I’ve got to get out of the sun
Mouth dry and red towel wrapped round my head
walking up crying singing ah sunflower
Where the traveller’s journey
Closed my eyes is done in the Black hole there
Sweet rest far far away
Up the stone climb past where
Bimbisara left his armies
Got down off his elephant
And walked up to meet
Napoleon Buddha pacing
Back and forth on the platform
Of red brick on the jut rock crag
Staring out lidded-eyed beneath
The burning white sunlight
Down on Rajgir kingdom below
Ants wheels within wheels of empire
Houses carts streets messengers Wells and water flowing
Into past and future simultaneous
Kingdoms here and gone on Jupiter
Distant X-ray twinkle of an eye
Myriad brick cities on earth and under
New York Chicago Palenque Jerusalem
Delphos Macchu Picchu Acco
Herculaneum Rajagriha
Here below all windy with the tweetle
Of birds and the blue rocks Leaning into the blue sky—
Vulture Peak desolate bricks
Flies on the knee hot shadows
Raven-screech and wind blast
Over the hills from desert plains South toward Bodh Gaya—8
The ‘platform of red brick on the jut rock crag’ Ginsberg refers to is on the summit of the hill called Grihadrakuta; its oddly shaped rocks and boulders gave it the name ‘Vulture Peak’. The Buddha is said to have stayed in the caves around the hill during his time in Rajagriha, and to have meditated sitting on Vulture Peak.
It was here that the Buddha received Bimbisara in one of the first momentous meetings between sage and king that often feature in Indian myths.9 On being asked about his family, he said that he had belonged, before renouncing the world, to the Shakya clan and that he had travelled to Rajagriha from the kingdom of Kosala in the foothills of the Himalayas. Bimbisara apparently responded by offering him the ‘generalship of a splendid army headed by a band of elephants’.
This may have been Bimbisara’s attempt at realpolitik. The kingdom of Kosala was the most powerful rival of Magadha in North India. Although Bimbisara was married to the sister of king Prasenajit of Kosala, and had received the state of Benares as his dowry, he still looked for ways to contain Kosala, and probably thought that it was a good idea to have a Shakyan nobleman on his side.
The Buddha turned down his impulsive offer, saying that there was no meaning for him in things and lustful desires and that he had left the world in order to seek enlightenment. Bimbisara persisted, but the Buddha was firm. According to the Nidanakatha, Bimbisara left after requesting that the Buddha visit his kingdom first after becoming enlightened, or a Buddha.
The exchange with Bimbisara hints at the determination of the Buddha. He wasn’t going to be distracted, even though, at that early stage in his renunciation, he couldn’t have known what he was looking for. His self-confidence probably helped him through the next few years as he wandered across the basin of the Ganges, still seeking, adopting and then rejecting the prevalent ways of wisdom.
After some time in Rajagriha, he travelled to the hermitage of a guru called Alara Kalama. The latter’s name does not feature among the main sramana teachers mentioned by Buddhist texts, but his reputation must have been strong enough among the many gurus then flourishing in North India to attract the Buddha. One of Kalama’s disciples, who later joined the Buddha, claimed that Kalama taught a special technique of meditation, which makes him seem a practitioner of yoga – a yogi.
The Buddha told Kalama that he wished ‘to lead the religious life according to your discipline and teaching’. Kalama told him that his teaching was ‘such that an intelligent man can, in a short time, attain to understanding equal to that of his teacher, and dwell in it’.
This was indeed the case, as the Buddha found out. But as he said later in the autobiographical sutra called Discourse on the Noble Quest (Aryapariyasena Sutra), ‘I was only paying lip service and reciting a doctrine I had picked up from the older (pupils), and as others did also I maintained I had known and understood the teaching.’
Soon, the Buddha began to have doubts. He began to think that ‘Kalama only has faith in this teaching and does not proclaim: “I myself know, realize, and take upon myself this teaching, abiding in it”.’ He went up to Kalama and asked him: ‘How far have you yourself realized this teaching by direct knowledge?’
