An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  By appearing to change little during my first three years, Mashobra itself made continuity appear attractive. Few cars ever disturbed the dust that lay in soft piles on the road through the village. The shelves in the grocery stores remained half empty. The hunchbacked man came every day and worked in the small field of corn beneath my balcony. The old press underneath my cottage rattled and clanged; and on the fifteenth day of each month, Daulatram walked up the hill to the post office with the printed copies under his arm.

  I occasionally had visitors: my parents, sisters, friends from Benares, an American art historian I had known for some years, a British diplomat I had met in Mussoorie and his wife from Delhi. Briefly, the cottage filled up, and I was always surprised to rediscover my own voice, the sudden garrulousness that came over me after weeks of solitude.

  The summer remained serene for the rest of the village. The afternoons were particularly still, for the inhabitants found the 30-degree heat excessive. The grocery stores remained closed; the men retired for siestas behind wooden multi-hinged shutters covered over with faded photos of Bombay film stars endorsing soaps and perfumes.

  Montu, the dhaba owner, replaced his noisy kerosene stove with a gas stove. For some reason, this made his food taste slightly better. His son, Neeraj, grew taller; wispy hairs appeared around his mouth, making him look even shyer. At noon, I walked through the deserted road to Montu’s dhaba, where a still unread copy of Punjab Kesari awaited me on the sunmica-topped table.

  It was the only newspaper I read in Mashobra. It had gossip about film stars on the front page; its jaunty tone relieved some of the grim news of the outside world. Still, I couldn’t help but feel relieved at my distance, both physical and emotional, from what seemed to go on endlessly in the heat-stunned plains – the religious riots, the massacres of low-caste Hindus, the deaths by starvation, the environmental catastrophes caused by big dam projects, the corruption scandals.

  During its overcrowded summer season, Simla seemed a disturbing symbol of that world. I hardly went there, except to look for books, and returned strangely fatigued by the press of tourists on the Mall, and the constant blaring of car horns and diesel fumes on narrow winding roads.

  It was to the regions of Kinnaur and Spiti that I went travelling during the summer months. I stayed in monasteries and cheap roadhouses, went walking through gorges and across quiet glacier-strewn slopes, and I returned to Mashobra, the roadhouse smells of tobacco and burnt manure still sticking to my clothes, with memories of early morning mists, bright dry afternoons and brisk sunsets.

  The Long Way to the Middle Way

  THERE IS A FAMOUS legend about the Buddha’s renunciation, which turns up everywhere. It reached Europe, modified into the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, as early as the eleventh century, and inspired Hermann Hesse’s cult novel Siddhartha. Like many Indians I first heard about it as a child. It describes how the sheltered and spoiled prince of the Shakya clan called Siddhartha makes four visits to a park outside the city of Kapilavastu and encounters, successively, an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic, a sramana. He is much disturbed by these sights; they tell him of the decay, suffering and death that come everyone’s way. He decides to renounce the world, and one night, when he is twenty-nine, he leaves his wife, Yashodhara, and young son, Rahula, and goes forth into the world as a seeker of wisdom.

  The legend emphasizes the fact that suffering is universal and, like most other legends, appears too neat. But it may be right in its broad details. The Buddha was most likely not a prince, but a member of a republican oligarchy. Prince or not, he did claim, however, to have known a sheltered youth, and his naivety in worldly matters probably gave him his peculiar advantage: of noticing suffering as if no one had noticed it before him, which also helped him to discover in suffering a fundamental truth of the human condition and made him dwell at length upon its causes and cure.

  The early canonical texts barely mention the Buddha’s marriage, and it is also not clear from them whether the Buddha had a son. It is the biographies written early in the Christian era, many centuries after the early texts, which present Siddhartha as a householder.

  They claim that his mother, Maya, died seven days after giving birth to him and that he was brought up by Maya’s younger sister, Mahaprajapati, whom Suddhodhana married, and who was later the first female monk in the Buddha’s sangha. According to them, the Buddha had a half brother called Nanda, as well as several cousins, including Devadutta, who later became his great detractor.

