehead. Only his keen eyes looked as though they might erupt with flame.

  “We should be going, Prince Siddhārtha,” Maudgalyayana said with a wave of his hand. One by one, Mahākāśyapa, Pūrna, and Subhuti turned and walked toward their palanquins.

  Yet still the prince could not depart, for a beautiful woman was now clinging to his leg. Her abundant black hair tumbled in disarray, and from between its flowing strands, two eyes like deep lakes stared up into his face. This was the prince’s wife—the Princess Yaśodharā. The golden beaded necklace that hung upon her breast sparkled by the prince’s feet.

  “My prince! Why must you leave us? Why must you leave me?”

  It was often said that the Princess Yaśodharā most resembled Siddhārtha’s birthmother, the king’s first wife, Māyā. Māyā had been a princess of Koliya, Śākya’s neighbor to the east, and a famed beauty. During her pregnancy, following the custom of the day, she had left Śākya to return to her home village for the birth. Yet the prince had come early, in a place called Lumbinī halfway between the two kingdoms, and seven days later, the mother had died.

  A carven stone monument marking the spot—one that stands to this day—was erected in later years by King Aśoka. Bereft of his birth mother, the prince had been raised by the king’s second wife, the princess Maha Pajapati, who was Māyā’s sister. Though both father and mother showered the prince with their affection and spared nothing in his education, he had not grown up to become the cakravarti-rājan—the universal sage-monarch to unify and rule the world—his father had wished he would become. Had the prince wanted such a role for himself, he might very well have succeeded in becoming that great ruler. Yet his grief over the loss of his mother Māyā and his understanding of the unhappiness and destruction fated for all men had led him ever further from the expectations and the passions of those around him and toward a life of solitary thought.

  Even though there were times that the prince looked upon Yaśodharā and saw in her face the image of the late Māyā and felt himself saved not once but twice, the love of the princess was not enough to keep the prince from leaving.

  Siddhārtha was twenty-nine years old. He already had a child with the princess, a boy named Rahula. As it was the primary obligation of the head of the household in ancient India to ensure that the bloodline was continued, one could say that the prince had already fulfilled the most essential part of that duty. In truth, there was nothing in his heart that held him back from leaving the palace. He had been waiting for this day for a very long time.

  “Be well, my princess. And take good care of Rahula. And my father, as well—he is nearing the age when his legs and back will pain him. He will need your help.”

  Siddhārtha leaned over and gently pried Yaśodharā’s fingers from his foot. The princess’s hand was as soft as an infant’s to the touch. Then he lifted her up and hugged her close. She wore a thin, silken gown and her breasts were warm against his chest.

  “I will always be beside you.” He gazed down at the clinging princess and, suffering a pang of worry, he caught his breath and looked up to the sky.

  Subhuti called out to the prince, asking him to make haste, and joined Pūrna in making a vajra mudrā, the mudrā of thunder, with his hands.

  Then the sharp voice of a woman rang out behind them, and to Siddhārtha, it felt like a blow to his back. “My prince! Wait!”

  The prince stopped and turned around to see the wet nurse Vamsa running toward him, her footfalls upon the stones breaking the hush in the courtyard. She was dressed in finery but her hair was disheveled, and the jeweled crown she wore as a sign of her nobility was hanging from one ear. She carried an infant in her arms, and she laid it at the prince’s feet.

  “Why, this is Rahula!” Siddhārtha exclaimed.

  “My prince, you must tell me why you would abandon your only child in this way!”

  Siddhārtha sighed. “The time for such explanations has passed, wet nurse. I entrust his care to you.”

  Vamsa bit her lip. Below them on the stones, the young Rahula was now sitting up, crying.

  “My prince! If you will insist on leaving us, then tread upon your own son as you leave.”

  Vamsa stared directly into Siddhārtha’s eyes. A stillness sharp as glass filled the courtyard. Uddaka still stood, his kora frozen in the air just above where the prince’s head had been, while Maudgalyayana and the other Brahmins did not move so much as an eyebrow as they watched beneath the blazing sun. The only noise came from the surging sea of cicadas.

