 
The Temptation Of The Buddha

A fictional study in the history of religion

and of aesthetics.

by Sonny Saul

Published by Pleasant Street Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Sonny Saul

This book is available in print by contacting PleasantStreetBooks@comcast.net

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

©2012 by Sonny Saul . All rights reserved.

"Art! Who comprehends her?

With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?"

Beethoven, in a letter

# Table of Contents

## Prelude

## Introduction

## Program Notes: first set

## Coda

## Chapter 1: Kama Mara and his daughters
## Chapter 2: A Very Brief Consideration of the General Nature of Ritual and an Attempt to Explain the Present Ritual in This Light; Reflections and Further Program Notes Postpone the Narrative.

## Program Notes: Second Set

## Chapter 3: Gotama—the narrative resumes
## Chapter 4: The Ritual—Gotama and Desire

## Chapter 5: A Turning Point for Gotama
## Chapter 6: No Longer a 'Life Denier'

## Chapter 7: The Tree—Kama Mara and Gotama
## Chapter 8: Beyond Fear, A Magical Interlude

## Chapter 9: The Pleasures of an Intelligent Conversation
## Chapter 10: Kama Mara's Song

## Chapter 11: Beneath the Tree with Desire
## Chapter 12: Siddhartha's Song

## Chapter 13: Siddhartha's Song Continued
## Chapter 14: Desire's Response

## Chapter 15: Taking Up Where Desire Left Off
## Chapter 16: The Song of the Earth

## Chapter 17: Regret
## Chapter 18: A First Disciple and Some Advice From a Master

## Chapter 19: Like a Novel
## Chapter 20: Historical Realities; Did the Principles of this Fantasy Exist?

## Chapter 21: On the Road; the Happiest Man Alive
## Chapter 22: "You Are the Buddha!"

## Chapter 23: An Early Sermon—Setting the Wheel in Motion
## Chapter 24: Reunion with the Sisters

## Chapter 25: Like a Fairytale
## Chapter 26: Desire Considered

## Chapter 27: One Day Many Years Later
## Chapter 28: Death of the Buddha—the End of the Story

##  Afterword

## Immanuel Velikovsky's Hypothesis: Venus as a Comet

## Julian Jayne's Book: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

## The Aryan Question

## L.A. Waddell's Aryan Theory

## The Archaic Revival and the Return of the Goddess

## Zecharia Sitchin's Annunaki Hypothesis

## Rudolph Steiner's Reading of Indian History

## Postlude: Part One

## Postlude: Part Two

## Acknowledgements

# P R E L U D E

Absorbed...

in that V e n e t i a n g l o w...

golden a n d warm,

everything perfectly natural,

S O L I D a n d convincingly real,

structurally,

in combination with light,

color led

(cascading melodically)

... to...

harmonious, moving rhythms/

s w e e p i n g dynamics;

fluid patterns of dramatic contrast.

Swirls;

of lines

and of light,

wove themselves into such unconventional, yet masterfully

ordered,

D E E P S P A C E .

... This supreme merging of effects held me in awe/... everything within the frame/...

diversified and harmonized to yield magnificent results/

... all elements contributing to that peace which aesthetic satisfaction always affords.

A detail (intrinsically pleasing)

—accentuated by individual curvilinear brush strokes—

a l u s t r o u s purple cloth...

internally illuminated and radiating light—

caught my attention...

Conceptual thought—

until then suspended—

intruded.

In that moment,

I turned... or was turned away from,

a realm of lyric,

idyllic charm,

of b e a u t y, and of m a j e s t y...

— \ The untrammeled offing fading...

immediately;—the sense of a _fall,_ broken contemplation...

Wishing to get back up / recover /

to return to the "surface",,, to breathe again,

and.... to reclaim

this deep mysticism,

I was unable.

THOUGHT was the barrier.

Reflections became the advance party of my descent and were quick to set up camp.

#  INTRODUCTION

_\--- --- \---_

"Faster than spring time showers of rain

comes thought upon thought"

Shakespeare (Henry the Sixth part two)

_\--- --- \---_

My own thoughts—which I knew were responsible for ending this out-of- the-ordinary experience and had nothing to do with initiating it, meanwhile, felt invigorated and raced on, compelling me to give them my full attention.

What's the relationship (I felt the pleasure of thought deepening through generalization) of this type of _sudden awakening_ , (through the aesthetic, to a new order of reality), to a religious experience?

The technical term; "aesthetic arrest" is used in the literature of the philosophic study of art and beauty to describe what happens when the _sublime_ shatters your ego system, when the radiance of the transcendent breaks through into your field of space-time. Isn't that, at least part of how, or similar to how a religious enlightenment or experience is understood, for example, Buddha under the tree?...

And... what did happen... that I became so "lost" in the painting?

What was it that had released me from the usual constraints of conceptual thought?

Giorgione's The Judgment of Paris

Knowing the impossibility of re-experiencing that initial sense of "sublime" and expanded awareness on purpose, eventually I did, anyway, return, nostalgically, to what I had been looking at; an approximately 3" X 4" image in a small book called "All the Paintings of Giorgione". Specifically, I had been studying a black and white photograph of a presumed copy (now in a museum in Dresden) of a lost original by that widely and profoundly influential, that most musical and poetical of painters.

What has been called "the school of Giorgione" or "the Giorgionesque" has come to stand for the exemption from all stress contingent upon conceptual thought or sentiment, for the independence from mere intelligence, and for the renunciation of responsibility to subject matter. What Giorgione (1477 -1510) painted stands on its own, requiring no (and in some cases, admitting no) explanation of narrative content.

Later, unconsciously trying to integrate the experience, I made a watercolor based on that little photograph (adding the purple cloth—and all the other colors). Still later, when I happened to read its title I began to consider what Giorgione's painting was "about"; its subject; "The Judgment of Paris".

Involuntarily, I began to re-view and to imagine and interpret the painting as both an illustration of, and a fresh take on, a very key moment in classical mythology. I could see Giorgione's handsome youth reclining under a tree as Paris, the brother of Hector, the great warrior and hero of Troy. Famed for his own good looks, as the story goes, he has been selected to judge a "beauty contest" among Goddesses (trouble stirred up by Zeus). The contestants held together pictorially by that swirling, luminous purple cloth are three nude women who primp and pose for him; the three most famous Goddesses of the ancient Aegean; Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite.

I remembered that each of the Goddesses attempted to influence Paris' decision and that Paris' reward for his choice of Aphrodite—Helen, acknowledged to be the most beautiful woman in the world, but already married to a Greek king, Menelaus set off a chain of events that led to the Trojan War.

And then I remembered an important idea I think first articulated, in the early 20th century, by archaeologist/ historian Jane Harrison; that this myth of Paris ought to be understood as _propaganda,_ in which the values of an apparently still vital, much older Goddess-oriented society are suppressed and reversed.

What Jane Harrison convincingly pointed out was that the archaic Greek world view, which included the concept of an awe inspiring living goddess, a principal informing power of the universe, capable of imposing a fate or destiny upon men, is completely turned around by the classical age's retelling of the story, and that clear political message of this later version is the thorough minimization of the feminine.

Two millennia later, re visualized and presented in Renaissance Italy, with such intense, yet restrained human feeling; gracefully and delicately, Giorgione's manner recalls the aesthetically sophisticated, and stylistically prophetic Roman, Ovid (whose version of the story of Paris, it happens, is the most complete that has survived).

Whether her analysis is correct or not, Jane Harrison seems likewise a prophet.

Still mentally invigorated, and feeling a kind of awe, I kept on contemplating the painting. A powerful creative idea came over/occurred to me. With only some changes in costume (by Paris), Giorgione's picture could be used to illustrate another key moment in world cultural and mythological history: the Temptation of the Buddha. A like patriarchal dominance in the culture of India, and perhaps a like need to suppress, has mythically imagined _exactly_ _the same image._

Whenever I returned to the painting, slowly, again trying to learn through artistic activity, I began to re-imagine it as if it really did represent this important moment in the Buddha story.

Longer each time, with my eyes on the picture, and then later, sometimes with eyes closed, I began to look back, in imagination, to the "space-time" of a "country" which would be better to call _Aryavarta_ than _India_ —lest present day associations confuse... Gradually it came alive.

Eventually... Paris was gone... instead... there was the Buddha! Actually he hasn't quite yet become the Buddha. It is Gotama Siddhartha who is sitting there under the tree... cross-legged, in meditative posture... absorbed in the bliss of inner experience. As he approaches perfection, I know it will be harder and harder to imagine him.

And there are the three Women/Goddesses! Drying or scrubbing themselves with that cloth already noted, given to them by the Italian painter... Though I actively imagine them, it seems like I am remembering a dream. Dark skinned, with slim backs and long legs, graceful and slender, they stand nude by a clear, stream-fed lotus pond where they have been bathing. Though each exemplifies a distinct type, yet, the resemblances are such that one can tell they are sisters.

In the context of the story that I have begun to imagine, the sisters are not "really" present in the scene along with Gotama Siddhartha. Rather, it is with the eye of inner vision that _he_ is beholding them, _we_ becoming aware through him.

Piercing the thrall of awe and fascination, conceptual thought—until then suspended (likewise for him) intruded. The detail of the lustrous purple cloth catches his attention, turning him away from his idyll.

Intuition, and then a happy absorption, in a way kept secret from consciousness, let me know that I had struck a rich vein. Like a prospector, I _felt_ the potential and began making preparations to mine. And like a sailor who heads out to sea on a small ship, I _knew_ I would require a significant 'ballast': an adequate supply of historical and other background information.

To present a summation of that effort, which became a major research project occupying the spare time of nearly two decades, I will use the literary form of _program notes_ the sort sometimes provided to an audience in the theater. As is the custom in this medium, the minimum information possible to enable the imagining of the scene, setting, character, and story will be provided.

And, as is the custom, the reader may skip these notes altogether, save them (perhaps) for later, or if time and inclination permit... read them next.

#  PROGRAM NOTES: first set

\--- --- ---

"Our notions of the future have something of the significance which Freud attributes to our dreams. And not our notions of the future only; our notions of the past as well. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history—or at least what passes for history among the masses of unprofessional folk.

Utopias, earthly paradises, and earthly hells are flowers of the imagination which continue to blossom and luxuriate even in the midst of the stoniest dates and documents, even within the fixed and narrow boundaries of

established fact."

Aldous Huxley (Essays Old and New)

\--- --- ---

**TIME** : Likely the greatest difficulty the reader will experience is to imagine the space and time in which these fictitious events occur. The date to think of is approximately 530 B.C.

To help place the 'present' of the late sixth century BC within a greater chronological setting, let the reader recall that it now has been 300 years since the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, and another four or five hundred since the events those epics describe. The Aegean lands are in the hands of Greek speaking peoples and are organized into city-states of varying size and influence. Rational explanations of the physical world are, for the first time, being attempted. Philosophy has been born. Heraclitus, Parminides, and Pythagoras may still be alive. Solon has been 'elected' leader of Athens. The birth of tragedy, and also the Persian invasions lie directly ahead.

Cyrus the Great, the King who unified Persia, has recently crossed the Tigris River into Babylon and freed the Judean exiles, permitting their return to Jerusalem. As many as 40,000 will walk the thousand miles. After Cyrus' death Darius will consolidate and extend the Empire of Persia to the Indus River.

In the Levant, following the restoration of the Temple, the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses, are being revised and edited to their present form. It has been almost two hundred years now since the kingdom of Israel has come to an end. The prophet Daniel has recently died and Malachi, the last in the line of inspired prophets, has spoken his final words.

In 'Aryavarta' (the Aryan country) society and culture are in transition, but it is clear that the age of 'classical poet warriors' recounted in the early Vedas is past, likewise the set of circumstances and the world view that originally inspired the 'Yogic quest', the mystic sacrifice, and the soma cults. This is the period of the Upanishads and their profound psychology.

Though it will be called "The age of Confucius" in China—where a moral and philosophic revolution is about to begin—Lao-tse (also in China) with equal impact, will begin to teach the _Tao._ Like the Buddha, neither Lao-tse or Confucius expresses concern with 'religion'. Their teachings, focusing on the life and understanding of man, are not concerned with gods, or life after death, or with the supernatural.

Throughout the world, mankind and society have undergone, a shift. The times when the gods resided in sacred precincts, when a Pharaoh claimed that a god was riding along in his chariot, when an Assyrian or Aegean or Hebrew king boasted of help from the skies, clearly, are over.

**SPACE—** _the scene_ **: society, politics, culture**

Very broadly speaking, the whole geographical region appears to be recovering and repopulating following destruction and devastation of still unknown cause. Societies are beginning to reconfigure themselves through new divisions of labor. Usefulness in these societies will increasingly require the cultivation of isolated talents, specialization, and an attendant fragmentation of personality. Already it is assumed that there is not, nor can there be, any useful expression of the inherent broader harmony in man's nature.

In Aryavarta, though the more settled life gives rise to new social roles and customs, still, many cling to tribal or clan identities. A reactionary movement arises. A radical movement of Brahmans retreats from society altogether. Dwelling away, among the shudras (outcasts), austere, independent men wander naked through the forests, denying themselves food and drink, lying on thorns.

**Āryāvarta** (Sanskrit: आर्यावर्त, "abode of the Aryans"), the ancient name for northern and central India, where the culture of the Indo-Aryans was based is the land that Buddha knew. Nine hundred miles from the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Aryavarta _,_ was restricted to the basins of the Sindhu (Indus) and the Ganges; the heartland of Indian civilization.

All sorts of streams and tributaries criss-cross this relatively small area, rural and mostly settled, with innumerable hamlets and valleys dotting both plains and slopes to the north. Villages consist of clusters of huts with small herds of cattle and goats. The major settlements—some now large enough to be called cities—are linked by growing networks of trails and river roads that support a lively traffic.

Fruits and nuts from trees, domestic water fowl, and many varieties of fish provide a free diet, yet the increase in population requires systematic agriculture. Most farmers are free men and each village has its own council of elders. Though obliged to pay taxes, they are pretty much left in peace.

Aryavartra maintains the ancient class distinctions. _Kshatriyas, Brahmans, Vaisyas, Sudras; w_ arriors, priests, peasants, workers/slaves—as elaborated in the Vedas.

Brahmans (priests) are the elite, completely free of the law and well paid. Local kings and strong men, generally supporting the Brahmans, live on vast estates tended by peasants. A class of merchants has begun to grow in power. In some cases kings and princes compete for their favor, in other cases, merchants become strong enough to rival them in power. This change in the social order coupled with the rising and falling of the fortunes of kings and merchants, and along with the general growth in population brings out old conflicts within the Vedic pattern and gives rise to new ones.

Within 'Aryavarta' there are more than a dozen autonomous kingdoms in the Ganges region alone. Larger rival kingdoms, with powerful military forces, and with rulers related to each other, are coming to the fore, swallowing up older, smaller, tribal confederacies and their rajahs.

To the South, below the Ganges is _Magadha_ —showing signs of becoming a significant empire. Its king, Seniya Bimbisara, during Buddha's lifetime, will be deposed by his son, _Aiatasahu_ , and executed.

To the north is _Kusal_ , ruled by another king, _Pasenadi_ —who also during Buddha's lifetime will be overthrown and killed by his son, _Vidudabha_.

Further north, along the Rohini River, which flows along the southern foothills of the Himalayas, above the Gangetic Plain, are the clansmen of the Buddha, the _Sakyas_. The Buddha will be referred to as _Sakyamuni_ —the sage of the Sakyans. The Sakyans fall within the kingdom of Kosala, which is second in power only to neighboring Magadha, soon to be taken over and destroyed by the king referred to above, _Vidudabha_.

To the northwest lies the Achamenid Empire of the Persians, from which, two centuries later, Alexander the Great will enter _Aryavarta_ via _Gonhara_ , modern Kandahar (in Buddha's time an independent kingdom ruled by a local chieftain, _Pukkusati_ ).

The East and Far South are unknown territories.

**CLIMATE** : We have to consider the weather. Although the climate of the subcontinent has not been entirely stable, evidence does not suggest any radical departure during this period from present conditions. There are two prominent seasons; hot and cool, corresponding generally to European summer and winter. Each season has its own pattern of rainfall.

The heat is legendary and oppressive. With bright sunny skies already the heat is extreme beginning in March and peaking in May or June when thickening clouds lower the temperatures. During this season buildings and walls are hot to the touch. Daytime winds blow dust giving the sky a brassy color. Humidity increases proportionately making even sedentary activity uncomfortable. Concentration becomes difficult. Nerves are easily frayed. Intensive work is not a possibility.

Midday hours are times of peace and quiet as most people seek refuge from the sun. Night time and early morning are more conducive to activity. Late evening is the time for socializing. Virtually everyone sleeps out of doors.

\--- --- ---

# CODA

Imagination fortified, I invite the reader to now return to the copy of Giorgione's painting, to re visualize, and to re imagine it, as it appeared to Gotama in his inner vision...

In the distant background we'll place the great Sindhu River. Like the plain below, it seems forever ancient. Above, and outside our framed image are the Himalayas—two and a half millennia younger and fresher then... Set off to the left of center, within the frame... sitting beneath the tree... is the would-be Buddha.

Drawn, irresistibly, to the foreground—as the next scene opens—the eye of imagination lights upon the three young women. Their individuality and extraordinary beauty is of such intensity that the idea of Goddess is suggested.

Charged full of that same hidden energy welling from within that constitutes one of the most characteristic features of classic Indian art, each blossom with a gentle, yet rich, vitality.

Reflecting upon the course which has led me to this scene, the combination of forces... in the manner and spirit that leads a composer to call for a repeat of a movement of music, I invite the reader before moving on to the first chapter to consider rereading, repeating the prelude.

#  CHAPTER ONE:

\--- --- ---

"It is only those kinds of truths—the truths that cannot be proved and that, in fact, are 'false', those that one cannot, without seeming absurd, carry to their ultimate conclusions, without arriving at the negation both of the truths themselves and of oneself—these are the truths that ought to be exalted by any work of art. They will never have the good fortune—or the misfortune—to be one day applied. May they live by the song that they have become and that they inspire."

Jean Genet

Kama Mara: Commanding aspect, relaxed demeanor, regal self-esteem, calm power...a venerable being, but most cheerful and amiable.

## \--- --- ---

# Kama Mara and his daughters

On the horizon of what has become a reverie, I apprehend, again from outside of the 'picture frame', something like the advent of a revelation. Commanding aspect and relaxed demeanor (unusual combination) communicate the presence of an individual of the highest rank. Regal self-esteem, calm power, and composure identify more than the physical resemblances (which I notice next and his age) the girls' father.

As he makes his entrance upon 'the stage', the girls are dressing. Regret, the youngest, is confiding to her sisters, "Look at our **bodies**! We've **earned** the privilege of representing happiness, beauty, and benevolence." She laughed, "Listen to me, How like Father I've become!"

"Life does become HARDER," Fulfillment understood; her voice rose melodically, almost before her younger sister's voice had fallen. "One can lose EASE approaching the heights."

" _Responsibility_ increases, no matter how it appears to others." Desire, the eldest, authoritatively finished the thought.

The contrapuntal mode of the girl's speech is independent but always in relation.

"But, don't you know, a good time may still be had at the higher levels!" A contrasting baritone enters, as if from inside his own solar system.

Father; barefooted, wearing a loose white cotton dhoti and colored turban, greets daughters.

A venerable being—but most cheerful and amiable—confidently following his own inner momentum, laughing, lifting his hands and placing his feet as if existence were somehow a joyful tragedy, Kama Mara establishes his tone.

"An individual, like an animal or a species becomes corrupt when it loses its instincts; the deep instincts of life,

when what is disadvantageous is chosen... preferred,

when experiencing the joy of life is treated as a wrong path...

when pleasure is actually sought in what would normally be misfortune.

That's life against life!

And they call me a devil."

Alive with metaphor, creating freshly each word, endowing all with the power of significance freshly perceived, Kama Mara reanimates the universe. With felt pride in his admirable daughters, he steps forward, embracing his eldest and says, "Desire; the strongest, brightest flower born of the primary force of nature!"

As if he is performing a ritual or pronouncing a blessing, Kama Mara, bows, takes the hands of his middle daughter to say, "Nature's most beautiful fruition... when Fulfillment succeeds Desire."

Allowing rhythmic space, first for silence, and then for the stillness within movement, he arrives before his youngest saying, "Regret, you must know all our names are prophecies."

Extending his arms and torso as if to catch and collect light and then, alternatively to tuck it quickly away, he begins a series of very slow revolutions. Combining the spontaneous with the well practiced, he gradually traces a wider circle around Desire, Fulfillment, and Regret who stand together enjoying and admiring their father's profound and mysterious playfulness.

All the while moving, Kama Mara is speaking. "As if one could withdraw into 'another world' even a metaphysical one. Of course the sit-abouts in the forest grove have it inside out. Anyone can tell, they don't value thought."

Laughing he came to a stop, "And _they_ would define _us_!" Moving in, close to the girls again, he pronounced his own name, " _Kama Mara_ ". "Will to power in the presence of death—doesn't my name include that meaning as well as suggesting some nightmare? Like all our names, the one that I have chosen for myself, defines me. "

With a gesture of agile flourish worthy of an acrobat, Kama Mara executed several quick spinning tumbles and then suddenly he became very still. Squatting low to the ground, he let his weight fall on his heels. Elbows in and palms pressed together between the knees, he awaited or summoned new energies. His _exposition_ complete.

If we were to imagine this scene as if it were a ballet, the rising posture of Kama Mara would announce a new _movement_ about to begin. The graceful, rhythm of the girls as they space themselves around their father, might raise the orchestra's voice.

Or, if this were that rare creation, a ballet—opera, Kama Mara might, moving about mysteriously, begin to sing, grandly, his voice at its lowest pitch,

"When our ancestors lived most richly,

thought most profoundly,

spirituality found its heights, its many-sided and constant fruition."

And then breaking off into an aside, "What a great error to suppose such a rich crop could grow upon impoverished soil, with life half killed, intellect discouraged, and intimidated! Under such conditions... any growth would only be _morbid."_

Changing his tone and posture, pausing to indicate a second strain, Kama Mara issues a _call_ , which invites _response;_ "Comparison with past greatness reveals pervasive decadence."

Desire, as if the leader of a _chorus_ , answers first. "Nowhere have we seen reflected around us the bittersweet spirit of languor. Nowhere the playful creativity... "

"Nowhere the developed aesthetic sensibilities applied to all spheres of life." Regret breaks in.

"Nowhere the capacity for careful organization that is our BIRTHRIGHT!" Fulfillment's _contralto_ rises where Regret's _soprano_ falls.

As the figures regroup themselves to form a fresh tableau, I thought about how Mozart was able to create music in several interwoven parts from a single text, especially a DaPonte libretto. That's how I want to hear the voices here; particularly the girls.

"Nowhere," Regret's youthful sound would be the ideal of a boy soprano. "The real sense and spirit the vitality."

"Instead," Fulfillment's full _alto_ stressed her lower register, "only relics of the forms of past greatness."

Desire (the _mezzo_ ): "I'll understood fragments of past knowledge, petrified intellect

Fulfillment: "...Herd animals..."

Desire: "Renouncing what they call 'life', they pronounce themselves 'holy men.' _They_ are the real "lords of death."

"...Following the dictates of self torture... "

"... And self adulation... self adulation!"

"...Crouching low, moving about by hopping, living in filth—"

"...Feeding on cow dung—"

"...Drinking their own urine—"

Kama Mara's _baritone,_ punctuating and echoing, had supported the _ensemble_ harmonically. They concluded the _movement_ in _quartet._

"What do they call their highest value?

" _Tapas_ ; What is it?

a self killing.

This is the meaning of perversion...

Thankfully Manu has not lived to see it."

Letting their music settle, again giving silence place, Kama Mara returned to the _recitative_ style, Beginning to pace about rhythmically, he introduced new narrative material.

"Our natural gifts have protected and preserved our spirits.

Though we are no longer understood to be,

We are the aboriginal people _._

Older even than the ancient ruined cities of the _Sindhu_ and _Sarasvati_ Valleys,

We trace our heritage back to _Manu_ and the _Seven Great Rishis—_

and then further back,,, "

"We will enact true drama and believe in it."

Breaking off almost abruptly, he said, more prosaically, "Our history extends far beyond what is known here."

Now with a full bass voice that seemed to come from out of nowhere, Kama Mara called "Desire, Fulfillment, Regret! Are you ready? Prepare your costumes, your _adivasis_ , scarves, veils, the make up for our ceremony. To the forest grove! We'll perform for the stinking renunciates. With our ritual we'll invoke the ancient lore. When the evening light is most beautiful we will enact true drama and believe in it!"

#  CHAPTER TWO:

## \--- --- ---

## "Who of us nowadays has any idea of what a Bach fugue really meant at the time in which it was composed?"

### Ludwig Wittgenstein,

### quoted by C.O. Drury in "Conversations with Wittgenstein"

## \--- --- ---

## "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it..."

### Oscar Wilde

## \--- --- ---

# A Very Brief Consideration of the General Nature of Ritual and an Attempt to Explain the Present Ritual in This Light; Reflections and Further Program Notes postpone the Narrative.

Does Konrad Lorentz's observation that ritual is as necessary to the animal as any other instinctive act apply also to mankind? If, indeed, man's need for ritual is as constant and real as animals', the forms then, which man's rituals take must be like the forms of human language; proportionally varied and the product of a generative grammar.

As ritual was originally understood in Aryavarta; as it is presented in the Vedas; as it is pieced together from the clay tablets of Sumer; and as it was apparently practiced throughout the ancient world, it is the enactment of received commands from the gods, a set of directions for how to best approach, please and serve them. But, over a broad portion of the world, at the time during which this story takes place, the source of ritual began to change. Old rituals began to be reinterpreted and man began, more and more, to create his own rituals

Carl Jung's understanding was that though ritual may become collective, initially its discovery must occur individually. Jung takes the position that, psychologically understood, authentic ritual, can't be fabricated or imposed on purpose by rational planning: it can only be discovered as it arises, dream-like, from unconscious depth, its aims pointing to conscious enactments of archetypal drives.