  Though unreliable, the later biographies offer many more vivid details than the canonical texts. For instance, the Nidanakatha, the introduction to the Jatakas, describes a ‘sowing festival’, which is supposed to have occurred in Kapilavastu not long after the birth of the Buddha.1 Such festivals were obviously important to a community like the Shakyas, which was then moving away from the mechanical rituals of sacrifice, unlearning its dependence on invisible gods, and discovering the fertility of the land and its own ingenuity and skill.

  On the morning of the festival, the city was decorated. Everyone, including the slaves and servants, wore new clothes and perfumes and garlands. Some hundred and seven ploughs were yoked to oxen on Suddhodhana’s rice field. They, along with the oxen, the reins and the whip, were ornamented with silver and gold. Suddhodhana left the city for the field in a procession of brightly dressed relatives, retainers and citizens. In the middle of his field there was a large jambu (rose-apple) tree. It was where the future Buddha sat, under a canopy patterned with golden stars, surrounded by his retainers, and watched his father and his servants ceremonially work the field.1

  The scene still remains fresh two and a half millennia later: a bright morning, the southern slopes of the Himalayan foothills shimmering on the horizon, a young man lolling under a tree in the middle of a field while all around him sparkles the gold and the silver of the ploughs, and men reaffirm their link with the land.

  What it doesn’t reveal, of course, is what is going on inside the young man’s mind. The Buddha talked wryly to his disciples of how slender and delicate and protected he was in Kapilavastu. He wore the finest clothes of Benares; walked day and night under a parasol; divided his year between three separate mansions, and was rich enough to give his servants not broken rice and sour gruel but white rice and meat.

  But it also made him lonely, more vulnerable to the perceptions which the tasks of everyday living mercifully delay or obscure. The Buddha himself confessed the self-doubts that weighed upon the young man who sat under the canopy with the golden stars:

  And though I was blessed with prosperity…I thought, The ignorant ordinary person, subject to old age and unable to avoid old age, when seeing another who is old and weak is troubled and feels anxiety, shame and disgust, overlooking the fact that oneself also is subject to old age. But I too am subject to old age and cannot avoid it, and seeing one who is old and weak, I will probably be troubled and feel anxiety, shame and disgust. This seemed to me not to be fitting. At this thought, all pride in my youth vanished.2

  The Buddha went on to describe his arrogant assumptions about his youth, his good health and life in general – the assumptions he thought only ‘ignorant ordinary people’ had. He, too, believed that he would be eternally young, healthy and alive. And questioning those assumptions he, even as a young man in his father’s palace, had begun to see how desire drove human life, how it made people seek permanence – of youth, health, life – in the midst of flux. He knew, he told Mahanama, also a Shakya and one of his great disciples, ‘that there is little that is pleasurable in desires, that they bring suffering and anxiety and misfortune’.

  The sequence of events leading to the Buddha’s enlightenment may be hard to trace, but it does seem clear that at some point he grew weary of the life he was born into. And at the sowing festival, he couldn’t help but see through the celebratory ritual, and observe the labouring oxen and men, the insects and worms, which their ploughs turned up an
d which the birds swooped upon. Meditating on them, he quickly entered a trance of sorts:

  I well remember how once, when I was sitting in the shade of a jambu tree on a path between the fields while my father was attending to the affairs of government, I became detached from desire and from that which is wrong and attained the pleasant state of that first stage of meditation, born of detachment, the contemplation accompanied by reasoning, and the contemplation accompanied by investigation. I thought this was truly the path leading to enlightenment.3

  He may well have thought so, but this was an isolated moment, and it seems not to have gone very far or deep. For, as the Buddha told Mahanama,

  all the same I did not experience zest and pleasure outside the desires, outside wrong dispositions, and I did not reach anything that was of higher goodness. So I could not say that I was not ensnared by desire.4

  It is likely that while in this state of mind the Buddha saw a sramana – one of the many who wandered across North India, and whom the Buddha often listened to in the park outside Kapilavastu. Their presence – no less ubiquitous than that of old, sick or dying men – may have suggested to the Buddha that escape from desire and suffering was possible, even desirable.