  Without a word the prince strode forward. In his heart he felt only the vastness of the void. When his foot touched Rahula, the child screamed as though burned.

  The five palanquins passed through the ornate gates of the palace like a shadow before the throngs of onlookers.

  The prince, gazing out through the wisteria hangings, saw a flower growing off to the side of the road, its large yellow bloom swaying wildly despite the lack of a breeze.

  “To Tuṣita,” he heard Maudgalyayana say from one of the palanquins ahead of him. The bearers quickened their pace and turned at the next corner.

  “To Tuṣita.”

  The voice reached Siddhārtha deep in his clouded consciousness.

  At this very moment, he was on his way to meet the world’s ultimate being, and the thought made him shake like a child with anticipation.

  Could this be the fear that comes before attaining enlightenment?

  Gingerly, the prince put his hands together.

  Snow was falling all around.

  It fell endlessly whirling, soundlessly filling the land around them with pure white. With every breath of wind, he caught a glimpse of vast plains, visible only as a dim, bluish shadow beyond the thick white curtain of snow. The sun was out somewhere between the snow and the ice that seemed to cover both heaven and earth—he could see its brilliant light reflected in one part of the storm.

  “The Eight Cold Hells!” Siddhārtha muttered, and he moved to draw his robes more tightly together at the neck. This was when he noticed that he seemed to have no arms. And not only did his arms appear to have vanished, but he also lacked a chest to cover with robes, a waist to tie with a sash, and legs below . . . in fact, his entire body seemed to be missing.

  Perhaps I am meant to face the world without form?

  Lose the self, and you destroy suffering. All that is left is the barren snow and ice. Strangely, he felt no pain. Though there was thought, there was no sensation—even though he had always assumed there could be no consciousness without the five senses.

  “What I don’t understand is, how can I see all of these inanimate things around me without having returned to my body?”

  Next to him, Maudgalyayana nodded. “We are in the Trayastriṃsa, my prince. Already we are 320,000 yojana distant from Jambudvīpa, the island of man.” Maudgalyayana said the numbers as though he were reading them aloud.

  “Jambudvīpa, as I understand it, floats in the seas to the east of Mt. Sumeru,” said Siddhārtha, his voice echoing too loudly. “This is the world where men live. I did not expect the heights above that, the Heaven upon Heaven—this Trayastriṃśa—to be such a desolate place.”

  “My prince, we are currently on the second level of the Six Heavens of the Realm of Desire, those being Cāturmahārājika of the Four Heavenly Kings, Trayastriṃśa through which we currently pass, Yāma, Tuṣita, Nirmāñarati, and Paranirmita-vasavartin. Here we find our paradise. Alas, in no more than eighty thousand years, it will perish.”

  “But why is this, Maudgalyayana? Where in this second of the Six Heavens, this celestial world beyond the realm of man, do you find this shadow of destruction?”

  The four Brahmin monks were standing in a circle now with Prince Siddhārtha at its center in the ice and snow. The wildly sweeping flakes passed both within and wi
thout their bodies.

  “We believe the origin of the problem lies in a warping of the space between imaginary coordinates two and three in the Delta quadrant, just above the Cāturmahārājika.”

  Two suns burned in a copper sky overhead. One was large and somewhat oblong and gave off a dull orange light. The other was small and possessed a brilliant white incandescence at its core, ringed farther out by a silver corona. Large eruptions of reddish gas flowed from the surface of the orange sun, swirling through the void at a frightening pace, extending toward the smaller, bluish white sun. The flowing gases painted land and sky in startling colors, and whenever the gases wrapped entirely around the smaller sun, the void between them filled with an incandescent brilliance. The light cut the long flatness of space in half, sweeping aside all other illumination and shadow. Then the crimson gas flow would spiral inward and vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving the two suns to shine in the copper sky once more.

