Bride of the Buddha

by Barbara McHugh, PhD

  Now, age seventy, I forgave him everything, and the iron shackle that had been around my heart for so many years fell open. My brother’s whole life had been driven by a terror too terrifying to acknowledge. I saw that now—and I was not just seeing it. I felt it as my own, the terror and helplessness shared by all beings, all needing salvation from the violent uncontrollable universe we’d landed in, the domain of Mara, lord of death. But there were many different notions of salvation. For my brother and so many men it required superiority to other beings, starting with women and children, which meant the ability to conquer and subdue them—as if treating beings like mere things somehow prevented you from turning into a thing yourself, a chunk of rotting meat in a charnel ground. Even Siddhartha had once believed this, although the only being he’d tried to conquer and subdue by extreme asceticism had been his own.

  He’d changed, of course. After his awakening, he repeatedly warned against judging oneself as superior, inferior, or even equal to another being. To do that was to create a false sense of self.

  I thought again about my dream, how Kassapa had called my brother a boy, the same as he had me. Did Kassapa still believe in his superiority and require it for his salvation? Whatever he had done, I needed to forgive him, too, and allow for the possibility that I really didn’t understand the underpinning of his motivations.

  I squeezed my eyes shut in a grotesque last effort to gain enlightenment so I wouldn’t fail all those beings who, instead of aspiring to awaken, would despise themselves as women or boys who could never become men, doomed to decay into meaningless fragments. Desperately, I drilled my attention into my breath—but of course this was the absolute worst thing to do. Awakening meant opening my mind and heart to the present moment, not forcing my awareness into an image of what I supposed it to be.

  I slowed my breathing, and finally calmed my body. But I could feel that some deep part of me was still holding on to self and world. Or, more accurately, I felt myself letting go, only to grab on once again. My feeling of total defeat returned. All I could offer the Council was the care I had for this world and the beings in it. At best you could call it love, which the Council recognized only as a means to that ultimate end, the final cessation of all suffering. This cessation was beyond words. Human love, compared to this non-state, was just another attachment.

  I closed my eyes again, but this time I didn’t meditate. I prayed.

  In my thoughts I addressed the Tathagata, who not long ago had maintained that someone like me had served all the Buddhas of all the ages because the Sangha required someone who embodied kindness. The Tathagata had wanted me to serve on the Council.

  Please tell me what to do, I said to him now.

  But the voice that came into my thoughts wasn’t the Tathagata’s; it sounded like Stick Woman.

  You know what to do, she said. Like the priests and the shamans, make your sacrifice to save the world.

  I don’t believe in sacrificing innocent beings, you know that.

  Forget beings. All true sacrifice is of the self.

  What “self”? What do I sacrifice?

  What else? Your highest self’s most precious possession. Your aspiration.

  I still don’t understand.

  Fake your enlightenment.

  My eyes opened on their own. I was staring at the white moon, which made me blink. I couldn’t perpetrate such a deception. There was no way of justifying it—not to myself and not to the Council. Kassapa and the others had no interest in saving the world. The whole point of the practice was giving it up.

  And you? came the question. What do you think?

  I don’t know.

  But I realized I could form an intention to relinquish, one moment at a time, my attachment to the way I wanted the world to be.

  I could also walk into the Council and let them draw their own conclusions about my enlightenment.

  And if they declare you unawakened?

  Perhaps I’ll deserve whatever they do to me. If I end up in the hell realms—well, I’ve risked that before, haven’t I?

  I stared up at the rising moon, constricting into a white light pitiless as a judgment. At this point I wasn’t all that far from my cave, where I could meditate in a welcoming darkness. I stood up. I could make it there by the time the moon was directly overhead.

  I stepped onto the path up the dry hill, its gravel almost as white as the moon. For the first time that night, I noticed the crickets’ chorus, shrill and quivering. I let the sounds penetrate me as I walked. In my cave I could resume practicing mindfulness of the body and wait out the night. I’d still have a few hours left to let go of everything for all time. If such a thing was possible.

  Forgive yourself for not-knowing, came the inner message. And ask all beings to forgive you for any harm you have done or will cause.

  And so I did. And I do.

  Here ends my confession.

  May all beings find the path to liberation.

  Epilogue

  Three Hundred Years Later, Mauryan Empire

  Mercy, mercy, mercy, whatever am I to do with this strange “confession,” passed along from monastic to monastic over the generations, ending with my eldest brother handing it over to me? I’m his far younger half-sister, a Sangha member like him and already fifty years old, my seventy-year-old brother not wanting to die with this wooden box full of inscribed palm leaves still in his possession. But am I to believe these written words? My brother told me the Venerable Ananda, Second Patriarch of the Sangha, bestowed this document to his closest friends, the venerables Kavi and Naveen, and told them to do with it whatever they thought best. So far, the decision has been to keep handing it down, recopying it over the years when the script becomes worn. Still, I’m probably not the first monastic to ask, “Should I throw it in the fire?”

