The Temptation of the Buddha: A Fictional Study in the History of Religion and of Aesthetics

by Sonny Saul

CHAPTER TWENTY:

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  “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy,

  a little I can read.”

  Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra)

  Details of his life may be considered allegorical, metaphorical or fantastic.

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  Historical Realities;

  Did the Principals of this Fantasy Exist?

  The Pali canon, the earliest and likely most reliable source of information, makes no mention of Kama Mara or his daughters. Beyond verification, wholly foreign to any authentic historical account, wherever they are mentioned (in ‘stories’ or ‘tales’ of varying type and complexity, reflecting a variety of sources and periods of time, comprising a substantial lore) the information is considered ‘legendary’, ‘allegorical’, or ‘mythological’; presumably inauthentic. Though non-canonical, these “Mara Tales” have always been considered to be important reading.

  The “Mara Tales” present Kama Mara as a “Prince of Death”, a “ruler of a kingdom of earthly pleasures”, and as a tempter. Sometimes a daughter of Mara is introduced, and when she is, her role is always and only to offer vulgar temptations. Though not always named, when she is, her name is ‘Desire’.

  The most elaborate version—also the one most laden with moralism—gives Mara three daughters (naming them- according to translator ‘Craving’, ‘Pleasure’, and ‘Discomfort’ or ‘Desire’, ‘Fulfillment’, and ‘Regret’), who function together only to multiply and make more completely lascivious, the temptations.

  An early version, found in the Samyutta-Nikaya, has each of the Mara’s daughters assuming in turn the forms of first one hundred young girls, then of one hundred young women who had not given birth, then of a hundred women who had given birth once, then of a hundred women who had given birth twice, then of a hundred middle aged women, then of a hundred older women. Each time the Buddha makes no response.

  Nobody believes these stories. If there is any history, it is covered over and disguised past recognition. One looks to them for allegory or metaphor, for information about the social history of the period from which they come, and for possible propaganda and what that reveals.

  The disproportionate lack of development of the characters of the Mara family (no trace of personalities) inspired me with the freedom to begin to imagine “the daughters of Mara”; Desire, Fulfillment, and Regret… and their father.

  Completely breaking with tradition, I have imagined Kama Mara as “the man behind the Buddha”, a dark skinned Vedic Aryan, a living representative of an imagined, most ancient cult; the brotherhood of the Seven Rishis, one of a scattered remnant whose mission it is, and has always been, to carry forward and to direct mankind toward its own best interests. I have imagined, for the first time, his daughters as individuals, each with a role to play in the education of Gotama Siddhartha who became the Buddha.

  Did the Buddha really live?

  There is not even one single piece of either writing or chiseled stone to mark the stretch of time from the ruin of the Indus Valley cities (1800 BC?) until the year of the invasion of Alexander the Great (323 BC). But we see the reality of Buddhism.

  No one doubts the actuality of Gotama Siddhartha who came to be called “The Buddha”. Buddha is of course, not a proper name; rather it is a religious title, which means awakened one or the one who woke up. Siddhartha (Sanskrit) or Siddhatha (Pali) is the personal name. It is little used in tradition. More frequent is Gautama (Sanskrit) or Gotama (Pali), which is the family name.

  GO means ‘cow’, and tama is a superlative suffix, meaning ‘most excellent, the greatest’. Gotama (the most excellent cow) must have been an auspicious clan name.

  It may be that Siddhartha, though he is often referred to as the son of a king, was simply the son of a council member or elder—one of a large number of ‘kings’ who met to administer the ‘kingdom’. This is how Gore Vidal imagined him in his historical novel, Creation.

  In early verses, Gotama is frequently called Adiccabandhu, ‘the sun’s kinsman’, which was translated ‘race of the sun’. Hajime Nakamura’s recent “biography based on the most reliable texts”, points out a Suttanipata verse (423) that says that this is his clan (gotta) name, and that Gotama was, therefore, a member of a clan whose members defined and traced their ancestry with reference to a certain traditional relationship with the sun.

  Concerning the historical man, Gotama Siddhartha, here is the complete list of facts and dates which currently can be stated with a measure of confidence:

  Birth: 563 BC

  Renunciation at age 29, the turning to asceticism, study with several teachers.

  The Enlightenment experience: 528 BC

  Travel, teaching until death at age 80: in 483 BC.

  All the other details of his life may be considered mythic, allegorical, metaphorical, fantastic, or novelistic.

  Can we have any confidence in the authenticity of the teachings of the Buddhism?

  Before trying to give the answer, it must be acknowledged that a very important part of Buddhism is revealed by the fact that any lack of direct evidence for its authenticity has never been in the least a threat to its credibility. Despite the volumes of sutras attributed to him; from a certain standpoint the Buddha had no teachings anyway.