In response, Kalama told him about the ‘Sphere of Nothingness’, which most likely was a kind of trance induced by meditation. The Buddha soon realized ‘the teaching and abode in that state’. Impressed by his disciple’s progress, Kalama invited him to join the hermitage as a co-teacher. But the Buddha was not satisfied. As he told his disciples later, ‘This teaching does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to knowledge, to awakening, to Nirvana, but only to the Sphere of Nothingness.’
The Buddha turned down Kalama’s offer; he obviously couldn’t see himself spending his life as the manager of an ashram. Still seeking a guru, he went next to a teacher called Udraka Ramaputra. He later described his time with Ramaputra in terms similar to those he used to describe his months with Kalama.
He learnt whatever there was to learn, and then grew restless. He began to consider that Ramaputra only had faith in his teaching and hadn’t realized it within himself. When he asked Ramaputra, Ramaputra told him about what he had learnt from his father: the ‘Sphere of Neither Perception nor Non-perception’ about how people may see the blade of a well-sharpened razor but not be able to see its fine edge. The Buddha understood this truth quickly enough. He was once again offered the leadership of the ashram and once again he declined and left.10
When he left Ramaputra’s ashram, he had been on the road for a few months. He was still as far from enlightenment as when he had first left Kapilavastu. But he hadn’t entirely wasted his time. From both his gurus he picked up ideas and techniques he would later rework into his own teachings.
The most important of these seems to have been meditation, a spiritual exercise common enough at the time to be used by the yogis, the sramanas, the Brahmins and both of the Buddha’s earliest gurus. It did not vary greatly at a basic level: it involved sitting cross-legged with a straight back in a quiet place, the posture ensuring a certain wakefulness, and concentrating on an object – image, sensation, sound, colour or the rhythm of breathing – which excluded all other objects, up to the point where the meditator felt comfort and pleasure, and detachment from his surroundings and preoccupations.
There are deeper stages that meditation leads to. The Buddha described after his enlightenment a series of four Absorptions (dhyana). In the first, the meditator grows oblivious to everything around him and though still capable of causal thinking he is free of desires or other strong emotions and feels a high degree of comfort. In the next two stages he stops thinking altogether and also transcends his feeling of comfort before reaching the fourth stage when he is aware only of the object of concentration and indeed has become one with that object.11
Meditation retains the central place in Indian religions it seems to have acquired even before the Buddha’s time. The Indian ascetics who manage to suppress their breath or slow down their heart rate show thereby their mastery of meditative practices. The Buddha wasn’t convinced, however, that meditation, as practised by the ascetics of his time, alone could lead to spiritual transcendence.
For one, the states achieved by meditation, no matter how deep, were temporary, ‘comfortable abidings’, as he put it, ‘in the here and now’. One emerged from them, even after a long session, essentially unchanged. Concentration and endurance were important means, but without a corresponding moral and intellectual development, they by themselves did not end
suffering.
The Buddha saw this more clearly later. At the time, he knew only that the techniques of both Kalama and Ramaputra had taken him thus far and no further – an important awareness in that it already set him apart from those sramanas who were merely seeking to justify their escape from social obligations, and easily fell prey to pseudo-wisdom. His experience had also taught him – a lesson he would later emphasize before his disciples – that mere faith in what the guru says isn’t enough and that you have to realize and verify it through your own experience.
Perhaps, coming from the backwaters of Kapilavastu, the Buddha still lacked the confidence to break with existing pieties. For his next move was just about as conventional as seeking wisdom from gurus.
As he described it, he walked south from Rajagriha and arrived in the region of Uruvela, where he saw a ‘delightful land with a beautiful grove, a flowing river, a well-constructed and attractive embankment…’12
Uruvela is now called Bodh Gaya, the most important pilgrimage site for Buddhists. Some of the forests that the Buddha spent his time in have disappeared. But the land is otherwise unchanged. Gaya, the nearest town, has the sweet-smelling squalor of a Hindu pilgrimage site: a maze of tiny alleys, where men and women in clean starched dhotis and saris walk gingerly past mangy dogs nuzzling heaps of rubbish, thick incense smoke trails from the many barber shacks with the garish paintings of tonsured heads, and flowers fallen off marigold garlands lie pressed neatly upon the muddy ground.
Bodh Gaya lies in Bihar, the poorest and second most populous state in India; on cold winter nights, countless bodies huddle on the floor of the railway platform, often rising to reveal hollow dark eyes, while rats roam intrepidly across the first-class waiting room upstairs. But a few minutes away from the railway station the land is empty, and on late mornings, the white temples on top of the cactus-craggy hills stand against a clear sky, the river glitters through the dark shades of the palm and tamarind trees, and out in the mustard fields peasants in white dhotis move slowly with their water buffaloes.
The Buddha spent more than six years as an ascetic in Bodh Gaya. Self-mortification was then a feature of Jainism, and many other religious and philosophical sects. Ascetics were a common sight in forests or groves near villages. They enjoyed much prestige, which has survived to this day, and even their rivals, the Brahmins, spoke highly of tapas, the spiritual power the body amassed through self-denial.
In Bodh Gaya, the Buddha tried to follow this well-established trend. It wasn’t an easy time for him in all sorts of ways. He had been away from home for just a few months. His failures with Kalama and Ramaputra were fresh in his mind. It may be that to the Buddha the torments involved in asceticism might have made it seem more challenging than learning wisdom by rote, as Kalama and Ramaputra had proposed. In his old age he spoke often of the hardships he voluntarily underwent for six years.
Once, when a Brahmin came up to him and confessed how hard it had been for him to live alone in a forest, the Buddha agreed and shared with him the loneliness he, someone used to the bustle of town life, had felt often during those six years in Bodh Gaya; how fear and terror were his constant companions, aroused by the approach of an animal, a peacock dropping a twig and the wind blowing among the fallen leaves.
As an ascetic, he had to seclude himself from human company:
When I saw a cowherd or a goatherd or someone going to cut wood or to gather grass or to work in the forest, I would run from thicket to thicket, bush to bush, valley to valley, peak to peak. Why so? So that they wouldn’t see me and so that I wouldn’t see them.13
But these were small deprivations compared to the arduous practices he attempted. He first tried to concentrate his mind in the way prescribed by the yogis: as he described it, ‘I clenched my teeth, pressed my tongue against my palate, and by my mind, controlled, subdued, and dominated my mind.’
But as he confessed, the effort made sweat pour from his armpits, and while calming his mind, convulsed his body. He next tried to meditate by stopping his breath. This time ‘an exceedingly great noise of wind’ escaped from his ears, and he was ‘frustrated by the painful effort and work’.
He kept trying but with the same effects. Yogic meditation having failed to bring insight, the Buddha decided to further limit his diet to soup or an occasional fruit. He now became ‘exceedingly emaciated’. As he told his disciple Sariputra,
Because I ate so little, my buttocks became like a camel’s hoof, my backbone protruded like a line of spindles, my ribs corroded and collapsed like the rafters of an old and rotten shed, the gleams of the pupils in my eye sockets appeared deeply sunken, my scalp became wrinkled and shrunken…
When I tried to touch the skin of my belly, I took hold of my backbone, and when I tried to touch my backbone I took hold of the skin of my belly…when I stroked my limbs with the palm of my hands to soothe my body, the hairs, rotted at the roots, came away from my body…14
His penances became more severe – akin to those followed by the sect of Naga Sadhus who still show up defiantly naked and ash-smeared at every religious fair in India. He went around naked and ate only once in seven days. He refused to sit down, preferring to stand or squat on his heels. The dust and dirt of many years accumulated on his body, as a ‘natural moss on my skin’. He went to sleep in a cemetery, lying on a skeleton. Such behaviour was sure to incite some local malevolence. ‘Boy cowherds then came up and spat and urinated on me and showered me with dust and stuck twigs in my ears.’
He might have had more respectful visitors from the nearby village, people who came to marvel at the spiritual seeker in their midst. At some point, a group of five Brahmins joined him. They were Shakyas from Kapilavastu, and in fact had renounced the world and taken to the wandering life not long after the Buddha had. They were also seeking wisdom, and, impressed by the Buddha’s example, decided to follow him into asceticism. They agreed among themselves that the Buddha, who had started early and seemed fanatically committed, would reach wisdom before any of them. They even asked him to ‘announce the Law’ whenever he attained it.
They were shocked then to see the Buddha eating porridge and gruel one day. As the Buddha himself recalled, ‘They turned away in disgust, saying, “sramana Gautama is luxury-loving, he has forsaken his striving, he has become extravagant”.’ This seems an exaggeration. But then porridge and gruel were an extravagance compared to the cow dung that the Buddha and his companions had often eaten.
The Shakyas felt betrayed partly because they had no idea of the great changes that had occurred within the Buddha even while he was with them. It had taken him longer than when he was with Kalama and Ramaputra, but once again, he had begun to question what he was doing; what, if anything, was the value of torturing himself.
He knew he had experienced ‘painful feelings’ that were more ‘acute and fierce’ than anyone else had and could experience. But, as he said, ‘Though I have undergone severe ascetic practices, I cannot reach the special and wonderful knowledge and insight transcending the affairs of human beings. Could there be another way to attain enlightenment?’15
The answer bubbled up from an old memory. One afternoon, years before, when he had been a spoilt prince in Kapilavastu, he had lain one afternoon in the shade of a tree in the middle of his father’s fields. He had let his mind drift and then grow still. Unexpectedly, he had found himself experiencing a great serenity. He had even wondered if this perfect equanimity was the way to enlightenment.
As the Buddha, whom starvation had by now brought close to death, remembered that afternoon, a great joyful peace suddenly came over him, and he asked himself if he had been trying too hard as a seeker, and whether excessive desire, even for enlightenment, wasn’t the problem. Certainly, no desire had prompted the meditative bliss he had reached under the rose-apple tree: ‘Do I need to be afraid,’ he thought, ‘of that happiness which is apart from sensuous desires and evil?’
He felt he could regain that felicitous state of m
ind. But he also realized that ‘it is not easy to reach that well-being with such an extremely emaciated body’. Breaking the vows he had kept for six years, he ate some porridge, massaged his body with oil and took a warm bath.
All this greatly disappointed his companions from Kapilavastu, who promptly abandoned him. It is now that according to one tradition a local woman called Sujata offered the Buddha a meal of milk-rice, which was nutritious enough to sustain him for the next forty-nine days. Alone now in the forest, but physically much stronger than before, the Buddha seated himself one night under a pipal tree, vowed not to move until he had attained enlightenment, and began to meditate.
A Science of the Mind
THE INDIAN FIG, OR pipal, is a big, elegant tree. Its leaves are heart-shaped and glossily dark green, with a tapering, curling tip. They tremble constantly, even without a breeze. Trembling and striking each other, they produce a soft, soothing chorus, until the whole tree with its vibrating and sparkling mass seems alive with a vitality all its own.
The Buddha is said to have been sitting at the foot of one such tree on a full moon night in April or May when he achieved enlightenment. He claimed to have learnt then the four noble truths of human experience: suffering, its cause, the possibility of curing it, and its remedy. Knowing this, he felt liberated from ordinary human condition.
In the Pali text called the Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivadins, he is quoted as saying, ‘Destroyed is rebirth for me; consumed is my striving; done is what had to be done; I will not be born into another existence.’ In the Nidanakatha, he celebrates his liberating insight into craving, or trishna, which he now knows is a ‘house-builder’, responsible for continual rebirth:
I have run through a course of many births looking for the maker of this dwelling and finding him not; painful is birth again and again. Now you are seen, O builder of the house, you will not build the house again. All your rafters are broken, your ridge-pole is destroyed, the mind, set on the attainment of nirvana, has come to the end of craving.1
An End to Suffering Page 15