This is the model through which the reader should understand the _RITUAL OF TEMPTATION,_ the extemporized _drama_ created by Kama Mara and his daughters that is about to be performed for a small group of forest hermits. Evolved through a series of spontaneous discoveries and inspired inventions, it will employ traditional Aryavartan _mudra_ and _hasta (_ elaborate learned patterns of facial and manual expression).

Like the use of the chorus in the nearly contemporary Greek drama, Kama Mara's employment of his daughters creates a living barrier, cuts off contact with the prevailing outside world of reality, and preserves an ideal domain of poetical freedom. The 'temptation' will demand something raised high above the normal path, the scaffolding of a fictitious natural state and in its place, fictitious beings.

Outside the prevailing clan and caste systems altogether, and possessing genuinely superior natural spirituality as well as superior physical beauty, Kama Mara 's daughters are so remotely different from those among whom they are traveling, that many, in effect, _cannot see them at all._ Only among the Saddhus, the Renuniciates (who typically see them as demon goddesses) can their ritual find context and meaning.

Beyond its formalized, more obvious aspects of temptation, importantly, their ritual expresses a conflict. A _positive_ valuation of life is compared to _world negation._ But a further and less obvious purpose propels it: a search to discover and communicate with a particular individual. Kama Mara has long ago selected and prepared an 'initiate'; one potentially capable of receiving, encompassing, and transmitting the wisdom of the remote past.

Before I was able to discover and fully comprehend this last and crucial point, it was again necessary to sift through a significant amount of historical material, some of it quite esoteric, broadening considerably the scope of my previous research. I offer the reader a second set of program notes. These are more important than the last set to the development of the story. Yet a reader, if impatient, may pass over them for now.

#  PROGRAM NOTES: second set

## \--- --- ---

## "Marooned on the temporariness of our assumed anchorage,

## we feverishly eschew the festered encrustations of the past."

### Dennis Sandole

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**Ice ages / climate shifts:** One hundred thousand years ago, for still not understood reasons, a global phenomenon... an ice age, began. This ice age—which some see as still present has been characterized by periodic advances and retreats. It appears as if there have been five or six consecutive significant displacements, with the highest rates of accumulation occurring during what is known as the _Tanzanell Advance_ when, at around 15,000 B.C., glaciations reached what is referred to as a 'global maximum'. Great areas of Europe and of North America even in today's moderate latitudes became covered with thick ice. Perpetual glaciers lay not only on the slopes of high mountains, but loaded themselves in heavy masses upon and across continents. Then, both suddenly and gradually, millions of square miles of the ice melted. Ocean levels rose significantly and the earth was flooded.

The earliest written explanation we have for this phenomenon is from Plato, who citing the authority of Egyptian sages, ascribed one such Deluge to the action of a celestial body that, changing its path, passed close to the earth. For whatever reason, by about 8,000–9,000 B.C. it appears that the ice had withdrawn almost totally to its present configuration.

**The Indus Valley Civilization** : Prior to the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the 1920's the earliest secure date in the history of India and Pakistan was the spring of 326 BC when Alexander made his raid into the northwestern provinces of the continent. Next, Herodotus, in the second century BC, gave out the word that "there are many Indian nations, none speaking the same language." (book II, 98)

The archaeological efforts of the last century have made it possible to begin to consider the origins of the Indus civilization. Evidence suggests that settled life in the northwestern sector of Southern Asia can be documented near the beginnings of the Holocene, following the retreat of the last great continental glaciers. An urban civilization developed in the area now India and Pakistan, with the Indus River and its tributaries as a focal point.

According to Gregory Possehl, the best modern scholar of the subject, at one point this civilization covered all of modern Pakistan except for the northern most mountainous areas, as well as southern Afghanistan. On the Indian side it encompassed virtually all of Gujarat and the western fringe of southern and central Rajasthan. In northern Rajasthan it includes the old drainage of the Sarasvati and Drishadvata Rivers; the Punjab, Haryana, and the northern Gange-famuna Doab in Uttar Pradesh.

There is, at present, no satisfying chronology for the Indus Civilization. To estimate 7000 to 8000 BC as a beginning time seems realistic. This is coincident with the domestication of plants and animals and the beginning of farming and herding societies.

Many thousand years pass before the next event of any chronological certainty when, at some point close to the middle of the second millennium BC, an apparently quite vast urban civilization appeared on the plains of the Indus Valley and surrounding mountains! First discovered at the two principal cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, this civilization is now known from over one hundred settlements covering over one million square kilometers. It is larger by far than the combined size of all the Near Eastern archaic states that would have been contemporary.

The evidence of a consistent style of town planning, of sophisticated engineering technology, and the intriguing absence of temples, palaces, or of any monumental architecture, testifies to a unique and unified culture which functioned in a manner that remains unknown.

The implications of the geographical and architectural layouts suggest a social organization, which doesn't seem to fit that of a political state. It is the opinion of one of the most important archaeologists of the region, Mortimer Wheeler, that, "Behind so vast a uniformity must lie an administrative and economic discipline, however exercised, of an impressive kind."

**The** _VEDAS_ : _Veda_ (in Sanskrit) means knowledge ( _gnosis_ ), deriving from the root _vid_ -(Indo-European) meaning to see/know, but the term has come to signify, for the English speaking world, 'the Hindu Bible'. The Vedas—at once religion and philosophy were not intended to be esoteric, they were meant for and open to all. The Vedic hymns are quite early, if indeed they are not the first, expressions of the discovery (or suspicion) that behind this visible, perishable world there must be something invisible, imperishable, eternal, or divine.

The particular Vedas we have and their assumed dates :

_Rig_ 1400–1100 B.C.

_Sama & Rajur_ 1200–1000 B.C.

_Tharva_ 1000–900 B.C.

_Brahamanas_ 900–600 B.C.

_Aranyakas_ 700–500 B.C.

_Upanishads_ 600–400 B.C.

_Mahabaratha_ 350 B.C.–350 A.D.

_Ramayana_ 250 B.C.–200 A.D.

_Puranas_ 200–1500 A.D.

These are the generally accepted dates but it is also generally accepted that all of the Vedas lived within an oral tradition before they were committed to writing **.** Max Muller, the pioneering European scholar, wrote his opinion that, "if we grant that they (the older Vedas) belonged to the 2nd millennium before our era we are probably on safe ground, though we should not forget that this is a constructive date only, and that such a date does not become positive by mere repetition... whatever may be the date of the early Vedic hymns whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C." Today, about one hundred years later, modern opinion remains divided between Muller's hypothetical dates.

_UPANISHAD_ **:** Means 'sitting near a person' and may refer to forest gatherings under mighty trees where sages and disciples met together. The Upanishads are a dividing line within the Vedic system. Within and after them the ancient ritual and sacrificial systems are ignored, reinterpreted, or rejected and the ancient gods are either seen in a new light or are no longer recognized.

**YOGA:** The meaning of the word includes 'unity' or 'union' in the sense of subjugation, corresponding to our word 'yoked' (from the sanskrit 'yug'). Another of the meanings of the word is 'right action'. The ancient Vedic understanding of human nature (the tradition inherited by Kama Mara) was that man was not complete, and contained a multitude of latent powers. It was believed that these dormant powers of man in all spheres and provinces of his activity could be greatly increased by means of 'right action'; a certain way of life, by employing certain exercises, and by a certain work on oneself. Yoga was a method for development of extraordinary powers and capacities

Yoga was not a philosophy to guide man, rather it was simply a way, accustoming man to control his mind, body, attention, and will, of increasing his powers in any of the directions of his activity. The same system (in the tradition inherited by Gotama Siddhartha), followed all the way to its end, led to _samadhi_ that ecstasy or state of enlightenment in which, alone, reality or 'truth' may be understood.

_MANU_ : In the Vedas—that superb religious literature with no known parent ("passed down from the time of the Gods") we are given a description of how Manu (the Indo-European root ' _man'_ ) with warning from a fish whose life he had saved (a small fish which grew and grew and is interpreted as _Vishnu_ in disguise) escaped the global deluge and became the great patriarch of the Vedic people, perpetuating not only life, but passing on the knowledge and wisdom of the antediluvian world.

_MAYA_ **:** The manifold world of fact and events; ordinarily understood as an illusion veiling the underlying reality of _brahman._ Maya consists of terms of measurement, classifications, abstractions. Within maya all is process. The world is not an illusion in the sense of a mirage. Maya is human categories.

_ATMAN_ **:** 'the soul of man', also _JIVATMAN_ ; 'the living self'. The etymology of the word is difficult, and this very difficulty shows that this term and also the word _Brahman_ are very ancient, and from the point of view of historical sanskrit, belong to a pre historic layer. The sense is of an inner essence of an individual, a secret and most profound reality—usually covered over by ego bound identifications on the surface of our being; a veil of ignorance.

_BRAHMAN_ **:** Sanskrit; 'to swell/ grow/ enlarge _';_ the eternal unchanging infinite immanent transcendent reality; the ground of all matter, energy, time, and space; the only thing that exists. 'Enlightenment' (the goal of Vedanta) implies a lasting realization of identity with Brahman.

**THE SEVEN** _RISHIS_ : Surviving along with Manu were a certain group of seven _Rishis_ (wise men). A parallel account survives from ancient Mesopotamia. There, we read in Gilgamesh, that the survivor of the catastrophic flood was called Utnapishtim. Cuneiform writings upon clay tablets refer to a very similar set of seven individuals along with him, called there the ' _Seven Sages'_. In both traditions India and Sumer—the seven perform the same functions and in the same context; preserving and then helping mankind to prosper, and re-presenting 'civilization'.

Sometimes, in the Vedas, a rishi may be pictured as shunning all worldly fame and fortune, even courting dishonor and provoking contempt, but a benevolent involvement in the affairs of mankind is always a part of the picture. Elevated through an esoteric knowledge, they set the example of ascetic spiritual practice, serving as organizers, visionaries, master builders, navigators, magicians, scientists, king-makers or advisers to kings. (Internal evidence suggests a possible date of about 6000–7000 B.C. For this period.)

_KAMA MARA_ **:** _kama—in Sanskrit =_ erotic desire _mara =_ death

The character who tempts the buddha in some of the early tales seems to be a devilish construct of at least two legendary deities, but I want the reader to imagine my fictional character, Kama Mara, as an Aryan (as the 'nobles' or 'pure ones' called themselves in the Vedas), capable of tracing his lineage back to Manu's time, a Master in the continuous line of disciples of those original Seven Rishis, a possessor of supernatural powers and profound ideas; highly initiated, and a chosen recipient of the most ancient lore, persevering in the mission, which was always the guidance and benefit of humanity.

The reader must also be aware of Kama Mara's perception that the current period (6th century BC) is a time of significant change. Slowly, it became apparent, and finally, easy, for me to imagine that, having realized the necessity, Kama Mara searched out the most opportune circumstances for the birth and preparation of such a being, who would be a new model for humanity. This is the motivating factor responsible for Kama Mara's and his daughter's leaving their ancestral home and journeying the thousands of miles across mountains and jungles.

Kama Mara uttered the fateful prophecy before Gotama Siddhartha's birth—(that he would become either a world emperor or a great religious teacher) which set the psychological stage for the development of this exceptional personality.

Further, I began to understand that it was Kama Mara who, at each critical juncture in Gotama's life, ensured that events unfolded in such a way—the only possible way as to lead to his birth as a Buddha.

#  CHAPTER THREE:

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## "Even in our time which no longer believes in God there are still thinkers who believe in the holy man."

### F. Nietzsche

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# Gotama—The Narrative Resumes

Meanwhile (in this fantasy of the initial drama of what will later be called 'Buddhism') he who, never sensitive to limits, would become so much, whose compassion (in a rare world historic _inner moment_ ) would supersede even his infinite calm, had been sitting. He was in the _Forest of Mortification_ (actual and metaphoric) where it was the fashion of the _saddhus_ men who 'renounce the world' to go and perform spiritual exercise. Here, among this convocation of forest hermits there was no conviviality. There was not even a sharing of meals, as these men scrupled to eschew even the vanity attendant upon begging for food.

Pictorial images found by archaeologists in the early twentieth century at the sites of _Harappa_ and _Muhenjo-Daro_ in the valley of the Indus River which show men and women in the well known 'lotus' and in other meditative postures reveal the great antiquity of Yoga, the practice of which cannot possibly have been any less than two thousand years old when Gotama Siddhartha took it up. Yet, in his own time if anyone had known about them the intense and prolonged austerities he had been practicing would have been considered extreme. Likewise the results he had obtained. As if in compensation for the lengthy and near total cessation of bodily activity, other powers had become rarefied, developing to a great and unusual extent.

He was aware that even before his birth he had been singled out. Prophecies had attached themselves to him. Extremities of plenty and pleasure, his singular fortune would be the signs to identify him. They were, and have always been noted. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "Buddhism", understood this. "84,000 was the legendary and symbolic number of women left behind in his harem amidst other and proportionate luxury", he wrote, suggesting some of the extravagance with which Gotama's life has always been associated.

At first, when he gave up everything, he had felt as if he had to acquire more. Those were the years of mystery and dream fantasy when seeds of false thinking flowered in his mind all woeful and gloomy.

Was it really _he_ who had, seven years ago, been such a prince? The bonds of his personal identity had long since been broken. When he had first begun to observe his own thoughts in the forest and jungle solitudes, the fictions and truths of his life had paraded interwoven, webs of spider-like elaboration variations of grand and simple design, taking on ever new thematic combinations.

But eventually, where inner and outer world met, he had begun to find his own way, discovering a life with which he could not completely integrate but from which, on the contrary he felt his consciousness arise, a vital spring replenishing an ever changing present.

As he sensed the power of this discovery, a new and stronger dedication, calling for ever greater privation and isolation, began to live in him. Then had come intimations of liberation... release, together with the development of original and advanced techniques. Everything he did became a _YOGA,_ and paradoxically, in spite of the intense urgency he continually felt—the drive which characterized his inward direction he had been able to succeed in giving his mind the broadest range and the most free play.

A particular exercise, of his own innovation, concerning perception occupied him as he sat alone, eyes closed, in the forest. Tracing the outward course of his own impressions from their close-packed intimate source in his consciousness to the horizons of the realities which enveloped them, he had discovered and had begun to develop a technique which enabled the apprehension of those events with which the broad arc of his life were concerned, as they approached... in space and time.

Awake, as if in a dream or yogic trance, Gotama thus is present at the scene which _we_ observed initially (in a state of aesthetic arrest) through the vehicle of Giorgione's painting of the "Judgment of Paris": the dark skinned goddesses standing nude by the clear stream fed pond, the purple cloth....

In Gotama's vision the sisters appear as signatures of an archetypal beauty. Something akin to a secret knowledge or hidden wisdom, something chaotic yet strangely meaningful, clings to them.

The detail of the purple cloth distracts him too. He becomes lost in thought, which brings him up short to his senses. He realizes what he has dreamed and the vision is gone. Was all this his own nature's instinctive trend projected and expressed in such transcendence? He can neither call it back nor forget it. For the first time that he can remember, he is surprised.

And... then... gradually, from somewhere within the roaring ocean of fiddling, rasping cicadas around him, the full force of a long simmering realization presents itself; his current life of extreme ascetic practice is just as vain and self limiting as was his former life of palatial indulgence.

#  CHAPTER FOUR:

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## "Historians and poets do not differ in the fact that the latter write in verse, the former in prose... the difference lies rather in the fact that one reports what actually happened, the other what could happen. Thus, poetry is more philosophical than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."

## Aristotle

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## "Long ago Aristotle defined the artists' task when he declared that even in verse Herodotus would be an historian and not a poet since a poet is concerned now with what has actually happened with what is possible. The possible—in our understanding of Aristotle's great insight after more than two thousand years—represents the issue of the moment confronting the human species—intensified to the maximum of its inner dynamic and dialectic."

### George Lukacs. From the preface to "Writer and Critic"

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## "I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth"

### Tennessee Williams — Blanche, "A Streetcar Named Desire"

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# The Ritual—Gotama and Desire

When the mild evening breezes of the Tropics brought the stench of the men of the _Forest of Mortification_ to Desire's nose, she involuntarily became acutely conscious of herself as _other_.

The sight too, of the six stagnant, malnourished men, their soiled, dusty garments, their matted hair, and filthy bodies, repelled her deeply into herself. Directly and intensely through the senses she felt the irrevocableness of her own beauty; the fineness of her own hair, plaited into tiny braids entwined with many colored threads, her dark eyes outlined to appear still darker, and her lips painted a ruby red.

Like her sisters, she wore no upper garments other than the silver bracelets on each arm, and the many cords, and chains around her neck, some of which fell loosely between her breasts, and called even greater attention to them and their painted nipples and the leaves and flowers drawn and colored around each one.

"Beauty is no accident. Beauty is a prize that is _won_ , achieved, like genius!" Desire (very much her father's daughter) spoke her thoughts out loud as they occurred, discovering them in her own delicately balanced phrasing.

To Desire and to her sisters, these foul smelling "holy men", whose appearance and manner of life evidenced such disregard for Beauty, were, naturally, contemptible. Everything about them seemed to indicate to the girls a wrong choice made, a wrong turn taken; life turned against itself.

Mitigating with a precocious resignation the disgust in the tone of her voice, Regret advanced Desire's theme. "I can respect anything that comes out of suffering. The way suffering is borne is a measure of dignity. But to seek out and **cultivate** misery... Where's the beauty there? And what does that say about the society of which these pathetic men are the conscience? Can they even see us, let alone comprehend our drama?"

Fulfillment took her sisters' hands saying, "Nevertheless, our inspiration must not waver."

Each of the girls did love the ritual they had created with their father. Their roles simple, but admitting of sufficient expression and variation so as never to be boring had long been internalized. Molded to their individualities, the ritual drama became a living mythology.

"Like her sisters, she wore no upper garments other than the silver bracelets on each arm, and the many cords and chains around her neck, some of which fell loosely between her breasts."

Yet there were difficulties. Lately, feeling that same effect that regular and frequent concertizing, which so accustoms a modern performing artist to the range of possible audience reaction that he may neglect the deepest meanings of his text, the girls, to protect the integrity of their drama, had become habituated to playing _for themselves and for each other_ even to the extent of becoming capable of _neglecting_ their "audience".

But this time, as soon as they had entered the grove, Desire knew that one of the men was different. He sat opposite the others and a little apart. His face and body were without charm, to judge by certain details. His smell and appearance assaulted her. Yet, intuition compelled her to see him not as an _other._ Immediately he became central to her drama. Desire's younger sisters, looking instinctively to her to set the tone, noticed the change in her.

The almost death-like gravity in his posture frightened Desire, but attracted her too. So thin, and so weak, yet he sat without tension. His easy repose was most unusual. He seemed unlike the others all the others to no longer merely aspire to detachment.

Through partly closed eyes, with half open lips, he accepted Desire's presence like the sweetmeats she placed in his beggar's bowl; neither attracted nor repelled but with an awareness that was uncanny.

Startled, she withdrew to the confidence of her sisters, feeling as if she had been seen for the very first time. "Look at that one!" she whispered excitedly, "Just sitting there... He's like a flower! I mean, does a flower bloom as if it were a flower? He simply is what he is. He is like us! Let's show him who we are."

Thus exhorted, the three incarnations of youthful femininity began to fill the grove with inspired dance, and laughter; evoking timelessness (but not without tempo), creating distractions and contradictions for the renunciates, showing them, as only theater can, more of life than they had been aware of renouncing.

But Desire was drawn back to her flower. Like a cat, she brushed by closely before placing herself down on the ground across from Gotama Siddhartha for this was indeed the very ascetic described in the previous chapter.

A surprising and great thing about this extraordinary Saddhu was the extent of his silent, motionless capacity for expression. His highly concentrated inner absorption exuded an implacable calm, communicating warmth and benevolent power. Desire sensed it. She could feel too, beneath those now closed eyelids of his, the attraction of a concentration capable of immense realizations.

While her sisters concluded the scene without her usual participation, and then, at last, withdrew behind the _curtain_ of trees bordering the grove, Desire; who had now adopted and was maintaining the ancient 'lotus' posture alongside of Gotama, remained.

The sun had set and the brightest evening stars were just becoming visible when Kama Mara appeared to fetch his daughters. He saw what Desire was doing and said aloud "Is she an actress? Or, is she playing the part for herself?" The expressions on the faces of her sisters echoed his question.

Desire, usually so alert to her father's presence, apparently did not perceive it now until lightly, gently, he laughed as he was about to touch her shoulder. Taking her hands as she turned and rose, Kama Mara, with the laugh that had broken the spell, said, "Desire knows no bounds!"

Kama Mara glanced at her still seated companion and then, taking him in, really looking at Gotama, said, slowly and a little sadly, "It is a fact. Habit will depreciate even the most brilliant talents."

Removing his gaze somewhat, stepping back he said, "A true hero scorns suffering. Strength, Beauty and Serenity alone should be offered to contemplation as models for perfection."

Desire was still looking at the seated _yogi,_ thinking, " _His_ Strength, Beauty and Serenity are not yet alive in the world. Besides, honest men don't carry their thinking, their reasons, exposed. Father taught me that himself. It's not decent to display all one's goods. What has to always prove itself has little value." Unlike herself, she said none of this aloud.

#  CHAPTER FIVE:

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## "Actually it's quite true that he's not 'waiting' for anyone since he's not made any appointments, but the very fact that he's adopting this ultra-receptive posture means that by this he wants to help chance along, how should I say, to put himself in a state of grace with chance, so that something might happen, so that someone might drop in."

### Andre Breton—(Entretiens)

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Desire spent the next several days in a cocoon of contemplation.

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# A Turning Point for Gotama

Desire spent the next several days in a cocoon of contemplation. Employed in mundane tasks, she considered this man about whom she knew nothing. There had been so few words, so few gestures even. But the simple sincerity and natural dignity of his presence had affected her... that such complete self absorption could coexist with such active sympathetic kindness...

Finally, her need overcame all considerations. Not bothering to change or even think about her everyday sari of thick greenish brown cloth, as she left her sisters to return to the grove she said only, "All the forest hermits I have seen up to now imitated renunciates. They were actors."

When this story is presented today, (in legendary tradition) this is the part where Gotama, on the path to becoming the Buddha, in an act of symbolic of his decision to return to a more natural life, accepts a dish of curds from a village maiden.

Desire found him seated among flowers; scarlet hibiscus, sweet smelling spider-lilies, and bright butter yellow allamandas... in the same place and position—the exact same—in which she had left him.

Attracted to this singular human, Desire sought to comprehend him. As if offstage, observing with all her senses, she studied his motionless body with its skin stretched thin over protruding bone. With a feeling of sudden alarm she became aware of the extent of his physical weakness.

Possessing a ready compassion, she went directly then, as she had on their first meeting, and without introduction or disturbance, seated herself opposite Gotama, who, also as before, offered no greeting but accepted her presence with just that unspoken friendliness she had been missing.

I like to imagine her as Leonardo daVinci might have drawn her...

the high degree of perfection and virtuosity

with which line and light

are manipulated...

... _the abstract grace of bounding arabesques traced from nature..._

a three dimensional being

of exceptional sweetness

is revealed.

Trying to imagine Desire drawn in the style of the Italian Renaissance reminded me of the "David" in Florence by Donatello. Perhaps Desire is to be best imagined as she might have been sculpted by Donatello, Leonardo's renowned peer.

A glow of health and strength,

youthful/ ancient mouth turned up

enigmatically...

a smile full of pleasant wonder...

thin limbed,

graceful and beautiful,

(shape revealing spirit)

A playful, but dignified stance...

no unnatural refinement..

Not till they had sat in intimate, silent proximity, sharing the experience of the sun crossing the sky above them, did Desire speak. Can the reader imagine her voice? Pitched precisely, soft, carrying her assured melodic articulation, expressing perfectly just those qualities caught by Donatello; her astonishing combination of naturalness and refinement.

As if they had been talking all afternoon, she said, "Only when a musical instrument is properly tuned can it produce a pleasant sound, one properly expressive of its nature. Too slack makes no music, too tense will break."

Once the words were in the air Desire realized that they were the first words she had ever spoken to him. She felt their meaning, smiled again, and would have qualified or clarified, maybe even disclaimed. But the echo of their sound and meaning came back to her. Somewhat embarrassed, she explained, "I _love_ music."

Daylight sank deeper and deeper into darkness until down below the horizon the sun's obscurity intimated the revelations of evening.

Beneath the trees where birds were quarreling over their roosts for the night, Desire and Gotama were silent.

The contemporary sense of time and its divisions are so different that it's hard for us to imagine how long it may have seemed before inspired words were found again.

"Life," she spoke as if the round world could understand and waited upon her, "if it is _truly_ life, moves forward in time like the earth and the sun into the unknown, but it dislikes moving on alone. What it needs, what it can't be _life_ without is companionship, intimacy, the warming understanding of another life, and to be able to confide one's depth. Nothing extraordinary or supernatural."

Her silent companion's complete acceptance of these words would precipitate a gradual, perceptible shift in everything; something neither of them had expected. Desire felt it right away, but it was not until the stars and the planets had begun to shine clearly against the delicious, cool blackness of the sky that Desire understood. "You no longer court suffering... Now you accept... With love... you _transform_ everything with love..." She thought this... but did she actually say it? Looking questioningly at him she was not certain, maybe she had not... a smile crossed her face.

As the low lying sparkling of water is seen in a deep well, so in the eye sockets of this starving man a low-lying sparkle flashed as he caught her smile. Just the way she had surprised him when he first had seen her in an inner vision, she was, now, continually surprising him. Observing the pleasant change that had overtaken his expression, Desire remembered the bowl of rice milk she had brought along with her. With a spontaneous gesture of humble ceremony she uncovered it and offered it to him.

