Buddha Read online

  Quickly, almost shaking, she quit her bed, throwing on her robe, and ran to her husband’s bedchamber. In the dim candlelight, Suddhodana lay twisted in the sheets. After their years of barren hopes for a son, he often slept alone now. Another king might have taken a lover who could provide him with a son. Another king might have simply had his wife murdered or locked away as a madwoman to dissolve the marriage contract. But Suddhodana hadn’t done those things. He had remained as fierce and loyal in love as in war.

  Tonight will be different, Maya told herself. I have been blessed. Cautiously, not wanting to awake Suddhodana too suddenly, she lay beside him on the bed. Gently she stroked his face, drawing him up from sleep. His hands turned to fists at first, then his eyes opened and looked into hers. He started to speak, but she laid a finger over his lips.

  She was not wild with desire, not its prisoner or slave. With her husband’s legs entwined with hers, she didn’t want pleasure as much as union. She encouraged him with words she never imagined saying. “Don’t make love to me like a king. Make love like a god.”

  The effect was dramatic. Urgently, he reached for her, and she saw the wonder in his eyes. For so long their coupling had been perfunctory, neither of them believing that anything would come of it. But tonight he felt some of the strong belief that had awakened within her.

  When she was ready, she rolled her hips and took him inside her. Her breath caught in her throat. The strange need within her reached a crescendo. For a few moments she entered that darkness of bliss that imitates immortality. Gradually she returned from it with a sigh, to find that the king was holding her in a tight embrace. He pulled her to him as if trying to meld his flesh completely with hers. They kissed and caressed; only her exhaustion in delight kept Maya from speaking what she knew with certainty: they had created a child.

  The dream had sustained her in the terrifying trip through the forest and the pain of her labor. Now it was returning in more ghostly form every day. Her head sank into the pillow. It was still a lovely dream, she thought, and an escape from her great weariness. She even thought it would be better to live in her dream forever, if only she could.

  IN THE ROYAL NURSERY Suddhodana gazed down at his son with awe and love. The baby had been presented to him in crimson silk swaddling clothes. He was certain the infant recognized him; it even grew in his mind that Siddhartha had kept his eyes shut until that moment, a fantasy no one dared to correct.

  “Should he be sleeping this much? Why is his nose running? If he’s left alone for a moment, I will have someone whipped.” Suddhodana’s demands were incessant and maddening. As was the custom, Maya would be quarantined for a month after the delivery, subject to cleansing and religious rituals. Suddhodana chafed at this, but he could do nothing about it except sneak in by candlelight after the queen was asleep to gaze at her for a few moments. He wondered if new mothers always looked so wan and weak. Suddhodana pushed his troubling thoughts aside.

  “Let him always be clothed in silk, and when they get soiled, throw them away. If you run out of silk, tear apart the court ladies’ saris if you have to.” Suddhodana wanted nothing with a hint of uncleanliness to touch his son’s skin. But silk was also a symbol, since Suddhodana was on the Silk Road returning home when a messenger sent by Kumbira reached him with the news that he had a son and a wife who were both alive.

  Every morning the king strode forward through the ring of women that stood fanning the young prince with their shawls. Reaching down into the cradle, he withdrew his son and held him aloft. He stripped off the diaper.

  “Look at him.” Suddhodana displayed his son in all his naked glory. “Well made.” All of the ladies knew what he was referring to. Kakoli, the royal nurse, started to mumble something agreeable.

  “Impressively made,” Suddhodana said. “Not that I have your experience, Kakoli.” Suddhodana laughed and thought again how easy it was with his son in his arms. “Don’t blush, you old hypocrite. If he was twenty years older and we could take forty years off you, you’d fall off your feet running after it.”

  Kakoli shook her head and said nothing. The handmaidens tittered and blushed. Suddhodana was certain they were more entertained than scandalized by his bluntness.