  A silence, like death, came next, followed a short while later by another plume of gas that rose from the waves of flame rimming the dusky orange sun, then extended into space. So the two suns traveled through the black sky, alternately emitting flaming gases and brilliant flashes of light, a symphony of brilliance that washed away all the other stars in the sky. When the two finally passed out of sight, another pair came racing up from the opposite horizon, one of them a giant fireball, ringed with silver, with a long tail of burning gas that stretched far off into the void.

  Two pair of suns made four suns in total that burned in the vast solar region of Trayastriṃśa.

  The blizzard had disappeared, as though a blanket had been removed from the world. Now everywhere Siddhārtha looked was a barren icy plain. Not even the four suns burning in the void seemed to have any warming effect on the frozen ground. Nothing moved in that bluish expanse, nor was there any sign of life; everything was frozen hard as steel. Even a portion of the atmosphere had crystallized into a translucent remnant scattered across the surface.

  The temperature was minus 272.8 degrees Celsius. If any civilization had once existed here, there was no trace of it now.

  “Even with all the energy to be had, there is hardly any heat movement on this world. The level of heat entropy is extremely low. My prince, it is only a matter of time before Trayastriṃśa is lost.”

  “Why can you not warm it? Or prevent the loss of what warmth it has? I am sure it would require an enormous amount of energy, but surely that is preferable to losing a world entirely,” Prince Siddhārtha said, struggling to understand.

  “It is an insulation phenomenon,” Mahākāśyapa explained, a pained expression on his face. “With the expansion of Trayastriṃśa’s space, we are witnessing a rapid dispersal of its heat energy.”

  “But why?”

  “My prince, this region has been cut off from the rest of space by a fluctuation in its gravitational field. Through our efforts, we have been able to free a small portion of it, but it is not enough.”

  “What did you mean by . . . Trayastriṃśa’s space expanding?”

  “Even as Trayastriṃśa is sequestered by the local gravitational field, it grows larger.”

  “But why here? Why only Trayastriṃśa?”

  “Sadly, it is not only Trayastriṃśa’s space that is affected. All of the Six Heavens of the Realm of Desire are showing similar, fatal changes. We cannot afford to be optimistic about this. It may come to pass that we are forced to stage a mass exodus from this space altogether.” Maudgalyayana’s words were heavy with the weight of his sorrow.

  “We had hoped for a solution in the past, but nothing has improved in the slightest,” Mahākāśyapa added.

  The five now rode in a large translucent sphere that contained them and them alone. Beyond its confines, uncountable twinkling stars formed a sea of light all around them. Siddhārtha saw the monks only as vague shadows against that starry backdrop.

  Gazing out into the vast expanse of star-studded darkness, he could see a giant torrent of light filling a third of all that was visible. It cut across the darkness, and the colors spilled from it like a waterfall: navy blue, deep green, indigo, and all the way across the spectrum to a brownish red. Bands of color split the darkness in half, seemingly in mid-explosion—yet no matter how long Siddhārtha watched, the light stayed perfectly still, neither blinking nor ebbing. That great field of light seemed stuck against the dark sky, frozen still as death. Which, he realized, was exactly what it was.

  “My prince, there are over a hundred billion spiral galaxies here in Yāma, yet the warping of space has begun dispersing them, or collapsing them, or eliminating them entirely. Look—” he pointed—“that spiral galaxy has been gravitationally sequestered. See how its nucleus contracts and releases its energy. We call this a quasar, but it is only a name. We do not understand what is actually happening.”

  Pūrna pointed with a finger toward the unmoving light. “That spiral galaxy is roughly 3,800,000 light-years distant from us. It was once comprised of one hundred billion stable stars—but I fear that most have already been lost. Here in Yāma, we have already lost ten billion such galaxies.”

  Prince Siddhārtha stood in silence, looking out on that glorious light of death.

  “Maudgalyayana, we should transport the prince to Tuṣita as quickly as possible,” Pūrna said quietly.

  “Yes. I’m sure that Brahmā awaits his arrival.” Maudgalyayana turned to Mahākāśyapa beside him. “Make for Tuṣita with all haste. We’ll be traveling from coordinates 713.081 to 429.993 . . . through imaginary space, but I don’t think that can be avoided.”

