The Mountain Goddess

by Shelley Elizabeth Schanfield

  She exhaled. “You’ve gone mad.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “It runs in the Gautama line.” Kanthaka whinnied and tossed his head. “Mad or not, I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “I went to bid her farewell. I was going to tell her. But when I saw her and the baby sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t dare wake them. So I need you to tell her something for me.”

  “Morning is coming. She’ll wake up. You can tell her yourself.”

  “By morning I’ll be far away.”

  “Far away,” Sakhi repeated. Her dream had foreshadowed this. Dhara’s karma had come full circle. On a cold night, Dhara had stolen away from her father’s mountain hall in search of answers. She had abandoned those who loved her. On this soft, warm night, Siddhartha was doing the same.

  “I can’t tell Dhara and the kingdom that you’ve left us.” The weight Sakhi felt when Dhara asked for her help was nothing compared to the one Siddhartha was asking her to bear. “That you’ve gone, and the Sakyas will be wiped from the face of the earth.”

  “You were one person who I thought might not believe the prophecy. I don’t leave my clan helpless. My brother will be king. He is a good soldier, proven in battle. I am not. He will defend the Sakyan kingdom.”

  “Prince Nanda? You can’t be serious. You’re the one who will lead the Sakyas to rule the world.”

  “If every man simply ruled his own passions, there would be no need for kings.”

  “You don’t believe that. There will always be kings, and you will be one of the greatest. Besides, you can’t wander the road of the Sixteen Kingdoms, seeking liberation like—like—”

  She closed her eyes. Like Jivaka. Perhaps her former lover was sending secret news of the gurus he had seen, the ones Siddhartha should seek out. “Those Gautama family eyes give you away.”

  “People see what they want to see. I’ll shave off my hair and put on a dhoti, carry a staff and a begging bowl, find the wisest guru in the Sixteen Kingdoms, and be a simple student at his ashram. When I’ve mastered his teachings, a forest hermitage. A mountain cave. The desert. Anywhere I can be alone.”

  “Bandits could murder you. Or demons seize you.”

  “I’m well trained in the warrior’s arts, and I’m not without power to fight demons.”

  “Suppose you fail on this solitary quest? What if you never find the truth you seek? Will you come back to face your wife and son then? Explain their pain was for nothing?”

  “I will search until I find what I seek or I die, whether a wild animal or a bandit or old age kills me. I do not do this lightly, Sakhi. I’m hurting them as little as I can. They would suffer more from my unhappiness if I stay than my absence if I go.”

  “You don’t know that.” Her words echoed in the great courtyard. Siddhartha put a hand on her arm. Sakhi shook it off. “If you think ascetic practices are difficult, try raising a child.” He flinched. Good. “It’s harder than being a king. Harder than going off alone to meditate in the forest.”

  “Yes. Watching you, I saw that it takes more than love to raise a child.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” Sakhi’s hands had balled into fists at her side. “You didn’t want a child, then one night on a whim you conceive one, but the night he’s born, you’ve decided family life isn’t for you? You have what you say you envied, but it’s time to go?”

  “You think it’s easy to leave?”

  She took his hand. “What you want is right in front of you. To follow your royal dharma, to build a home and raise a family brings wisdom, too.”

  “That’s your truth. One as transcendent as any teaching I’ve ever heard.” He laid Sakhi’s palm on his heart. It beat strong and slow. “You think I’m a coward. Perhaps you’re right. I couldn’t wake Dhara to say goodbye, because I would never have gone.”

  “That tells me you should stay.”

  “Try to understand. Since childhood I’ve been given every advantage, every luxury. The throne of a wealthy, powerful kingdom awaited me. A beautiful wife, impetuous sometimes but who loves me and gives me a son. I have everything! But still I am not satisfied. I thought my son would end my yearning, that fulfilling my duty would fill the void, but tonight I realized I was wrong. Sakhi, possessing everything only deepened my dissatisfaction. The only experience left is to give it all up.” He paused. “What I want, is nothing.”