  ASITA AWOKE in the forest thinking about demons. He hadn’t for many years. He could remember glimpsing one or two in the past, on the fringes of a famine or a battle, wherever bodies were being harvested. He knew the misery they caused, but misery was no longer Asita’s concern. He had been a forest hermit for fifty years. The affairs of the world had been kept far away, and he passed whole days in a hidden cave when he retreated even from the affairs of animals, much less those of men.

  Now Asita knelt by a stream and considered. He distinctly saw demons in his mind’s eye. They had first appeared in the dappled sunlight that fell on his eyelids at dawn. Asita slept on boughs strewn over the bare ground, and he liked the play of light and shadow across his eyes in the early morning. His imagination freely saw shapes that reminded him of the market village where he grew up. He could see hawking merchants, women balancing water jugs on their heads, camels and caravans—anything, really—on the screen of his closed eyes.

  But never demons, not before this morning. Asita walked into the nearly freezing mountain stream, his body naked except for a loincloth. As an ascetic, he did not wear clothes, not even the robes of a monastic order. Lately he had felt an impulse to travel very high, nearly in sight of the snowcapped peaks on the northern border of the Sakya kingdom. Which put him close to other lokas, worlds apart from Earth. Every mortal is confined to the Earth plane, but like the dense air of the jungle tapering gradually into the thin atmosphere of the mountains, the material world tapered off into subtler and subtler worlds. Devas had their own lokas, as did the gods and demons. Ancestors dwelt in a loka set apart for spirits in transition from one lifetime to the next.

  Asita had been raised on this knowledge. He knew also that all these planes merged into each other like wet dyed cloths hung too close on the line, the blue bleeding into the red, the red into the saffron yellow. Lokas were apart and together at the same time. Demons could move among humans, and often did. The reverse, a mortal visiting the demon loka, was much rarer.

  He plunged his head under the water, then flung it back, sending long streams dripping from his uncut beard and hair. On days when he needed food, Asita carried his begging bowl down into one of the villages. Not even the youngest child was frightened to see a naked old man on the street with hair and beard down to his waist. Ascetics were a normal sight, and it was a sacred duty, if a wandering hermit showed up at one’s door near sunset, to offer food and hospitality.

  Asita wasn’t hungry this day, however. There were other ways to keep the prana, or life current, going. If he did visit the demon loka, it would take enormous prana to sustain his body. There would be no air for his lungs to breathe among the demons.

  He allowed the brilliant Himalayan sun to dry his body as he walked above the tree line. Demons do not literally live on mountaintops, but Asita had learned special powers that allowed him to penetrate the subtle world. He had to get as far away as possible from human beings to exercise these abilities. The atmosphere was dense around population. In Asita’s eyes a quiet village was a seething cauldron of emotions; every person—except only small infants—was immersed in a fog of confusion, a dense blanket of fears, wishes, memories, fantasy, and longing. This fog was so thick that the mind could barely pierce it.

  But in the mountains Asita could find a bedrock of silence. Sitting in that enveloping emptiness, he could direct his mind, as clean as the flight of an arrow, to any object or place. It was really the mind that went to the demon loka, but Asita had such one-pointed clarity that he could travel with it.

  And so it came about that the demon king Mara found himself staring at a most unwelcome intruder. He glared at the naked old man sitting in lotus position before his throne. Nothing like it had happened in a long while.

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p; “Go away,” Mara growled. “Just because you got here doesn’t mean you can’t be destroyed.” The old man didn’t move. His yogic concentration must have been strong, because his lean brown body, as tough as the sinew showing under its skin, grew sharper in outline. Mara would have commanded some lesser demons to torment the intruder, but these hermits weren’t so easily dismissed, so Mara bided his time.

  After a moment the old man’s eyes opened. “You do not welcome me?” His voice was mild, but Mara read irony in it.

  “No! There’s nothing for you here.” The dead and departed passed through Mara’s hands, but it displeased him to meet mortals under any other circumstances.

  “I didn’t come for myself. I came for you,” the old man said. He rose and looked around. The demon loka is a world as varied as the material world, and it has its regions of greater and lesser pain. Since torment did not threaten Asita, he beheld only a dense, noxious fog surrounding him. “I bring you news.”

