Bride of the Buddha

by Barbara McHugh, PhD

  I dared not look up

  “How could I not be grateful?” he asked. When I looked at him, he was smiling. “Don’t forget, gratitude is one of an awakened being’s favorite emotions.”

  “So you forgive me?” I asked, as perplexed as I was relieved.

  “My forgiveness is a given,” he replied. “You now have to forgive yourself. Your remorse and regret are your karma; self-forgiveness is your practice.” He stood up, slowly, favoring his back. “When motives are mixed, so is the karma, but you did well to save Jagdish and his men from serious consequences.”

  I felt compelled to ask. “Did he confess that Devadatta hired him?”

  The Tathagata shrugged. “He confirmed your story about a third party. I questioned Devadatta, who replied by declaring that he was leaving the Sangha and teaching on his own.”

  My rush of relief plummeted, as though struck by an arrow. “So he’s not disrobing. And we don’t know for sure if he tried to have you killed.”

  The Tathagata merely smiled. “A good example of uncertainty, one of the primary characteristics of reality. But our Sangha will survive. For now.”

  “For now?”

  “Impermanence. The most primary characteristic of all.”

  I closed my eyes, concentrated on my breath, and observed the stream of sensations arising and disappearing in my body. In this way I prevented the fear gnawing inside me from swallowing my mind.

  That was how I learned that Devadatta created the schism in the Sangha that he’d threatened all along. With several hundred fanatical monks—and to my surprise, a dozen or so nuns—he’d already left for Gaya Hill, never to return. Yet the Tathagata never uttered another word against him other than a general announcement to the public that Devadatta, who had failed to uphold the principles of the Sangha, was no longer to be considered a part of it. There were rumors later that Devadatta regretted his actions and wanted to apologize to the Buddha, but I never saw him again to find out. Many of his monastics did rejoin our Sangha eventually. But I never knew for certain if Devadatta actually hired Jagdish or merely suggested the deed to Prince Ajatasattu, who we soon found out was already scheming against his father.

  My joy at Devadatta’s departure made my efforts to forgive him—for whatever he had done—much easier, but, oh, the stories that have flapped about ever since and come to roost in minds that should have known better. Tales that Devadatta not only hired assassins but also tried to crush the Tathagata with a giant rock and later used a mad elephant to attack him—all these attempts failing, according to the storytellers, thanks to the Tathagata’s superhuman powers. Unfortunately, I was implicated in some of these tales, probably by monks who’d observed my concern about the danger to his life and drew their own conclusions. In a few stories, I actually saved the Tathagata; others portrayed me as a fool, throwing myself in front of the rocks and elephant, trying to rescue a superhuman Tathagata who never needed saving. Jagdish might very well have heard many of these tales, which may have caused him to suspect that somehow Ananda had set the demon up. At any rate, my karma with him was not finished.

  But my personal karma formed only a minuscule part of the catastrophes in the years that followed.

  15

  To relate the historical events that eventually led to me ending up disgraced and contemplating leaving the Sangha forever would take far more time than is left to me, so I’ll say little more than that both sons of the Tathagata’s devoted kings betrayed their fathers in terrible ways. The Tathagata called it the karma of monarchy, which even at its best was imbued with violence and greed.

  In short, the princes Vidudabbha and Ajatasattu staged coups and both kings wound up dead. And that wasn’t the worst of it. In the Tathagata’s seventy-eighth year, Vidudabbha carried out his revenge, sending his army to raze our capital and massacre nearly all of the Sakyan clan. The Tathagata tried to negotiate a peace, but he managed only to buy time, for which I thank him, as most of my family escaped (my beloved Ama had recently died), including one of my sisters, who joined the Sangha. (Since then, the rumor has arisen that she’s me, the Tathagata’s estranged wife who finally made amends by ordaining as a nun. However many times she denies this, such rumors have a way of persisting.)