  “How cruel you are,” she said. “To leave Dhara, and take him.” She gave a curt nod at Chandaka. “Do you want me to carry a message to Dhara, too?”

  “Ask her forgiveness for me, if you will. For that day by the shrine, and for this. It is my karma to see Siddhartha safely on his way. She will understand, I hope.”

  “Then what will you do?” Sakhi asked.

  “Beyond that—” His voice caught. “Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  It was Siddhartha’s turn to hurry them on their way. He kissed Sakhi’s palm and put it against his cheek. “Farewell, Sakhi.” Her heart fluttered.

  Then Chandaka leaned down to offer his hand to Siddhartha, who grasped it and swung up behind him. The horse stepped to the open gate on his muffled hooves. Until this minute she hadn’t accepted that he would really leave. As they moved away, Siddhartha called out softly.

  “Tell her to name our son Rahul. She will understand.”

  Rahul. “Hindrance” it meant, in the sacred tongue. A cruel name.

  They made no sound as they rode swiftly down the wide avenue and disappeared.

  There was small hope Sakhi would see him again, with all the dangers that faced Siddhartha on this quest. Yet it was hope. She should go back to be with Dhara. When the palace woke, the devastating news would spread with the speed of thought. But home tugged her. There would be time enough tomorrow.

  Not a single lamp lit the capital, which on every other night sparkled with thousands. The enchantment was total, but it no longer frightened her. It would end. She made her way down the broad, tree-lined king’s road under a beautiful arch of branches. In the moonless sky, blazing stars peeped through the leaves, as bright as if she were high in Himalaya’s kingdom.

  Her thoughts wandered with her steps. Siddhartha could not be half a king, half a sage. That she could accept, though for Dhara’s sake and the kingdom’s it angered her. He had to choose one path or the other and follow it with his whole heart. After all, it had been prophesied. It was his karma.

  Karma. The fruit of one’s actions. The sages spoke of the many rounds one makes on life’s wheel, birth to death and birth to death over and over, until after many existences, the stains of every sin are washed away. In that final lifetime, a mortal lives fully in the dharma. Every action is virtuous, performed not for reward but for its own sake, in harmony with the order that governs the universe. At the end of that life, one sheds the body, never to return. One achieves immortality, moksha, union with the great Self, with atman.

  Beyond atman, what was there? This little spark of consciousness, this little self that somehow existed in the person called Sakhi, why did it exist at all?

  What was reality? Behind the trees, the road, the world, there was only black nothing. The truth of it made her reel. Then in one dazzling flash, she saw thousands of Sakhis, thousands of possible existences. She had lived as every form of animal, every kind of human, every living thing. Her atoms had made up oceans, mountains, towering clouds.

  Why was this Sakhi, this merchant’s wife, this mother of five sons, here now? The answer was close, so close. She reached out to grasp it, and it disappeared.

  There was no answer. There was just mystery.

  A warm breeze ruffled her hair and rustled in the leaves. She looked up. Remember the Nasadiya, my daughter, the Creation Hymn.

  “Father?” It was his voice, warm and melodious. She ached to hold his warm hand as she had as a child, watching Agn
i’s flames dancing on the eagle altar. “I do remember, Father.” Sakhi’s throat tightened. He had tried to show her the meaning, to teach Sakhi its secret when she was young. She didn’t know how to listen back then. She wished she could tell him that, now that she understood. She closed her eyes and crooned the ancient hymn.

  Then there was not being or non-being.

  There was no realm of air, no sky beyond it, no seeing.

  There was no death, nor immortality.

  No divider of day and night, no duality.

  The All, breathless, breathed, then the great force

  Of warmth and light gave birth to the First One.

  Who can say what happened? Who truly knows?

  Whence the world was born and whither it goes?

  The gods are later than its creation, its spark and flame.

  Who knows then from where the First One came?

  The First One, the first origin of this creation,

  Whether the One formed it all or did not,

  The One whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,

  The One truly knows it. Or perhaps knows it not.