  “Is there a particular danger in keeping to normal space?” Mahākāśyapa inquired.

  “Yes. I’ve received word that slight warping has been detected in the vicinity of coordinates 799.341. If this should happen to be a typical relativity-theory gravitational field I see no problem, but if it is an engineered field, going there would be tantamount to plunging headfirst into the abyss.”

  Mahākāśyapa raised an eyebrow. “Does their reach already extend so far?”

  “One can never be sure with that phantasmagoric lot,” Maudgalyayana spat in a tone most unbecoming an enlightened holy man.

  The bubble that held them passed through the blackness of space like a shooting star.

  Maudgalyayana and the three other monks stood still, hardly seeming even to breathe. Alone, Prince Siddhārtha turned to watch the brilliant veil of light recede behind them into the distance.

  Three million eight hundred thousand light-years.

  Whatever he was seeing there at this moment was probably already long gone at its point of origin. The brightness that reached him now was nothing but an avatar—the temporary likeness of what was in reality, nothing. Powerful radiation would soon reach the nearer regions of space, bringing true death to the darkness around them.

  An edge of crimson crept along the border of the indigo sky. The blending of colors cast a deeply unsettling glow upon the vast sea of sand that spread in all directions. The landscape was so flat that the rising and falling of the dunes was almost imperceptible—and yet, incongruously long shadows stretched out, as though drawn by an unseen hand into long tracks across the plain.

  Here and there, brown objects thrust from the dune sea like fallen branches. Their surfaces had been polished to a shiny luster by the moving sand, yet it was impossible to tell of what substance they were made. Siddhārtha judged that they had been lying here buried for a good hundred thousand years.

  “My prince, here is where Tovatsue, capital of Tuṣita, once stood. Now it is nothing but desert. The only signs that anything was here at all are the remnants of the buildings that emerge like fossils from the sand.”

  Maudgalyayana and the other monks pressed their hands together in silence. Siddhārtha followed suit.

  The translucent sphere in which they traveled floated over the dunes at a height of several centimeters. Suddenly, a blindingly brilliant light cut across the indi
go sky above. It was made by a giant object, and for a while fragmented streaks of incandescent ions glowed in the wake of its passage. Some amount of time later, a blast wave of immense heat swept across the desert.

  The faint crimson light at the edge of the indigo sky grew brighter and dimmer, a fluctuation that inspired an irrational fear in Siddhārtha.

  “The proximity warning system has indicated our arrival path,” Pūrna declared, looking back over his shoulder.

  Without a sound, the vast sea of sand split in half, revealing a giant city in the depths below.

  Siddhārtha struggled to move his legs, but found the effort baffling. A feeling of resistance troubled every motion, as though his entire body were submerged in water. Each time he tried to step forward, his foot would shift in a different direction of its own accord.

  Tuṣita’s capital, Tovatsue, was enormous, full of complicated devices and structures with functions that staggered the prince’s imagination. He grasped that the vast city was in fact a single edifice, its countless parts interconnecting in an immense cylindrical shape. The walls and ceilings of the giant corridors that served as the primary streets glowed with a beautiful aquamarine light, giving a sheen of vitality to the faces and bodies of the five travelers. An incredible number of side streets connected at right angles to the corridors; down these, Siddhārtha could see the edges of living quarters and manufacturing districts. There was a faint floral scent to the air, which was pleasantly dry and a comfortable temperature against his skin.

  Siddhārtha blushed when he reflected back on the gloomy, unhealthy design of Kapilavastu, and its sad lack of facilities—the city’s water supply and sewage system were barely sufficient at best. The situation cast shame on both his kingdom’s way of life and its leadership.

  And yet, the prince thought, perhaps I am wrong even to compare the two. Is not this Tuṣita, the Pure Land? Am I not the first man to visit this place while still alive? It profanes the sanctity of the divine to compare this hallowed land above Heaven with the refuse-strewn streets of man below!