by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER TWELVE:
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“What is the price of Experience?
Do men buy it for a song?
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street?
No, it is bought with the price of all that a man hath,
his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy, And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.”
William Blake
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“Sometimes you have to play for a long time
to sound like yourself.”
Miles Davis
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Siddhartha’s Song
I ask the reader to imagine the long and rather formal story that Siddhartha will tell (ostensibly to Desire), like Kama Mara’s song in the last chapter as either soliloquy or aria. Either as each, alike, functions not so much to advance plot, but to express or reveal character and motivation.
Gently withdrawing his hands from Desire’s and extending them out to her, with palms up, he begins,
“Man gathers flowers, his heart set on pleasure.
Death overtakes him like a flood of water;
just sweeps him away- ”
But he broke off and was silent. Desire was still. “I want to tell my story.” he began again. “Will you imagine it with me Desire? In the land of the Sakyas, between the black masses of the mountains and hidden among the foliage of tamarinds, mangoes, and forests… I was born. My first memories are of the lower slopes, which extend to the clouds…
“Before I had been born my mother dreamed that
a white elephant with six tusks
who wandered among golden mountains,
entered her left side
without pain.”
“My father told me that the vivid reality of this dream so disturbed my mother that she sought an astrologer to interpret it. This astrologer foresaw that she would give birth to a son capable of either of two immense destinies; a powerful ruler or a great spiritual teacher. My father also told me that my mother felt the powerful importance of this, but was saddened and did not wish her son to be either of these things.”
Siddhartha became quiet. He waited until his song built again within him, finally starting again from the beginning.
“Man gathers flowers, his heart set on pleasure.
Death overtakes him like a flood of water;
just sweeps him away- -
When I was born, my mother
who with deep affection had painfully carried me,
died.
Swept away,
she was not permitted to nourish me.”
“I have never been able to pronounce the sweet word, “mother” and have it heard …
My father, shielding me with advantage,
tried to protect me from further unpleasantness.”
(Gotama took back both her hands and held them in his.)
“In my boyhood I was slender and delicate,
I wore silk, even the undergarments.
Attendants held a white umbrella over me.
For my sake, lotus ponds were planted;
all for my sake –
In one place blue lotuses ,
in another place red louses,
and in another place white lotuses,
all for my sake.”
My father was a very wealthy man. Where, in the dwellings of other powerful men, slaves and workers and servants were used to being given broken rice together with sour gruel, my father’s were given white rice and meat.”
“Before I was yet a man I had three palaces. During the months of rains I was entertained by musicians and did not even go outside.”
“As I grew older, training to be a horseman and an archer, I became strong in body. Debating with intelligent men and women, I learned to speak well and became strong in mind. But so thoroughly protected had I been from harsh reality that actually I was unaware that there is suffering in the world.”
“Eventually a turning point came. I saw a creature different than anything I had ever seen. Stooped over, wrinkled with no hair, it could barely walk and leaned on a staff. My coachman answered my question saying, ‘This is an old man ; what we will all be if we keep on living.’ I returned to the palace and did not cease to think about it.”
“Next week, when I returned to the market I saw a man with the disfigured face of a leper. ‘Is this a man?’ I asked. ‘A sick man,’ my coachman replied. ‘We will all be like that if we keep on living.’ Now I was disturbed.”
“And when, a week later, I returned to the market and saw a man who seemed to be sleeping but whose color was not that of life, I asked ‘What kind of man is this, if it is a man, being carried by others?’ The coachman told me, ‘This is a dead man, and we will all be like that when we have lived long enough.’”
“I was devastated to learn these truths of human life; old age, sickness, and death. Whenever I opened my eyes a sigh involuntarily escaped me, for all I saw ran counter to my inmost spirit. I began to despise life. Obsessed with the consciousness of things falling into decay, my heart followed them, robbing joy of satisfaction.”
“When I went out the next time I saw something else I had never seen before; a man almost naked whose face was full of serenity. I learned that this was an ascetic; a man who lived apart from everything and seemed to have gained peace of mind.”
“Though I was only sixteen years old, I decided I would run away to the forest… and to become like that ascetic I had seen.”
“What good is a gold crown if inside one feels base? What good is it to rule if one is at odds with oneself? My life felt like a wrong road along which I must go back to the point at which it began, a mistake to correct.”
“Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
And then… Why this?
this restless, ceaseless coming into and going out of being?
I felt this as grimace of painful disfiguration on the countenance of nature,
a never ending dirge in all realms of existence?”
With the help of my coachman Chandaka and the snow-white Kanthaya, my favorite horse, I escaped. I left my family and home.”
“Casting off old values,
I searched out new ones,
saying to myself,
‘there is right looking and wrong looking’.
Wrong looking sees sickness, old age. and death as tragic, unavoidable,
and seeks their meaning.
I will concentrate upon Right Looking.”
“With these sort of notions I settled in for the life of a forest hermit; a renunciate. My essential drive was this: ‘no ascetic in the past, none in the present, and none in the future, will practice more earnestly than I.’”