Observing the pleasant change that had overtaken his expression...

Without any ceremony, gesturing for her to come and sit beside him, Gotama accepted her kindness and the bowl of food. Opening his mouth to speak for the first time in several years, allowing utterance to a thought which arose from deep within, compelling his attendance, his voice, slowly, distinctly emerging from his belly, resonating through the skin stretched tightly over his thin dry frame, pronounced the single word, " _Dukka—(_ suffering)". Then, without stopping to wonder at the marvel of speech, he continued, " _Dukka_ , the melodic theme of human experience, calls for a complete response," he finished.

Desire laughed—he _had_ heard her, or else had read her mind. "Our bodies must live!" she said taking hold of his thin shoulders. "Let your belly smile! It is not easy to reach a state of well-being with such an extremely emaciated body."

Desire laughed, "our bodies must live."

Gotama Siddhartha ate the food very slowly. He had begun to feel its effect, and, smiling inwardly, to savor, very gradually, the _taste_.

Looking up after a moment he noted that the other hermits around in the grove, in this _forest of mortification,_ had come round and were staring, shocked and dismayed at these violations of procedures on the part of their fellow ascetic; the very one whose incomparable self denial had become legend among them, and in fact, had led them to him in the first place.

Desire, noting all this, took good advantage of dramatic possibility. Quite casually and with a sure confidence, projecting her own full beauty and the sound of her voice across the space of moist, cool, air, she said, "One who is really free may concede to his natural needs. It's the inner state, isn't it? that matters, not so much any outward renunciations."

Gotama found words rising within him to complement hers. Echoing the warm, resinous and melodic tone that Desire had used, he addressed the shocked yogis. "We have been taught, and well know by our own experience, that meditations and exercise in self-submergence can lead to inner perfections, but... greater than these is _compassion_ , a kindness."

It was the first time they had heard his voice.

When they did speak, if they ever spoke at all, this was not the kind of thing that the Holy Men of Aryavarta usually said. The ascetics were puzzled; even offended. They felt his power and authority and also his friendly good will, but they really did not know to what he was referring or about what he was speaking. But Desire knew. Her instinct told her that she had played a part in something of importance and that it had lain outside of her father's direction. She felt fulfillment and regret and understood, with fresh insight, her sisters.

As she takes Gotama's hand her dramatic words crystallize their astonishing mutual revelation;

" _Love is the perfection of consciousness,_

an ultimate meaning of everything around us.

Not mere sentiment, it is truth and the joy at the root of all creation."

Every actor knows that at a given time the curtain will fall. Hurtling round the sun, the spinning Earth's ritual experience, (from where Desire sat through the night with Siddhartha) of the eternal black sky's deference, at dawn, to the morning's light, signaled her cue to withdraw, and the end of the scene.

When Kama Mara saw her, later in the day, immediately he knew that everything had changed. "Haven't you stepped outside your role; the role that you were born for? You are _Desire_."

"Too late," she answered. "Now you'll see what Desire is made of. I was a coward. You must know I did the best I could. For the first time I felt my limitations. But you are right. I _am_ Desire. I'll make up for the poverty of my sufferings by the splendor of my passion."

"Now we are certain of it," Kama Mara said, with a bow and a smile, which rivaled each other in depth. We have found the one for whom we have been searching."

Turning and leaving her, straightaway, he called his elephant, mounted and set off to find Gotama.

#  CHAPTER SIX:

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## "Melancholia is the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction, which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on."

### Sigmund Freud

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## "Psychoneurosis must be understood... as the sufferings of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of a soul and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation or spiritual sterility".

### Carl Jung

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# No Longer a 'Life Denier'

When Desire had left him, Gotama continued to sit, but it was as if all his constellations were realigned. Self-denial had taken him as far as it was going to. He understood and felt, now, that his own body was critical _._ His life was going to require a degree of physical conditioning and strength.

His practice of austerities had resulted in a mastery of self-submergence, a proportionate development of spirituality, and even of supernatural powers; but along with this had come also a refinement in his capacity for experiencing pain. All this sitting... and a too great and prolonged preoccupation with concepts and procedures had damaged, not only his muscles, but also his instincts. He had been depressed.

As surely as a change had occurred in him when he had left the comfort and wealth of his home and family to seek, through ascetic practice, somehow, a release from the _dukka_ which his consciousness continually perceived and experienced, again, Gotama was reborn.

He began to laugh out loud. At laughter's sound he smiled more deeply, then still more deeply at what had made him laugh in the first place, then again. He was feeling release and relief.

When she had given him the bowl of rice milk, it was as if Desire had handed him a new perspective. Reflecting upon the significance of this change, he composed, for himself, two thousand years before the birth of _Zen_ , the first _koan;_

" _Spring does not become Summer,_

Blossoms do not become Fruit;

How can one come to a new point of view?"

At age thirty-five, feeling like a butterfly (or rather, a larva) about to emerge from its cocoon, the emaciated hermit was ready to return to a more natural life. With his mind opening, expanding towards composure, he set out to breathe the open air and to exercise his new strengths. Gotama became a wanderer, walking freely and responding to nature. His atrophied muscles responded, launching as if in applause, ripples of well being within him. Gradually he became cheerful. The weariness of spirit, which had settled upon him, vanished as his old center of gravity returned. His good nature, full of loving kindness and humor and with it the desire for expression long repressed began to assert itself.

In his belly a fresh smile was born: an uncommon smile, inviting imitation but difficult to reproduce (not even alluded to in Darwin's "Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals")... this smile... which would later flourish to warm all he encountered.

In his belly, a fresh smile was born.

Meanwhile, the five _bhikkus_ who had been practicing austerities with Gotama were at a loss. Realizing that he had quit the grove for good, and learning that he was walking about in the villages, eating ordinary food, talking with others and so on, they took up their bowls and robes and left the grove themselves, setting out for Isipatana, called the 'Deer Park', an ancient site sacred to Brahmanism, and currently a gathering place for the growing class of wandering ascetics.

#  CHAPTER SEVEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "It is true that I neither can nor do pretend to the observation

## of complete accuracy, even in matters of outward costume,

## much less in the more important points."

### Walter Scott, in the dedicatory epistle to Ivanhoe

## \--- --- ---

## The only possible novel about the past was exhausted by Walter Scott."

### Honore de Balzac

## \--- --- ---

## "Do what you will, this world's a fiction

## And made up of contradiction."

### William Blake

## \--- --- ---

# The Tree—Kama Mara and Gotama

In the earliest record that has come down to us of these events; that is to say the orthodox Pali canon of the Buddhists in Ceylon, we are told that the Buddha 'attained illumination' beneath the _nigrodha_ tree on the bank of the river _Neranjara_ , near the village of _Uruvela_ , later called Bodhgaya.

It was there, "at the time of year when flowers close" that Gotama Siddhartha arrived at the hilly grove and, recognizing _the immovable spot,_ settled into the shade of a particular tree. Sometimes identified as an _assattha_ , or _Pipal_ tree, later—after the enlightenment—it is called the _bo_ or _bodhi_ tree. Bodhi is the Sanskrit equivalent of the Japanese word _satori_ , meaning 'enlightenment'.

The story of the Buddha's enlightenment is never told without mention of this tree, under which it was _necessary_ to sit. The ancient section of the Samyutta-Nikaya called 'Sattavassani' (Seven Years), which deals with the period of ascetic practice, says that Gotama remained in meditation four weeks before finally leaving the _bodhi_ tree and that he spent a fifth week in meditation under the _ajapala_ tree where he encountered and subdued a demon, Mara, and determined to preach to others. This text tells that it was here that the three daughters of Mara ( _maradhitaro_ ); _Tanha, Arati, and Raga_ , were likewise encountered.

The Pali Vinaya, says that then Gotama departed from the ajapala tree and spent a sixth week under the _mucalinda_ tree (Mucilinda being the name, at the time, of a deity associated with snakes), and it is written that here, under the tree, Gotama was shielded from a threatening storm by the snake's great hood. After this, now in entering his seventh week, he came to sit under the _rajayatana_ tree and there, "delighted in his liberation".

Gotama had been up since before dawn. Without taking thought he began walking. He had been re hearing internally, Desire's words, "Love is the perfection of consciousness..." when he reached the spot. Serene, in one well-practiced motion, he folded his hands together and also his legs underneath, immediately placing ankles up upon knees. Unconsciously, naturally all chakras aligned, he breathed like a baby smiling from _a timeless center of the universe._ Right away, revelations came, as did snakes and birds, basking in his radiance. _Everything_ , _Everywhere_ , was _Here._

Absorbed in wonder, held in awe and fascination, Gotama sat whole-heartedly. So rare is this, for men and women of any period of history, that sympathetic imagination is challenged; likewise description. Can we imagine a "crystalline suspension of mind"? a "condition like that of Primal Being"? an "eye of the universe continually experiencing the sublime"? (just a few of the attempts at description I collected.)

Was he "like an insect experiencing metamorphosis"? None of us knows anything about that either.

The dense calm by which, incidentally, Kama Mara had found him immediately affected the elephant upon whom he arrived. Literally struck by its force, the animal lowered its trunk and halted. Kama Mara, apparently not so affected, hollered out, "Hey! Yo! Its better to be a fat old man who sweats than to be nothingness!"

While the animals around him scattered, Gotama, maintaining his posture, not even shifting the position of his hands and fingers, took in the scene.

"Is there someone here?" Kama Mara hollered again before leaning down, lowering his voice and speaking more directly... now from not more than a couple of feet away, "Does _this_ represent the furthest evolution of humanity? Or, isn't there some further vanity?"

Circling his elephant around Gotama, he shouted, "Morbid pervert! Mooksha? Hardly! You cannot even speak." Then, lowering his voice, "I think that you were expecting me. You _did_ see _something_ coming. But, do you know that I am Desire's Father?"

As I imagine it, Kama Mara was right about Gotama not being able to speak. Sensing that to now form words would result in the proportionate loss of the greater consciousness, which he had just been able to attain, Gotama _was_ unable to speak.

Looking hard at the apparently evaporated being before him, Kama Mara wondered, "Is this the young prince I once knew? Can _this_ be the initiate I have prepared?"

Calmly, in the most matter of fact manner, still seated upon the elephant, he continued to address Gotama, his voice exuding earned authority, authentic power, "I can't take seriously such extreme valuation of deep sleep. So weary? Too weary even for dreams? So profoundly depressed?"

Probing for a strength against which to test himself, Kama Mara, becoming more conversational, affected disappointment. "Isn't the greatest of all pleasures and powers _life_? This all too typical holy man routine... Is _this_ your _life_? Have you forgotten? Pleasure too, and growth are equally profound expressions of life's fullness."

"Don't you know, anyone can escape from life." He continued to pace around him, circling with the elephant. "Its the same old sad story—all over Aryavarta—past present, future. Are your idiosyncrasies so particularly exceptional? Or are you just a more extreme case, an obvious instance, of the general trend; that everywhere the instincts are becoming mutually antagonistic?"

His voice was now warmer and less threatening. "Are you sure that you know the world well enough to transcend it? I'm afraid that you've taken a wrong turn and simply followed it almost all the way to the end. You are listening. I know it. I'm here to turn you around. Real transcendence lies in the _opposite_ direction."

After a moment of silent appraisal, Kama Mara began to speak. In ever lower, thicker tones, he said, "There is no point trying to talk with an exalted one. Let's try some direct action. We'll see what you know about transcendence. Lets prove ourselves _"_

" _All around, to the very edge of the fortress of my pride, I beat back the waves of illusion and of wrongness. Nauseated, I turn from them, as I do now from you._ "

#  CHAPTER EIGHT:

## \--- --- ---

## "We all know that art is not truth.

## Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."

### Picasso

## \--- --- ---

# Beyond Fear, a Magical Interlude

Henry Fielding, near the middle of his novel Tom Jones, in one of the philosophical prefaces that he wrote before each chapter, felt it worthwhile to make explicit his concern when presenting "matters strange and surprising" which he imagined would be possibly difficult for readers to believe. Some, he wrote, "are ready to allow that the same thing which is impossible may be yet probable, while others have so little historic or poetic faith that they believe nothing to be either possible or probable the like of which has not occurred in their own observation."

This present chapter, being an account of, at once the most outlandish and of the most private character, which searches out the most retired recesses, places the reader in like difficulty. We have no concurrent public testimony or records to support or corroborate our imagination.

I can though, in good humor, cite the literary precedent of Karl Popper, who, generalizing from a suggestion about Goethe, and the source of his strange theory of colors (that all colors were derived from white and black) imagined that _Parmenides too_ was color blind.

And I love Fielding's citing of an unnamed "genius of the highest rank" to whom he credits the remark that, "the greatest art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction in order to join the credible with the surprising."

Being thoroughly aware that great artists, by convincing us of the truth and reality of what they see, feel, and express, create a world richer, fuller, and more meaningful than that of our commonplace perceptions, and feeling, particularly at this point, a certain lack of imagination, I wanted to imagine how a great visual artist might have presented the next scene; Kama Mara's imaginative attempt to break the concentrated state of Gotama's attention through FEAR... to "freak him out?" The 19th century French painter, Eugene Delacroix—a great discoverer in the realm of the sublime, including also the ugly and gruesome—usually referred to as a 'romantic' came first to mind.

Nietzsche considered Delacroix to be comparable to Wagner in his use of "virtuoso effects" and in his "uncanny access to everything that seduces, allures, compels and overturns".

The following description of a Delacroix painting (the "death of Sardanapolos") by the 19th century French poet, Charles Baudelaire, gives some of the idea of the relationship of beauty and horror (which so interested both men)... and begins to set our own scene.

" _Everywhere we see desolation, massacres, fires... everything testifies to the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of mankind. Smoke rises from cities razed to the ground. The throats of victims are cut, women are raped and children hurled beneath horses' hooves or pierced by the_ _daggers of their raving mothers; the entire corpus is a hymn in praise_ _of suffering inevitable and unrelieved,"_

Though the "romanticism" of Delacroix is well adapted to a visualization of Kama Mara's "temptation" of Gotama—which certainly must have employed convincing, colorful, and dramatic effects—finally the more well ordered visual field characteristic of the 19th century Spanish painter Francisco Goya, sometimes called the "father of modern art" may better suit our purpose.. In illustration he may never have been surpassed.

This is the moment I would like to imagine that Goya might have chosen to represent. Here Goya's great sense for the compositional relation of objects to each other would have found full expression.

Kama Mara, with a sweeping gesture,

drawing upon his mastery of the ancient powers of illusion,

transforms himself into...

Gotama Siddhartha's own most fearsome image of death; the dreaded twins Dimul and Mrityo,

_A_ _two headed_ g _iant thousands of feet tall_ ,

around whom the Four Corners crystallize

an army of horrific forms.

One-eyed, three-eyed, beaked, clawed, with tusks, some camel faced,

bearing headless bodies, mutilated, monstrous ogres, reeking of goat,

_advance to attack_.

With fabulous immediacy, black storm clouds gather.

The temperature falls sharply along with all wrath upon him there beneath the tree.

The monstrous twins pull arrows from their shoulder quivers

without hesitation fixing them to their bows,

and aim straight at him...

Great facility in the use of paint, and powerful, short broken lines give fluidity and movement. The color, arranged in pleasing patterns, is luminous and skillfully blended with light, giving everything solidity. Individual colors are all harmoniously related to each other in color masses, which make up designs of considerable plastic significance. The forceful lines and the irregular placing of the figures give everything a sparkling animation and expressiveness.

The fearsome twins dominate the pictorial space, but rather than the awesomeness of their sheer size, rendered beautifully and with convincing simplicity, it is their psychological characterization that communicates a tone of frightening hideousness. The relationship of the two-headed giant to the background army of horrific forms is accomplished by an ultimate economy of means.

Despite the most gruesome characterizations and subject matter, an airy, delicate, light, floating tone prevails. The contours of the bodies are softened by lines of light, which help the transition of space from the figures to the background.

Now, in order to _imagine_ what legend tells us became of those arrows shot toward Gotama, I am going to have to ask the reader's indulgence to attempt a thought experiment of a different kind.

1. Conceive the possibility that a point of balance exists in the mind from which the all that exists can be perfectly regarded—a still standing point or 'hub of disengagement' (as it's called in the technical literature of Eastern religion). Like the axis around which a body rotates, it is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, rather the movement around it determines its relative immobility.

2. Imagine the forms of that movement as representing symbolically the multiple and overlapping discreet infinities of our representational systems.

3. Imagine that from the point of view of our hypothetical hub, or 'nucleus' (all suggestive of a 'Bohr atom') should the (mental) spinning ever cease—(as it has for Gotama) that in whatever direction one looked, each distinction would still be expressive of an underlying unity. _And imagine that every distinction_ _would emerge_ , especially, and most obviously, the apparent opposites.

4. Let this concentrated point represent the vantage from which Gotama now occupied the unchanging unity of vast space and time.

5. Now from this unique state of arrest, imagine Gotama grown conscious of the _illusion_ of the movement of arrows when the evil warriors aimed their weapons at him.

Later Indian statuary takes up the theme of Gotama's response. Extending his arm and touching the ground with his right hand, a gesture replete with poetry and symbolic meaning, expressive of the most perfect calm, he calls upon the Earth to bear witness.

His countenance, at first evincing only the most benign acceptance, warmed towards a smile of friendliness as he acknowledged the supposed threat for what it was: the dramatic poetics of a masterly creative power originating from within a source of boundless love.

As when he'd seen (in inner vision) the three dark skinned Goddesses wrapped together within the purple cloth, and marveled at nature expressed in such transcendence, these hideous and frightening projections of Kama Mara pleased him well. He felt the powerful expression and admired the aesthetic significance (though he did not stop to consider any of this).

Cascading gently into a laugh... out loud... a smile begins to spread on Gotama's face.

A rippled reflection as in a thousand mirrors...

Surprise, laughter, and surprise;

laughter, surprise, laughter...

The magic formula! In a state of joy and wonder, Gotama watches as all the weaponry of an army of ogres transforms; turning into lotus blossoms falls to the ground around him as if in tribute.

If the reader can imagine the flash of Siddhartha's recognition of the same eternal consciousness passing through Kama Mara as was filling his own being, and the spontaneous expression of love—indistinguishable from compassion towards all that existed, he may perhaps fathom, metaphorically, the falling of flower petals all about him. as the transformation of the weaponry of an army of ogres. .

Gotama's voice entered the cleansed atmosphere with a sense of ironic deference. Knowing the role which might be expected of him, he gently mocked that expectation. "The same old story, as if another illustration of it were necessary." he said.

Shaking his head to show some measure of the pleasure he felt at this exhibition of Gotama's powers which included, apparently, humor, Kama Mara athletically—almost magically dismounted from his elephant and approached him, positioning himself in a restful but determined squat, ankles under his thighs, elbows locked around his shins, directly opposite his still seated _peer_.

#  CHAPTER NINE:

## \--- --- ---

## "Everything has been thought of before;

## the task is to think of it again."

### Goethe, quoted often by Stravinsky

## \--- --- ---

With these words Kama Mara's whole aspect shifted.

## \--- --- ---

# The pleasures of an intelligent conversation

From the position of his deep squat, Kama Mara began, "In some ways you haven't changed. You remind me now of the boy prince. Let's understand each other. Outward circumstances have altered, but once again, you are simply too comfortable, maybe too comfortable even for vice. If everyone were as comfortable as you, all deeds would die out, good and bad."

With these words Kama Mara's whole aspect shifted. He began to appear to Gotama as a great and venerable wise man—a _guru._ His words carried fresh power. "When you destroy passion and desire in yourself, even as a preventive measure against their stupidity and likely unpleasant consequences, that's just another form of stupidity! It's the recipe for decadence. When life is in the _ascendant,_ one inclines towards and follows the instincts."

"'Vice and virtue are likewise chains." The guru was mocking... and then declamatory, "Whatever _enlightenment_ is, it has nothing to do with an increase of virtue, or with its opposite."

Without taking thought (this would be his modus operandi from now on), quietly, almost off hand, as if Kama Mara had inquired after his health or mentioned the weather, Gotama replied. Words, starting very slowly, gathered resonance and rhythmic momentum. "The concern of the strongest and purest heart is only that the flame of truth which it keeps alive should burn most intensely. It doesn't trouble about the distance to which the brightness may penetrate."

Gotama had never said anything like this. He had never been in a conversation like this. Words, together with the flow of thought tasted sweet to him, as did his breathing, so well practiced. He savored the essence of the moment and the expression of its fulfillment, but even before he finished the thought, Gotama saw that Kama Mara was losing some of his character as guru and taking on the aspect of _friend_ , one from whom he might gain, not only knowledge and perspective, but also other pleasures of companionship he had so long denied himself.

With renewed warmth, he resumed the conversation. "Isn't the deepest thinking always the most humble? At last, I have begun to learn with your daughter the art of _self forgetting,_ as a bird flies through the air, as a fish swims in the water."

"Before one can breathe deeply, the lungs must be emptied... " he tried to continue, but the thought trailed away. Kama Mara waited, and after some silence Gotama began again, saying, "Aren't all things generated out of their opposites? What is inexpressible, perhaps, may provide the background against which whatever I am able to express will acquire meaning."

Kama Mara was pleased. Not only had this former prince and forest hermit been able to match his powers of magic, but now he was showing the charm of his re emerging intellect and personality. He said, "You are on the way. Let's get you there! You must know superiority in man is shown by the virtue of his work or of his actions. This _is_ power. You have been doing too much meditation. When you meditate you fix your mind on something. That's something artificially put upon the mind, so it doesn't belong to the mind's native activity.

"Life, do you say, should resemble the flight of a bird? So upon what do the birds of the air meditate? Don't they simply fly? And the fish? They swim! That's enough. Who wants to fix his mind upon something? You've always had it backwards."

"Here's the point. You've learned it for yourself; first one must train the body to the desired effect. It's not about a mere disciplining of thoughts and feelings. One must convince the body. Strict maintenance, perseverance in select and significant gestures, and then, all this becomes inward."

"Ha! Had I known what fire was, I would have cooked my rice much sooner!" Gotama burst out with a laugh.

Kama Mara wasn't smiling yet. "You must have known that the origin of all acetic practice had nothing to do with any metaphysical view of the world. It was always, practical. The great Vedic Rishis of earliest times taught _awareness_ and demonstrated that through _technique_ they could become like the gods."

"You were a fool! Your ascetic ideals were an hibernation, a slumber in nothingness combined with lust for glory. Insanity! Desiring to achieve mastery over not something _in_ life but over life _itself,_ you attempted to seal up the walls of the life force and its deepest, most powerful and basic conditions."

"You disdained health most particularly the natural outward signs of well being: beauty and joy. Instead, you sought pleasure and triumph and felt it too in misery. Your sufferings have all been self-inflicted."

Gotama was silent a long while. Relaxed and patient, like a chess master, he allowed thought to gather and assemble. "How had this strange Magician achieved this surpassing understanding?"

Kama Mara felt the silence. Still squatting, he placed the palms of his hands on the ground by his heels. He locked his arms, elbows slightly bent. In the manner of a modern gymnast, pulling his hips up and then rocking back, he extended his legs straight out just above the ground. Balancing, he held that pose and then, gracefully, lowering his hips back down and just off the ground, alternately and leisurely, stretching each leg out in front of him he said, "Because natural laws govern the human personality, one's natural tendencies have great importance and must be considered and developed. One force may govern the others, but none can conform the others. Natural tendency is the key."

With the trace of a smile, Kama Mara finally pulled his legs back in, and copying exactly the manner in which Gotama was sitting, centering himself around his lungs and heart, his feet up upon his knees, he continued, "Your yearning for harmony took the form of a craven retreat, a withdrawal before the contradictory problems thrown up by life. Seeking inner balance you cut yourself off from society's struggles. But, such a 'balance' could only be superficial, illusory, vanishing at any serious contact with reality. Harmony for the individual presupposes his harmonious integration into his environment, into his society."

"And let me tell you now... he who has followed these things to their conclusions, and is his own man, can, with impunity and without danger, enjoy and participate in everything that life offers. Indeed he is best served by the things that are believed to be most dangerous."

"Your inheritance is fatal. _That's_ why I'm here. You must realize that you still belong to the number of those who suffer from disease. It's a sort of sleeping sickness, which has its roots in the past. Once you realize this, fresh insight will flow and with it, fresh power and freedom; not from any bondage, not from anything; but _for_ something."

A long silence rose between them, completely comfortable, but Kama Mara had more to say. "For the whole of your life", he began, "from even before your birth, always unknown to you, I have been your guru, watching, providing the needed impetus at the right times, conspiring, so that the necessary events might unfold."

"The only real satisfaction in life is to work—and not from compulsion. This is what distinguishes man from an ass. With regard to my own work, when it began, initially it was not the whole of me, but only my mind, though I loved the work the moment I conceived it... I set myself the task of being able, through dedication and persistence, to accustom my whole nature to love this work I had chosen, and not my reason alone."

Gotama focused more closely, but Kama Mara raised his hand. "Don't wonder at it", he said. "All things in time... The guru's role is not to avoid error, but to guide the misguided... and to allow error, even to the full. One who only samples an error may long husband and delight in it like a rare pleasure, but he who exhausts it completely is bound to recognize it."

"Now, in order to understand and to go forward, you must consciously persevere and assimilate—and at last you are able. There is a mass of information concerning objective truth and real events that have taken place and you must also be able to bear it within yourself as well as all the results of all kinds of voluntary and involuntary experiences."

"Do you see and understand the importance of what I am talking about? Not everyone can receive it. If my own beloved father were to come to me here at this moment and urgently entreat me to give him merely the tenth part of this understanding, and if I wished with my whole being to do so, yet I could not, in spite of my ardent desire, give him even the thousandth part, as he has neither the experience nor the knowledge which I have purposely lived and acquired through my life. "

"Understanding is the essence obtained from all kinds of personal experience and from information intentionally learned. It cannot be taught after the fashion of an automatic remembering of words in a sequence. Only understanding can lead to _being_ , whereas knowledge has only a passing presence in it."

