by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER THREE:
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“Even in our time which no longer believes in God there are still thinkers who believe in the holy man.”
F. Nietzsche
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Gotama—The Narrative Resumes
Meanwhile (in this fantasy of the initial drama of what will later be called ‘Buddhism’) he who, never sensitive to limits, would become so much, whose compassion (in a rare world historic inner moment) would supersede even his infinite calm, had been sitting. He was in the Forest of Mortification (actual and metaphoric) where it was the fashion of the saddhus men who ‘renounce the world’ to go and perform spiritual exercise. Here, among this convocation of forest hermits there was no conviviality. There was not even a sharing of meals, as these men scrupled to eschew even the vanity attendant upon begging for food.
Pictorial images found by archaeologists in the early twentieth century at the sites of Harappa and Muhenjo-Daro in the valley of the Indus River which show men and women in the well known ‘lotus’ and in other meditative postures reveal the great antiquity of Yoga, the practice of which cannot possibly have been any less than two thousand years old when Gotama Siddhartha took it up. Yet, in his own time if anyone had known about them the intense and prolonged austerities he had been practicing would have been considered extreme. Likewise the results he had obtained. As if in compensation for the lengthy and near total cessation of bodily activity, other powers had become rarefied, developing to a great and unusual extent.
He was aware that even before his birth he had been singled out. Prophecies had attached themselves to him. Extremities of plenty and pleasure, his singular fortune would be the signs to identify him. They were, and have always been noted. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay “Buddhism”, understood this. “84,000 was the legendary and symbolic number of women left behind in his harem amidst other and proportionate luxury”, he wrote, suggesting some of the extravagance with which Gotama’s life has always been associated.
At first, when he gave up everything, he had felt as if he had to acquire more. Those were the years of mystery and dream fantasy when seeds of false thinking flowered in his mind all woeful and gloomy.
Was it really he who had, seven years ago, been such a prince? The bonds of his personal identity had long since been broken. When he had first begun to observe his own thoughts in the forest and jungle solitudes, the fictions and truths of his life had paraded interwoven, webs of spider-like elaboration variations of grand and simple design, taking on ever new thematic combinations.
But eventually, where inner and outer world met, he had begun to find his own way, discovering a life with which he could not completely integrate but from which, on the contrary he felt his consciousness arise, a vital spring replenishing an ever changing present.
As he sensed the power of this discovery, a new and stronger dedication, calling for ever greater privation and isolation, began to live in him. Then had come intimations of liberation… release, together with the development of original and advanced techniques. Everything he did became a YOGA, and paradoxically, in spite of the intense urgency he continually felt—the drive which characterized his inward direction he had been able to succeed in giving his mind the broadest range and the most free play.
A particular exercise, of his own innovation, concerning perception occupied him as he sat alone, eyes closed, in the forest. Tracing the outward course of his own impressions from their close-packed intimate source in his consciousness to the horizons of the realities which enveloped them, he had discovered and had begun to develop a technique which enabled the apprehension of those events with which the broad arc of his life were concerned, as they approached … in space and time.
Awake, as if in a dream or yogic trance, Gotama thus is present at the scene which we observed initially (in a state of aesthetic arrest) through the vehicle of Giorgione’s painting of the “Judgment of Paris”: the dark skinned goddesses standing nude by the clear stream fed pond, the purple cloth….
In Gotama’s vision the sisters appear as signatures of an archetypal beauty. Something akin to a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom, something chaotic yet strangely meaningful, clings to them.
The detail of the purple cloth distracts him too. He becomes lost in thought, which brings him up short to his senses. He realizes what he has dreamed and the vision is gone. Was all this his own nature’s instinctive trend projected and expressed in such transcendence? He can neither call it back nor forget it. For the first time that he can remember, he is surprised.
And… then… gradually, from somewhere within the roaring ocean of fiddling, rasping cicadas around him, the full force of a long simmering realization presents itself; his current life of extreme ascetic practice is just as vain and self limiting as was his former life of palatial indulgence.