  This confession certainly casts new light—or maybe it’s better to think of it as shadow—on the Blessed One’s discourses. They’re still not written down, although writing is becoming more and more common—look at our King Asoka, who works so tirelessly to spread the Dharma throughout the Empire. He’s inscribed every boulder, pillar, and statue he can get his hands on with his own version of Dharma, even while the spoken word remains the only proper vehicle for the Buddha’s teachings. By this time in my life my ears have received most of them, including the one where he warns of a counterfeit Dharma as the only thing that could bring the true Dharma to an end. Is this what I now hold in my hands?

  Or is the counterfeit Dharma to be found among the spoken discourses themselves? Contradictions lurk in so many of them, although the basic tenets—descriptions of suffering’s true nature, its causes, and the way out of it—seem clear enough. But sometimes the teachings appear to imply that godlike powers necessarily accompany awakening—and other times not. The judgments of women and stories about Ananda and others living back then are even less consistent. Yet it’s clear that we women were accepted into the Sangha in the Buddha’s day and that many became enlightened. Were the stories of these first nuns Ananda’s contribution to these original discourses? Did he provide the balance he spoke of between his view and Kassapa’s? (I use the male term only because of my own perplexity. Until reading Ananda’s purported confession, of course I assumed he was male.) And what should I make of his eventually taking over the leadership of the Sangha? According to the history we’ve been told, it was handed over to him by Kassapa himself, designating Ananda as his true successor.

  Maybe this document is a forgery, but surely if a forger wanted to discredit Ananda or the teachings, he would have made certain that as many people as possible read it and not just hand it to Ananda’s friends with no instructions whatsoever—and without really finishing it. Also, consider this: Ananda lived an extremely long life—some claimed he reached the age of 120—and after his death, his body was burned on an island between two rivers as a way of avoid
ing favoritism of one group of followers over another. As a result, few people viewed the cremation and even fewer saw the unwrapped body. Perhaps the then-holder of this document was the only witness.

  Still, I’ve thought about burning these pages. Even if they’re true, their appearance in all likelihood would only stir controversy and cause division. With women’s position in society continuing to erode, despite the Dharma’s success this so-called confession could discredit Ananda, not to mention the Buddha himself, even more than in the time it was written. On the other hand, the admonition not to cling to any aspect of oneself—including one’s sex—as an essential identity remains crucial to the teachings. Perhaps one day this distinct feature of the Dharma will be taken seriously enough for attitudes to change.

  No, I cannot destroy these pages. The story of Ananda is such a mystery, and this confession might one day illuminate it in a way that helps people find the true Dharma. Especially considering that Ananda’s enlightenment is perhaps the greatest mystery of all.

  The official account is that he decided to spend the night in the contemplation of the body—which the confession relates as well. But, needless to say, the oral tradition has nothing about him feigning enlightenment. Instead, the monks relate how, near dawn, he decided to lie down after meditating all night. In accordance with proper practice, he’d been mindful of his body in the positions of standing, sitting, and lying down. Yet his enlightenment—when he finally abandoned all clinging—occurred in none of these positions. It happened “before his head touched the pillow and his feet touched the ground.”

  How could this be? He seems to have awakened in mid-air.

  Historical Note

  “The Pali Canon served as the bricks, and characters like Svasti the buffalo boy were the mortar. Although a boy named Svasti was mentioned in the early scriptures, I embellished his character to help tell the Buddha’s story.”

  — Thich Nhat Hanh,

  describing writing a biography of the Buddha1

  In Bride of the Buddha, I portray a Buddha who is both a historical being and an evolving, collective creation of the human imagination. Both types of material—historical and imaginary—have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to depicting a figure who has guided millions of lives for twenty-five centuries. Factual evidence has the advantage of creating credibility, but even carefully documented earthly lives are always being reinterpreted, with some facts included and others left out—and the facts themselves are constantly being recast as well. The danger of demanding total conformity of a particular story to history is that we can become attached to facts as defined in any given era, confusing them with unchanging truth and closing ourselves off from other viewpoints. In hopes of pointing to possibilities beyond the strictures of our time and culture, I’ve also made use of some imaginary material, with its power to symbolize truths beyond words.

  I wrote the life story of Yasodhara, wife of the Buddha, to explore the relationship between love and the quest for awakening; I also wanted to address the contentious questions surrounding the Buddha’s abandonment of his wife and infant son to pursue his quest for enlightenment. My preparations included several visits to India, combined with an examination of the earliest Buddhist discourses, as found in the Pali Canon, and other early written documentation of the Buddha’s life and teachings. Ultimately, I felt I had to treat both Yasodhara and the Buddha as historical individuals and imagined creations. Thus I mixed fact and fiction, taking advantage of modern scholarship while at the same time weaving in myths and symbolic narratives to express truths beyond words. Above all, the material I included, whether fact or myth, had to serve the story.