  There were so many deaths! That decade also saw the end of the Tathagata’s beloved chief disciples, Sariputta and Mogallana.When we received the news, the Tathagata’s eyes seemed to mirror the loss itself, and I felt my heart tearing open. “To the Sangha, they were like the largest branches of a mighty tree,” he said. “And now they’ve broken off.” Yet as I continued to weep, the Tathagata’s face clarified into purest compassion—and even joy. “How can you sit there and cry?” he asked me. “They have both attained parinirvana, complete freedom from the prisons of space, time, and emotion.”

  We were once again in King Bimbisara’s—now King Ajatasattu’s—bamboo grove, seated in a small pavilion not far from the three-story sal-wood residence hall Bimbisara completed for us shortly before his abdication. We’d returned to Magadha, after traveling from town to town, mostly among the Mallans and Vajjins. They were clan-republics, much like the Sakyans had been, their governments a far better reflection of our Sangha’s organization than the region’s ever more tyrannical monarchies, such as the one presently hosting us. Although the king’s grove was green and shimmery as ever in the late monsoon morning sunshine, it echoed with shouts, grunts, thudding hooves, crashing metal, and all the other noises of warriors training in the fields nearby. Prince Ajatasattu may have knelt at the Tathagata’s feet and sobbed his repentance for, as he put it, his “negligence” toward his father, but it was clear to me that he mostly hoped to glean information from his itinerant spiritual teacher as to how easily the clan-republics we had visited could be subdued, in case he felt like invading them.

  “I can’t help but grieve,” I said, weeping anew at the sight of Sariputta’s neatly folded yellow robe and worn acacia begging bowl, returned to us by one of his companions.

  The Tathagata folded his arms, gaunt with age, and shook his head at me, the hopeless case. “Consider this,” he said. “Your refusal to embrace the full truth of impermanence is prolonging your suffering in the same way that resistance to pain causes more pain.”

  Suddenly, I felt I could no longer bear his calm ability to savor the colors and textures of his life, light and dark, without attachment. “I know, I know,” I said. “Like all beings, I’ll be separated from my body and all that I love. Meanwhile, we’re staying here with a king who’s using you for his own selfish purposes, wasting your energy, and compromising your health when the Sangha needs you. The Order’s future, especially without your chief disciples, is far from certain.”

  “What do you expect of me? I’ve taught you monastics everything I know. There are no secret doctrines in the Dharma I teach to be passed along to a select few. As I told Devadatta, the Sangha is perfectly capable of governing itself after I die.”

  “The Sangha is not ready for you to die!” I said, my voice jagged with desperation. “And you don’t have to—if you only stopped working so hard and took seriously the tonics I make for you.” I worried particularly about his attacks of dysentery, which seemed to be worsening.

  “Oh, I take your tonics seriously, I just don’t take them orally.”

  “This isn’t a joke.” Once again, I’d descended into huffiness. I couldn’t help noticing that in his old age, the Tathagata was reminding me more and more of Stick Woman in his offhand comments about his personal survival, and I was reverting to a petulance I thought I’d outgrown years ago.

  The Tathagata leaned his chin on his mottled fist, and for the first time I noticed a definite tremor. “So you yourself are not ready for me to die. But how long would you have me live? A thousand years?”

  I concentrated on my breathing, trying to return to a reasonable state where the Tathagata wouldn’t need to mo
ck me. “You know how I feel about supernatural feats,” I said. “I truly believe that the best way to gain enlightenment is with the help of a teacher with human limitations, not a god with special powers. Otherwise, one just ends up worshiping the god.”

  “Very well, then I won’t choose an unnatural life span,” he said cheerfully. I had no notion of the future consequences of our little exchange. I’d simply tried to disguise my personal distress by stating an intellectual argument. Nor did I particularly notice the novice, a pale, spindly twenty-year-old with a premature furrow between his eyes, who suddenly appeared in front of us and heard our conversation, or at least the last part of it.

  The young monk cleared his throat. “The Venerable Kassapa the Great will give the Dharma talk tonight.” Kassapa had joined the Sangha several years before, boasting of his spiritual knowledge and hinting that he was being groomed as the Tathagata’s successor. I’d been too caught up with the recent tragedies to worry about whether he would turn out to be yet another Devadatta, poisoning the Sangha with elitist views.