  What we call the “the Teachings of Buddhism”, from this standpoint, are merely the opening moves or gambits in a process leading to a certain kind of experience: a transformation which is sometimes called an Awakening or Enlightenment.

  Always, the most important message remained unspoken. When words do attempt to express it, they make it seem absurd, or as if it were nothing at all. This inexpressibility, and the idea that any teachings are mere preliminaries has been an essential part of Buddhism in all periods.

  Though it is doubtful whether, at the time of the Buddha, writing or reading was practiced in the Northern valley of the Ganges (where he lived), ‘Buddhists’ believe that the founder of their way of life composed works which his immediate followers learned by heart, recited out loud in groups, and thus preserved.

  The earliest written collections of Buddhist sutras are called the Nikayays. These constitute the three Tipitaka (literally baskets, as the sayings written on palm leaves were carried about in woven baskets.) By the time that these ‘discourses’ of the Buddha’ were written down; 500 years or so after his death (first in the Pali language and soon after in Sanskrit), there were already about twenty schools of interpretation, each with its own texts and styles.

  So it is extremely hard to know what was the original form of Buddhism. Today one can look back and discern that two main strains of literature developed; one in Pali and the other in sanskrit.

  Buddha spoke neither Pali nor Sanskrit. No record of his own words in his own language survives and there is no physical evidence of the Buddha having lived at all until the stone carvings which began to appear about two hundred years after his death.

  How reliable is the oral tradition?

  Long absent and now extinct in Western society; regular, systematic memorization and recitation in groups was the rule in the ancient world. The collective aspect, among other things, kept the ‘texts’ intact and free from alteration, modification or interpolation. If one forgot, others would recall. If one erred, others were there to correct. Memory and tradition were thus reinforced and ancient messages, wisdom and tradition were preserved. This method, with some justification has been, and is, considered to be more reliable than anything copied and written down by a single individual.

  Within this context, the authenticity of the Buddha’s words, finally committed to writing for the first time at a council or seminar held in Ceylon in the first century BC seems credible, likewise the proportionately far greater feat of preserving, in this manner, the Vedas.

  Within the context of his own tradition, in what did the reform of Buddha consist?

  I’ve imagined that a part of Buddha’s greatness was always that, despite t
he world and life-renouncing to which he so long devoted himself, he kept a degree of naturalness, a loyalty to his own nature. Following his awakening under the tree, he neither maintained nor recommended asceticism. For the same reasons which he had abandoned his life of excess and luxury, later he abandoned extreme self-discipline. His life and experience had led, very clearly, to a middle way, an inner path that represented, through an active principle of compassion, a return to the ancient roots of Aryavartan world-affirmation.

  Stressing the inner state of being, he would announce, demonstrate, and come to represent the idea that one whose spirit is really free from the world might concede to his natural needs without becoming ‘worldly’.

  His realization that the detachment of the heart from material things is not the same as a renunciation of the world played a key role in enabling compassionate love to become the fundamental operative principle of the novel ethics which came to characterize what would be called ‘Buddhism’.

  Where, generally, the way of Brahmanism had become secular and obedient to custom, its ethics emphasizing the spiritual characteristics of ‘good actions’, I imagine Gotama’s ‘way’ to be supra mundane, transcendent, with compassionate love as the operative principle.

  Establishing a foundation for practical secular ethics from a much freer stance, Buddhism would have no imperatives. Followers of the Buddha were never under obligations to obey a moral code imposed upon them. Their social personalities and roles emerged ideally—by virtue of free, organic, spontaneity and brought the manifold development of their individualities into agreement with the happiness and interest of their fellow men.

  Gotama’s intense awareness that all which comes into being must be ready for the terrors of individual existence and for perishing led to a different perspective from the traditional Vedanta which recommends that the highest and proper activity of this life is to achieve, express, and communicate the rapturous vision of the eternal joy of existence behind the world of Maya, the perspective from which suffering, struggle, and the perishing of all phenomena appear as necessity, as the most exuberant expression of the fertility of Brahman. Gotama’s teaching would not require these concepts and he would not refer to them.

  What are the core teachings of Buddhism?

  Though certain ancient texts say that Gotama was assailed by the temptations and threats of Mara and his daughters after his enlightenment, a later biography speaks of these temptations and threats as occurring before. Apparently people closer to the time of Gotama regarded Mara’s temptations as continuing even after the enlightenment. This became important for later Buddhism since it indicates that, upon enlightenment, Gotama did not become some completely different kind of perfect being. Even after his enlightenment experience he retained his humanity.