  “Or perhaps knows it not.” Just as she finished the last line, there was pounding, a fist on wood, and a loud cry.

  “Deepa, open up!”

  Sakhi opened her eyes. Dawn was breaking. Without knowing, she had walked almost to the gate of their mansion, and before it, her husband stood with his fist raised to knock again. The boys were still mounted on weary-looking horses, surrounded by bullocks loaded with goods.

  “Bhallika! Arjuna! Bhima!” Sakhi gave a joyous shout.

  “Ma!” The boys slid off their mounts.

  Bhallika turned. “Sakhi? Sakhi!” All of them together, laughing and crying at once. Bhallika kept saying her name over and over. “Sakhi… Sakhi… Sakhi… ”

  Their arms around her were the answer to every question.

  Thank you so much for reading my novel!

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  Afterword

  I never intended to write a novel about the Buddha’s wife.

  In fact, I never intended to write a novel at all. I love historical fiction, and I wanted to read the story of Siddhartha, the young prince who lived sometime in the 5th or 6th century BCE in northeastern India, and who rejected wealth and power, duty and family to wander homeless, seeking a way to free humanity from suffering. He became the Buddha, whose teachings have helped millions and are still as profound and useful today as they were 2500 years ago.

  The story of how I came to search for a novel about the Buddha began when my interest in Buddhism, which had been dormant since college, reawakened. My son and I had begun studying Tae Kwon Do, a Korean martial art, and at each level, from beginner to black belt, the student has to learn an increasingly difficult series of stylized self-defense moves that are almost like a dance. Our instructor referred to these forms as “moving meditation,” and said their origins could be traced back to Buddhist meditation practices.

  This fascinated me. I began to research the links between Asian martial arts and Buddhism. Siddhartha was born into the warrior caste, and when he became the Buddha, many warriors chose to follow his path to peace. He exhorted his followers to wander the roads alone and spread his teachings. It was an era of political and religious upheaval, and it can be imagined that his followers faced many dangers on their solitary paths. Those who had been warriors would have known how to defend themselves.

  In a later century, when the Indian warrior-monk Bodhidharma went to China to teach Buddhist meditation, he found the Chinese monks weak and helpless, easy prey for robbers and rival sects. He began teaching them self-defense using methods that included endless drills in empty-handed fighting, techniques that were precursors of the moving meditations my son and I were learning. They were a way to not only perfect awareness in the present moment—an essential part of Buddhist wisdom—but also to clear the mind before battle. These methods became the basis of Kung Fu, and through Zen Buddhism, they infused the samurai tradition.

  These forms are also a powerful way to relieve stress. At the time that my son and I had begun to pursue our black belts, our family was facing many challenges. We were caring for our aging parents and for my husband’s brother, who had been stricken with a brain infection that ultimately left him unable to move or speak. As crisis followed crisis, the moving meditation I practiced in Tae Kwon Do became essential to keeping me focused, calm, and healthy.

  I continued to devour books about Buddhism, but I never found a historical novel about the Buddha’s life that satisfied me. Toni Morrison says you must write the book you want to read, and I had the crazy idea I’d write my own. I didn’t know what I was getting into, between the research I’d need to do and learning the writer’s craft, but that’s another story.

  Suffice it to say, I started writing, and the very first character to appear on the page was a beautiful young courtesan named Ratna. Courtesans figure prominently in Buddhist chronicles as the cultured and influential women who became his earliest supporters and followers, but Ratna is not mentioned in any Buddhist legend; she emerged from my imagination. Compelling though she was, she was soon pushed aside by Siddhartha’s aunt, Queen Prajapati, who raised the prince from infancy after his mother’s death. This queen occupies a special place in the chronicles and in my heart for her role in founding the order of nuns.