  The legends diverge at this point. One of them asserts that the sight of the sramana helped the young prince decide that the homeless life was for him. He decided to leave Kapilavastu on the same night, and told his servant, Channa, to keep his horse ready.

  According to another version, the Buddha’s son Rahula was born seven days before he renounced the world. Apparently, the Buddha’s parents lived in fear that he would one day emulate the sramanas who passed through Kapilavastu, and they managed to persuade the Buddha to wait until his son was born. This might explain his relatively late renunciation, thirteen years after his marriage.

  As the Nidanakatha relates it, the Buddha wished to see his son before his departure. He walked into his wife’s room.

  At that moment the lamp of scented oil lit up. Rahula’s mother was sleeping on a bed strewn with…flowers, her hand resting on her son’s head. The Bodhisattva stopped, standing at the threshold and gazed (at his wife and son).

  ‘If I take my wife’s hand off (his head) and hold my son, she will awaken, and will be an obstacle to my leaving. I will come back and see (my son) after I have become a Buddha.’ So thinking he descended from the flat roof of the palace.5

  It was midnight. Channa was waiting downstairs with his horse. There were guards at each of the four gates of the city, especially placed by Suddhodhana to prevent his son from leaving. But as the Buddha rode towards the north gate, it opened by itself. The tempter Mara, the divinity of desire, now appeared before him and told him to turn back since he was destined to be the ruler of a great empire. This was the first of the many temptations Mara would hold out to the Buddha.

  He refused and rode through much of the night, across three different republics. On the sandy beach of a river called Anomiya, he dismounted. He told Channa he wished to renounce the world. Channa said he would follow his master. The Buddha told him he was not allowed to do so, and that he should return to Kapilavastu.

  He then cut off his hair with his sword and took off his princely clothes and ornaments and put on the robe of a sramana – these acts later became part of the ordination ceremony for Buddhist monks, bhikshus. He sent Channa back to Kapilavastu with his horse and other things and then proceeded on foot to a mango grove where he spent the first week of his freedom.

  The Buddha’s own words, as recorded in the Pali texts, present a less dramatic account of his departure. While in Kapilavastu, struggling with his self-doubts, he had begun to wonder:

  The thought came to me: The household life, this place of impurity, is narrow – the sramana life is the free open air. It is not easy for a householder to lead the perfected, utterly pure and perfect holy life. What if I were now to cut off my hair and beard, don yellow robes, and go forth from the household into homelessness?6

  The impulse to renounce all social responsibilities, to put an end to role-playing, and gain the freedom to remake oneself had come over countless people living in the increasingly regulated societies of post-Vedic civilization, and had led to the sramana movement. Its popularity explains partly why the Brahmins stipulated renunciation as the last phase of life. They acknowledged its appeal and hoped to incorporate it into their world view. But they didn’t want to see the young set free from their obligations to society, and undermine its very basis, the family.

  The Buddha’s mind, however, was made up:

  And I, being young, a youth with black hair…cut off my hair and beard, although my father and foster mother opposed this…donned the yellow robes and went forth from the household life into homelessness.7

  According to some texts, the Buddha returned to Kapilavastu about eight years later, some months after his enlightenment. He stayed outside the city, in a grove frequented by sramanas, under the shade of a vast banyan tree, and on his first morning he went around the city with an alms-bowl.

  News of his presence reached his family, and the first meeting between father and son was tense. Suddhodhana accused the Buddha of degrading himself as a beggar in his hometown. The Buddha calmly responded that looking for alms was the custom of the sramanas.

  They must have parted well, for a week later the Buddha visited his old house. His wife had been living there since he’d abandoned her, and it may have been with some bitterness that she sent their eight-year-old son, Rahula, to the Buddha, saying ‘Rahula, that is your father. Go and ask him for your inheritance!’