  Just as it is a misunderstanding to consider Buddha to be a ‘God’, likewise Buddhism is not a belief system, nor a code of behavior. ‘Buddhahood’ is the result of an essential experience attained at the end of a path, or a series of steps, which others can, and do, take. This ‘way’, Gotama formally presented as ‘the Eightfold Path’, deriving it from the more axiomatic ‘Four Noble Truths’. With an emphasis on practicality, these are formulas designed for ease of comprehension. Rhythm and sound, as well as logic, contribute to memorability.

  Attempting to cleanse muddled superstition and to clarify things, he directs concentration upon a ‘way’ a course of action designed to provoke a direct experience. His psychological and scientific outlook is a form of artistic invention.

  Perceiving ‘dukka’ (pain/frustration/anxiety/suffering) as the central theme in the life of man, the Buddhism of Gotama Siddhartha presents, in a style of dramatic repetition, assurance that relief is possible.

  Generally, within Buddhism, speculative philosophy or metaphysics have been thought of as extravagance or indulgences to be avoided… or even as impossibilities. Gotama, as I imagine him here, resembles his contemporaries in Greece, the pre-Socratics. He is contemplative—like an artist or philosopher, concerned with causes—like the man of science, and practical—like a psychologist.

  The lively seed or kernel planted originally by Gotama has permitted, encouraged and stimulated many variations; many developments, which have branched off and taken root all over the world. Alan Watts called ‘Buddhism’ “Hinduism stripped for export”, and it is followed today in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Tibet, Japan, Mongolia, Korea, Formosa, Pakistan, Nepal, the former Soviet Union, some parts of India and probably by isolated individuals in every country, by hundreds of millions living today.

  The introduction of Buddhism has come slowly to the Occident. It has taken, in fact, over two thousand years. Not until the 18th century English Conquest and colonization of India led, in the 19th century, to linguistic, philosophic, and scholarly readings and interpretations of the Sanskrit classics, did the beginnings of an understanding finally reach the West.

  How did Gotama come to achieve such self-reliance?

  To this impossible, necessary, and suggestive question, the present fantasy suggests that Kama Mara’s anonymously wielded guidance from afar—and the effect of the ritual he created were just what the uniquely talented Gotama required.

  It was, finally, the ‘temptation’ and especially the roles played by Mara’s daughters that opened Gotama’s eyes, woke him up, and gave him his life direction. Through this influence, as imagined and described here, Gotama came to submit his own ethic of inner perfection to a principle of love. To say it another way, the turning point for him was being able to abandon a merely internal, merely subjective attitude. This change of orientation led to his working toward experience, toward an active participation in reality just as it is.

  The way I have imagined Kama Mara’s role in the life of Gotama goes beyond what is traditionally presented in the genre of ‘Mara Tales’ and ‘Buddha Stories’. This account has discovered the influence of Kama Mara as present, if unseen, at all of the important, formative moments in the personal development of the Buddha.

  I’ve pictured Mara as a unique and visionary educator toward a fully developed humanity. The creative key to Mara’s method was the discovery of the means by which the dormant forces within might be roused to fruitful activity, to the kind of understanding of, and grappling with, reality, which an harmonious unity of personality requires.

  Greatness of personality and of spirit involve independence. Because of the overwhelming power and immediacy of his own experience, Gotama could never become a disciple of Kama Mara. The idea that one repays one’s teacher badly if one remains perpetually a pupil will prove central to the developing Buddhism.

  Is there a social revolution implied by the life of the Buddha?

  In most studies of the history of Buddhism that I have consulted in preparing this text, it has been too often overlooked that, from the harmonious development of the human passions into rich and fully expanded personalities, the creation of a novel social order must have followed. I have imagined that at least a part of the success of early Buddhism was, that by stripping off the shackles which the contemporary social conditions imposed, its founders, Gotama and Desire were, for a brief time, able to regenerate society.

  There is a sense in which this story about Gotama Siddhartha is the story of the liberation of a religious/poetic soul from the relatively impoverished, prosaic confinement of a bourgeois world. There is an implied criticism of the division of labor in society and the deformation of human nature due to all the constraints resulting from the existence and consciousness of social rank and roles.

  Initially, only the most thoroughgoing renunciations could enable Gotama to develop his full human capacities. Rejecting the advantages of his birth and social position in their full nullity, when it became humanly necessary for him, and later, again without wasting one word about it, renouncing the guru’s of the forest school, Gotama learned by long, painful experience, the ideal of humanism; a way around two fa
lse extremes.

  Putting before us the fulfillment of a mature and developed personality; a real growth in concrete circumstances, he comes to embody and to, finally, teach by example the possibility of perfection of man as a physical and spiritual personality. This perfection is founded, at once upon his mastery of the external world and upon the elevation of his own nature to spirituality, to culture and harmony, without a denial of its natural character.