  Prajapati, too, was soon pushed aside by Kirsa Gautami (who is called Kisa Gotami in the Pali language). In the Buddhist legend of the mustard seed, Kirsa suffers a tragic loss and goes mad. Crazed with grief, she wanders until she encounters the Buddha, who tells her that he can help her, but she must first bring him a mustard seed from a house where no one has died. In her search, she finds that every home has experienced death and loss, and this knowledge brings her back from madness.

  I’d first heard this story as a child, not long after my oldest sister fell ill. On a beautiful, lazy summer afternoon, she had been practicing diving into the Minnesota lake on which we lived, and she suddenly began to have violent seizures. For what seemed like hours, she shook and vomited, until she was taken away by ambulance. I was eight; it was terrifying to watch. When she returned home a month later, she was struggling with neurological deficits. My sister’s suffering and my parents’ anguish had a profound impact on me, and the story of the mustard seed helped me cope with my own fear and grief. My brother-in-law’s illness triggered many memories from that time, and recalling the comfort Kirsa’s tale brought me, I felt moved to write my version of this powerful parable.

  As readers of The Tigress and the Yogi will know, Kirsa finds her way into the Sadhana Trilogy as the daughter of the outcaste Mala, Book I’s powerful protagonist. In that book, the very young Kirsa and Siddhartha become playmates. (In some places in the Buddhist chronicles, Kirsa is Siddhartha’s cousin.) The Tigress and the Yogi ends when they are barely teenagers, before Kirsa experiences her tragedy.

  To tell the rest of her story required that Kirsa meet the Buddha, and that required that Prince Siddhartha leave home on his quest (or sadhana, a Sanskrit word sometimes translated as “spiritual search,” hence the Sadhana Trilogy). The woman who figures most prominently in the critical moment of his departure, known in legend as the Great Renunciation, is his wife.

  Though Siddhartha’s wife goes by many names in the many texts that tell the Buddha’s tale, I first met her as Yasodhara (in one of those novels that didn’t satisfy me), and Yasodhara she has always been in my imagination. Despite her many names, there is curiously little about her in Sanskrit sources and the vast Pali canon, and the outline of her story begs to be filled in. She plays imp
ortant roles in two dramatic events in his life: the Great Renunciation and his return to his family six years later as the Buddha, the Awakened One.

  In the most common version of the Great Renunciation, Yasodhara has just given birth to their first son, which precipitates her husband’s spiritual crisis. The legends give two scenarios for his departure. In one, Siddhartha orders his unwilling charioteer, Chandaka, to saddle up his trusty horse while the gods put the city to sleep so Siddhartha can ride away in secret. He stops by his wife’s chambers, but does not wake her or their son Rahula, fearing that if he wakes them he will not be able to leave. In another scenario, after the prince has slipped away from his wife’s chambers without waking her or their son, he stops to ask his father’s blessing before he goes, and the king complies. Most scholars think this was added to the story much later to show that although Siddhartha rejected his royal duty, he was still a good son (but perhaps not such a good husband and father).

  Other sources from the proliferating early Buddhist sects give a different version. In these writings, Yasodhara and Siddhartha make love on the night he decides to leave. The texts are very clear that he has been ignoring his 84,000 concubines and that he makes love to his wife to prove that he is a man. Thereafter they fall asleep. This version describes Yasodhara’s anxious dreams that point to his leaving. They wake in the middle of the night and she asks him to take her with him. “Wherever I go, I take you with me,” he responds, but Yasodhara is not fooled. Sure enough, the next morning he is gone.

  These texts explain that he really hasn’t lied to her; he was implying that he would take her to Nirvana with him. And indeed, they show her to be engaged in an equally trying spiritual quest. She has conceived, but the pregnancy lasts six years. At first, it doesn’t show. As word comes to Yasodhara of Siddhartha’s ascetic activities, she begins to copy them, sleeping on the ground and starving herself so that the baby stops growing in her belly. When Siddhartha realizes the error of extreme asceticism and begins to eat, so does Yasodhara. Her pregnancy begins to show, and she is accused of infidelity. At the moment Siddhartha reaches enlightenment, Yasodhara gives birth to Rahula.