Let the reader pause a moment before the next scene begins, and try to imagine the figure of Kama Mara as he stands and prepares lungs to receive air which will make voice swell, as if he were about to sing an _aria._

#  CHAPTER TEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "Now listen Socrates, to a story which, though passing strange,

## is nevertheless entirely true, even as Solon, wisest of the Seven Sages,

## once asserted."

### Plato, Timeaus

## \--- --- ---

Let me tell you who I am.

## \--- --- ---

# Kama Mara's Song

"From my own Guru,

who received it from his,

and so on...

back to the time of our earliest ancestors

who survived that flood

which overwhelmed Aryavartra, when the ice, nine thousand years ago...

which covered so much of our land at that period, melted,

washing away what this world cannot imagine.

'Close—in' fashion, face to face—the way I speak to you, I received an account of that event that comes from M A N U —

who became the great L A W G I V E R ,

who saw the end coming—

who, being warned by a Great Fish (our Krishna in disguise) which spoke to him,

knew and prepared,

who, accomplishing what was needed... preserved life,

who, gathering all kinds of seeds, plants, animals,

and likewise the wisdom of the prior age in the persons of seven chosen RISHIS,

began everything anew.

Manu and Seven Rishis

— at first in the Himalayan hills —

and eventually returning to the plains,

made suitable for living by the melted glaciers —

achieved and established an orderly, intelligent beginning,

imagining, initiating, and encouraging brave worlds."

Changing his posture and tone, Kama Mara moved closer to Gotama and began to speak less formally, "Certain realities have changed. The original Seven Rishis, of course, are no longer among us. Knowledge, of their accomplishments has faded, not to mentions appreciation or gratitude. If they are heard of at all, their existence is doubted. But I am living evidence that a remnant survives and _still acts_ in the world. I carry the most ancient lore. I share the mission, constant since the beginning."

"My inheritance is not the same as yours. It is fatal in another manner."

"My daughters and I are the darkest people, from the South, the aboriginal people. You must understand just what this means for me. My ancestry may be traced back through, and to a time before, that most profound, most inspired, and very ancient, high civilization of the Indus and Saravastri River Valleys... to the time of Manu."

"I have been selected. Once a generation, at various times in various places all around the world, individuals have been, and are continuing to be chosen, Yours will be the last generation. You are last in Aryavartra.

Your personal accomplishment marks the summit and finish. "And now you must know that even though you are not so black skinned as me, even though your ancestry is through a different line, your roots—all of our roots go back to that same small group of individuals who survived the destruction of the previous age."

Kama Mara, with a rather formal acrobatic grace, legs completely straight, bent at the waist, stretched and placed the palms of his hands upon the ground by his feet. Slowly he leaned forward and balanced his full weight upon them, lifting his feet into the air. Balancing thus, he folded his legs into a lotus like position and lowered his legs and hips through his arms, assuming a seated position on the ground beside Gotama..

Allowing for a quiet interval, Kama Mara, in a more confidential tone, spoke again to Gotama. "Listen. Now to go forward, you will need to go back. Listen. You have begun to hear and understand. From a time even before you were born, I have directed circumstances so as to guide your life. The goal has always been your most complete development in terms of your own nature."

"With a sure success, when certain key moments unfolded, progress was facilitated. It was I who made sure that—I know you will remember these events—they had such powerful effects since your father had made sure to shield your experience. You did finally get to see an old man, and then a very sick person—also... and finally, you saw a dead man. Was it maybe too obvious a stroke, when next I made sure that you would encounter a 'holy man'?"

"There are some things, the understanding of which, require a new being. I have worked to create in you this new being... and you have worked too, and are prepared."

"But, tell me, why were you still sitting here under the tree when I arrived on my elephant, just as if you had never met Desire?"

Gotama was motionless but his mind was alive.

When at last, Gotama responded, he spoke very slowly, most respectfully, but with long spaces between his phrases.

"Isn't our consciousness merely the last, most recent development of the organic? As such, it is all that is most incomplete, and most _precious_."

"For a while, I must remain alone... sitting... not _doing_ anything... I have not carried my path all the way to an end..."

"In Nature before a function has fully developed, fully matured, a threat is posed to the organism... Think of any developing young animal subject to the domination of its mother. Isn't it well—maybe even necessary as a protection, that while anything is growing or evolving it be subject to some kind of a tyranny? This is how I now understand what my way of living has been about... And I thank you if you have facilitated this."

Kama Mara acknowledged all this with a long low bow.

Gotama, surprising himself with the flow of his words, and with his readiness to speak, continued, "There always lies, so near to us, a realm in which we escape entirely from all we know; but who has the strength to remain in it for long? As soon as any relations to our will, to our person, or even to those objects of our pure contemplation, enters consciousness, the magic is at an end, we fall, habitually, back from the arch type to the individual thing which is the link of a chain to which we also belong."

"Still, for a while more I must remain alone. For now, I must continue to look; seeking and seeing _within_ , not from outside."

"I mean no offense, but with language there is always a grain of contempt; the speaker immediately vulgarizes himself. We are no longer esteeming ourselves sufficiently when we communicate ourselves. Our deepest and most profound experiences are not garrulous. And you are certainly right, that they could not communicate themselves if they tried. Whatever we have words for, that is what we have already gotten beyond."

And then Gotama added with a smile, "And, you must know that the Initiate always at first rejects the Master."

Hearing in this speech a rare sense of proportion and then, an even scarcer humor, Kama Mara was beginning to _like_ him.

Abruptly, an intuition announced the presence of his daughter, Desire, " _in the wings"_ —and Kama Mara, wishing to conclude the interview, said, "Of course I understand. Your initially absurd overinvestment, your misunderstanding, has had functional consequences, hindering your development. You are not yet prepared. A disease of thought cannot be terminated. It must run it's natural course. Slow cure is the only cure. Sit, as you wish, as you must..."

He was laughing as he stood to leave, and then, not to Gotama but in soliloquy, he said, "Until now these threats and temptations have been a ritual, a game. But suppose, imagine... what if my girls let themselves be carried away, beyond the game? I'm thinking about Desire. What if she becomes so involved that she destroys and replaces everything? There has always, so far, been a point, a false detail, to remind her to stop and to withdraw, but what if she gets so carried away that she no longer recognizes anything, and you too (he looks at Gotama), leap with her?"

Then, directly to Gotama he said, "Be ready! Every creature is driven to pasture by a blow."

Completing a deep and sweeping bow—a gesture which effectively swept away the scene—Kama Mara, like a tumbler, mounted his elephant and withdrew, moving away slowly in a lazy walk to the edge of the clearing where he had sensed the presence of his daughter.

I entreat the reader to turn for inspiration, as I did, and to imagine the end of this scene as if had been painted upon one of the giant canvases of the great Venetian, Tintoretto (1518-1594)

_Of course motion is not possible in a painting, but the forms depicted are fundamentally that of movement and drama._ _The way the two figures are placed—With Kama Mara, on the elephant, head up and body leaning down, with his right arm extended and bent at the forearm in a right angle, coming forward from the center, and Desire in the foreground more to the left, her left arm extended above her head and her right drawn in around her breasts (she's ready to be lifted)provides the setting and focus for an overall impression of vigorous life._

The clothing of both Desire and Kama Mara is rendered with an internal illumination, which radiates and imparts translucency. The whole is an animated swirl of light, color, and line, as are each of the individual units and details seen to be, upon closer examination.

The great force of movement infused into Kama Mara's gesture towards Desire is communicated by means of the broad, isolated line of color, which defines the contour of his arm.

Behind and above Kama Mara, occupying significant pictorial space, and extending rhythmically across the canvas, areas of light are accentuated and placed in contrast with areas of broad and rich color. Particularly striking are the ribbon like streaks of light which set off the deep colors of the sky,

Kama Mara, moving out of the picture, in yet another expression of his repertoire of inexhaustible physical grace, elevates Desire, who responding like a most practiced dancer / acrobat somersaults onto the back of the elephant. "Let him be awhile." Kama Mara said to her. "Wait. But then, when you see him, put aside cleverness. Invoke the most secret depths."

#  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "Only in fiction can we share

## another person's specific experiences."

### John Berger —(Success and failure of Picasso)

## \--- --- ---

# Beneath The Tree with Desire

Not thinking, absorbed and tranquil, like one who watches children at play, Gotama Siddhartha continued to sit throughout the day. His eyes fell upon distant yellow rice fields marked with the contrasts of dark, thick, late day shadows thrown off tall and full foliaged mango, pipal, and sal trees. Closer were shady natural garden pools upon which gently waving colored lotus flowers gleamed, floating.

It's hard for me to picture Gotama as the Vedic Sun hero some legends depict him, but it is not so difficult to imagine that just when he had chosen, with an intuitive respect, his vantage to the East, there rose up in him an almost ecstatic and continually refreshing mode of perception the horizons of which were perpetually receding.

In trying to find ways to describe what was happening to Gotama, non-human analogies suggest themselves. From the collection: 1) when he had come to sit down under the tree, Gotama had felt as if, for lack of something to burn, a fire had died out inside of him, 2) that a change of state, as when water becomes steam, had occurred, and 3) that perhaps he was like a plant whose many shoots bloom; some at once, some in sequence.

With the sun's decline, evening breezes were felt and the moon shone. The fleeting world of the constellations began to faintly appear and gradually brighten. Filled with a constantly renewed wonder, he continued to sit and stayed awake, aware and watching through the night. He was listening when the sounds of flapping, yawning wings, and the cries of birds broke the night's quiet.

The large painted and black-necked storks had not yet departed from their overnight resting spots upon the tree tops, blue kingfishers held their places on low branches, a few egrets had arrived upon the surface of a nearby pond along with a solitary heron... when Desire chose to make her entrance just before the dawn.

Bowing low and slowly, concealing neither passion nor beauty, she stood opposite him for the timeless moment, which ought to have been commemorated in the folklore, legend and art of twenty-five hundred years.

Desire chose to make her entrance just before dawn...

Wanting to be seen, she gently tossed her head, stretched. Elongating her torso with a simple, connected motion, she seated herself on the earth opposite Gotama, whose slight and gentle shift of posture was the only outward signal of his grateful acceptance of her presence.

This time her words came freely. "What justifies us is our _reality._ How does it come about that so _admirable_ a reality," she inclined her upper body indicating that it was to him that she referred, "deserves no respect when expressing _desire_?"

Awaiting no response, she went on. "You are not like the others. You're _like me_! We've made similar sacrifices, forsaken advantage, habit, knowledge, opinion, indolence, but for different reasons. Mine were for the sake of _good taste_ and _beauty_."

Not expecting any reply, Desire silently began to attune herself to Gotama; to his posture and to the rhythms of his breath and heart. When she had achieved a level of sympathy, she returned to the thoughts with which she had begun. "You are beautiful too, although you haven't always _preferred_ it. Why do we have this faculty for taking pleasure? To what end is there beauty in all of nature? What makes beauty appear? And... what is your name?"

Her abrupt last question surprised him. Without hesitation, with a full smile, he told her his name, "Siddhartha."

" _Every wish fulfilled_!" Desire softly exclaimed the name's meaning, returning his smile. "Your name _promises_." The sound of her voice conveyed warmth. "My name promises too. It is _Desire_. When we met at first, you recognized me, and I knew you. Then, we belonged to our fantasies. But now, having exposed them, having begun to name them, proclaiming them through words and actions (she moved closer to him) we're tied up with each other and forced to go on."

My name promises too. It is Desire.

Moving still closer, Desire had whispered those very last words.

Siddhartha, quietly, in a deferential, friendly, and most respectful, tone answered her. "I was never ignorant of the power of human joy, nor am I careless about beauty. But I had come under the impression that the existence outside of myself of these powerful impressions was an illusion and could not be the means I was seeking. Impressions such as I was endeavoring to analyze and define could not fail to vanish at the contact of a material enjoyment that was unable to bring them into existence. The only way was to try to know them more completely at the spot where they were to be found, namely within myself, and to clarify them to their lowest depths."

"When I severed all ties with a natural life it was because I sought deliverance. I searched as one searches for gold; washing away all that is not gold."

Desire was astonished by this profound response, expressed so casually and intimately especially as she had expected no answer at all and was prepared to go on in monologue. Not realizing what she was doing, she reached out and took his hands, and squeezed them, saying, "Isn't the function of life—not to interpret, not to transcend, but to _experience_ ?... Yes, you know it is. _Now you do know it_. _Now you are like me._ Isn't it by being natural that one best recovers from one's _unnaturalness_ —from one's spirituality?"

"Pure inwardness is empty, abstract. We can't believe in the incomprehensible! Reality dissolves into dreaming... into the merely subjective. Banishing the mysterious, the way is clear to the instincts."

Gotama, in proximity with Desire, was feeling an ever deeper center within himself. His breathing, and now he realized his heartbeat, had synchronized itself with hers. He felt her voice as if it were his own. Her smile warmed him. She brought him to laugh with her.

#  CHAPTER TWELVE:

## \--- --- ---

## "What is the price of Experience?

## Do men buy it for a song?

## Or Wisdom for a dance in the street?

## No, it is bought with the price of all that a man hath,

## his house, his wife, his children.

## Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy, And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain."

### William Blake

## \--- --- ---

## "Sometimes you have to play for a long time

## to sound like yourself."

### Miles Davis

## \--- --- ---

# Siddhartha's Song

I ask the reader to imagine the long and rather formal story that Siddhartha will tell (ostensibly to Desire), like Kama Mara's song in the last chapter as either _soliloquy_ or _aria._ Either as each, alike, functions not so much to advance plot, but to express or reveal character and motivation.

Gently withdrawing his hands from Desire's and extending them out to her, with palms up, he begins,

"Man gathers flowers, his heart set on pleasure.

Death overtakes him like a flood of water;

just sweeps him away- "

But he broke off and was silent. Desire was still. "I want to tell my story." he began again. "Will you imagine it with me Desire? In the land of the Sakyas, between the black masses of the mountains and hidden among the foliage of tamarinds, mangoes, and forests... I was born. My first memories are of the lower slopes, which extend to the clouds...

"Before I had been born my mother dreamed that

a white elephant with six tusks

who wandered among golden mountains,

entered her left side

without pain."

"My father told me that the vivid reality of this dream so disturbed my mother that she sought an astrologer to interpret it. This astrologer foresaw that she would give birth to a son capable of either of two immense destinies; a powerful ruler or a great spiritual teacher. My father also told me that my mother felt the powerful importance of this, but was saddened and did not wish her son to be either of these things."

Siddhartha became quiet. He waited until his song built again within him, finally starting again from the beginning.

"Man gathers flowers, his heart set on pleasure.

Death overtakes him like a flood of water;

just sweeps him away- -

When I was born, my mother

who with deep affection had painfully carried me,

died.

Swept away,

she was not permitted to nourish me."

"I have never been able to pronounce the sweet word, "mother" and have it heard...

My father, shielding me with _advantage_ ,

tried to protect me from further unpleasantness."

(Gotama took back both her hands and held them in his.)

"In my boyhood I was slender and delicate,

I wore silk, even the undergarments.

Attendants held a white umbrella over me.

For my sake, lotus ponds were planted;

all for my sake –

In one place blue lotuses ,

in another place red louses,

and in another place white lotuses,

all for my sake."

My father was a very wealthy man. Where, in the dwellings of other powerful men, slaves and workers and servants were used to being given broken rice together with sour gruel, my father's were given white rice and meat."

"Before I was yet a man I had three palaces. During the months of rains I was entertained by musicians and did not even go outside."

"As I grew older, training to be a horseman and an archer, I became strong in body. Debating with intelligent men and women, I learned to speak well and became strong in mind. But so thoroughly protected had I been from harsh reality that actually I was unaware that there is suffering in the world."

"Eventually a turning point came. I saw a creature different than anything I had ever seen. Stooped over, wrinkled with no hair, it could barely walk and leaned on a staff. My coachman answered my question saying, 'This is an old man ; what we will all be if we keep on living.' I returned to the palace and did not cease to think about it."

"Next week, when I returned to the market I saw a man with the disfigured face of a leper. 'Is this a man?' I asked. 'A sick man,' my coachman replied. 'We will all be like that if we keep on living.' Now I was disturbed."

"And when, a week later, I returned to the market and saw a man who seemed to be sleeping but whose color was not that of life, I asked 'What kind of man is this, if it is a man, being carried by others?' The coachman told me, 'This is a dead man, and we will all be like that when we have lived long enough.'"

"I was devastated to learn these truths of human life; old age, sickness, and death. Whenever I opened my eyes a sigh involuntarily escaped me, for all I saw ran counter to my inmost spirit. I began to despise life. Obsessed with the consciousness of things falling into decay, my heart followed them, robbing joy of satisfaction."

"When I went out the next time I saw something else I had never seen before; a man almost naked whose face was full of serenity. I learned that this was an ascetic; a man who lived apart from everything and seemed to have gained peace of mind."

"Though I was only sixteen years old, I decided I would run away to the forest... and to become like that ascetic I had seen."

"What good is a gold crown if inside one feels base? What good is it to rule if one is at odds with oneself? My life felt like a wrong road along which I must go back to the point at which it began, a mistake to correct."

"Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?

And then... Why this?

this restless, ceaseless coming into and going out of being?

I felt this as grimace of painful disfiguration on the countenance of nature,

a never ending dirge in all realms of existence?"

With the help of my coachman Chandaka and the snow-white Kanthaya, my favorite horse, I escaped. I left my family and home."

"Casting off old values,

I searched out new ones,

saying to myself,

'there is right looking and wrong looking'.

Wrong looking sees sickness, old age. and death as tragic, unavoidable,

and seeks their meaning.

I will concentrate upon Right Looking."

"With these sort of notions I settled in for the life of a forest hermit; a renunciate. My essential drive was this: 'no ascetic in the past, none in the present, and none in the future, will practice more earnestly than I.'"

#  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."

#  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

\--- --- ---

"Then I shall tell you," she said,

"Love's function is giving birth in beauty;

in body and mind."

Diotima, as related by Socrates in Plato's Symposium

\--- --- ---

"To work through love is Nature's Way."

Pamina, in Mozart's The Magic Flute

\--- --- ---

But something had already come over Gotama that signaled to Desire, even before she kissed him, that their scene was concluded.

\--- --- ---

# Desire's Response

Gotama's story, which has been told and retold for two and a half millennia, did not fail to move Desire, the very first hearer of it. Spontaneously, and contagiously, she laughed. Not knowing why, Gotama followed her with smiles and laughter of his own.

Exuberantly, ebulliently, she grasped his shoulders, shaking him and said: "I told you! It is in our original, our own _wild nature_ that we find the best recreation for our _un-nature_ , from our spirituality. Well, at last, at least, it's obvious that sitting alone in the forest and not eating is no solution."

Affectionately, and teasingly, Desire placed her palms one at a time up against the soles of his feet, which were, as he was once again sitting cross-legged, resting up on his knees. With a little giggle she began, "At last! You've discovered it! The powers of the healthy, unbound, friendly mind! For its own sake! _And_ as a means to higher states."

She sat back, placing her hands on the earth behind her, and smiling to herself, began again. "Yes, you _are_ like me. As youths we both exerted ourselves in the service of beauty, in doing what came naturally to us. I can discern in you the distinctive marks of a prince. Your eyes are clear and beautiful, your features are noble. You are, despite all you have gone through, despite your own most strenuous objections, radiant still, shining like the sun."

Inclining her head towards him, turning her eyes up to meet his, she let her long hair brush against his hands and knees.

"Here's how I see it," she said, "you've always had a presentiment that underneath this reality, in which we live and have our being, is concealed another and quite different reality. Your aversion, your hatred of the transitory life, maybe at first stemmed from this natural, philosophic attitude... but the course your life has taken is also a consequence of your so-extreme capacity to suffer."

"Apart from this... your austerities, you've never found meanings. It might appear that you've had no feeling for others... but it is not hard for me to see that you didn't want to be touched because you felt every contact so deeply..."

She touched his face with hers, held it there, and then kissed his cheek.

Gotama accepted what she had said, along with her kiss, saying, in a tone that did not make her draw back, "I thought: only voluntary suffering will have value. When one is falling, you know...dive!" Signaling her complete acceptance of this reply, Desire pressed her lips against his and held them there, softly, then whispered, "Cultivating a horror of happiness and beauty, of reason and of the senses," she laughed, "you had come to hate what is human. Even more, you hated what is _animal_. Your wish, your resolve, was to get beyond _Maya;_ the world of appearances and measurements. To accomplish this," she laughed again... "you put aside... _desire_."

She put her fingers upon his lips. Scolding, she mocked, "A full scale rebellion! Against the most fundamental propositions of life! Like a tortoise, you drew your senses back in towards yourself." Kissing him again, she laughed, "Here's what my father says: _'_ _Pure spirit is pure lie_ _!'_ " She affected Kama Mara's voice.

"The senses don't lie." she clasped now his two hands within her own. "Where the lie comes in is what you were making of them. What is apparent; here before us; is the _only_ world."

Then, letting go, she leaned back again, this time placing her elbows upon the ground behind her. Tilting her head forward as if to get another perspective, she allowed him to consider her. Finally she said, "That which is in opposition is in concert. From things that differ come the most beautiful harmonies. _Cold_ things become _warm._ A _warm_ thing becomes _cold_. A _moist_ thing becomes _dry_. A _parched_ thing becomes _moist_."

Now Desire was close to him again, her hands once more upon the soles of his feet. She whispered, "I know the kinship, the close and common tendency of spirituality and sensuality, and of cruelty, too."

Desire stood and moved closer to him. Placing one leg after the other up and over Gotama's knees and feet, she pulled herself up and onto his lap. With her mouth almost touching his, she delivered the final lines of the scene, "What opposes us, unites us. The finest attunements come from things bearing in opposite directions... the embrace of the male and female... _Opposites_ _act in_ _absolute harmony_ , in unbreakable continuity of relation."

Saying this, as she kissed him, she became quite still. Something had signaled, even before she kissed him, that their scene was concluded. Instantly and gently she moved back to make allowances, sensing that Gotama was overpowered, compelled urgently to attend to some inner workings of his being.

Wordlessly, and very gracefully, she lifted herself and, stepping back, helped him to gather himself, pulling his feet back up, higher, over his thighs. She straightened his shoulders, kissed his forehead so lightly, and straightened his shoulders a second time. For a moment, bending over him, she held his head in her hands, closed her eyes, and kissed his forehead. He, also wordlessly, let his own eyelids close.

As Desire stood looking at him, she thought to herself, "If a stone won't budge and it is wedged in, one must move some of the other stones around it first."

My only explanation for this behavior of Gotama is to imagine that he could, at that point, literally, no longer identify with his own temporal ego. Perhaps just then he had begun to experience, with intensity, _the overwhelming living power and immediacy of an eternal consciousness_ which he saw passing through Desire as well as through himself and of all things. Maybe it was the proximity of Desire which precipitated this. In any case, picture Gotama's metaphoric "doors of perception" opened wide—all the way and now, rather suddenly, he finds himself overwhelmed, held in thrall by the display of a rush of a radiant power. Beyond fear and desire, there is, for him, no turning back now.

Jean Genet observed in an essay about Rembrandt, that "the erotic quest is only possible when one can recognize the individuality of every being: when that individuality is irreducible, and the physical form only attests to it." This, as Desire could see, was the opposite of Siddhartha's present state.

Having already observed in relation to him, as her father had likewise done, a proper mode of compassionate charity; Desire, displaying again the same self possessed swirl of easy grace which we have imagined Tintoretto to have captured so well, stepped around behind him and, placing her hand upon his shoulders, bent and whispered into his ear, "Nothing succeeds in which high spirits have no part. Stay cheerful. Don't forget to get some sleep."

Desire was caught up in the drama. Without doubt, she thought, Siddhartha was a man capable of being the initiate her father sought. But, she sensed about his person possibilities beyond what she had learned from her father, and then she remembered that her sister, fulfillment, had a role to play in the drama and that the next scene would belong to her.

#  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

\--- --- ---

## "We call 'beauty' that which pleases us

## without evoking Desire."

### Leo Tolstoy, "What is Art?"

\--- --- ---

# Taking up where Desire left off

When, upon the evening following Desire's morning scene, Kama Mara's middle daughter, Fulfillment, in a glow of golden light, made her entrance, already Gotama had felt her approach and, remembering her from that inner vision referred to at the beginning of this text, recognized her before she appeared

Magically; in the same manner that Kama Mara had first appeared to him; as a projection of his own fears, and Desire; as a projection of his _anima_ (Is Jung's term comprehensible in this context?), Fulfillment appeared as his own image of feminine beauty.

In his current frame of mind the entire focus of his being absorbed in the exploration of the depth and peace of an all absorbing, expansive inner realm—the shock of her sudden appearance in this character was overwhelming.

_Maestoso._ Assuming a grandiloquent posture, right away she _sings_ ,

"Nature tries always to adorn herself, to not be herself... yet

in each thing we may read the signature of all things.

Behind...

within...

embodied...

A universal soul...

continually finds its own self again in all being.

You are it, and, it is you.

We see ourselves in all being, and all being in ourselves."

Assuming a grandiloquent posture, right away she sings.

It seemed to Gotama as if the surfaces of her body were curved mirrors in which everything was reflected. Her tongue, like an hibiscus petal, caressed the sounds which echoed in the air from each of her consonants and vowels and then echoed again inside him as he felt and observed his own mind sorting her richer meanings and contexts.

"What _is_ the role of beauty in nature?" She read his thoughts. "Doesn't the apprehension of beauty, attracting its object by an urgency of contrast, sometimes come to us with such a vigorous blow just to try to awaken our consciousness from its lethargy?"

"Learning from the beauty in nature, we strive to express the beauty in our own selves, each according to his own individual temperament." She bowed, signaling the end of her rather formal _prelude_ and _exposition._ Stepping back, frankly studying him, obviously aware of the impression she was making, she stood opposite him awhile, hands on her hips.