  The Tathagata cocked an eyebrow. “Kassapa will give the talk?”

  The novice looked down. “Requests to.”

  The Tathagata stood. “Fine, if the other monks agree. But I’ll be presenting the talk tomorrow.” He smiled at me. “It will be my last one here. We’ll be leaving Magadha within the week.”

  As the novice bowed and took his leave, I stared at the Tathagata, my surprise mixed with a new apprehension. Kassapa would remain in this area along with most of the other monks. Was the Tathagata departing from here to be with followers he could trust? How much influence did this great kassapa have, anyway? Surely the Sangha had not rid itself of Devadatta only to face another threat from within. “Why are we leaving so abruptly?” I asked.

  “You were right. I need to make some preparations before I die, and I can’t do it here. We’ll spend the next rains retreat in Vesali.”

  “Why Vesali?” My feeling of danger was in no way assuaged by his choice. During our last stay in the republic of Vesali, a former member of the Sangha had denounced the Tathagata in front of the Vajjin parliament for promising nothing to his adherents except to teach them how to end their suffering. The Tathagata merely chuckled and thanked his denouncer for the compliment, but there were now those in Vesali who had become disillusioned with the Tathagata for failing to reassure them that he would use supernatural powers to save Vajji from military attack.

  For the first time, I felt, like the sudden stab of a needle, the possibility that everything the Tathagata had tried to do in his life could fall apart.

  At the very least, in Vesali our selections of lodgings would be limited. “Do you care nothing for your safety?” I asked him.

  “Safety?” He gestured, the loose skin on his arm’s underside swaying, toward the sunny fields beyond the trees, where metal clunked against metal and the warriors’ cursing and laughter filled the air. Again he smiled. “One of the greatest sources of suffering is the craving for safety.”

  “Very well,” I said. “I’ll suffer for us both.”

  The next day the Tathagata gave the last talk he would ever give in the Magadha Kingdom, on the hunched gray shoulder of Vulture Peak, speaking to the Sangha from the granite cave that had been carved years before into a vast cube-shaped enclosure able to accommodate a hundred monks. “Be a lamp unto yourselves,” he said. “Live with the Dharma as your only refuge.”

  His Dharma talk made clear, as I remember it, that we were to make the teachings part of ourselves and not seek an authoritarian leader to rule over us. After his death, we were to govern ourselves in a democratic way, similar to the Mallan and Vajjin republics, where we were headed. But not everyone agreed with my interpretation, and even then I wanted a more definitive statement from him, explicitly forbidding anyone from taking his place.

  But now we were on the road again, wandering from town to town with a company of forty other monks, including my old friends Kavi and Naveen, my little-boy students who now were nearly fifty. At first everything seemed to go well. The Tathagata’s health stabilized, and even though we were no longer staying with kings, our hosts owned estates that allayed my fears that we would end up sleeping on rock piles and eating cow fodder. The Tathagata still had plenty of followers among the Vajjins, who were a cheerful if decadent lot, dancing and singing at the slightest pretext and decorating everything in sight—sewing spangles on their clothes, artificially gilding the spokes of their carts’ wheels, and even painting pink or blue polka-dots on their cattle. “We don’t need to visit the deva realms!” the Tathagata joked. “We have them all around us.”

  For a couple of months, it almost seemed like old times, the Tathagata teaching in pleasure parks or dining with some, if not all, of the town’s notables and discussing the Dharma, always encouraging the servants to listen in. He spoke often about how mindfulness and virtuous behavior fortified each other, teachings that suited the Vajjins, who lacked the discipline to pursue deep meditation.

  Then one morning, under a sky packed with ominous purple clouds, the Tathagata announced to the monks that they were on their own for the rains retreat. He and I were leaving for the tiny nearby village of Beluva for an indefinite time. When I asked him why the change of plans, he replied that Beluva was a good source of lemons and water.

