by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
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“We all live in the same time forever.
There is no future and there is no past.”
George Balanchine
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Unique communication, no dependence upon words, direct pointing, seeing into one’s own nature.
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A first disciple and some advice from a master
Kama Mara had waited long enough. The Drama his drama, The Temptation of the Buddha, ought to have concluded. Instead, revisiting the set he found his youngest daughter sitting in meditation with the ascetic.
Never at a loss, he shouted out to her, “You’ll die of hunger sitting beside this rice bag! Haven’t I told you? The sick represent the greatest danger to the healthy.”
Regret was on her feet. She took her father’s arm. Absolutely composed, rising up on her toes, she kissed his cheek, eager to explain, “Father, it’s his calm and cheerfulness. I feel stronger near him.”
That was simple enough, but Regret wasn’t finished. Letting go of her father she, deliberately, delicately, with her bare feet, smoothed out the dirt in front of the still seated Gotama. Then, breaking off a small dry branch from the Bodhi tree, she used it to sketch four concentric circles there in the dirt. Within the outermost circle she wrote the words (in Sanskrit), “unique communication”. In the next, she wrote, “no dependence upon words”, in the third circle, “direct pointing”, and then in the last, “Seeing one’s own nature”.
“Apparently,” Kama Mara said to the smiling Buddha (who, most likely, was not literate), “an utterly convincing mythology readily creates itself around you.”
“Father,” Regret broke in, “he is a Buddha.”
For the first time since he sat down beneath the tree, Siddhartha rose. Completing this motion all at once, he came to his feet with both the most gracefully deferential bow and full faced smile and said, “Greetings and homage, Master Mara … By learning; by endeavor, discipline, and self mastery, you have made an island of yourself that no flood can overwhelm.” His voice was most confident, calm and resonant.
Kama Mara answered, returning his bow and smile, his voice registering every nuance.
“However deep one’s knowledge,
it is like a piece of hair
flying in the vastness of space.
However important one’s experience,
it is like a drop of water thrown into the abyss.”
Gotama, responded, not missing a beat, “My initial strategy was to give up longing for existence in any form. I sought the Eternal and Timeless, I cast off that craving thirst, that desire which leads to renewal, and my methods were not without result… but no system of thought can include boundless life.” “… finally… I have woken up, overwhelmed by the very same divine spiritual essence of which we are all a part that has also been poured into the world immediately surrounding us… ”
“The fruit of this experience, which I see we share, is not only a deep and rich awareness, but also the love and compassion we feel. Now that I am awake I can see what’s before my eyes.”
“So, at last, you have arrived at good health!” Kama Mara laughed, embracing him. “And cured,” he asked, “perhaps are ready to formalize your discoveries and make prescriptions? “It’s seldom that great men want to teach. It’s always the people who force them to. See what’s happened already. Even though your heart was elsewhere inclined, and you sat as far alone as you could, far from anyone else, already you have taught well.” Indicating Regret, he said, “Already you have your first disciple.”
Grasping Gotama’s two hands in his own, Kama Mara said, directly and earnestly, “It was a road that you had to take… At first you felt that only when you shut out the world of the senses could you be linked with the spiritual; which you imagined as a world of true being. You see it now, don’t you? The source of your error, from the beginning, was your unfounded belief in the reality and existence of a transcendental world. ”
Then, letting go of Gotama’s hands, Kama Mara said, “The key note of Aryavartra, from the beginning has been the tendency of its people towards spiritual realization. But it has been misdirected , and with this has come the herding of our Vedic peoples—herding, yes, like cattle—at first with rituals and sacrifices, with fixed gestures and chanted mantras, then, finally even the belief in another world. At first our people learned to serve the gods, later to court a metaphysical unreality, but now, not only our people, but people everywhere, from now on, can wake up, to honor the vital spring within each of us.
Kama Mara spoke with tremendous assurance rising. “It is always rare, most unusual, for spiritual teachers to instruct the people at large. We have only seen—up to now—the guru who teaches a small group of disciples; people with already advanced qualifications. The new teaching will require new lesson. Old customs and traditions will not be of assistance. Man must adapt to something that is unfolding in the world. Since it serves no purpose, we won’t look back with regret to an ancient way of being as something lost.”
Now he lowered his voice, and broadened his phrasing, “Your discoveries will produce adaptable, supple, many-faceted teachings. Though they arise here on Vedic lands as they develop, and as they are received, they will prove to be even more useful in other places and in other times.”
Regret, heard the veiled irony and listened with pleasure to her father’s prophecy and blessings upon the Buddha.