She stood opposite him awhile, hands on her hips, frankly studying him, obviously aware of the impression she was making.

Insinuating many meanings, she teased him. "Sitting quietly doing nothing: spring comes and the grass grows by itself."

Fulfillment seemed to take up where nature left off. Her self conscious artistry multiplied her impact so that she spoke and appeared past herself, so that she became, to Gotama, transparent to the transcendent, like a window, opening up and carrying the divine radiance into the field of time.

Concepts flowed for her, and catching the spirit, without thinking, Gotama, surprising himself, said, "Beauty is no accident. Your father is right."

Fulfillment was ready and said, with a sparkling laugh, "I'm more beautiful than you. Anyone who knows me will tell you that." Her sense of _time,_ and the soft, ululating rhythms of her perfectly chosen words cast a spell. Gotama felt as if, from a rapturous sleep, he were emerging into an even more dazzling reality.

I'm more beautiful than you. Anyone who knows me will tell you that.

"Listen; my name is Fulfillment, but we won't adorn our metaphors with the stars. My sister is in love with you. It's not like her at all. One thing is certain," she said, and now assuming an ironic tone, "Desire cannot offer _fulfillment_. Don't sacrifice yourself. It's what I told her too."

At first when Fulfillment had appeared, so radically different from everything else was she, that the shock her beauty produced upon Gotama was profound. But, as she spoke things transpired within him. Gradually a greater, but unassuming, emancipating harmony unfolded, expanded, and provided context to include her appearance. As his acquaintance with this living _goddess of beauty_ ripened, the apparent discordance of her startling singularity was resolved into modulations of rhythm. A greater recognition of the beauty in all things, great and small, opened for him and became easy. Beauty became a matter of course... revealing the radiant glorification of the eternity of all phenomena... a triumph over the suffering inherent in nature.

Only the most subtle shifting of countenance and posture expressed Gotama's inner experience, but his revelations were not lost upon Fulfillment.

Her reaction was immediate. A general rippling in the atmosphere around her announced it, and then, a slight raising of her chin, and the sharpest smile. A quick turn—whole body at once—and her long hair was flying. The near violent arching of her back alluding to an urgent impatience, her arms straightened out, rising up above her head. The focus became her fingers, dancing, both hands at once.

But before she had really begun, suddenly, breaking _time_ altogether, she moved up very close to him she said, "Well then, is there nothing to be done? Aren't you going to become the BUDDHA?"

No one had ever spoken of that. "Buddha"- an _awakened one_. Had he, in fact, _still_ to wake up? Feeling again as if his innermost thoughts and feelings were being directly read and spoken to, an increased sense of the breadth, scope, and power of what he had just now understood to be an improvised ritual drama revolving about him... began to dawn.

But this perception and train of thought were not long lived. Just as when Desire had sat on his lap, powerful and pressing inner sensations, impossible to ignore, were demanding his attention. Since he had first seated himself beneath this tree, he had felt something opening within himself. Gradually, at a distance at first, he had experienced its attraction, but rather suddenly now an image crystallized; a distant and open door toward which all energies trained. Overwhelming, like a psychic whirlpool, it began to draw him in.

Absorbed, as he so thoroughly was at that moment, and about to lose his identity completely, his mind produced and presented the strongest sensations he had ever experienced of the awareness of a universal and raging desire for existence and for beauty and joy in existence. But his mental training directed and carried him beyond even this...

Meanwhile, Fulfillment, passionately and sonorously, went right on to the heart of her own message, "In the world of _art_ every thought has a symbolic form. And it's the forms that make expression possible. Now that you've prepared yourself so thoroughly, have made yourself so intensely aware, so _enlightened_ , aren't you inclined to your own formal and beautiful fulfillment... _nirvana_?"

Gotama did not react or speak. She went on, "Having grown up among powerful men and women, I can tell that you have the power... but even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows."

"All that we are," she said, articulating, without pause precisely, what was occurring within him—but all the while in another different context, "is a result of our thoughts, founded and compounded in proportion with necessity. You aspired beyond fear, beyond desire. Now, are you beyond Fulfillment?"

"Nirvana: ceasing; blown out... a beautiful _word_..." Fulfillment was both whispering and beginning to sing, her face close to his as she shaped each word into a broad _crescendo._.

"I imagine nirvana as a beautiful activity."

She let these words go into the air, and then, after following their echoes, she became very quiet. Not being afraid to give stillness its rhetorical, musical, and dramatic place, added profundity to what she had said and to the moment.

_Appassionata:_ a slow circling walk became an extended _prelude_ for a final _movement_ , _con moto._ In this brighter tempo and _key_ she said, "I'm right and so was your father. Isn't that what he was afraid of... that you would become a great religious teacher? Wasn't he right? Hasn't the world has had enough of those?"

_Accelerando_ : She was beginning to _cook._ " _BUDDHA_! Imagine your disciples? Can't you just picture them! Already they are holding their begging bowls. They have misunderstood everything. They are not genuine, not even actors but _imitations_ of actors. And they stink, too! Think this through. Generations, for thousands of years, sitting around not doing anything because of you! And the _CULTS_!"

Fulfillment brought herself to a halt. Placing herself opposite him, without the use of her hands, she sat and folded her legs. Pressing the palms of her hands together, she looked hard at him. "People will like you. There's no doubt that you will be accepted. But, such acceptance is not without its problems. What might seem to give genius greater scope, so often winds up, actually, vulgarizing it. Authentic spirituality, like authentic beauty, is not for the masses."

She spoke now without movement. "Your discoveries are deep, intimate, delicate, hidden even. No matter how great your effort, it will be impossible to communicate them. The state at which you have arrived was not reached by logical reasoning. Besides, in our country it is Vedanta that will always be sacred. Don't sacrifice yourself.

Breaking the rhythm, Fulfillment stopped, and in a broad _ritardando_ she spoke her concluding words of the scene.

"But...are you the kind of man who ought to be free?

Or will you be casting off your final value

when you cast off your chains?"

#  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "There is no art in sailing down the stream. But when heart and destiny hurl us down to the sea's floor and up into the heavens, that trains the helmsman."

### Holderlin, in a letter, 1798

## \--- --- ---

# The Song of the Earth

Gotama, both shielded and clouded by the aura of his own perceptions, and drawn, increasingly, by the greater specific gravity of a golden white light, which shone internally, gave to Fulfillment's words his own meaning.

Within him the inertial force of boundless and indescribable thoughts, or rather hieroglyphs of thoughts, propelled by the momentum of his years of ascetic discipline, rose and formed an inclination, and then a resolution..

Fulfillment, divining some sort of a climax, bent her head and smiled questioningly.

They both heard a voice from within Gotama Siddharatha rise and emerge and then fall off so abruptly that Fulfillment knew he would not speak again,

"We limit ourselves,

choosing,

excluding,

including,

saying 'yes' or 'no.'

Finally the peace of unity is there no longer;

the freedom to which we were entitled." it said.

While she listened to this extraordinary response, and then especially during the silence which ensued, Fulfillment reviewed in her mind all that had passed between them. Had she rushed the tempo? Had he been able to understand her?

It seemed to Fulfillment as if Gotama had listened to and accepted her words completely—taking in their full import. In fact, this powerful receptivity of his had caused her to feel the impact and effect of what she herself had said to such a profound degree that she had then drawn ever more from herself, more than she had ever given before, more than she knew she had to give. The power and effect of her own words had surprised her.

The controlled, intense strength of Gotama's concentration, the vibrations of which blossomed out in rhythmic reverberation filling the grove, held her there, fascinated. Fulfillment bowed partly out of respect—and instinctively not wanting to disturb him any longer—and, partly, because she felt her performance complete.

Her heart had, right away, sensed the powerful, complementary interplay of his perfect serenity and soulful kindliness. Led by intuition, her intellect now told her that he had attained a supreme detachment, thorough and unprejudiced, not distinguishing between profane and transcendental realities; a level of sanctity at which miracles are possible.

Gotama began a silent _soliloquoy_ which Fulfillment was able to divine.

"Neither herdsman nor deserter...

Running on ahead,

since I have found it,

I'll show the way.

Free from future and past,

Peace, horror, sadness, shame, honor, bliss,,,

whirling fires of becoming;

an ETERNAL PRESENT too

I'll leave behind..."

Fulfillment was transfixed. Her total absorption had brought her to a point of identification. But then... suddenly... her senses signaled alarm! She shivered. Was the man seated across from her _about to die?_

Can anyone imagine something beyond his own experience? My own failure in this regard reminded me of my former inability to grant credibility to the legend of the Orpheus, the Greek who was called _the first musician_. Such was the mystical/ magical power in his music, totally compelling, overwhelmingly attractive, it is said, that it was able to supersede all other physical forces even to the extent that, of their own accord, objects—rocks and boulders are specifically mentioned—were said to have followed him about to hear; or to somehow participate mystically in the vibrations of his music, which, assumedly, superseded, in a totally compelling, overwhelmingly attractive manner, all other physical forces.

Maybe, just as incredibly, in the legend of Gotama (we can't yet call him Buddha) a kind of variation or inversion of Orpheus' case occurred. The golden white whirlpool was about to swallow his non resistant being on the other side of an inner doorway when a weird and lonesome threnody, a so forlorn wail, rose up and out of the Earth. Emanating first from so-called inanimate nature; the dirt, stones, sticks and rocks, it was echoed by the vegetative world.

In just the reverse of Orhpeus' case, this song of the earth, cutting through the timeless void, reached Gotama and drew him back into himself, seated there in a lotus posture opposite to Fulfillment.

Let's imagine the end of the scene; the re-animated Gotama Siddhartha, still not the Buddha, full of _earthy_ , freshly realized joy, but also a trace of regret, acknowledges the mystery of what almost happened with a laugh from the belly.

"To explain is to apologize. To _live_ , that's enough!" he softly and so kindly said to Fulfillment.

Pulling his ankles up higher over his knees, upon his still crossed legs, he touched the Earth as if to invoke a fair witness.

Fulfillment wondered... What had she seen? What had she heard? What had she imagined? Her growing sense that events were taking an unanticipated turn reminded her of the larger ritual and that the next scene would belong to her sister, Regret.

# CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

##  \--- --- ---

## "It is through the body that metaphysics

## will be made to enter the mind"

### Antonin Artaud

## \--- --- ---

## I should only believe in a god who knows how to dance.

## Only in dance do I know of parables for the highest things.

### Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Zarathustra)

## \--- --- ---

Regret, still laughing, began a dance.

# \--- --- ---

# Regret

Darkness called for sleep. Gotama responded, dreamlessly. And when dawn followed close upon the steamy night, immediately, straightaway upon awakening, experiencing the rushing sensations of a perpetual recession of his inner horizons everything expanding but all complete and in-the-moment, conceptual thought suspended—he took up where he had left off, sitting beneath the tree.

The air was still cool and felt fresh. The sun not even up midway behind the clumps of thick banyans which grew parasite-like interspersed among the tall palms, when Kama Mara's youngest daughter came, in turn, to play her role.

Immediately affecting, her presence communicated the natural profundity, beyond experience, of all child prodigies. Yet, she knew that she was no longer a child.

Hardly extending a gesture of greeting as if she had always known him, or as if they had only recently left each other's company, Regret's first words, though delivered that way, were not casual. Over her shoulder, as if absorbed elsewhere, she said, "The most **spiritual** beings are also the most courageous, and **always** experience the most painful tragedies."

Then, turning, she walked right up to him and said, "My sister, Fulfillment, told me what happened. It hasn't taken me so very long, compared to you to learn to love, **and to be in love with life...** How different we have been!"

"When life puts forth its greatest forces of opposition, to whom ought we to look for inspiration? Why didn't your remember Manu? Well...? Who has ever faced more difficult problems, and who ever brought a broader ' **YES**!' to life?"

"Manu's way, was the **original** way. I doubt that Manu anticipated a movement of people who would abandon society altogether in favor of a mystical Union with the Divine. I know that certain ancient and very great Rishis have renounced the world—but only and always in a **temporary** way, and for a specific goal."

As if people spoke about these things all the time, her sentences flowed, one after the other, as if what she said were the most matter of fact and natural things one might say.

She spoke these sentences one after another, as if what she said was the most matter of fact thing in all the world.

More than simply 'beautiful', though she was beautiful by any standard, Regret's appearance and the effect she knew it always had, combined with the range of her perceptions, and the fluent ease with which her mind worked, gave her a rather ultimate confidence.

Gotama, still emerging from nothingness was, by contrast, un-fluent. He watched her, and listened with the greatest attention. Not only could he not help smiling, he began to laugh out loud. It was as if each of these sisters had her own key to his personality.

Unable to swallow her own impulsive laughter, Regret burst out, "I am called 'Regret', and, you see I'm a girl. I'm closer to immortality than you... **closer to the source**. The knowledge I have, intuition grants... and the means of expressing emotion, **no less essentia** l."

Commencing a series of very slow Aryavartran pirouettes, arms extended and only slightly bent, her words ceased. The speed of her revolutions increased. She pulled her arms in. Her body became a blur. When, eventually, she stopped Regret said, "While you spent years of effort, all I had to do, all I did, was... **realize**."

Regret's delight in performing her role was obvious. At this moment, for her, _Drama_ where all liberties are possible, and _Life_ were not opposites. "Last temptation!" she called out, making herself giggle. "Or, shall _I_ choose, and reject you, so as to deprive you, or maybe rather to shield you from the vanity of triumph?"

Regret held his gaze and smiled with him, assuming a cordial confidentiality. This time very slowly drawing her long thin arms in and alternately extending them, and all the while moving about in a circle, she began to spin again. Not in the least out of breath, halting directly in front of him, she announced. "This is the finale, the last scene in the last act. Will you have the courage to be **inconsistent**? Will you draw the **full** conclusions from the knowledge you have obtained?"

Her long, slim legs moved imperceptibly, carrying her in _retrograde_ _motion._ "Here's how **I** see it." she said, "whatever your goals were, you weren't achieving them. You couldn't achieve them no matter what. But now... now you see things differently. Suddenly, all the goals have vanished... giving you this great freedom... but not from the direction you were expecting."

She spoke as if she were reading his mind and heart. "At last, you're able to **embrace life.** Now you understand just how _misanthropic_ it was to place such value on Eternity... Timelessness..."

Imperceptibly, her legs carried her forward towards him so that she was able to say most quietly, "Where once you held spiritual perfection at the center of all reflection, now that is finished. Now you are able to see that the fruit of true wisdom is not manifest in a person removed from society. Siddhartha, how is it even possible to imagine **wisdom** without contacts with others."

Subtle movements of her face, the shaping of her mouth, gave her poetry an added power.

"How insufficient is spiritual perfection without love!

How much better ignorance and bungling with love

Than... knowledge and skill without!"

Now Regret seated herself and took his hands. Something made her smile, almost right away. "Love is freshly born in you. It's ready to grow, and to develop," she said. "You have become like me, and like my sisters, and... my father. Advancing the work of love is our life. It's **how** we live... our _way_ _..._ Really though, its just a matter of course—and nothing at all... something which cannot be avoided..."

With that she was standing again and had already begun to slowly spin in rotation around Gotama. Her words and thoughts had come with increased rapidity and now, while she danced, Gotama reheard them.

When the dance had gone on long enough, Regret, causally, her smile innocent and self absorbed, touched his arm, making sure she had his attention, and asked, "Shouldn't every child be taught, right away, as I was, to understand one's own relation to infinite being... and have all of childhood to wonder over it...?"

"My parents told me that it was like in the game of hide and seek... Brahman **plays** **at hiding itself in all things**. Well, if we really appreciate this analogy, remember and feel that Brahman, whether hidden or revealed, is in, and **is** all things, then our actions will flow and everything we do will be **right action**."

Regret resumed her dance.

Gotama heard her words as prescient, precipitating echoes, which formed for the first time in his own thought. He yielded to her lead and Regret, immediately sensing it, began a new series of movements, which, functioning like a _modulating bridge_ in music, transported her from one area to another. All led to a further and explosive burst of unsuspected energy. Cartwheels and vaulting somersaults carried her back, smiling, before Gotama, where, beginning a new _movement,_ she spoke/ sang its opening _theme._

"On the surface of the water.

lotus flowers float just level.

Above the water,

others stand up.

Under the water,

are many more."

Folding, or rather crumpling herself upon the earth as the sound of her voice faded, Regret became so absolutely still that, suddenly, it was as if there was no one there. The effect of this sudden cessation was that Gotama felt an increased self awareness and the ensuing quiet most patiently invited his response.

Regret, meanwhile, had gathered herself and arose. Adopting and holding a series of poses—the sort we now know as the postures of classical Hindu dance which, functioning like a set of _transitional_ _phrases_ in music, announced that the final movement thematic material had arrived.

She began slowly, executing stately Aryavartan pirouettes, again tracing a circle around Gotama and the tree. Stopping right behind him, putting her hands on his shoulders, in the most measured way, she explained. "The world of is like a lotus pond."

As if she were blowing him a kiss, Regret said, "An explanation can't be something private. It must be public. You will have a teaching for us all? "

With this rather abrupt arrival back in the _tonic key,_ she made a deep, sweeping bow and began to giggle contagiously _._ The high degree of her perceptiveness was brought into great relief by her youth and humor.

Only a little composing herself, she added, more seriously, _a coda_ ; "Your old way of life was way too self concerned and too negative. Now you affirm life. Everyone will see it. You'll communicate your experience."

Her tone had changed. She was at her most assured. "Actually... your experience will communicate itself. This is just what will make you great... and such an **important** teacher. You will advance, not my father's message, what help could you be with that? But rather, simply, you will teach, show... what you have learned." With a burst of laughter she absolutely could restrain no longer, Regret was finished.

Kama Mara had, at first, appeared to Gotama as completely terrifying, personifying his own greatest fears. Desire seemed a part of himself—his own feminine unconscious nature. Fulfillment appeared to completely embody everything beautiful. But it was Regret's own spirit that was winning Gotama's heart. Enjoying her immensely, Gotama's smile warmed them both.

Regret became silent and withdrew into the shade. She leaned up against the tree, her arms wrapping around a branch up above her head. As each of her older sisters and her father had, she was discovering herself in relation to Gotama. His state of mind, so different from her own, without recourse to very many words, had made itself felt.

With a genius for intuition, which amounted to an almost extrasensory perception, Regret sought out the fullness of detail, the depths and pinnacles of his character. Her enthusiasm for this task was boundless, her spirit a sure thread.

Placing her bare feet together, she stood with her hips thrust back. As if they were wings, she raised her arms out behind her, palms up. Fingers extended, she relaxed into the pose and said, "In this world, which bursts with life, thought is not ours alone **.** I too hear the voices of the stones and grasses. Whose heart could **not** be affected? All things feel and sway mankind. **"**

Her balanced pose, held almost long enough to stop all momentum, had functioned as a _ritardando._ Lowering her arms and bowing to Gotama, she said, "How can one love humanity, know its ills, and have no compassion? Compassion... that's always the source of grace and power. It enriches everything about and around us, regardless of whether this is our intention."

"Siddhartha, you **are** an **explosive** man, with tremendous forces stored up. For a long while you have been gathering, saving up, conserving and your energies are powerful. My father is a great man in this way as well... but he is different. Always so aware of ancient greatness, instead, he says that mankind's will today is toward **nothing**. THAT'S why he called me Regret _._ "

"Can you follow me just a little longer? Here the way father looks at it, it's not the task of the healthy to nurse the sick. He says that the necessity is for physicians who are **themselves** sick."

"He's chosen you. You are the predestined savior. You will be a support, a prop, a model, taskmaster, tyrant, and God. Your legend is prepared; your distinctive art, and your craft, your mastery, your destiny, and happiness. Now that you are cured, you will defend your people, of course against **sickness** , but also against us, my father and my sisters; the **healthy**."

"You'll show the way, provide a method. It will all come naturally. You will take the life loving and life affirming compassion you have discovered to the world for the profit, good, and happiness of man. You will provide a technique for really getting somewhere. "

Quickly, her posture expressing the utmost deference, she sat down, cross-legged, right next to him, their knees almost touching. More than anything, she wanted now to be _quiet._

Had her final _cadenza_ been too dense and too long? Had she rushed the _tempo,_ over acted, and stepped outside of her role? She knew that she had not failed to strike a common chord with Gotama, but now, looking at him, and for the first time since she had begun her performance, feeling his gaze upon her, she began to feel self conscious and said, "Of course, everything I'm telling you already know."

What seemed to overcome Regret was an unfathomable serenity that she felt emanating from behind the kindness of Gotama's expression, his complete absorption, as if an inner fire burned that compelled his attendance upon it.

The effect of Gotama's state of mind, so different from her own, so inexplicably powerful and magnetic, had, through the course of the _scene,_ made itself felt and it had struck a chord within her. Spontaneously, she was moved to emulate him. Any self-limiting affirmations or negations were suddenly out of the question. Neither would she now avoid the false or seek the true.

Regret felt all this quickly, clearly, and quite naturally. Without taking thought, she began to attune herself to his state of being. Starting with the patterns of his breath, she let his presence overwhelm her. All and everything that she had so artfully and passionately expressed disappeared. She now saw everything from an unexpected angle. _She had surrendered to the Buddha Mind._

All and everything habitually perceived was now appearing fresh, and within the context of a continual rush of the experiencing of _eternity_ , obviously necessary and linked in the fertility of a universal will. She quite forgot herself. The ritual and its final _act_ were concluded but Regret was unable to make her exit.

Without taking thought, she began to attune herself to his state of being.

#  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

\--- --- ---

"We all live in the same time forever.

There is no future and there is no past."

George Balanchine

\--- --- ---

Unique communication, no dependence upon words, direct pointing, seeing into one's own nature.

\--- --- ---

# 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.

#  CHAPTER NINETEEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "Historical writing is fiction."

### Oswald Spengler

## \--- --- ---

# Like a Novel

Myths are tales anyone can tell. A myth isn't a story itself in a particular form or with a particular style or finish. Based on the germ of only a very few accepted historic facts, the myth of the Buddha has been growing and filling itself out in the collective imagination for more than two thousand years, in much the manner that a village may grow up, or a town or city, developing, for the convenient use of its people, around a few distinct land marks in certain ways for good reasons.

This account, though diverting the reader in all manner of directions, in form, most suggests or resembles a modern novel. Our narrative has followed a young hero, Gotama Siddhartha, the privileged son of a most distinguished and loving family. Filled with an indefinable longing, life is simply too much for him. He can neither endure his own lot nor any part of the entire social system into which he has been born and raised.

Despite his comparative advantages, when certain realities of the human condition dawn upon him, he finds existence cramped, limited, and unacceptable. Of politics, power, wealth, marriage, he wants no part. Like Ishmael in _Moby Dick,_ who goes to sea, or like Kerouac's hero, Sal Paradise, in _On the Road,_ even a little like the great patriarchal character of the modern novel, Don Quixote, who leaves a reasonable existence to become a knight errant, Gotama wants to find some remedy for what is baffling him. And maybe he too longs for adventure and peril in far away and unknown places.

In each of these famous renunciations is a protest; a direct action against, and a flight from the burdens which the prevailing social structure has placed upon the development of individuality.

It seems significant that neither Ishmael, Sal Paradise, Quixote, nor Gotama sets out alone. Ishmael finds a whaling vessel and joins its crew. Sal Paradise becomes of member of a hip fraternity. Quixote has himself "knighted" and must also go "on the road". And Gotama joined a forest school.

Each, identifying at first with what might symbolize rebellion, associates himself with a group of social outcasts to live apart from the world. Each will come to experience the nearly fatal implications of his revolt.

Ishmael, despite his own advantages of education and understanding, subjects himself to all the whaling protocols. Likewise Sal Paradise will attempt to absorb the 'beat' protocols of Dean Moriarty. Quixote, who has given up the quiet comfort of his home and retirement, subjects himself to the rigorous codes of conduct of knight errantry. Gotama, though born a prince, agrees to follow the dictates of his forest master in any and whatever designs, submitting like all the rest.

Most obviously Ishmael, but each soon finds himself immersed in something like a totalitarian social movement and serving under a tyrant. Sal Paradise kept a comparative independence but yearned for something like servitude and avidly sought it in the inferred commandments of the loose brotherhood of jazz musicians and hipsters to whom he was drawn. Quixote's group identification is, of course, imagined, but the demands placed upon him are no less real.

Gotama is most like Ishmael, who will only barely escape (on a coffin) the disaster that engulfs the whole crew. Eventually, to save himself, Gotama will need to go beyond the limitations and prescriptions set for him, to basically throw himself overboard and swim for it. When he does he will come to resemble—no longer Ishmael—but Captain Ahab, whose self appointed mission lay totally outside the bounds and conventions of not only the "whaling industry" but of even the renegades and castaways who formed the usual class of whaling men.

Gotama's transition to this maniacal state comes when, like Ahab, he is finally no longer able to identify with any of the concerns of the group. Gotama, like the profoundly intelligent Ahab, with all the resources of his craft and occupation, will follow his own most pressing inner needs. Prepared and sustained by his practice and his mastery of the technology of yoga, Gotama enters an actual and metaphoric wilderness of jungle solitude comparable to Ahab's vast Pacific. Far out of and beyond convention, both attract followers.

We cannot be on certain grounds, imagining what, if anything, might correspond to the white whale, Moby Dick, for Gotama, but we do know that the traditional Vedic philosophy of Aryavarta did not solve his inner concerns, but rather amplified them, and impressed upon him their limitations, nor did it provide the techniques to transcend those concerns.

The austere knowledge that his own being, his own personal living self (Atman), was a manifestation of an infinite, and infinitely greater self (Brahman), and that the two were identical could not solve for him in a satisfying way his fundamental anxiety about life. A complex of ideas surrounding this conflict possessed him, and must have become an obsession,

Our story imagines that this is the "great white whale" which would have dragged Gotama down to destruction had it not been for the efforts of Kama Mara and his daughters. The deep and natural affections which spontaneously arose upon contact with a healthy group of individuals became the bridge which allowed Gotama to return to life, to a practical humanity.