  My fear for his life reawakened, clawing through me and shredding the foolish complacency that had lulled me over the past months. Lemon juice and water were treatments for dysentery. The Tathagata was predicting that his illness would return.

  Beluva was a dank little hamlet of fewer than five hundred people. In the rainy season it seemed to generate its own darkness full of miserable little teakwood cottages black with rain and cringing under banyans and huge oaks that creaked and shuddered in the constant wind. But lemon trees flourished on the hillsides, and rivers and streams skipped and glittered everywhere. The Tathagata’s lay followers procured a cottage for us—two dim little rooms next to a private wash house—and set about supplying us with curries and rice.

  Almost immediately, the Tathagata fell ill.

  As he had in the past when sick, he spent much of the time in deep meditative absorption, far from whatever pain his body might otherwise have suffered. But this time, his body seemed far more tortured, either rigid or quaking, moans echoing out of his dry and cracked mouth as if with a life of their own. Yet even when his mind was not absorbed, his words remained calm. “It would be good if you recited some Dharma,” he said, his face a gray cadaver’s but for the foul breath that hovered over it. “It will help me meditate.”

  A sick dread dragged through my body day after day as I performed the necessary tasks to keep the Tathagata alive, reciting whatever of his teachings came to mind while supplying him with water and dosing him with lemon, ginger, yogurt, and alkaline drinks, most of which he refused. For hours he just lay there, dry and shaking. My meditation practice barely kept me from caving in to the increasing terror that the Sangha would not survive.

  Then one morning the Tathagata arose from his bed and went to the wash house. He returned in a fresh robe, emaciated but with the light back in his eyes. I was not shocked at his quick recovery—it was always so when the Tathagata was ill. Once the illness passed, he didn’t prolong the symptoms by telling himself stories that he was still sick.

  At the sight of his revived self, I wept with relief, telling him how terrible I had felt and how grateful I was for his revival.

  “Not again!” he said. “This respite is temporary. How many lessons do you need to understand impermanence?”

  But I wasn’t going to hang my head. “I fear for the Sangha. Without your guidance it could very well fall to the Devadatta surrogates—such as Kassapa—who think that the heart of your teachings is to practice spiritual acrobatics.”

  He smiled. “That’s where you come in. You know all my teachings. It will
be up to you to ensure they survive.”

  Now I did hang my head. “I haven’t even awakened.”

  “Well, then, awake! You have the power. You’re loving and kind, and you’ve done so much for the Sangha over the years. Everyone delights in your presence and benefits from your recitations.”

  Flattered though I was at his praise, hopelessness weighed me down. So often in my life anger had ruled me. “I’ve never thought of myself as kind.”

  “That’s because you don’t cling to your kindness to define yourself. This is all to the good.”

  “I’ve practiced deception, I’ve indulged in grief,” I said. “I’ve meditated all these years but don’t seem able to get beyond this karma.”

  The Tathagata was silent for a moment, and our little hut seemed to open to the cries of the cuckoos and the wind in the trees. “Perhaps you need to confess.”

  I blinked, completely perplexed. “To whom? I already confessed to you.”

  “Maybe you need to confess to the world.” In the dimness of the hut, I couldn’t read his eyes. Was this more of the cryptic mischief of a man who considered himself beyond death?

  “How could I tell the world the truth? The Sangha would be completely discredited; the teachings would be mocked.” I studied the shadows gathered in his face. Maybe his illness had deranged his mind.

  “Not that sort of confession,” he said. “Write it down. There must have been some reason why you learned this skill.”

  “What would I do with such an account?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps you’ll burn it. Perhaps you’ll give it to a trusted friend. Have faith that the Dharma will guide you.”

  I still feared for the condition of his mind. “I need to know something of why you would have me do this.”

  The Tathagata sat down on the clean bamboo mat I had put out for him when he was in the wash house. He may have recovered, but he was still weak. “You yourself once quoted me comparing my knowledge to the innumerable leaves in a forest and my teachings to only a handful of them. For that handful is all that’s necessary to end human suffering.”