  “I doubt it.” Mara moved restlessly in his seat. As temple paintings often depict him, his throne was made of skulls. His body was red with flames spitting around it, and instead of one horrible face he possessed four, which turned like a weathervane, presenting fear, temptation, disease, and death.

  “Someone is coming to meet you. Soon, very soon,” Asita said.

  “Millions have met me,” Mara shrugged. “Who are you?”

  “I am Asita.” The old hermit stood up and faced Mara directly. “Buddha is coming.” This caused a slight tremor, nothing more, to run through Mara’s body. Asita noticed it. “I knew you would be intrigued.”

  “I doubt you know anything.” Mara wasn’t simply being arrogant. To him, Asita was a blank. There was nothing to hold on to, no ground for temptation or fear to stand on. “Who picked you as messenger? You’re deluded.”

  Asita ignored this and repeated the word that had made Mara tremble. “Buddha is coming. I hope you’re prepared.”

  “Silence!”

  Until that moment Mara had paid as much attention to Asita as to a small seasonal famine or an insignificant plague. Now he leaped from his throne and shrank to human size, keeping only one of his four demonic faces, death. “What if he comes? He’ll abandon the world, just as you did. Nothing more.”

  “If you believe that, then you have forgotten what Buddha can do,” Asita said calmly.

  “Really? Look!” Mara opened his mouth, which was solid blackness behind his fangs. The blackness expanded, and Asita could see the mass of suffering that Mara embodied. He saw a web of souls caught in turmoil, a tangle of war and disease and every version of pain that the demons could devise.

  When he felt that the spectacle had had its effect, Mara slowly closed his mouth again, and the darkness receded back inside him. “Buddha?” he said contemptuously. “I’ll make them think that he’s the demon.” The prospect brought a smile.

  “Then let me speak as a friend, and I will tell you your fatal weakness,” Asita said. He sat down in lotus position, folding his legs over each other, making the mudra of peace with his thumb and forefinger. “Being the monarch of fear, you’ve forgotten how to be afraid yourself.”

  Enraged by this insult, Mara roared and swelled to monstrous size as the hermit suddenly faded away. He could feel the possibility of Buddha like the faintest light before dawn. Still, Mara was blind. He believed humans would ignore yet another pure soul. This was a mistake. The child on the horizon would be noticed because what he stood for was destiny.

  3

  The silk curtains to Maya’s chamber parted, and Kumbira rushed out. The only thing she could be grateful for was that no one else knew yet. Her slippers padded quickly, quietly down the corridor. Night had fallen. The seventh day of the full moon was rising after the baby prince’s birth, casting bars of ghostly light onto the polished teak floors of the palace. Kumbira paid no attention.

  After dinner Suddhodana had retired to the nursery to be alone with his son. When Kumbira ran in, breathless and speechless, her face wore an expression he had seen only once before, when his father, the old king—

  “No!”

  The cry sprang from him involuntarily. Horror chased the gladness from his heart and clamped tight bands around his chest.

  Sorrowfully, Kumbira drew her sari over her head to mask her face. Tears dripped from her tired eyes.

  “What have you monsters done to her?” Suddhodana demanded. He swept past Kumbira, knocking her to the ground with a glancing blow. At the canopied bed, the king tore the drawn sheets away to reveal his wife. Maya looked as if she only slept, but the stillness that claimed her was complete. Suddhodana dropped to his knees and took her hands, whose coolness seemed temporary, the kind he could rub away whenever she felt a chill. Involuntarily he started to rub them now.

  Kumbira allowed an hour to pass before she crept into the room with a retinue of court ladies. They were there to console but also to bring dignity. Grief, like everything else surrounding a king, was a matter of ritual. The moment Suddhodana consented to leave, attendants were prepared with ointments, winding sheets, and ceremonial marigolds to adorn the body. The wailing women were on call, and of course a dozen Brahmins with prayers and censers.