Through contact with these fully integrated personalities Gotama comes to understand his fixation upon experiencing a lasting "union with Brahman" as an expression of spiritual isolation and of revulsion against the world. "Suffering" which he had elevated and had allowed to dominate his being he came to see as a mere nothingness, which he had filled with many meanings.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY:

## \--- --- ---

## "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.

## \--- --- ---

# 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 the 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 false 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.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:

## \--- --- ---

## "Can I be as I believe myself, or as others believe me to be?

## Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown

## and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself.

## Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself."

### Miguel de Unamuno

## \--- --- ---

On the road—the happiest man alive.

## \--- --- ---

# On the Road—the Happiest Man Alive

_I hope the reader has not completely forgotten the narrative thread left off a few chapters back_ _and will consent to return with me to imagine the picturesque episode, which occurred not_ _long after 'the enlightenment' beneath the tree. It is rarely omitted in any telling of the life of the_ _Buddha._

Taking naturally to the open road, crossing fields yellow-green-like rugs thrown across the jungle cleared flat land breathing naturally the open air, Gotama, beginning his life's work; teaching, sought out his old companions; the five _bhikkhus_ with whom he had spent those years in the Forest of Mortification, the ones who had so deplored his fall from their common fanatical asceticism.

The Deer Park (Migadaya), where they had gone, is situated in Sarnath, on the outskirts of Varanasi, some 200 to 300 kilometers from Gaya. It has been a religious or sacred site since ancient times. Gotama knew the way and that it would take at least ten days to walk, not including rest time. No brooding over the future, no laments from the past, he set out.

Upon seeing his approach, the _five bhikkhus_ decide among themselves not to acknowledge him, saying, "He has broken his vows and abandoned holiness. Now he lives in abundance and indulges in pleasure." But when he draws near, it becomes, straightaway, so obvious that he has attained some remarkable happy glorification or beatification that they can not but greet him with the most respectful awe and obeisance, even expressing their desire to become his disciples.

The _Samyutta-Nikaya_ and the Pali _Vinaya_ say that the first real sermon that the Buddha delivered was addressed to his former companions, at the Deer Park. As presented in those accounts, it is here that he speaks of the Middle Way, the Four Noble Truths, and the Noble Eightfold Path for the first time. But to a modern researcher/ historian it appears at least equally probable that, as time went by, a number of teachings were brought together, 'redacted' into the document now referred to as the "Sutra of the Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma".

I imagine a more personal, informal, and friendly beginning for Buddhism.

Seated in the shade of great heartwood along a shallow stream, enjoying the fragrant resin of a clump of ocibanuum trees, Gotama, in a manner which will become typical of him, speaks to his former companions.

"My friends, _bhikkhus_ , already I am called 'Buddha', but you must know that 'enlightenment' is neither a higher or a lower state. It's just as if I have woken up. From what? My life up to now... a dream I remember clearly. It was as if there were a circle around me composed of many worlds and of the orders of time. Together, all formed a chain. As in common for dreamers, I had no idea that I was asleep and dreaming."

"Strange. But what woke me up was the power, the _force of the present moment_. Instead of obliterating it—as we had, together, habitually practiced doing for years, all at once, its presence overwhelmed me... and so thoroughly too, that I could not but become continually aware of it, and increasingly so."

"It was a result of this experience... that I regained the sense of my own identity. The immediate awareness, which I felt now with such force, transformed memory... This freshness reformed my consciousness."

"This new sensation had on me the effect which love has of filling one with a precious essence; or rather, more precisely, this essence was not in me, it was myself."

So saying the new Buddha embraced his former companions. Then, making a point of it right away, to illustrate the unique freedoms of thought that were to become eventually so characteristic of proper Buddhism, Gotama told the _five bhikkhus_ , "You must know that _Tathagatas_ (those who come to the truth) can only try to show a way. I have discovered a path, but you yourselves must tread the path."

"Just because they may have been handed down by many generations, traditions need not be followed. You must do your own work. Do not believe in anything because it is spoken of by many, or because it has been written. One can't simply take the word of others, including mine, and believe it. Do not believe in that as truth to which you have become attached by habit. And don't believe in conjectures. Believe after observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason."

"I don't want you to get the wrong idea about "enlightenment", or what I mean by saying I have woken up, and start to imagine that there is a place to get to—like by climbing a ladder. If you should ever think so, then right away you've got altogether the wrong idea. The place to which you really want to go is one at which you actually already are."

"In order to come to this new point of view one must be, first, consciously self aware. To analyze things is only possible when self-consciousness is present. It is the only way. One must be, first, consciously self-aware. There can be no substitute for this. Then, one knows for certain if things are wrong, or if things are good. Without consciousness of itself, observations and reason have a very limited use."

" _Bhikkhus_ , there is something else, something worth saying, worth teaching. A very basic and useful idea; extremes need not be practiced."

"One is equally misguided when completely devoted to sensual pleasures, or too attendant upon practical matters, or when one mortifies one's self—as we have done. Avoiding extremes, the Tathagata gains realization."

The _Life of the Buddha_ has begun. Compassion and artistry will entail the need to communicate in an effective, lasting manner, the wonder of the unfathomable reservoir of freedom that has opened up to him. The innovative techniques of his teaching, through practice, begin to develop. He leaves the Deer Park, accompanied by the first "Buddhists".

I'd like the reader to understand that the new Buddha had many conversations there at the Deer Park, and that more than a few "discourses" took place. Hajime Nakamura, in his account of the Buddha's life, wrote that "For the Buddha to go to Varanasi to expound his ideas was something like a modern scholar presenting a new theory at a national conference." In this way one can understand and agree with Nakamura that the visit to the Deer Park was a great turning point in Gotama's life, for it was after this that he began to live amongst and teach ordinary lay people. For the next forty-five years, until his death at the age of eighty, he traveled from place to place in central India, along the reaches of the Ganges, devoting himself to teaching.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:

## \--- --- ---

## "The grandeur of real art... is to rediscover, grasp again and lay before us that reality from which we live so far removed and from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperiousness, that reality which there is grave danger we might die without ever having known and yet which is simply our life, life as it really is, life disclosed at last and made clear. "

### Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

## \--- --- ---

# "You are the Buddha!"

Along the road away from the Deer Park, passing through groves of willow trees making beautiful shapes against the sky heavy with gray, making their way beyond the sugar cane, Gotama and his followers encounter, hidden among the shadows of dark green fruit trees, a favorite haunt for the herds of spotted deer, a solitary youth sitting so quietly that the deer around him are not disturbed.

Nearly naked, long unwashed, more than a little frail, but of great and cultivated awareness, this intuitive, perceptive renunciate (for he was one of that lonely brotherhood), observing the manner and bearing of Gotama and the way his associates regarded him, was able to recognize that _here_ — _in Gotama_ —was one who had attained the very experience that he himself had been seeking.

Overcoming his shyness and evidencing the greatest respect he crossed the field and approached Gotama. Bowing as deeply as he could he addressed him, "A Buddha! How is it that I recognize what I have never seen before?! And how glad it makes me!"

His eyes were very sad, but they burned with inner fire. Observing that the Buddha was giving him complete attention, he went on, speaking from the innermost depths, "Your presence, full of intelligence, and so friendly, calls for complete sincerity. I must tell you that the source of trouble for me has always been my own mind. I suffer from an habitual restless condition which has always clouded perception. Hoping to end distraction and fresh desires I abandoned society altogether. At first, for many years, I practiced meditations with gurus. Now I practice alone. Effort and dedication has not been lacking... yet, I can tell you, nothing has been accomplished. Nothing affords lasting satisfaction. I feel stagnated and blocked from real development... Can you help me to find peace of mind?"

An outburst of laughter, almost a howl, was Gotama's immediate reply before he said, "I cannot believe you ask such a thing, or that you continue to wander about, sitting naked in the fields... Well, I have nothing to give you, nothing to demonstrate."

A little puzzled, he couldn't help smiling, feeling that, indeed, something was to be gotten. He kept after Gotama, saying, "Is it by chance that you have come here? You are the very man for whom I have instinctively been searching—a man to whom I can entrust the guidance of my inner world... to acquire the being of a worthy man."

"Just like the fish that covets the baited hook!" Gotama, shaking his head, laughed some more. "Don't think I hide something from you. Truly, I have nothing to hide."

The moist air around them was redolent with the scent of the wild laurel that was blooming all around them. Gotama inhaled deeply, slowly, and softly asked, "Have you noticed the laurel?"

"Yes, I have. Certainly it _is_ wonderful." He stopped for a moment, losing himself in the scent. Observing this, Gotama laughed a little and said, "You see, nothing is hidden from you."

A deep, fresh rush of perception delivered a smile that slowly grew on that face so long unaccustomed. Laughing out loud and bowing again, with a shiver of excitement, he said softly to Gotama, "I have been separating myself from that which I am in the most continuous contact. If one looks for 'truth' one cannot see it. When one listens for 'truth' one cannot hear it. But _here it is_ , _this is it_... abundant, inexhaustible."

Gotama's eyes flashed. He leaned over and whispered, "Look! You are the Buddha!"

As many others would later do, the new _bodhisattva_ remained with the group and as they walked along, one of the original _five bhikkhus_ , asked him about his conversation with Gotama. "What was it? What happened when you smelled the laurel?"

"I had a misunderstanding about 'spirituality' ", the former hermit readily explained. "All along I had felt that beneath everyday reality there was something quite different which I ought to discover—like something transcribed after the manner of ancient pictorial writing. Buddha-mind is your ordinary mind. I smelled it out!"

Later, walking along together, as they paused to watch a solitary water buffalo, the new _bodhisattva_ , enjoying the calm, asked Gotama, "Well, now what is your assessment? How shall we go on now to live our lives? It is my opinion that the daily practices—religious and otherwise—with which we are both familiar have attained such an age that they have outlived themselves. They are becoming like ancient rancid butter, and from them comes decay which is eating itself into our lives."

Gotama's answer, very measured, came slowly and their talk did not disturb the water buffalo. "Let this be our teaching; when we're hungry, we'll eat. When we're tired, we'll sleep."

One of the other _bhikkhus_ , who had been walking behind and listening to everything and did not really understand, said, "Siddhartha, is what you are talking about... 'Enlightenment'. I am longing to experience this too."

"I am willing to help in every way," he replied, again unable to restrain a laugh, "but there are some things in which I cannot be of any help. When you are hungry or thirsty, my eating or drinking will not fill your stomach. When you need to sleep or respond to the calls of nature, you must do these things yourself also."

With this remark the eyes of that _bhikkhu_ , began to be opened and he laughed out loud..

With such conversations, it's not hard to understand why, within a short while, the group gradually acquired a reputation among the villages of the region and that not a small crowd of people came out and attached themselves to the group that followed the Buddha.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

## \--- --- ---

## "There is the material the poet has collected, the material the new spirit has revealed, and this material will form the basis of a truth the simplicity of which will be undeniable, and which will lead to great, very great things."

## Apollinaire

## \--- --- ---

Together we'll attend his first formal talk to 'non-specialists'.

## \--- --- ---

# An Early Sermon—Setting the wheel in Motion

Like the seeker in the last chapter, discovered sitting quietly among a herd of spotted deer along the road leading from the Deer Park, You and I, reader, have encountered Gotama, and have been drawn to follow him. Together we'll attend his first formal talk to 'non specialists'. The lore of early Buddhism tells us that this event, whether apocryphal, or historic, took place at the estate of a wealthy land owner whose name does not come down to us. We know him only as 'the father of Yasa'.

The Pali description serves as our point of departure;

" _At the time there was in Baranasi a youth of good family, called Yasa,_

_the son of a wealthy merchant, of an obedient and refined nature"_...

And while the group was in the vicinity they passed the residence of a man Siddhartha had know as a child, a friend of his fathers'... this very 'father of Yasa'. Gotama left the company, and turning in, off the main road, entered and walked slowly through a grove of bananas and slender palms to arrive at a fine village home. He found Yasa's father admiring the coconuts.

After exchanging affectionate greetings, Gotama explains that he is traveling with a group of _bodhisattvas_. "Siddhartha," Yasa's father said, "already I have heard about you, and I know that the people are turning to you, looking up to you as to a lofty mountain. So... you have become a _guru_ after all!"

Gotama, acknowledging this reference to the prophecy given at his birth, says, "It is not because of any power that I have. Of course you must know that I cannot save or help anyone, but, I am trying to teach them to be able to help themselves. I believe that if I have success, the explanation is that my words, and something about me, verifies their own experience which has not yet dawned upon their conscious minds."

"Reasonable enough." Yasa's father said. "Stay awhile Gotama, if you can. Stay and refresh yourselves. It will be my pleasure to provide hospitality."

**THE SCENE:** _Just outside of the town of Benares; a meal on the estate of Yasa's father's._ _A large villa with slightly sloping tile roofs. Verandas with pilasters of white stucco emerge from thick bougainvillea. Groves of oleander, hibiscus bushes in flower, citrus and guava orchards bearing fragrant fruit. Over wheat bread served with barley rice and peas, the smell of ghee, along with warm spirits, prevails. Gotama and his group of followers recline and converse on several large sheets spread out on the ground for them._

It is evening. Melons, rice, and coconuts on brass trays are passed around by women in bright saris of purple and blue, flowers in their hair. With the prospect of a rather more formal than usual talk before him, I am inclined to imagine Gotama with somewhat the attitude of a doctor pressed into service.

After the meal, he takes up a branch, just as Regret had done, smoothes the dirt with his rough sandals, and traces a large circle as the group gathers around, gradually, to see what he is doing. Still looking down at the dirt, he sits down folding his legs up over his knees, and is quiet a long while.

Finally, he looks at everyone and says, "Everyone seems to understand himself and the world, but really, most people are almost totally lacking in knowledge of either. In fact, it's almost natural now, normal, to have lost a critical interest in our own selves... I mean... even in what ought to be one's most basic concerns... Our contemporary life, too often routine, is conducive to like habits of thinking. Laziness and a lack of curiosity are the result... and... a real helplessness."

And then, unfolding his legs, he stands up, wrapping his arms in close around himself, and stays quiet a while. When, with some drama, he opens his arms wide and says, "Don't you know, Brahman, the Great Self, is playing at 'hide and go seek' with itself... for always and always and always And, each of us, each one of us, ourselves, is Brahman—on purpose getting lost... for the fun of it! Do you know? Have your heard it?"

"How lost... how far out can one go? _Maya_... the categories of human thought... like a game with set boundaries.... all well organized. Look, here's the PAJVA CHAKRA—the Great Wheel of Becoming"

Indicating the circle he has traced with his stick, and six smaller circles drawn around on the circumference, he says, "Here are the Six Great Worlds:

DEVA

HUMAN BEING ASHURA

PRETA ANIMAL

NARAKA

"Notice that it's a wheel. It goes round with no stopping. Anywhere is the top... so... let's start here." Gotama indicates a small circle close to him. "This stands for the DEVAS, the great and powerful gods who hold the open sky, supreme spirits, who we imagine to be happy. These are the ones who have made a success of things. If we think long enough about these, then it's easy to imagine their opposites... (he points to an opposite smaller circle) here... a world of great sadness, the NARAKA, the world of the failures."

"Follow round the circle and we come to the HUMAN realm; a world where death comes more quickly. Here is where we wake up and go to sleep and where there's work to be done. Opposite from us on the circle is the world of ANIMALS. With feelings so like our own, but with language and consciousness comparatively, so undeveloped, they present a continuous caricature of human life."

"Just below the human world..." Gotama walked around and pointed with his stick, "is a spirit world, full of tormented creatures cut short or prevented from growth and development. The PRETA world is where everybody is chronically frustrated; large appetites and not the means to satisfy them."

Stopping his presentation, Gotama made several circuits around the circle he had drawn, gathering his thoughts and allowing the quiet to be heard. At last he faced everyone. Finding just the right pitch for his voice, he began again, "Opposite the PRETA are the ASHURA—different kind of beings. Like the DEVAS, these are highly developed, but are, unlike them, full of anger, furious in fact, and ready to do harm, to inflict pain. These are the ones called 'demons', the 'evil spirits'."

Gotama stopped altogether, folded his arms in and across his stomach. He appeared to be concentrating as if he were trying to remember or organize what he would say next. Or, maybe he had decided, that despite his being the center of everyone's attention, he would enter into a prolonged meditation. He was completely still. The soft sounds of the evening rose up to fill the silent space. Birds flew in and out of the soft-needled casuarina trees and the thick jungle of pandanus. Flute voiced drongues swooped and cut through the air overhead like dazzling knives. Pairs of crested dub dubs sang from the branches.

Gotama's voice cut surprisingly through the moist, still air. "Is everything that I been describing a way of talking about our own selves? Could it be that when we are in a state of equanimity—of balance—between the extremes—then that is 'the human realm'? He indicated that point within the dirt circle that he had drawn.

"Maybe when we become so powerful, happy, and satisfied it is as if we had entered into the land of the Devas? You see what I mean? Say we are overwhelmed... with loss... or in turmoil... maybe then we are in the Naraka realm. When frustrated; among the Pretas? Should we become angry, then we are in the land of the ASHURA... and... (you see, finally, we have gone all the way around the circle) if we are not conscious of ourselves sufficiently, we are among the animals."

"So... are these boundary realms standing for the modes of our being?... Well, then, what sense can we make of this... this _wheel of existence_? How are we to understand it?" Gotama's tone and manner were intimate, confidential, as if he were in conversation with each one of his listeners individually.

"We have been taught to search for a world behind this world—a _real_ world behind this world of _appearances._ So then, maybe it is in this way that all the spokes of this wheel stand for our own inner being? And maybe it is not only every realm in this circle, but also all the modes of our being that perhaps they are standing for which are... unreal. What I am talking about is a lack of substantial reality."

Gotama stopped talking and again became extremely still. One effect of these repeated silences was that everyone was given an opportunity to review and to reconsider his train of thought. Another was that, when at last he spoke again, all were glad and listened with fresh ears.

Now that he had left off repeating and interpreting the old formulas and began to speak common sense out of his own completely novel viewpoint, Gotama completely commanded everyone's attention. "For me, neither family life, warfare, work, ritual, nor the religious teachings and practices I sought out and studied, afforded peace of mind," he began. "All of it seemed removed from _true wisdom."_

Now that he had left off repeating and interpreting the old formulas and began to speak common sense out of his own completely novel viewpoint, Gotama completely commanded everyone's attention.

"Suddenly and this came about because of a song I heard sung by a young woman who had bought me a bowl of rice milk as I sat in meditation it occurred to me to think about music. The idea that I should retain this love of music even though I had not heard any at all for many years moved me very much. Well, then you could say that I began to search out the deepest melodies, the deepest themes of life... as if life were music. When I thought of it like this, it was not so difficult to discover the _raga_ heard most easily amidst its endless variations; the _dukka raga_ , played upon open, unstopped strings."

"Insatiable desire, the will behind everything, by means of an illusion spread over things, can always detain its creatures in life... The love of knowledge, the seduction of beauty, the metaphysical comfort that beneath suffering another realm lives on indestructibly... all of our cultural life is made up of these stimulants of the forgetfulness of sorrow."

"I came to believe, at first, that the cause of _suffering_ was somehow inherent in desire, the deepest root of which is the burning thirst for existence. So, I reasoned, if such passionate longing might cease, then a liberation might be accomplished, a release from suffering."

"Attempting to silence utterly desire, I divided the world. On one side I placed this comparatively blind thirst for existence, and on the other I placed wisdom, which takes a comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to conceive, with sympathy and love, of suffering as its own."

"It was only through music that I was able to understand the joy experienced in the annihilation of the individual. The eternal, the spirit behind the principle of individuation, is given expression in its omnipotence... "

"Up until this time _,_ though there is nothing in the physical world which is pointing to a liberation in this direction, within me an impulse had arisen to withdraw, to imagine a realm of pure spirit... and so, vainly, in isolation, I had been seeking an inner perfection. _"_

"But, as the Pajva Chakra has shown us, there is a limit to how far anyone of us go. One cannot sharpen a knife indefinitely. When I began to understand this a WAY opened for me, a way which led to release... to peace. Anyone can discover it for themselves, as I have. Along with a new freedom I was overwhelmed by a spirit of compassion, which very much surprised me."

"So, here I am, back to the world I had left behind. Though nothing has changed, it's a new world now to me. I can't help now but share my discoveries, telling what I have learned, my mistakes... If one is patient, there are steps that will set one on a direct path, steps that any one may take, steps which will eliminate many difficulties."

"Now listen. I want to suggest how you might place your feet before you and begin to take these steps for yourselves. I ask you to begin by holding in your mind four most important perceptions. Taken together, they will lay the foundation, a foundation of the necessary self consciousness for an experience... a _realization._ "

"First, as I have already said, all life partakes of _dukka._ If you do not get what you want you suffer, if you do get what you want you suffer. Between getting and not getting, life may be compared to a flickering flame. Endeavoring to avoid pain or to gain delight fans the flame, making it blaze. This leads to a second important perception; that _wanting_ , desire, in itself and its expressions in pleasure, power, and permanence, is most fundamentally characteristic of life, and that desire and the world, where all is flux, are at odds. "

"So, then the next, the third important perception become obvious; that suffering will never cease as long as the fire is fed... To avoid suffering one must cease feeding the fire."

"Fourth; the fire can be put out. This is accomplished by not wanting... The flame, no longer fed, will fade... And then, at last, a path opens, easy to follow..."

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:

## \--- --- ---

## "If I regret anything, it is the time when mystical and theological notions induced me to lead too secluded a life."

### Vincent Van Gogh (Letters)

## \--- --- ---

## "I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect of the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country."

### Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

## \--- --- ---

For Gotama there would be no more renunciation, life remained... to be lived.

## \--- --- ---

# Reunion with the Sisters

Gotama woke up remembering Regret's irresistible laughter. No longer afraid of happiness, he laughed out loud before even opening his eyes.

When his eyes did open they observed that the bamboo trees at the end of the grove were parted and that a deer path led off through them. Slipping away from the group camped on the estate of Yasa's father, and then altogether from the little village on the outskirts of Benares, Gotama followed the deer, heading off alone into more open country.

Leaving behind mango trees that were like great black tents pitched in the fields, he came to a deep rutted open road with straight asoka trees and dusty pink and yellow lantana bushes growing along the ditches. The landscape sent back the echoes his heart desired.

He contemplated the ritual drama of the 'temptation'... and penetrated with piercing glance into its inner agitated world of motives. A symbolic picture passed before him whose deepest meaning he almost believed he had divined. The great distinctiveness of his memory picture, which he desired to draw aside like a curtain to get at the original behind it, enthralled his eye and prevented him from penetrating more deeply.

The quiet rhythmic pattern of his paces set up a correspondence and in his mind he heard;

"Kama Mara... Kama Mara... Kama Mara,

Desire... Desire,

Fulfillment,

Regret...

Mara, Desire,

Fulfillment, Regret...

Fulfillment, Desire...

Desire, Fulfillment...

Mara, Desire,

Fulfillment, Regret...

Fulfillment, Desire,

... Desire... "

Implications were not yet settled. Names, relationships, and memories, revolved freely in rhythmic parade as Gotama was coming to understand the entire significance.

Kama Mara had first appeared as an horrific giant, an ultimate threat! But as the drama unfolded, he was revealed to have been the most beneficent, profound, and creative _guru._ His own identity and the direction of his life had taken on a new and forceful unity and power when Gotama understood how closely linked were the their destinies. It had been Kama Mara who issued those prophecies about him at his birth. Behind the scenes, it had been Kama Mara who, when he was a young man, still living in his father's palace, made certain that that he encountered that old man—the first he had ever seen, and then the first sick man, then the dead man, and finally the ascetic.

And when the extremity of his asceticism was leading nowhere and had begun to threaten his life, it was again Kama Mara, who through the most artistically staged encounters, the 'temptations', contrived to deliver him. It was his educational genius which had all along made possible the steps in his development and provided an authentic foundation for what he now understood as his life's direction.

Finally Kama Mara had become his friend. He longed to see him again.

His memories of Desire were even more compelling. Simply, through the expression of her own nature she was able to demonstrate solutions to problems he had never been able to even formulate; insoluble problems. It appeared to be a part of her nature to continually offer contributions to his well-being. The offer of food to him at just the right moment was not only symbolic, and not merely a turning point. He felt that it, and she, had saved his life.

Fulfillment? Opening out and expanding his conception of Beauty, she had encouraged _nirvana_ but he had not understood. Only when he had mistakenly attempted to abandon it, had he come to know that _nirvana_ meant and is life. His gratitude towards her was immense.

And, Regret? Continually he heard, in his imagination, her laughter. With a delightful squeal of joy, she had predicted the fulfillment, which he was finding now.

The luxurious privilege of Gotama's birth had accustomed him, as a young adult, to considering the means of this ease as the most important thing. Later, as an ascetic, it was self-denial that had served to orient him. Finally, he had become aware of the simple, but profound value of his own humanity, a humanity superbly well endowed by nature and experience.

Walking felt best. His feet led. With the days' heat at its greatest, he shrunk from the harsh afternoon light and the more traveled roads. Seeking the refreshing shade of a grove of amlak trees, he fell, again, upon paths taken by deer, which followed the shape of the earth in the ageless jungle forest.

Drawn by an extra sensory perception and by the cooler air that rose off a shallow, wandering mountain stream, Gotama found himself at a small blue green pond with lotuses in blossom. Some were white, with green leaves and stalks. And there were crimson ones too, with large flat crimson leaves and stalks. Ducks paddled between them and white egrets floated in the shallows. All around bougainvilleas gushed up out of the sandy earth in fountains of papery flowers—lilac, orange, crimson, pink. Birds called to each other from the dense shade of mango trees.

To enter more deeply into this scene—as I have done throughout the story—I want to describe an imaginary painting. Something about the colors, the pond, and the grouping of the female forms suggested that the French painter, called an "Impressionist", Pierre August Renoir, might have been drawn to depict this landscape with nudes.