  Rahula was polite with his father, asking him only as he left the house for his inheritance. The Buddha reacted by asking his close disciple, Sariputra, to accept Rahula as a novice monk.

  Rahula’s grandfather was extremely unhappy when he came to know that another member of his family had become a sramana. There was not much he could do. But he did make the Buddha promise that he would never again accept a young man as a novice monk without the permission of his parents.

  On the whole, the Buddha’s first visit to Kapilavastu after his enlightenment was not wholly successful. He dismayed his father and wife by taking Rahula as a novice monk, and although a few of his kinsmen – notably Nanda, his half brother, and cousins Devadutta and Ananda (who later became his personal attendant) – were won over by his teaching, he did not gain a sizeable following. His links with Kapilavastu were to grow stronger only over the next few decades. He visited the city again after his father’s death and he accepted his stepmother as a nun – she was the first woman to be so ordained. He is also said to have intervened successfully in a dispute over water the Shakyas had with their neighbours. And he lived long enough to hear about the destruction of Kapilavastu by a vindictive and powerful new king.

  The Buddha knew great fame in his lifetime. But when he first left Kapilavastu, he was only twenty-nine years old and insecure and anxious. Like the countercultural wanderers of his own and later eras, he wished to attach himself to a guru-like figure in order to learn the secret of salvation. But Kapilavastu was at the edge of the urban civilization of the Indo-Gangetic plain, where the sramana movement had originated. The big cities where the sramanas found both their patrons and recruits, and which the young Buddha had dreamed of visiting, lay to the south and to the east of the Shakya city-state. Leaving Kapilavastu, the Buddha was faced immediately with a long journey.

  According to the Nidanakatha, after a week at the mango grove, he travelled to the city of Rajagriha, the capital of the kingdom of Magadha, four hundred miles east of Kapilavastu. The ancient city, whose modern extension is now known as Rajgir, lies in a small valley surrounded by hills, sixty miles south-east of Patna, the present capital of the Indian state of Bihar. Close to a mineral-rich region, it was once the largest city in India and known as a centre of wealth and culture. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism and the Buddha’s rival, is also supposed to have lived here. In what may be the most cruc
ial event in the history of Buddhism, five hundred monks met in Rajagriha in the first ‘Buddhist council’ held three months after the death of the Buddha and agreed to systematize his teachings.

  The Buddha spent much time in the hills around the city. Eight miles north of Rajagriha lies Nalanda, where the Buddha found his closest disciples, Sariputra and Maudgalyayana, and where a famous monastic university set up in the fifth century AD attracted Buddhist scholars from China, Central Asia and Tibet.

  On his first visit to Rajagriha, the Buddha had a crucial encounter with Bimbisara, who was then the young king of Magadha. While standing on the terrace of his palace, Bimbisara noticed and was greatly struck by a young sramana who looked as if he belonged to a noble family. He ordered his servants to find out about him. They came back with the information that the sramana was staying in a cave on one of the five hills. Bimbisara got into his chariot and drove to the hills; he then walked to the cave from the foot of the hill.

  This moment would become a famous episode in the legend of the Buddha. In April 1963, Allen Ginsberg climbed the steps leading to the cave. Ginsberg was then spending a year in India, ‘dreaming’, as he later described it on the back cover of his published journals, ‘about holy-men and visiting some few’. In his poem ‘Howl’, published in the same year that his mother died in a mental hospital, 1956, Ginsberg had spoken of the spiritual exhaustion and anomie that existed in the midst of the unprecedented prosperity of post-war America. In India, looking for salvation through eastern wisdom, he was one of the earliest and most famous of the disaffected members of the western middle class who wandered across Asia in the 1960s. Ginsberg later found his guru, a Tibetan, in Colorado. Walking on a hot April afternoon up the hills where the Buddha first met Bimbisara, he reflected, perhaps inevitably, on the insubstantiality of history and the transience of empires: