Apparently, the Buddha didn’t think that a simple presentation of his ideas, which had worked upon the Brahmins from Kapilavastu, Yasa and his friends, and the young men in the forest, was going to impress Kashyapa. At any rate, the legend records that he performed three and a half thousand miracles, which include flying through the air and ensuring that the ascetics could not kindle their sacrificial fires. Finally, the Buddha bluntly informed Kashyapa that he hadn’t attained enlightenment and never would if he continued with the same means of sacrifice and asceticism.
Convinced of the Buddha’s superior ways, Kashyapa and his followers cut off their matted locks and threw them into the river. His brothers and their followers saw the locks as they floated past. Wondering what was going on, they walked up the river to where the Buddha was. The Buddha led them to a hill, where he preached them the famous fire sermon.
There is a hypnotic quality to this sermon, which was one of T. S. Eliot’s multicultural borrowings in his poem The Waste Land. The effect is more dramatic when you imagine the scene, about a thousand matt-locked ascetics sitting on top of a hill near Gaya, being told that the fire they worshipped could be looked at differently, that there was no better metaphor than fire for the volatile nature of the senses and the desires they perpetually engender. ‘Everything is ablaze,’ the Buddha said:
What is ablaze? The eyes are ablaze. The form (objects seen by the eyes) is ablaze. The mental functions (based on eyes) are ablaze. The contact of the eye (with visible objects and mental functions) is ablaze. The sensations produced by the contact of the eye, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither one nor the other, are ablaze.
The ears are ablaze. Sounds are ablaze…the nose is ablaze. Smells are ablaze. The tongue is ablaze. Tastes are ablaze…The body is ablaze. The objects (felt by the body) are ablaze…The mind is ablaze. Objects of thought are ablaze. The mental functions based on the mind are ablaze. The contact of the mind (with audible objects and mental functions) is ablaze. The sensations produced by the contact of the mind, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither one nor the other, are ablaze.
By what are they ablaze? I tell you they are ablaze with the fire of greed, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion, ablaze with birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair…A disciple who is well-learned, Bhikshus, when he considers things in this way, grows…weary of the eye…He grows weary of the ear, grows weary of objects seen by the eye, grows weary of the mental functions (based on) the eyes, grows weary of the contact of the eye…Growing weary of them, he rids himself of greed. Being rid of greed, he is liberated. Being liberated, he becomes aware of his liberation and realizes that birth is exhausted, that the pure practice is fulfilled, that what is necessary has been done, and that he will not return to this world again.1
From Bodh Gaya, the Buddha moved with his new followers to Rajagriha, the capital of Magadha, where six years previously he had met Bimbisara and turned down the opportunity to command his army. This time he went at the invitation of Bimbisara, whom he had promised to visit soon after his enlightenment.
Bimbisara had heard vaguely about the encounter between the Buddha and the Kashyapa brothers in Bodh Gaya, but it was not clear to him who had converted whom. He went out to meet the Buddha accompanied by the Brahmins and wealthy people of Magadha. When they met, the Buddha encouraged Uruvela Kashyapa to speak. Kashyapa told the court of Bimbisara why he had abandoned his ascetic practices and taken refuge in the Buddha’s dharma. The Buddha then preached a sermon to Bimbisara, who expressed his desire to be a lay disciple and donated a dwelling to the Buddha in his own pleasure park, a bamboo grove not far from Rajagriha.
While at the bamboo grove, the Buddha met the two men who became his closest disciples, Sariputra and Maudgalyayana. His fame was obviously growing at the time for one day Sariputra, who was a sramana affiliated with a Brahmin teacher called Sanjaya, met one of the Buddha’s disciples in Rajagriha and asked him about his teacher. The disciple told him that the sramana Gautama of the Shakya clan taught a doctrine which, though difficult, could be put in verse:
All things arise from a cause
He who has realized the truth has explained the cause
And also how they cease to be
This is what the great sramana has taught
Much taken by this description, Sariputra returned to his companion Maudgalyayana and repeated the verse before him. They then went together to the bamboo grove and asked the Buddha to accept them as bhikshus. Other followers of Sanjaya followed them in joining the Buddha, inciting rumours around Rajagriha that the Buddha, who had already poached the followers of Sanjaya, had come to take away the sons of the city’s citizens. The Buddha told his disciples to ignore the accusations, which he said would last for all of seven days and disappear. He now had more than a thousand bhikshus in the sangha.
The Buddhist texts are not very forthcoming with biographical or physical detail. They describe the Buddha as very tall and handsome; his voice as cultivated and his language as elegant and clear and full of imagery and metaphor. The texts are more or less silent about the Buddha after his enlightenment and his early successes with converts. One has to infer from the stories and discourses how the Buddha passed more than forty years of his life.
A broad picture emerges from them: of the famous and charismatic figure in yellow-brown robes walking barefoot across the Indo-Gangetic plains with a small entourage of bhikshus, the man who is courted by kings and frequently approached for instruction and clarification, who is requested to provide relief from famines and personal distress, and even coerced into opening an order for Buddhist nuns.
He acquired three of his most important lay followers during these years: Jivaka, a physician, Anathapindika, a banker and gold-dealer, and Ananda. Jivaka became a doctor on call for the sangha. Anathapindika bought and donated to the sangha a park near Shravasti, the capital of Kosala, where the Buddha spent many of the monsoons of his mid-life. Ananda became his personal assistant, bringing him water, washing his alms-bowl, screening visitors and keeping him in touch with the sangha.
There are stories of the miracles he performed during these years. Most famously, he converted a highway robber called Angulimala (literally, Finger-Necklace), who operated in the Kosala region and wore a necklace made of the knuckles of the people he had robbed and murdered.2 Prasenajit, the king of Kosala, whose police had been hunting Angulimala, came to see the reformed criminal in his new robes. But the citizens of Kosala were less tolerant. They stoned Angulimala as he walked around Shravasti looking for alms. When, bleeding, he appeared before the Buddha, he was told to endure his pain for he was experiencing here and now the ripening of his evil deeds for which he otherwise would have had to endure hellish pains for a long time.
Once, when the Buddha was in Rajagriha, a messenger came from Vaishali, the capital of a people called the Licchavis, who formed one of the self-governing republics in the Vrijji confederation. He brought news of cholera and death from his town, where drought had led to famine, and he asked Bimbisara to persuade the Buddha to help the Licchavis. The Buddha had praise for the Vrijjis’ democratic and consensual style of politics. He travelled to Vaishali, where he was received heartily at a great hall in the city. According to the texts, the rains followed in due course, and the cholera retreated.
On his later visit to Kapilavastu, after the death of his father, the Buddha had been accosted by his stepmother, Mahaprajapati. She said that she wished to join her stepson and step-grandson in renouncing the world. The Buddha had replied evasively and discouraged her. Mahaprajapati went away in tears, but persisted nevertheless. She cut off her hair and wore the yellow robes of a monk. Accompanied by a few women from the Shakya clan, she followed the Buddha on his tours. She arrived in Vaishali while the Buddha was there, being feted by its grateful citizens. Outside the hall where the Buddha was staying, his assistant, Ananda, noticed her, covered in dust and with swollen feet.
Tearfully, she told Ananda of her wish to persuade the Buddha to let women join a sangha. Ananda took her case to the Buddha. But the Buddha was adamant. Ananda began to argue with him. He asked the Buddha if women who went into homelessness and followed his teachings would be able to attain enlightenment. When the Buddha said yes, Ananda wondered why in that case he wouldn’t ordain a woman who had been his guardian and nurse after his own mother died very early in his childhood.
The Buddha relented, but only after suggesting eight severe conditions to Mahaprajapati. She accepted them. They effectively subordinated the nuns, or bhikshunis, to the bhikshus. He was still full of regret when he told Ananda that his teachings, which he expected to last a thousand years, were now, after the admission of women into the sangha, going to last for only five hundred years.
The Buddha was understandably anxious about admitting women into a celibate order of men. But his decision was a radical step for its time, for there was no comparable place for women in the religious and spiritual traditions of the Brahmins, or other sramanas.3 The Buddha did not consider gender a factor in attaining enlightenment. In a collection of poems by early Buddhist nuns, a bhikshuni is quoted as saying, ‘What does womanhood matter at all when the mind is concentrated, when knowledge flows on steadily as one sees correctly the dharma? One to whom it might occur, “I am a woman” or “I am a man” or “I am anything at all” – is fit for Mara to address.’4 In other texts, the Buddha is quoted as criticizing the prejudices that consider a woman to be successful if she performs her household duties well.
Nevertheless, women remained subordinate to men in Buddhist monastic institutions. It was the movement of Tantric Buddhism, emerging in India around the seventh century, which overturned many of the old patriarchal rules of monastic orders. Respect for women became one of the prerequisites of enlightenment. All dualism had to be rejected in this later tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. This meant giving up attachment to gender distinctions. The most important goddess, Prajnaparamita, was the embodiment of wisdom. Tantrics revered yoginis, goddesses uniquely equipped to cut through attachments and take practitioners to prajna (wisdom). Sujata, the woman who had given the Buddha his last meal before enlightenment, came to be honoured in the Mahayana tradition.
His scepticism about bhikshunis did not stop the Buddha from befriending women. One of his closest personal relationships seems to have been with a rich laywoman called Vishakha, who lived in Shravasti with her husband and many children. She was a prominent benefactor of the sangha, to which she gave clothes, food and medicines. She also established a monastery outside Shravasti.
On one occasion, the Buddha was denounced as an idler by a rich Brahmin farmer he had approached for alms. He replied that far from being an idler he was working harder and more profitably than the farmer. He said, ‘Faith is the seed, penance the rain, understanding my yoke and plough, modesty the pole of the plough, mind the tie, thoughtfulness my ploughshare and goad…exertion my beast of burden.’5 It was through such strenuousness that one achieved the ‘fruit of salvation’.
The texts are full of such exchanges. They speak of a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. But then the Buddha did not ever seem to have ever pretended to humility. He had the brusqueness of a busy doctor. He seems to have been convinced that he not only spoke the truth but also that what he said could be objectively verified. It may be why he avoided contact with other sramanas and teachers, and avoided getting into metaphysical speculation. He spoke more than once of the ‘jungle of opinions’ he plainly thought himself well above it.
His aristocratic equanimity cracked only when he thought that the bhikshus had misunderstood him. He was quick to admonish a bhikshu in his group who thought that consciousness survived the body and reappeared in a new form of life and so was immortal. ‘From whom have you heard, you foolish man,’ he exclaimed, ‘that I have explained the dharma in that way? Foolish man, have I not in many ways declared that consciousness is dependently arisen…’
He also seems to have lost his temper with Devadutta, one of the relatives he had accepted into the sangha on his first visit to Kapilavastu after his enlightenment. When Devadutta attempted to seize control of the sangha, the Buddha denounced him as a lost soul. Apparently, Devadutta then went on to befriend Bimbisara’s son, Ajatashatru, and conspired with him to assassinate the Buddha. However, the men he sent out to kill the Buddha ended up in the sangha. A desperate Devadutta tried to crush the Buddha under a large boulder and let loose a wild elephant on his former mentor. He then tried to split the sangha by proposing tougher rules for the bhikshus. None of these attempts succeeded and Devadutta is said to have committed suicide.
On the whole the Buddha took abuse calmly – and much of it came his way, mainly from jealous competitors and people who felt he was seducing people away from their everyday duties. On one occasion, a Brahmin whose relative he had converted accused him of being, among other things, a ‘thief, crackpot, camel and donkey’. The Buddha let the Brahmin rage for a while, and then abruptly asked him whether he ever had people over for dinner. When the Brahmin said yes, the Buddha asked him what he did with the leftover food. The Brahmin said that he kept it for himself. ‘It is just the same with abuse,’ the Buddha said. ‘I don’t accept it, and it returns to you.’ He later told the bhikshus that he felt no resentment, distress or dissatisfaction when others reviled or abused him, and he also felt no joy or elation when others revered and honoured him.
He did not encourage people to revere him. He did not indulge the old Indian desire to see holy men or their images, the desire for darshan (sight), which even now forces Hindus into arduous journeys for the sake of a fleeting view of an idol or guru. He asked a sick bhikshu who had fervently wanted to see him, ‘What use is the sight of this vulnerable body?’ and told him that whoever understood his teaching also saw him at the same time.
Accustomed to solitude in his childhood and youth, he probably always found it a bit hard to train the bhikshus and give discourses to laymen. He confessed that he liked to wander alone ‘like the rhinoceros’, and there seem to have occurred long periods when he withdrew from public life.
A Spiritual Politics
THE BUDDHA SPENT EVERY monsoon for more than twenty years in the parks donated by Anathapindika and Vishakha near Kosala’s capital, Shravasti, and gave many discourses there. He also spent several monsoons in the Magadhan capital Rajagriha and in Vaishali. For the rest of the year, he travelled. Since Kosala and Magadha covered most of North India between them, he and the bhikshus had free run of a very large territory.
The conversion of the king of Magadha, Bimbisara, now appears a crucial event in the history of Buddhism. Freethinkers like the Buddha and people of the sramana movement could expect a responsive audience in the smaller states. The Buddha had probably got too used to the atmosphere of rational discussion and tolerance that prevailed in the small self-governing republics on the margins of the Indo-Gangetic plain, such as the one he had belonged to. But for anyone hoping to preach his message and gain a greater following, the large kingdoms posed new challenges and uncertainties.
Benares wasn’t the only unfriendly place in the heart of the plains, where the Brahmin orthodoxy was still dominant, and which derived much of its power from royal patronage. As the rumours against him proved, there was also some opposition to the Buddha in Rajagriha, even after Bimbisara became his lay disciple. In these circumstances, the Buddha did well to secure influence over the ruler of Magadha, which was one of the two biggest and most efficient kingdoms in North India. In many ways, this was a bigger achievement for the Buddha than the conversion of the Kashyapa brothers, who had followed the sacrifice-based religion of the Aryan settlers of India.
The Buddha seems to have known that the bhikshus could not move around and expect to survive on the kindness and generosity of alms-givers without a minimum of political support. Later, he also became a friend and advisor to Bimbisara’s rival, Prasenajit, the philosophically mi
nded king of Kosala.
Prasenajit, who had been educated at the university of Taxila, was the same age as the Buddha. On first meeting the Buddha, he challenged him, saying that he could not believe anyone so young could be an enlightened being. The Buddha told him that there were four things that should not be despised because they are young: a warrior, a snake, fire and a monk.
Though Prasenajit became a friend and lay follower of the Buddha, he did not give up his practice of blood sacrifices. He was fond of rich food; he had four wives, including one from the Buddha’s former clan, the Shakyas. But he donated generously to the sangha, and sought the Buddha’s advice on personal, political and philosophical matters. He was also capable of taking, it seems, a bit of ribbing about his girth. Once when he came to see the Buddha he was panting hard. The Buddha said,
A man who always lives with care,
And shows restraint while taking food,
His sensuality’s reduced,
He grows old slowly, keeps his strength.1
Prasenajit immediately asked his attendant to remind him of this verse at every mealtime.
Although the Buddha’s concern for the welfare of the sangha made him support the leading monarchies of his time, he seems to have preferred another model of political organization: the small tribal republics or oligarchies, such as the one he had belonged to in Kapilavastu, or that of the Licchavis, whom he had helped, which knew nothing or little of personal or autocratic rule, and where decisions affecting the community were made through collective deliberation.
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