_There are no shadows, only_ c _ontrasting light and dark areas saturated with a continuous succession of color-chords unified by a patterned arrangement extraordinarily rich in sensuous appeal. The scene becomes visible almost secondarily, accomplished in our minds, more by the use of color than of line. Separate objects; the pond, ducks, bougainvilleas, flowering jasmine, crimson lotuses, and even the white egrets, come into view by means of color contrast. The overall impression, created out of seemingly infinite subsidiary designs, everything permeated with a light that is thoroughly graded, suggests both a love of nature and of metaphor. Voluptuous color masses merge harmoniously within a series of rhythms in space. All has ease, grace and fluidity. All evokes the drama of nature and of perception._

Emerging from Renoir's imaginary canvas, we realize that this is the same magical place where, in an inner vision at the beginning of this story, Gotama had first encountered the three young women bathing and drying themselves with a long purple cloth.

Now, like the progression of this story, it seemed to him as if his arrival to this point signaled a culmination—but, he felt that the movement had not taken place in a direction going from 'present' to 'future'. Instead, it seemed as if the momentum, which directed events was no sooner born than it _flowed back_ —at top speed—and settled upon itself.

Wetting first his head with cool water, he then washed his feet. In complete repose, he stood, barefooted and balanced, under a vast banyan tree the long aerial roots of which, trailed from the branches around and above him. The soft cackling of a small flock of parrots sitting at the top eating the small red fruits caught his attention. Straightaway, he entered into an ecstatic meditation. _Timelessness_ overwhelmed him. Birds and other small animals were quick to notice and flocked, gathering to share the atmosphere around him.

Laughter and quick cheerful sounds... feminine voices broke the spell and alerted his attention to the presence of the three 'Goddesses'. —There! Just as he had seen them at first! But now as he observed them his eyes were open. He now knew that the beauty, strength, playfulness, grace, and culture they exemplified were _completely unique,_ lost to the world save through them. The thrilling proximity, the electric attraction of the three sisters taught Gotama to better understand and sympathize with the feeling of his own old comrades, those five _bhikkhus_ who wanted nothing other than to follow him around as disciples.

All this was experienced just below the level of consciousness.

"Our time here has come and gone. Father is right, our 'play' is done." Gotama recognized Regret's voice.

"So, what's next?" he heard Fulfillment ask. "What's left for us now that the Buddha has appeared? Our purpose here is fulfilled."

"I'm still thinking about Siddhartha," Desire cried.

"I know. We all are." Fulfillment

"For him, if was as if there were no temptations." Regret

"Temptations!?" Desire broke in.

"Fulfillment settled things, "For Siddhartha... _initiations_... _"_

Softly, Desire's voice said, "I know that he is in love with me."

These words brought Gotama from out behind the tree, propelling him towards the girls. Desire saw him first. The sudden change in her told the others. "You've been spying!" Mock anger in Desire's voice; "Gotama Siddhartha Buddha!"

She chopped the water sideways with a cupped hand that sent well-aimed splashes up and onto him soaking his garment just as he came within range. Fulfillment and Regret took up their older sister's cause sending water and laughter in Gotama's direction until, at last, he jumped into the stream retaliating with splashing of his own.

For Gotama there would be no more renunciation. Life remained... to be lived.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:

## \--- --- ---

## "Of all lies, art is the least untrue."

### Gustave Flaubert

## \--- --- ---

# Like a Fairy Tale

In begging the reader's indulgence for all the rather obviously fictive elements of this narrative, I can cite a relevant precedent: the general class of stories known as Tales of the Buddha and its sub class; the Mara Tales! No one thinks these stories happened. "They are not like Carl Sandburg's 'Life of Lincoln'," Joseph Campbell once joked.

Psychologically the Buddha and Mara tales (and incidentally their parallels in the early alternative Christian literature) function in many of the same ways as the familiar genre of stories known as 'fairy tales'. Also, they invite retelling and invention, like certain melodies that lend themselves to variation. The present author has felt unconstrained, and even inspired to improvise upon such a rich lore.

One might imagine other volumes in a _series_ of stories; "Kama Mara and His Daughters". A prior one might have chronicled their activities prior to arrival in Aryavarta, when they traveled in Hellas (what we now call the Greek Isles)—and encountered some of the men who became the pre-Socratic philosophers. (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras?) A later one might depict their journey to China and their adventures with Confucius or perhaps Lao Tse.

There is much of the 'life of the Buddha' still to relate, but the story of 'Kama Mara and his daughters in Aryavarta' draws to an end. Explaining elaborately, carefully, even ritually to Gotama that the source of his own inspiration and dedication is the patriarch, Manu, and the Seven Great Rishis, (those progenitors of mankind who journeyed to remote places after the Great Flood, founding, settling, and supporting outposts that would make possible the continuity of man's development), Kama Mara announces his intention to depart.

"One of our tasks as the disciples and descendants of these Rishis", Kama Mara confides, "has always been the preparation of successors to whom knowledge, and all that is connected with it, may be handed down. In this way what has been attained is preserved from age to age, passed even from one civilization to another."

"Traveling the length of Aryavarta, as I have, one might have thought that all traces of Manu's influence had long ago vanished. Many have heard nothing of him. It would appear that every attainment of this remote period has been utterly lost. But, I myself, am living testimony that these have been guarded, protected against persons who might mutilate and distort. It is only carefully chosen pupils, only those who have undergone prolonged and difficult preparation, who have been entrusted with the ancient lore and wisdom."

"Our aim—especially when mankind has regressed to a barbarous state of one kind or another—is to promote and to assist the difficult emergence from that state to a new civilization, to a new life. Though hidden from the eyes of ordinary humanity, our influence persists uninterruptedly."

"You must know, no civilization ever begins of itself. There exists no progress which begins accidentally and proceeds mechanically. Civilization never starts by 'natural growth', but only by cultivation."

"When we think of the great majority of the ideas we encounter, they are nothing like what I am talking about. Nor are they the product of cultivated development, but they are the product of the degeneration of ideas which existed at some time or are still existing somewhere in much higher, purer, and more complete forms."

"Later it will be obvious, but only now is an important truth becoming apparent: mankind is passing through a transitional period."

Mara stepped back. With legs straight and arms extended out from his sides, he bowed more deeply than Gotama had ever seen anyone bow, and spoke from that position. "It is not contrary to _enlightenment_ to be in possession of knowledge concerning the essential nature of man and his destiny in the world. You were chosen, and you have been prepared through your own experience, to inherit Aryavarta's most ancient and most profound understanding" he said.

Then, straightening and rising to his full height, Kama Mara declared,

"A truly existent Brahman, a Unity, is divided against itself...

and so, is continually in need of salvation.

What Brahman is always in need of... what saves or restores Brahman...

and grants the achievement of its perpetually attained goal...

is non-Brahman; the world of Maya,

(including the laws of cause and effect)"

More prosaically, he went on, "One needs to be clear. What is really being talked about? If there existed parts of the infinite _Brahman_ , _Brahman_ would cease to be infinite. We cannot conceive parts in what is neither in time nor in space. Likewise, _Atman_ , the individual living soul, cannot be a modification of a greater divine self, for _Brahman_ is eternal and not changeable and there is nothing outside of _Brahman_... There is nothing that could cause a change in it."

" _Atman,_ the living self cannot, cannot be anything different from the divine self because _Brahman_ , if it is anything, has to be All in All so that there cannot be anything different from it. The divine self and the human self are one and the same. If _Atman_ is not _Brahman_ what can it be? In _Brahman_ there is no room for what is not _Brahman_. _TAT TVAM ASI_ _,_ thou art it."

"What we experience of the world is a double process. At one time, expanding, it grows apart so as to become many out of one, at another it contracts so as to be a single one out of many. All the elements run through one another, becoming different things at different times, and never being continuously the same."

"In _small_ we never find _least,_ but only _lesser,_ for it is impossible that what is should not be. And in _great_ there is always a _greater_ —and it is equal in number to the small so that each thing is to itself both great and small."

"When you sat with the other _bikkhus_ , the drama my daughters performed for you expressed and called into relief a division within _Maya_ ; a sphere of beauty always opposes a co relative sphere of suffering. Only as an aesthetic phenomenon, may existence and the world appear justified _._ And it is only through love that all the limbs which the body has as its lot can come together into one in the prime of flourishing life."

This exposition of Kama Mara's philosophy—which ranged broadly in this manner and explored considerable detail—I dwell now no further upon, nor upon Gotama's reactions and replies. Nor will I dwell much upon the leaving taking of Kama Mara and his daughters from Siddhartha except to characterize the attending poignancies as brightened with anticipation, and with the feeling of conviction—rightness and necessity.

They all knew that Desire would remain with the Buddha.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:

## \--- --- ---

## "Our Art has been masculine through and through, this is to say, lop-sided. It has been vitiated by the unacknowledged feminine principle. This is as true of ancient art as of modern art. Men have paid a heavy tribute for their seeming subjugation of the female... I have a strange feeling that the next great impersonation of the future will be a woman. If it is a greater reality we are veering towards then it must be a woman who points the way. The masculine hegemony is over. Men have lost touch with the earth; they are clinging to the windowpanes of their unreal superstructures like blind bats lashed by the storms of oceanic depths. Their world of abstractions spells babble."

### Henry Miller, On Art and the Future

## \--- --- ---

I'd like the reader to imagine a note for my fictional character, Desire, in Buddhism, as an equal partner with Gotama.

## \--- --- ---

# Desire Considered:

# Considering a role for 'Desire' in the origin and early history of Buddhism?

I interrupt the narrative line once again, this time for the purpose of encouraging the reader to consider why Desire has been previously ignored in the literature of Buddhism. Jane Harrison's analysis, referred to prominently in the first pages of this present work in relation to the "choice of Paris" and the painting of Giorgione, suggested that the high regard of the male and scarcity of attention given to the female in the literature and art of classical Greece amounted to _negativism_ and indicated the possibility that something was being overcome. We have already noted the fact that the same cultural forces were at work in fifth and fourth century BC India.

It may well be that as the _religion_ of Buddhism developed (first by means of the oral traditions and then in the literature of the first few centuries A. D.) patriarchal orientations layered and covered over important aspects and meanings of the life story of Gotama. Memories of Desire with the appearance of the written word, were purged. Then it was made definite: women are to be kept at a distance.

Our current understanding is that the recognition of the equality of not only men, but of men and women, now appears to have been a feature of both early Buddhism and of early Christianity as well. Since in reality, today neither of these religions features such equalities, therefore it appears that those to whom the inequalities were advantageous endeavored successfully to conceal this essential feature and distorted the teaching itself.

The primary source materials of Buddhism include the information that the Buddha had associates, followers, and disciples who were female. These written texts portray the founder of Buddhism as without gender prejudice.

The early sutras mention the mother and wife of Yasa, who abandoned their roles in the conventional social order to follow Gotama, and depict them as equals to the men, sharing their lot much as some women did in the early Christian community. In particular, the treatment of Mary Magdalene in the literature and history of early Christianity may shed light on the striking neglect of Desire in the early writings of Buddhism. In the contemporary literature outside of the New Testament, the 'alternative gospels', a picture of her emerges as an eloquent leader of the faith and an articulate advocate for the Gospel. She is sometimes referred to as 'the disciple Jesus loved most,' and as his 'companion', 'partner',' and 'consort'. A long suppressed but rich and continuing tradition (a heresy) has kept alive the story that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and mother of his child.

The inner group around Jesus, as described in the Greek 'New Testament' is, like the group that the early sutras describe which gathered around Buddha, almost exclusively male. But again, non-canonical texts tell another story. The 'gospels', of Mary, Thomas, and Philip, the 'Dialogue of the Savior,' and the 'Pistis Sophia' all either imply or depict Jesus' close association with women.

Not written until the next generations after the death of Jesus, and so, roughly contemporary with Buddhism's first documents, the accounts of the beginnings of Christianity reflect many similar societal conditions and likewise, reactions to them.

It seems more than simply possible, and I believe it has been often observed, that Jesus and Gotama shared the misfortune, after their deaths, of having their teachings co-opted, and their way of life almost altogether forgotten.

I advocate the strongest role for my fictional character, Desire, in the imagined historical past, in the present, and in the future, and likewise for her companion, Gotama. The literature and oral traditions pertaining to the Buddha and his teaching are vast. The lore of Desire has yet only a beginning.

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:

## \--- --- ---

## "There can be no schools.

## There are only painters."

### Gustave Courbet

## \--- --- ---

Gotama, at this period, is described as a "bountiful man" who "wears a yellow robe and wanders homeless."

# \--- --- ---

# One Day, Many Years Later

The simile of a calf, which enjoys its life with its mother and then stays on with her after the nurturing time has passed, has been used to illustrate the effect that the Buddha had upon many of those he encountered.

It seems reasonable and it's easy to imagine that, at first, in those very early days, most 'Buddhists' lived in remote areas—forming occasional, novel social groups apart from the greater society. Though accounts vary, Buddha was said to be, at times, in the company of over a hundred people; men, women, and children of all ages. Eventually little village groups—of up to several hundred, or even a thousand grew up in which the practice of 'Buddhism' could be facilitated.

Gotama at this period is described as a "bountiful man" who "wears a yellow robe and wanders homeless". One account reads that during the rainy seasons it became his habit to withdraw to one location, the town of Shrvasti. This retreat was known as _vassa._ In the other seasons, when no rain fell, Gotama traveled, teaching about _the way_ he had discovered.

It's easy to imagine him sometimes returning to visit his Shakya home in the foothills of the Himalayas, then walking south, to visit such cities as Kushinava and Vaishal. crossing the Ganges at the port of Patalipurta on his way to Rajagriha, where, it has been reported, he would spend at least a month in the bamboo groves outside the city, always sleeping outside, and spending time each day begging food in the country lanes.

From Rajagrika, likely the Buddha moved on to Varanasi where I imagine him, in his later years, with many hundreds of people accompanying him on pilgrimages to the Deer Park. They must have traveled in the dead of night—because of the sun's heat—and slept all day.

In the early twentieth century Rabindranath Tagore wrote, _"In India we still cherish in our memory the tradition of the forest colonies of great teachers. Those places were neither schools nor monasteries, in the modern sense of the world. They consisted of homes where, with their families, lived men whose object was to see the world in God and to realize their own life in him._ "

The forest, near the village, was like a happy retreat, cool and silent, with flowers and birds... with bowers and huts. To help imagine Gotama and Desire in such surroundings, I want to describe another imaginary painting by a great artist. This time I think it is the Dutchman Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525 -1569) who might have best interpreted Tagore's "forest colonies", depicting Gotama and Desire with oil paints on canvas..

... _a dramatic landscape extending through vast distances... low hills bulge out of the earth... a lingering monsoon cloud puffed up out of nowhere momentarily obscures the sun casting shadows with patterns of contrasting colors. Upon closer examination, to which we are subtly drawn through subsidiary well-integrated color rhythms, the picture is revealed to be teeming with human activity._

_The many figures_ , _which at first sight seem to be scattered at random all over the lower part of the picture, gradually reveal themselves as the units in a varied and effective space-composition._

The 'subject' becomes discernible only when we read the title of the painting: "Buddha and Desire Preaching". Only then, do we begin to look for, and find them, in the lower foreground. We discover them in the context of a level fruited land, well watered with numerous streams, and animated by a sampling of what, when we look closely, represents an endless profusion of activity. A herd of buffaloes, rustling through the grasses, is driven out to graze. Beneath spindly eucalyptus trees, hand-carts loaded with vegetables trundle toward market on a small dirt road. Visible along this road—further away from town are men... carrying... what? Perhaps alms, or maybe supplies. I see some are carrying flowers. Apart, off the road, in a grove of bamboo trees, which form a visual base for further varied and active movement, some men are sitting alone, some in small groups. When I notice their begging bowls I remember the 'forest colony' suggested by Tagore. But the eye is subtly led back to the sal trees and you realize, by the light, that it's morning... Attention rests (visually) while the mind enjoys contrast between a keen interest in identifying and studying the figures and in seeing them merge into a background to which much greater space is allotted.

Entering the picture we can discern the social organization. A routine has evolved. In calm, warm, well-shaded groves, group recitation is taking place. The conventional melodic lines, well known cadences and repetitions produce the sonorous, harmonious effect conducive to an elevated serenity. Peasants, Brahmin's, merchants, warriors, women, children and elderly alike have gathered.

It is the hour for their morning walk. Buddha is a little heavier now and accustomed to wearing ceremonial robes. He is without a turban. He holds Desire's hand. Her long hair, not grayed, is wound closely around her head, up and off the shoulders and neck. She wears a colorful wide cotton sari, which is likewise gracefully wrapped around her body with the loose end thrown over her shoulder.

"Imagine," Desire begins talking right away, "a man wandering in a jungle. Suppose he finds an ancient path, one trodden upon by men of some earlier age, and following it, discovers a dwelling place, surrounded by a park. There are even several lotus pools. Refreshing and beautiful, it's a thoroughly delightful place and it is completely uninhabited. Suppose that man were to go back home and announce his discovery to his family and friends, and propose that they should all go there to live.... well, that's the case with Gotama. He has found an inner dwelling; a place in fact inhabited by Buddha's of a bygone age."

Indicating with his arms the earth and the expanse of sky, Gotama said, "I used to think—'how grand must one become when fully awakened!' and, 'How admirable is he who devotes himself so fully to spiritual activity that he no longer thinks of himself!' But... how mistaken I was! I don't like being called Buddha! It is a singular sensation to hear one's self praised. Positions of honor, and this has always been said, enslave gods and men. I can only attempt to regard such occasions as admonitions..."

"Listen to this." Gotama said quickly, diverting the topic from himself... "I want to tell you a story. I heard it from my first guru—an old man and a mad one for certain. So unlike anything I had been taught, this lesson set me thinking in some new ways and I have never forgotten what he said.

"'It's like this,' he told me, 'Inside us, it is as if we have an ox. Now this ox can obey orders from outside, but the mind is too weak generally to do anything inside. So, however we train or educate the mind, the ox since it is largely untamed and untrained will only know the grossest commands. That's why,' he explained, 'it is easy to decide something but then have trouble carrying out one's resolve."

"'Meanwhile,' he told me, 'don't forget about the driver, and all that belongs to the driver... He can't drag his cart along without the ox.' Well, listen! He yelled at me, ' _You're_ the ox, and it's the ox who must change.'"

"While I was trying to follow all this and to comprehend the meanings, the old man rushed right on to tell me that the cart was important too. He shouted it, 'Its existence has been ignored,' he said. 'but it's a real part of the team. It has its own life, which is the basis of our life. It thinks, is hungry, has desires, work. It too should be educated, trained. Originally the cart was built for a different road. The mechanical parts were built for that road. But the road has changed. It is difficult now to escape a breakdown.'"

"That's just as he told me! Just the way he told it!" Gotama broke off with loud laughter.

Desire was smiling. Looking around she saw the bemused and puzzled looks on the faces around her. She said, "If it weren't laughed at, it wouldn't be 'Buddhism'."

"So, in the old man's story, what then is the self. He would not explain it, but... consider, it can be neither ox, driver, nor cart, neither thought, mind, nor body. These are, each, conditions which the self must submit to; fetters, clouds by which it is darkened, so as to lose the sense of its substantial oneness."

Desire was smiling. Looking around she saw the bemused and puzzled looks on the faces around her. She said, "If it weren't laughed at, it wouldn't be 'Buddhism'."

The lore of Buddhism is rich in 'conversations'. Zen Buddhism especially takes up this genre to great effect. Authenticity is not of concern. Somewhat like collective dreaming or collective novel writing, conversations have suggested themselves and remained in the literature. I wish to add just a few. This next involves a wandering 'truth seeker' who has just joined the group. We can imagine him emerging from Bruegel's painting.

With just a bit of cloth tied around his waist, an emaciated fellow whose age is difficult to determine his face being crossed with dirt as well as wrinkles and his matted hair, being of indeterminate color and tied in a top knot comes up and addresses Gotama and Desire.

This is their first conversation. The dirty fellow introduces himself like this, "Right away, when I heard about you, I felt that I ought to meet you and possibly, be instructed. To this end I have worn out a pair of sandals, and I am glad to find you. Though I have not been here long, already I feel that something is very different. I have not observed customs I expected to find and some social arrangements I have observed surprise me. Men and women are eating, talking, relaxing together. It appears that you are living in easy abundance, in pleasant company."

Desire answered, smiling ironically, "Oh come on, shall be like a line of blind men—each holding onto and being guided by the one ahead of him?"

She had heard this comment before. "Asceticism" she explained, "especially extreme asceticism, is never natural. It is always a reaction. It doesn't, it cannot represent Truth in its original aspect."

Gotama followed her, "When enjoyment loses its direct touch with life, growing fantastic in a world of elaboration, then comes the call for renunciation, which rejects even happiness itself as a snare."

Desire's voice rose where his fell. "Yes... You may have already experienced for yourself that it's easy enough to slice off one's flesh or even to give up one's life altogether for the sake of what one supposes to be a 'spiritual perfection'. In fact, doesn't one make similar sacrifices when one desires fame or fortune in a worldly way?"

Gotama said, "Knotting the hair, shaving the head, sprinkling ashes over the naked body, fine robes, a great house, riches... The hermit and the man of the world likewise indulge or are slaves to their vanities, their passions. "

Desire added, "And also, for the same reasons, are respected by others."

Gotama said, "I have often compared our life in the world to a lotus plant that is living in the water. Our petals do not become soaked." Gotama and Desire took each other's hands and Gotama went on, "Before I came to this understanding I was like a person caught in a room who wants to get out, but doesn't know how. I tried the window, but it was too high. I tried the door, but it was too narrow. If only I had turned around, I would have seen that the door was right there and open all the time."

Desire suggested, "Since it is ignorance that is at the root of trouble... following old customs, obeying rules won't help." When she paused Gotama began, "Only having direct and authentic experiences yourself helps. "

" _Before I came to this understanding I was like a person caught in a room who wants to get out, but doesn't know how. I tried the window, but it was too high. I tried the door, but it was too narrow. If only I had turned around, I would have seen that the door was right there and open all the time."_

Their voices continued as if in song, or like a musical duet with the hands crossing on the piano. Desire began a phrase, "So, we have a saying, 'Whoever wishes may live in a village'..." Gotama followed her lead, "'Whoever wishes may live in a forest.' And so,... in answer to your question... we have no compulsions."

Desire; "To be attached to one thing, say a certain opinion or practice and to look down upon other ones as inferior—this is called 'a fetter'. It is like being chained."

Gotama; "We certainly are not teaching that there is one thing that is the truth and everything else is false."

Desire; "Why drag in _truth_ anyway? Just be ordinary."

Gotama; "For us, the _way_ is keeping in good health, an ordinary life."

Desire; "That is our 'practice'. "

Gotama; "Original mind is like the empty sky."

Desire and Gotama put their arms around each other and bow together to their guest as they finish this long passage.

Another imaginary conversation occurred later, when the cooler breezes of the late afternoon encouraged another walk. Gotama and Desire had left the group and set out along an acacia shaded path. One of the company, a tall, older man, well, but modestly, dressed, in good health and with a friendly way about him, begged their indulgence.

"We knew one another a long time ago, when we were young men. You and I were disciples of the same old guru." he said. "We soon became friendly and discovered that we had each abandoned comfortable lives for many of the same reasons. Do you remember me?"

"My friend, I certainly do." Siddhartha said. "As I recall those problems that gnawed within us like worms and gave neither of us any rest."

"It didn't take you very long to realize that you could not get what you needed with this guru. You left, and not long after, so did I. By that time I had lost hope of discovering anything real concerning those matters which made me join the forest school in the first place." Siddhartha's old friend said.

"Years later, by chance, we met a second time. It was just after you and Desire had begun to teach together. You and I sat together and had a good talk one afternoon. Do you remember?"

Desire embraced him. "It was you", he said to her, "who kept after me, wanting me to give my own answers. We had been talking about death, and about reincarnation. I could not comprehend or accept your lack of interest in this topic, Gotama. Well, Desire, you asked my own opinion about the reasons for birth and death. I'll remind you that I did not know very well what to reply. Although I had thought long about it, and had diligently studied the Vedas, I could not give a decent answer."

"Gotama, you insisted that you had nothing to impart on this question yourself, and that if you tried to give an answer I might have an occasion to make it an object of ridicule and that, anyway, whatever you might say would be your own answer that it would not be _mine_."

"This conversation affected me deeply. I began to think freshly about many things. I admit to you, that I realized that I had been looking for all the wrong things in all the wrong directions. For the first time in years I recalled, vividly, the life I lived before entering the forest. Right then I decided that I would return home to the family that I had abandoned and to try to live, as best I could, the life to which I was born."

"Well you know it is not so easy to go back home. Many things besides myself had changed. My father was now very old, and much weakened. I was glad to be able to devote attention to his household. This is how it happened. One afternoon... it was nearly a year after our conversation... I was sweeping the walk of my father's house when a pebble which my broom had sent flying struck some bamboo. The unexpected sound it produced suddenly, in a flash elevated my mind. Immediately all my discouragement vanished before a feeling of happiness. All anxiety, all doubt was dispelled. The misgivings that had been harassing me a moment before concerning my course of life, and of the possibility of realizing truth, or even of truth itself, were suddenly banished as if by magic. My joy became boundless."

"Desire, the question that you had asked me, which I continued to hold in my mind, became transparent. With that sensation, the sound of a pebble knocking against some bamboo, came all the others connected with it which had been waiting in their proper place, a series, lost and forgotten until this sudden happening imperiously commanded them to come forth. The frivolous, somehow unavoidable way in which I had come upon the sensation guaranteed the truth, the reality which that sensation had revived... and of the mental images released... and the new viewpoint I came to!

"I understood that I would not have had this experience if you had been _unkind_ enough to explain all things to me. You were like perfect gurus."

