Gautama Buddha: In Life and Legend

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Gautama Buddha

In Life and Legend

Betty Kelen

To Juli and her friends, this tale of a man who said:

Make what is right become. It is possible to make what is right become. Were it not possible to make what is right become, I would not say, ‘Make what is right become.’ But because it is possible, therefore I say, ‘Make what is right become.’

Contents

Acknowledgment

Foreword

In the Beginning . . .

1. The Birth of Buddha

2. Growing Up

3. The Great Renunciation

4. The Noble Quest

5. Enlightenment

6. The Wheel of Dharma

7. The Samgha

8. Home to Kapilavastu

9. The Lord Buddha: The Sage

10. The Lord Buddha: The Teacher

11. Ill Winds

12. The Great Decease

And in the End . . .

Bibliography

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank Mr. M. R. Tongnoi Tongyai, Second Secretary of the Permanent Mission of Thailand to the United Nations, who kindly read my manuscript from a Buddhist’s point of view, and gave me the benefit of his comments.

Foreword

Brahmin, I lay no wood for fires on altars. Only within burneth the flame I kindle.

–SAMYUTTA-NIKAYA

Gautama Buddha lived twenty-five hundred years ago. Anyone who wishes to know what sort of man he was must peer at him through shrouds of time and thickets of legend. Many of the stories that have been preserved for us appear to tell the life and work of a real man; others are symbolic of the religious beliefs of the Buddhists and the Hindus; others are pure folklore, as old as man and lively with marvels and miracles.

The real miracle is this: that wisdom exists. It is inbuilt in the foundation of the mind, and though it is hardly noticed by ordinary people in their hurry to get on with their everyday affairs, there have been some extraordinary men who have noticed it. They have seen the shape of pure wisdom and have described it in simple language for the rest of us to build our lives upon.

Siddhartha Gautama was one of these gifted men. The moral law he devised became the inspiration of many eastern civilizations, and people ended by assuming that he must have been not a man, but a god. His life story, therefore, like that of other religious teachers, is a sort of sacred drama, the biography of a spirit as well as that of a person.

Gautama’s spirit is versatile. It leads through rich jungles of oriental folklore toward the Himalayan ranges of man’s thought.

In the Beginning . . .

Many a birth have I traversed, seeking the Builder.

- DHAMMAPADA

Religion is man’s contact with the mysteries of the infinite, and that is why most religions have tales to tell about the beginnings and ends of things, the limitless past and the unmeasured future. The Buddhist legend-makers have imagined that mankind has existed through aeons of time, each aeon being a number of years so high that no mathematician of earth or heaven can possibly calculate it: twenty-seven zeros after ten might be a modest estimate.

Now and again in this fantastic stream of time, there arises a Buddha—an Enlightened One—and he becomes a teacher of his fellow man. Every one of the Buddhas teaches the same thing. When mankind forgets his teaching, it is time for a new Buddha to be born and a new Buddha-age to begin.

We are living today in the age of Gautama Buddha, but we are told that six Buddhas lived before him; some legends count twenty-four or even one hundred, and there are those that speak extravagantly of several hundred million Buddhas who walked the earth before Gautama.

Buddhas are not gods. They are human beings, no different in essence and origin from you and me: sparks of energy bound, according to Buddhist belief, upon the ever-turning Wheel of Life, and every Buddha is fated to be born and reborn throughout an eternity in many different conditions, high and low. In the beginning perhaps he is simply dumb matter, a lump of clay or a rock. After crossing an immense desert of years, his life-spark passes into plants and then animals, and it lives, dies, and is re-created through aeons until at last it animates a man. Birth, decay, old age, death: the Buddha knows this universal cycle scores, even hundreds, of times, as indeed we all do. So far, a Buddha is Everyman.

But there is one respect in which a Buddha differs from others. At some time or another in his myriad lives he has been filled with a sublime determination: to make his soul perfect. From this moment, he is no longer a common man: he is a Bodhisattva—one who is going to be enlightened.

The story of Gautama Buddha, therefore, begins not on earth but in the jeweled and perfumed gardens of the Heaven of Delight, where enthroned in the light of a million suns, a Perfect Being sits meditating upon his long course of lives, like an accomplished actor remembering his past roles.

Once at an inexpressibly remote time he had been a conceited young divinity student named Megha who, after spending some years in the mountains reciting his scriptures and prayers until he knew them by heart, descended into a village of the plains to find it festively arrayed with banners and flowers. His first thought was that these decorations had probably been put out in his honor, but a young girl quickly robbed him of this pleasant idea. We are holding a festival of welcome for Dipankara Buddha, she told him. He is going to pass through our village today.

In her hand she held seven lotus flowers which she said she intended to throw beneath the feet of the famous Teacher. Megha persuaded her to sell him five of them.

He joined the throng on the highway and watched the Buddha approach, majestic and benign, his visage calm as a smooth lake. The people hailed him with delight and bowed with their palms pressed together, and the girls ran around him strewing their flowers. The Buddha drew near, and Megha tossed his lotuses; but to his utter amazement, instead of falling onto the path, they remained suspended in the air in a circular pattern, and Dipankara was turning his wonderful gaze upon him.