  Many of the book’s characters and scenes are based on canonical writings, but when the traditional tales, canonical or not, veer far from historical accuracy as currently understood, I toned down or discarded them, keeping only what seemed to me to have important symbolic value. Legend has it that the Buddha was a prince who lived in three palaces, for example, while scholars today believe he was the son of an elected clan leader in an oligarchy. To me, the palace legend demonstrates how even a life of power and splendor is subject to suffering, so I present Siddhartha as the son of a clan leader (rather than a king), while retaining the symbolic element of the story by depicting his residences as more opulent than they probably were. Another example: I portray characters witnessing paranormal events that Yasodhara or others present cannot perceive, leaving readers to decide for themselves whether these events were supernatural or hallucinatory (or both).

  The ancient texts also contain certain anomalies about Yasodhara and Ananda. One is the failure of the Pali narratives to mention the Buddha’s wife after she gives over her son to his father’s Sangha, even though the same scriptures make much of Pajapati, his stepmother, the first woman to ordain. Two other, more striking, incongruities have to do with Ananda: Why did the Buddha need Ananda to persuade him to ordain women? Ananda hadn’t even achieved enlightenment, and he used arguments that must have already occurred to the Buddha. The other inconsistency about Ananda is that in spite of his privileged relationship to the Buddha, he was the only close associate of the Buddha who failed to awaken in his teacher’s lifetime.

  My fictional solution was, as you’ve seen, to merge Yasodhara with Ananda, a strategy I hope will work well in our current age, with its openness to gender fluidity. (A monastic I know has referred to himself as belonging to a “third gender.”) In any case, Yasi’s joining the Sangha in disguise could explain her absence in the texts, while her life of deception, which violated the Buddha’s fundamental precept that all speech must be truthful, could account for Ananda’s difficulties attaining enlightenment. Also, her threat to the Buddha to make her female identity public could serve to explain why the Buddha was persuaded to reverse his objections. The texts themselves give some support for my choice to make Ananda and Yasodhara the same person. Both were cousins of the Buddha; both were known for their physical attractiveness; and Ananda is often depicted as devoted to women and their causes, even beyond his plea for their inclusion in the Sangha.

  I also had to choose from among contradictory accounts of the same events. To resolve these inconsistencies, I had Yasi/Ananda treat many of them as inaccurate gossip. Non-canonical sources offer several versions of Yasodhara’s life after the Buddha abandoned her, for example. There are stories of Yasodhara fending off suitors, others of her joining the Sangha as a nun, and one rendition of her being pregnant with Rahula for the full six years it took the Buddha to become enlightened. In Bride of the Buddha, Yasi denies these accounts, which strike me as apologetics for her absence in the earlier texts.

  I also changed both Yasodhara’s and Ananda’s ages relative to the Buddha, not only because they’re presented inconsistently, but because the numbers don’t add up. The accounts that have Yasodhara and the Buddha born on the same day are legends, not historic truth. For one thing, in the ancient world men usually married women far younger then themselves. Also, if Yasi and Siddhartha were sixteen when they were married, as some stories tell, they would have been childless for nearly thirteen years, as Rahula was born when Siddhartha was twenty-nine in all the accounts. Thirteen years of infertility would have caused Siddhartha’s father, if not Siddhartha himself, to arrange for him to take a second wife for childbearing. Even more important, his ongoing failure to sire children—an essential husbandly duty, especially for a clan chief-to-be—flies in the face of the problem-free life portrayed by the legend, which in my view demonstrates symbolically that even the most perfect life entails suffering. Finally, there is a tradition in ancient literature in which friends and associates were said to be born on the same day, suggesting that birthdays in common symbolized entwined destinies.

  The problem of Ananda’s age is even more complex. According to some sources, he too shared the Buddha’s birthday, which would have made his job as the Buddha’s attendant difficult in later
years. Some scholars say the Buddha must have been thirty-five or more years older than Ananda, which raises its own set of problems. Ananda would have been a child and in no position to argue for nuns’ ordination at the time Pajapati was struggling for women to be accepted in the Sangha. I chose a compromise, where Yasodhara/Ananda is ten years younger than the Buddha but comes from a family known for its youthful qualities.

  Finally, the texts portray many historical figures inconsistently. A primary example is Devadatta, the monk who in the Pali Canon tries to kill the Buddha, while another oral tradition portrays him as saintly and devout. The breakaway Sangha that Devadatta founded survived for many centuries, so the Devadatta in the scriptures might in some instances have been a representative of the Sangha’s factions that promoted an extreme form of asceticism. In any case, Devadatta is sometimes identified as Ananda’s brother, other times as Yasodhara’s, and many scholars now believe he was just another cousin in the sense of being a member of the Buddha’s clan. I chose the latter, more scholarly view. Another inconsistent account of a historical figure is that of Thullananda, the defiant nun who defends Ananda in the sutras as well as in my novel: She appears in the Pali Canon and other places as both a formidable teacher and a “bad nun.” The bad nun moniker won out, and the novel hints at why.

  Kings Bimbisara and Pasenadi both appear frequently in the Pali Canon, as do their treacherous sons, and much of what I present is true to both history and scripture. I did take liberties with the non-canonical story of Pasenadi’s disastrous marriage to a servant by making her Yasodhara’s personal maid before marrying Pasenadi, and I made Yasi’s brother the perpetrator of the deceit.