  “Highness.” With a word, Kumbira brought all this to the king’s attention. Suddhodana looked up blankly. Kumbira waited a moment to see if she would have to repeat herself. As he gently placed Maya’s arm across her chest, Suddhodana shuddered. It wasn’t just that his wife had often slept that way, one arm folded across herself, the other across him. It was also that the king felt a slight stiffness creeping into Maya’s limbs. Touch being the sense most cherished by lovers, he knew that he could never touch her again. He nodded curtly, and the wailing in the corridors began.

  Grief is to demons what music is to mortals. Unseen and unheard, Mara walked through the palace. The formality of death is strict. Yama, the lord of death, is aware of every last breath, and he gives permission for the jiva, or individual soul, to pass into the other world. The lords of karma await to assign the next lifetime, sitting in judgment over the person’s good and bad actions. Cosmic justice is meted out by the devas, the celestial beings who lavish the soul with rewards for good actions, and the asuras, or demons, who rain down punishment for wrongdoing. Demons do not have a free hand, however. The law of karma is precise and exacts only the punishment that is deserved, not an ounce more.

  This made Mara’s presence unnecessary, since Maya was already in the care of the three devas who had come to her in her dream and who met her again as she took her last breath. To die in one world brings birth in another. But Maya lingered in her body as long as she could. She willed her last spark of life energy to flow through her hand to Suddhodana as he knelt by the bed clutching it.

  None of this concerned Mara, however. He walked past her bedchamber and directed his steps farther, to the nursery, which was now empty of nurses, guards, and priests. The new baby was completely unprotected. Mara crossed to the cradle and peered down at the wide-eyed child. The young prince lay on his back with his throat bared to the first predator that walked by.

  But even the king of demons cannot cause physical harm directly. Demons’ work is to amplify the mind’s suffering. Mara would try to do that with this child, since no baby is born without the seeds of pain in its mind. Gazing down at the cradle, Mara let his face slide through a number of nightmarish masks. You’ll never see your mother again, Mara thought. She’s gone away, and they are hurting her. Siddhartha kept his gaze fixed, yet Mara was sure that the baby had heard. In fact, Siddhartha recognized him. Mara was sure of it.

  “Good,” the demon said. “You showed up.”

  He leaned closer to whisper in the baby’s ear. “Tell me what you want. I’m listening.” This was always the key, to play upon your opponent’s desire. “Can you hear me in there?” The baby kicked his feet.

  “So many souls need you,” Mara said wistfully, resting his arms on the cradle. “But here’s the joke.�
� He paused to lean in closer. “When you fail, they’ll wind up with me! I’m letting you in on the secret so you won’t say I was unfair. Become a saint. It will only make you a better instrument of destruction. Won’t that be delicious?” As if in answer to his question, the wailing over the dead queen grew louder. The baby looked away and fell quickly asleep.

  FUNEREAL SMOKE, oily and thick, twisted through the air and tainted the sky as Maya’s body burned atop the huge pile of sandalwood logs that had been chopped from the forest. The ghatraj, king of the funeral site, was a huge, sweaty man. His face reddened as he shouted orders for more wood, a higher flame, more melted ghee to pour over the body. The ghee had been churned from the milk of sacred cows. Priests walked slowly around the pyre chanting while the wailing women tossed thousands of marigolds into the fire. Behind them hired mourners whipped themselves in their grief and endlessly circled the body.

  The spectacle made Suddhodana sick. He had defied the Brahmins by not taking Maya down to the ghats by the river. On his orders the funeral pyre had been built in the royal gardens. Maya had remembered playing there as a child, when noble girls from the region were brought to court on the chance that any might please young Suddhodana. It was fitting that her last resting place would be somewhere she loved. Secretly Suddhodana knew that this was a gesture born of guilt as much as of love. He was the one who still had a future.

  Canki, the highest Brahmin, finished the rites by lifting an ax in the air. The most sacred moment had arrived, when he would pray for the release of Maya’s soul while Suddhodana smashed the remains of her skull to release the spirit inside. The king approached the pyre, his expression stony. He glanced down at a necklace in his fist crafted of rubies and gold. He’d given it to Maya on their wedding night, and now he gently placed it next to the skull.