Megha thrilled throughout his body. Under that glance his vanity fled, and he fell to the ground with his long hair spread so that the Buddha might walk over it.

Dipankara passed on in silence; and yet in thought he had spoken to Megha. The young man felt a wish and a will arise in him: he would forge himself into a Perfect Being, like Dipankara. Fast on that thought came another, the incredible realization that it was actually going to happen; that Dipankara had in fact recognized him as a future Buddha, an Enlightened One.

Now, sitting in the gardens of the Heaven of Delight, he knew that the long discipline was almost complete. The imperfect soul that had once lent life to a divinity student had changed beyond recognition. It had become a Bodhisattva, a Buddha-to-be, with only one life left to live—that of a Teacher.

The Bodhisattva’s mind embraced the earth in time and space. He chose the year, the place, the parents; and then he prepared himself for the adventure of rebirth.

1. The Birth of Buddha

It is the rule that when the Bodhisattva ceases to

belong to the hosts of the Heaven of Delight

and enters a mother’s womb, an infinite and

splendid radiance passing the glory of the gods is made

manifest throughout the world.

– DIGHA-NIKAYA

Twenty-five centuries ago there flourished in India a city called Kapilavastu. It lay about a hundred miles north of the modern city of Benares at the very border of Nepal where the fertile fields of the Ganges Valley begin to rise into hills and purple mountains; and beyond, the land soars to the eternal snows of the Himalayas where the gods live and the sacred rivers have their source.

The city and the little kingdom that lay around it for about nine hundred square miles were dominated by a people of the Sakya Clan. They were Hindus, descendants of the Aryans, those poetic conquerors who moved into northern India about 3000 b.c., speaking the mother of languages, Sanskrit, and compiling the oldest books in the world, the Vedas. The Aryans were an extraordinary race of intellectuals who must have made themselves the masters of the more primitive peoples of northern India as much by their brilliant conversation as by force of arms. They had a noble conception of God. That which exists is One, they said, though the wise call It by many names.

As the centuries passed, gods galore made their appearance in the skies of India, but it was only the wise who remembered they were but shadows of the One. The Sakyas, a simple farming folk, worshiped numerous painted images with piercing eyes and wondrous black mustaches, and priests were kept busy caring for their temples and shrines and making complicated, costly sacrifices of gold and grain, the flesh of animals, and the intoxicating wine called soma.

The Sakyas had a king whom legend tells us was called Suddhodana Gautama. Gautama was his family name, and Suddhodana means Pure Rice. Various of his noble relatives are said to have been named White Rice, Fine Rice, Washed Rice, and Immortal Rice; we may infer that the Sakyas were extremely fond of rice and grew a lot of it.

Suddhodana was deeply in love with his wife, a lady so beautiful that those who saw her could hardly believe their eyes. Her name was Maya, which means Illusion, and they said that it fitted her, for she looked like a girl in a dream. Moreover, she possessed the highest and choicest gifts of intelligence and piety: we are told that she abhorred murder, stealing, lying, immodest behavior, and strong drinks. The only shadow in Maya’s life was that she yearned for a child, and she spent a great deal of time visiting temples and praying that a son and heir might be bestowed upon her.

There came the time of the Festival of the Full Moon of Midsummer when the people of Kapilavastu swarmed in the streets, singing and blowing horns. The ankle bells of dancing girls were heard on all sides as their skirts unfurled in colors and spangles, and the sacred cows ran with the crowds, trailing long garlands of flowers from their horns.

Queen Maya enjoyed these festivities for seven days. On the seventh day she rose early, bathed in scented water, and having adorned herself, she went into the city where she distributed the stupendous sum of four hundred thousand gold pieces in alms to the poor. Then she retired to her rooms, lay down upon her bed, and slept.

She dreamed that the great Kings of the Four Quarters, of the North, South, East, and West, came and stood at the four corners of her bed. They raised her, bed and all, and bore her as if on a magic carpet out of the palace, over the roofs of the city, across the rising hills toward the most secret fastnesses of the Himalayas. There they set her down beside a sacred lake, where their four queens were waiting. These heavenly ladies washed Maya in the lake, anointed her with the perfumes of paradise, robed her in clothing of astonishing beauty, and threw garlands about her neck. They led her to a golden mansion built on a silver mountainside, and they made her lie down upon a bed on a veranda overlooking a mountain bathed in golden light.

Not one word of explanation had been given Maya by the dream-people for their surprising actions; and those caught in a dream ask no questions. Now, as Maya stared entranced at the sublime mountain, she saw appear upon its summit a white elephant. In its trunk, which was like a silver rope, it held a white lotus, and it was descending the mountain at a tremendous speed, yet moving with the ponderous grace and dignity of elephants. As it drew close to the silver mountain and approached the golden palace, the sound of its cries crashed among the peaks, and it came thundering upon the veranda with a grand sound of trumpets, straight toward the paralyzed queen. But it did not harm her. It swerved aside and raced three times around her bed. Only after the third round did it suddenly halt, and then it struck her once with its trunk on her right side and disappeared.

But Maya knew what had become of it. It had entered her womb.

Maya awoke. Oddly enough, she had no feeling of fear left over from her dream;