by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
--- --- ---
“There are many kinds of pride.
Pride is not all of a kind.”
Biddy, in Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations”
--- --- ---
Siddhartha’s Song (continued)
Desire had withdrawn her hands and closed her eyes. Leaning back, she listened to Gotama’s song, which flowed on.
“I cut off my long glossy black hair and went straight to find the holy men.
“When I began to work on myself I gave up my own decisions.
To no longer think for myself and to submit to another was not difficult
as I had, in reality, nothing to lose.
I felt that my identity had become completely mechanical.
I felt as though I did not exist.
I went and sat down with them.
And there I remained…
Until it happened again…
Until my identity had once more become completely mechanical.
Without a word, I departed.
Overcome by the vanity of everything…
I resolved to live completely alone.
Whenever I saw anyone; a cowherd, or a stock farmer, or a grass cutter, a woodcutter, or someone gathering firewood, I fled. From grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from low ground to low ground, from high ground to high ground, I thought, ‘Let them not see me! Let me not see them!; Just like a deer that lives in the forest when it sees a human being…”
“I fed my body on the fruit that fell from trees, from mosses, grass, even cow dung. Like the beams of an old shed, my ribs stuck out.”
“Feeling such an outcast, I became a thorn-sided one. When I did lie down, my rule was that it should be only upon thorns. The dust and dirt of many seasons gathered upon me, like the outer bark of a tree trunk, but never did I think ‘I will wash.’ I never thought of it.”
“In the burning tropical jungle solitude,
for seven years I practiced useless and grisly exercise
together with a penance of starvation so severe.
For seven years I practiced useless and grisly exercise.
I lived for days on one sesame seed,… and then took a grain of rice… all the while resolved to contemplate with unbroken intensity the sad ocean of birth and death.
Because I ate so little my buttocks became like a camel’s hoof. The skin of my belly stuck to my backbone and the joints of my limbs became like the joints of the kala creeper.
Desire, when the mother cows had been driven out and the cowherd had departed, into the cow pen I would crawl on all fours and eat the droppings of the suckling calves. My body turned black.
At night I sought out the burial places to sleep with the skeletons …
Because I had renounced so much, mistakenly, I strove to acquire an equivalent. My most formidable enemy, as always, was myself. I put obstacles in my own path. There I was, lying in the bush, lurking in caves and clover. I became so concerned with the far away that I forgot to care about my immediate footing.
All this while I saw nothing exalted about myself.
instead, I discovered all that was loathsome.
Yet … mind, having the property of presenting distant objects and distant goals as if they were at hand, deceived me… Convinced that beyond the film of false reality lay another; the miraculous, I restrained, crushed and burned out my mind with my mind; like when a strong man seizes a weaker one.
Beguiled by an illusory nearness of the sublime,
how little aware I was that deep precipices were hidden before me…
I imagined that the tortures, through which I put myself -
like practicing trance without breathing.
setting my teeth and pressing my tongue to my palate,
(the pain… as if a strap were being twisted around my head,
as if a butcher were slowly cutting my forehead with a sharp knife)
were like the path of a broad green meadow
covered with luxuriant flowers.
Now as he spoke, Gotama began to leave larger gaps between his thoughts and his words. “Since the time when I took up the homeless life … until now… until you found me … there had been no occasion when either a painful… or a pleasant feeling … could overpower my mind…Vainly, in isolation, I sought and awaited enlightenment.”
“Desire, you came at the perfect moment when you brought the rice milk,” Gotama told her, speaking again more fluently. “Practicing a yoga, that day, I had re-entered my own past. I was twelve years old and sitting comfortably in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree. Father was away. Remote from obligation, deprivation or pleasure, I—just spontaneously entered upon the my first real contemplation; a wide ranging reflection both directed and sustained.
Full of vigor, waves of insight carried me along, thrilling me… But I was not able to sustain this recollection. The re creation of my first meditation failed. Instead I experienced my own weakness and lack of freedom in comparison to my younger self. Right then, for the first time since I had left the palace, I desired nourishment.”