Gotama, also smiling, but with deep feeling, said "I am glad we did not ruin things for you, but we deserve no credit here. You somehow expected... the unexpected... what you could not have hoped for... or it would have remained undetectable."

Desire, beaming, said, "Your story demonstrates the truth that any teaching, spiritual training included, should be a means to an end—a way towards a direct experience... like the one that you have had."

"Imagine a raft that is used to get across a river. If good teaching can be compared to anything, it is like that. Would anyone think it was wise to keep sitting on this raft after the passage had been accomplished?"

"Gotama and I—since we last met have begun to build what we consider to be a solid raft. We call it the " _Noble Eightfold Path"._ It can get us across. It can help to get us over the difficulties because it leaves them no room."

"Gotama said, "Desire and I, in our formal teaching, say that before one can embark upon the raft, one must understand the _Four Noble Truths."_

#  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:

# \--- --- ---

## "It has to be conceded that man cannot help revealing his personality in the world of use, but there, self expression is not his primary object. In everyday life, when we are mostly moved by our habits, we are economical in our expression... but when our heart is full in love or in other great emotions, our personality is in its flood tide. Then it feels the longing to express itself for the very sake of expression."

## Rabindranath Tagore

# \--- --- ---

## "I believe that the more one loves, the more one will act; for love that is only a feeling I would never recognize as love."

## Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter

# \--- --- ---

# \--- --- ---

# Death of the Buddha—The End of the Story

The last part of their life has been much more settled. People have come to see _them_ in greater proportion as their legs and stamina have weakened and as their fame has spread.

Gotama has lost the full belly of his middle age. Wearing a simple white dress, or long shirt, he is stooped. Carrying a strong bamboo cane, he walks ever more slowly. Desire; gray haired, at his side, holds his arm. Supporting him a bit, she is less stooped and still wears a colored sari.

A woman came forward and bowed. She kept her head down a while before admitting that she had a question. Gratefully receiving their gestures of encouragement, she asked Gotama, "Do you think about death? Some say that they have remembered other, previous, lives and that because of this they "believe in" reincarnation. Is this possible? What, Master Gotama, is the real, correct view about what happens after death?"

"How can I answer this? Gotama began laughing right away. "Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.".

The woman was surprised at this and said, rather bluntly, "Then you cannot tell me what happens when we die? Whether or not we really are born again and become another person somewhere else after our funerals?"

Gotama, who was already smiling, laughed out loud at this, saying, "Excuse me please. When you joined us did I ever agree to elucidate such points? Instead, let's sit together a while and share a cup of tea."

Although she did not understand the point of the Buddha's reply and was somewhat embarrassed, she was happy for the opportunity to spend time in his company and she did partake of the tea. With a lively interest she listened when Gotama, cup in hand, broad smile on his face, renewed the conversation.

"When you came here, when you first greeted me, did I not return your greeting? And when, on one occasion, you presented to me the flowers you had brought from the town, a sweet and thoughtful gesture, did I not accept them most happily, enjoying their scent and beauty? And now we are sharing some tea. Why do you seek something more from me?"

Desire said softly, "He has never had interest in this type of inquiry. He wants, simply, to be helpful to those, as he says, 'on the riverbank'. He says he will 'show them the ferryboat'. But, don't you say Siddhartha, and I like this part, that should they reach the far side, they may discover that there is neither river nor ferry boat nor even the two banks..."

"Nor any Buddha either!" Gotama added, laughing. "That is when the dream of this existence will be neither remembered nor forgotten. Meanwhile... illusion, delusion, and enlightenment are equally offensive. Everything is fine as it is."

Desire, seeing that the woman was laughing, said to her, "You were asking something that is far from yourself. Maybe it is better to _experience_ , to be aware of the here and now."

It's not hard to imagine that when death was at hand, Gotama knew it. Legend remembers that, calling people together, he said he didn't have much longer to live and that if anyone desired to say something or hear an explanation about anything. anything at all he said, and that if anyone were too embarrassed, to have a friend speak for them.

"What?" Desire, who had been his companion continually, said, teasing him as she had when they first met, "for forty five years I have told everyone that the first fact of Buddhism is: _This cannot be taught_. And so _now_ you will begin giving lessons?"

Taking her hands, Gotama said to Desire and to the larger group around her; "She is right."

" _Within this flux of perpetual perishing,_

past and future are as perishable as the present; as any dream.

Let us bear witness to the impermanence

of everything actual.

A thing's real constitution conceals itself,

All things constantly act and come to be but never are."

" _It is_ _love_ _that sees through all dissimulation and masquerade. It penetrates to the core. As a mother, even at the expense or risk of her own life, will love and protect her children, so likewise, it has been my wish to cultivate love without measure."_

Looking at Desire, at those around them, and up to the sky for the last time, legends concur that it was with these words, and while lying on his side, that Gotama Siddhartha, who had become "The Buddha", died.

I end this narrative by asking the reader to imagine Desire organizing some of the "sayings of the Buddha" that had been collected, and helping to formalize the _Eight Fold Path_ and the _Four Noble Truths,_ and then, later, with her younger sisters, returning to their original work; spreading the teachings of the original Seven Rishis and Manu—in their new context—to other parts of the world.

#  AFTERWORD:

## "But follow them no more; my course here bounded, as each artists' is, when it doth touch the limit of his skill."

## Dante (Paradise)

# \--- --- ---

## "Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation."

## Karl Marx

# \--- --- ---

Now that the foregoing historical fantasy is complete, I realize that, along with any artistic impulse, it was my own immature understanding and need to clarify and advance my thinking that motivated the whole project.

I had neither formulated an outline, nor decided against a plan, but had rather, spontaneously, following my interests, read, researched, and gathered materials, a good amount of which, as it turned out, could not be used directly in telling the story of the Buddha.

This 'afterword' will present, briefly, some of these discoveries; a few of the more unusual and provocative approaches towards an explanation and an understanding of the history of the period during which the Buddha lived. Of exceptional interest in their own right, they are, surprisingly little known. Taken together they provide additional insight into the psychology of the characters in the narrative.

Influenced always by historic and geographic circumstance, always and everywhere there have been great differences in man's view of himself. And, subtle change in self-image occurs constantly, both individually, socially, and culturally. This said however, there is a consensus of opinion, which my own research verified, that definite, radical, and widespread changes in man's view of himself (of 'the human condition') forever altered throughout the known world during the period with which this story especially has to do; the lifetime of the historical Buddha.

I think it was the philosopher Carl Jaspers that first called this period the 'Axial Age'. Now, in the axial age, it becomes _characteristic_ for the individual, for the first time, to think of himself as an individual, to be aware of his isolation, to try to understand, through the use of reason and philosophy, the physical universe.

The way man, pre and post Axial Age, saw himself in relation to 'the gods' is particularly telling. By 'gods'' I generally mean those figures described by Homer, and the older Vedas, the pantheon, which we learn of first in Sumer. The hold of these 'gods' upon the individual—which involved a particular recognition of the human limit—would, in the post- axial age, never again be so integrally conceived.

Along with the elaborately described rituals prescribed by the gods, a certain awe began to disappear, the corollary of which was a new preoccupation with the direction, morality, and meaning, of his own life, and also with the possibilities of life after death.

In this sense it appears that in the axial age, man emerges as much a new type, and that a very different mankind passes from the scene.

When I began to look at pre axial age 'India' in this light, the question of the antiquity and origin of Vedic tradition, its relation to the Indus civilization, and the search for the possibility of any links with Sumer, became an anchor of my research. Several of the discoveries of these investigations, which continue to occupy me—and, for the most part, remain unsettled, are included here.

#  IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY'S HYPOTHESIS:

# \--- --- ---

## "The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, we may learn, and know things better. This—as we well may conjecture, resembles truth. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, now will he know it... and even it perchance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would not himself know it; for all is but a woven web of guesses."

### Xenophanes

# \--- --- ---

# Venus as a Comet

In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky's first book, 'Worlds in Collision', appeared in print propounding a startling theory—startling partially because of its broad ranging erudition and scholarship encompassing such divergent disciplines as classical literature, paleontology, folklore, biblical studies, psychology, geology and astronomy, etc., and startling partially because of its implications if correct.

Briefly; what he presented was the idea that two series of cosmic catastrophes took place within historical times, 34 and 26 centuries ago. The sequence he constructed was that what we now know as the planet Venus was shot out from some convulsions of the planet Jupiter and became a comet. Falling towards the sun, it assumed a stretched out elliptical orbit. Passing close enough to Mars to drag it out of its own orbit, and cause significant disruption, it then passed on by the earth.

Velikovsky writes, "It was in the second millennium before the present era... that the Earth underwent one of the greatest catastrophes in its history... a celestial body... a new comet came very close to the Earth, touching it with its gaseous tail."

About 800 years later, Venus came close enough again to Mars and also Earth to wreak major havoc. The spectacle of this event, shown through a broad ranging survey of the written records of the entire world from that period, serves as the starting point which leads Velikovsky to a radically revised chronology of world history.

Velikovsky's analysis puts the development of religion, particularly Judaism in a new light, but likewise a good deal of world mythology and sacred literature in general. What is described in the ancient texts is taken seriously and literally but seen in a new light.

Isaac Asimov, who referred to Velikovsky's theories as a type of 'exoheresy' wrote: "For one thing Velikfovskianism, and indeed, any exoheretical view that becomes prominent enough to force itself on science, acts to puncture scientific complacency—and that is good. An exoheresy may cause scientists to bestir themselves for the purpose of reexamining the bases of their beliefs, even if only to gather firm and logical reasons for the rejection of the exoheresy—and that is good too. An exoheresy may cause scientific activity which, in a serendipitous fashion, may uncover something worthwhile that has nothing to do with the exoheresy—and that is very good, if it happens."

Asimov's references to 'science' and 'scientific complacency' have obvious implications and applications to the story we have imagined..

#  JULIAN JAYNES' BOOK:

# The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

First published in 1976, Julian Jaynes' work, has not received the attention it deserves. Crossing many disciplinary boundaries and arriving at non-traditional conclusions, it presents a critical challenge that is not easily met.

A pretty good summary of the book's main idea appears on the dust jacket. "Ancient peoples... could not 'think' as we do today, and were therefore not conscious. Unable to introspect, they experience auditory hallucinations—voices of Gods, actually heard as in the Old Testament or the Iliad—which, coming from the brain's right hemisphere, told a person what to do in circumstances of novelty or stress. This ancient mentality is called the bicameral mind"...

... "Only catastrophe and cataclysm forced mankind to learn consciousness and that happened only three thousand years ago... Not a product of animal evolution, but of human history and culture, consciousness is ultimately grounded in the physiology of the brain's right and left hemispheres."

If we can accept this hypothesis, for which Jaynes' book provides evidence and support, we can understand then that the end of the bicameral period signals the beginning of 'consciousness', the sign posts of which are the birth and rise of philosophy, democracy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, Judaism, etc. Each of which, in light of Jayne's theory, can be seen as presenting guides for navigating the new predicament of post bicameral man.

It is for the first time; in the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BCE, that the nature of ' _psyche'_ (life/spirit/soul), becomes an object of interest and of controversy. Solon's famous "know thyself," and Socrates' "the unexamined life is not worth living," have full meaning in this context. For a man to 'know himself,' in the new sense, the divine voices must be a thing of the past, no longer necessary. At this point in time the voices already are being pushed aside, relegated to the 'high places'—temples and so forth. Wily, crafty Odysseus, capable of ingenious and on the spot invention, becomes the model of the NEW MAN.

Specifically, the origin of consciousness begins when (Jaynes explains) man 'knows himself' by initiating memories of his own actions and feelings, looking at them together with a sort of model; an ' _analog I_ ' generated at every point by the thing it is an analog of.

Built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior, an ' _operator_ ' emerges; a metaphor of ourselves, neither thing nor repository; intimately bound up with volition and decision, ready to explain anything we may find ourselves doing; or to guide and predict what we might be likely to do. Very useful, it can move about vicariously _'doing_ ' things in our imaginations that we are not actually doing.

Jaynes likens this analogical realm to the _order of mathematics._ It had become the subject of intense investigation by the writers of the Upanishads and by the pre Socratics, when Gotama Siddhartha considered it in 450 B.C.

This theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind illuminates the question with which the present narrative fantasy began; that is, the relationship of religious and aesthetic experience.

When the bicameral mind begins to break down, _poetry is called the divine speech._ It's only later that a division or specialization occurs. In the realm of religion there are prophets, institutionalized sometimes as oracles, and in the aesthetic, there are poets.

Originally the result of direct inspiration, eventually Poetry began to require training, became something one had to learn not unlike having a religious experience. A technique designed to stimulate an experience was required. Characteristic of both techniques is the care to include and encourage _receptivity_.

Jaynes quotes the famous English 19th century poet Percy Shelly, who expressed his understanding of this need for receptivity very clearly when he wrote that, "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry'. The greatest poet cannot even say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness... The conscious portions of our nature are prophetic neither of its approach nor its departure."

Citing examples from a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, Jaynes concludes that all post bicameral creative or innovative 'thinking', shares this character, and relies upon the same inspiration as the older mentality. He offers the following formal summation; that all creative thought includes the following three stages.

  1. Preparation—the problem consciously worked over.

  2. Incubation—without conscious concentration.

  3. Illumination—later justified by logic.

The techniques of Buddhism, at all stages of its history, notably, fit this paradigm, most dramatically those of the _Zen_ school where through specific techniques the _conceptualizing mind_ is silenced and _original mind_ is discovered.

#  THE ARYAN QUESTION

The word _Aryan_ is Sanskrit and means 'noble/cultured'. It is the word used in the Vedas by its authors to refer to themselves. It is still unsettled—no one knows for sure who the original Aryans were and where they came from. As touched upon in the second set of program notes, within the last quarter of the twentieth century, and especially since the turn of the century, a major shift in understanding of this 'Aryan question' has occurred.

The original theory that had gained wide acceptance, and is still credited by some, was that (whoever they were) the Aryans either migrated into or invaded India sometime around 1500 B.C. This 'Aryan Invasion Theory' derived from an observation made in the early nineteenth century in the field of linguistics that Sanskrit, the ancient language in which the Vedas are written, has extremely close affiliations with Latin and Greek.

Sir William Jones, famously proposed in 1786, "No philosopher could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from a common source."

The hypothesis deriving from this observation, which came to be so influential, was that the very widespread distribution of what came to be called the 'Indo-European' family of languages had been affected, in historic time, by the mass movement of a race of peoples; the Aryans, who, coming in 'migratory waves' had left a homeland (perhaps the Caucasus Mountain area—but never identified with certainty) and divided en route with some going to what became Europe, the rest to what became India.

Citing evidence within the Vedas, the original theory imagined the Aryans as a light skinned, blue-eyed people; skilled at horsemanship, equipped with chariots and iron weapons, who overwhelmed and subjugated the indigenous inhabitants whose civilization was at a lower level than their own, imposing their own culture and religion.

When, in the 1920's and 30's, the cities of _Muhenjo-Daro_ and _Harappa_ were unearthed and it soon became clear that these sophisticated urban centers dated from well before (at least a thousand years before) the supposed 1500 BC date imagined for the Aryan Invasion, a 'revised theory' proposed that the Aryans had overrun a river valley civilization which had flourished for at least a thousand years before their arrival; a civilization more advanced but weaker in technology and military prowess.

Where previously the Aryans were seen to be bringers of civilization to a barbaric India, now they were seen to be destroyers of a culture and civilization far older than their own. A further revision suggested that the Aryans may have for a time lived peacefully with the remnants of the once powerful, but now already long in decline, Indus Valley civilization.

Expressed perhaps best by the 20th century scholar, professor and author Gordon Childe, the Revised Theory retained the essential point of Aryan superiority by relocating it. "The lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither material culture nor a superior physique, but a more excellent language and the mentality it generated... at the same time (Childe continues) the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them, by bare superior strength, to conquer even more advanced peoples and impose their language..."

European intellectual and moral superiority was a forgone conclusion to the savants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proved by the success of European colonialism, Christianity and the Industrial Revolution. The condition of superiority was seen in the classical Greeks and carried forward by the Romans. With the discovery of the Indo European language family here was evidence for an even earlier history, one set with a prehistoric past that only archeology could discover. The Aryans or Indo Europeans must have been blessed with this 'superiority' since they too were successful conquerors of vast lands.

However, the influential work of Franz Boas, in _Race, Language, and Culture,_ was able to demonstrate conclusively and influentially that those three (in his title) elements are independent historical variables that characteristically shift, diverge, mix and change even over short periods of time. Thus the term "race", as it had been used was not meaningful. At least in the more learned scientific and academic writing and opinion it was effectively discredited as a useful concept in human biology.

The influence of Edward Said, writing within the last fifty years, has been a force for the thorough discrediting of the theory of inevitable superiority and its attendant conclusions. "I doubt," he wrote, in his widely read _Orientalism,_ if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet _that is what I am saying_ in this study of Orientalism."

The work of Boaz and Said has helped to open scholarship of the modern period to a re examination of all aspects of the 'Aryan question'. Today a new consensus informs investigators that it is at least possible, and even likely, that the last two hundred years of linguistic, archaeological and historical hypotheses have represented a great and sustained error.

The very latest thinking suggests a new model. It sees the Vedas and Vedic culture as very much older than had been originally thought and likely originating in the far South. For many, it confirms the outline of the story told in the Vedas and suggests now the likelihood of Vedic Aryans living in the sub continent since the Deluge.

Gregory Possehl in _Indus Age,_ wrote that, "In the end, there is no reason to believe that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke the Indo-European language and was possessed of a coherent or well defined set of features."

#  L.A. WADDELL'S ARYAN THEORY

The 'strong view' of the theory of the Aryans as a distinct racial group who became _civilizers_ in India has nowhere been presented with as much force of originality and scholarship as by L.A. Waddell, the author of _The Makers of Civilization in Race and History, Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered, The British Edda, Egyptian Civilization: It's Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology_ , and other formidable works.

An authority in many fields, the breadth of his erudition allowed him the freedom to make connections and to arrive at conclusions that are of extreme novelty and which few are in a position to critique. To characterize his conclusions as unorthodox is not sufficient. He establishes an entirely revised chronology for historical man, documenting it with evidence from the most diverse sources.

Waddell's deciphering of the ancient seals unearthed in the Indus Valley disclosed, for him, the Sumerian origin of the founders of that 'great colony' around 3100 B.C., and that it remained a colony until around 2260 B.C. His translations of Indus Valley King lists show 'absolute agreement' with Sumerian King lists—"not only in names and achievements, but also in precise chronological order of their succession." This established "with absolute certainty", for him, their identity with the Sumerians.

"The Sumerians—those foremost civilized and civilizing ancient people whose monuments and high art of 5000 years ago are the wonders of the modern world—were the long lost Aryans... The Phoenicians were not Semites, as has been hitherto supposed, but Aryans and the chief colonizing branch of the Sumerians; and that the people who colonized and civilized India, as well as those who colonized and civilized the Mediterranean, Northwest Europe, and Britain, and who were the ancestors of the Britons, were literate Aryans, and belonged predominately to the Phoenician branches of that race."

Further, Waddell's investigations of the _Puranas—_ the Vedic epics of the ancient heroes—showed that "most of these kings had never been in 'India' at all! They too were, instead, identical with those of Sumerian and Babylonians."

Waddell's understanding of the word 'Aryan' seems to be totally at odds with the modern view. He writes that it was used by the ancients in a _solely_ racial sense to designate the "master men" who "civilized the aborigines". With regard to the migration of the Aryans, he writes that a "great migration" to India did take place, but not until the period of 700/600 B.C. . That migration, he wrote, came from Asia Minor and consisted of the remnants of the Sumerians. The cause, he explains, was the "devastating and annihilating war of extermination waged by the Assyrian king Sargon II."

## The Waddell Problem

The ideological component in Waddell's work is complex and unusual, not always easy to comprehend. A further complication, especially at first, is his sometime use of common words in a specific, technical manner.

'Orientalism' is not reason enough to warrant discounting all of L.A. Waddell's conclusions. These are hard to sort out. Though little credibility is given to his translations of the Indus script by expert opinion, the consensus articulated by the powerful within academia, final judgments are not presently possible, if indeed we are ever to know.

For the purposes of this narrative it is enough to call attention to his work, citing his influence, He is a remarkable example of the ability of a single individual to create a fresh vision of history.

Trying to reconcile Waddell's view of history—in particular his use of Sumer as a model for understanding the Indus Valley Civilization with that of Gregory Possehl's, led me to a broader conception of my fictional characters, Kama Mara and Gotama Siddhartha, both of whom, I imagine, thought of themselves as Aryans.

#  THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL AND THE RETURN OF THE GODDESS:

Some possible questions with no possible answers:

1. Is the role of Desire, and of her sisters (only now beginning to be imagined) better understood in relation to the concept of a "return of the Goddess"?

2. As the Renaissance is associated with the revival of the Classical, will the next age be associated with the Archaic?

3. Are the currencies of the phrases "archaic revival" and "return of the Goddess" in themselves testimony enough of their phenomenal actuality?

The sometimes disorienting rush of the 20th and 21st century civilization's technological progress and social change has prompted many to look back in time for a model and anchor. The prevalence of religious fundamentalisms would indicate a yearning for the remote and pre historic past ('the archaic' as it were)—a time before the current problems all began. In this context the fairly recent rediscovery of the Great Goddess of Neolithic times, and the currencies of theories as to the great extent, continuation, and evolution of her worship in the river valley civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, where modern civilization began, assumes an important psychological significance.

Probably it was the Swiss mystic philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung who has best expressed the modern understanding that man, no longer believing in gods, may experience the gods nonetheless but as _psychic factors_ ; specifically as _archetypes of the collective unconscious_.

Writing convincingly about the rise of then contemporary fascism, Jung described the German nation as possessed by a re-emergence of the Grail Mythology. In this context he described the archetypes (functioning like the old gods) as _collectively_ bringing salvation and protections together with disorder and destruction; requiring sacrifice and ritual, operating individually and collectively, having the power to heal and to destroy; not just individuals but an entire people.

Following this Jungian model, it is the premise of a book written in 1984 called _Return of the Goddesses,_ by Edward C. Whitmont that, fed unconsciously and motivated by archaic emotions and instinctual habit patterns of a deeper mytho-magical state of which it is unaware, the collective 'patriarchal ego' is operating in increased maladaptation; that the analytic/ rational and owner/ materialist trends which are its expression have caused contemporary man to become profoundly estranged from both nature and himself; and consequently to be at grave risk.

Whitmont's argument is that it is _this crisis_ which has constellated or precipitated the Goddess archetype ; the return of the Goddess and her domain in the present moment.

**But what is the "domain of the Goddess?** "

I had imagined her domain to consist in anima figures—in art, literature, and in 'real life'—upon whom the complex contents of these unconscious archetypes of the unconscious may be projected.

But I have been influenced by Terrence McKenna, who, in a book called The Archaic Revival, articulated a different, and, I think, a much broader view;

" _the real division between masculine and feminine is not a division_ _between men and women but rather a division between_ _ourselves_ _as conscious animals_ _—omnivorous, land clearing, war makers, supreme_ _expressions of the_ _Yang,_ _and the circum global mantle of vegetation—the ancient metastable_ _Yin_ _element that constitutes by far the major_ _portion of the bio mass of the living earth."_

McKenna further instructs us to consider that inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence.

" _The widely felt intuition of the presence of_ _the other_ _as a female_ _companion to the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the_ _light of self awareness, self reflection and self articulation; the light_ _of the Great Goddess."_

" _The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation_ _of our group existence in the world. What I call the 'archaic revival' is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes_ _toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The 'archaic revival' spells the eventual break up of the pattern_ _of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization._ _Rather it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that_ _the overarching theme that directs the archaic revival is the_ _idea/ideal of a Vegetation Goddess—the Earth herself as the much_ _ballyhooed_ _Gaia_ _."_

#  ZECHARIA SITCHIN'S ANNUNAKI HYPOTHESIS:

The enormously popular series of books published over the last quarter century by Israeli born author Zecharia Sitchin under the general title "The Earth Chronicles", follows Velikovksy's lead in bypassing academia and going straight to 'the public' with his original scholarship and conclusions. Like Velikovsky, he is concerned with the written records of all ancient peoples. but it is particularly the Sumerians, whose innovations agricultural, metallurgical, pastoral, astronomical, nautical, architectural, legal, literary and otherwise started civilization as we know it, that interest him most. Where many most have read Mesopotamian literature as 'mythological' Sitchin's reading is literal, historical.

Strikingly, individual Sumerians rarely took credit for their formidable inventions and accomplishments, instead attributing everything to a group sometimes called 'gods', but usually referred to, by them, as the 'Annunaki'; a group of individuals, male and female, who "to earth from heaven came"; who were their acknowledged superiors and masters in all respects.

With regard to the project of imagining a life of the Buddha, Sitchin's perspective influenced directly the account of the 'Deluge' given here by Kama Mara, who speaking as a Vedic Aryan, confirms the legend of Manu. This is same account we know from the Sumerians, the outline of which is that the gods saw a disaster approaching that would cause a worldwide flood and decided that mankind should not be warned, but rather, should perish. It is in the Sumerian and Vedic accounts that we find the most information about this period.

When the waters began to subside, the leaders of the Annukaki made the decision—partly out of desperation—to redirect humankind with a goal of restoring the planet to habitability, making men now somewhat more like junior partners than slaves, and introducing and teaching to them the techniques of farming and animal domestication.

Eventually kingship, based on the Annunaki model, was "bestowed upon mankind"—worldwide—but first, in about 3800 B.C., in Sumer. (Prior to that time it was only the Annunaki and their descendants who ruled.) Sitchin's understanding is that the 'goddess' Innana had been given the Indus Valley as her own domain and that kingship was established there in around 2800 B.C.

Relying mostly on fresh interpretations of clay tablets and cylinder seals from Mesopotamia, especially the so-called creation story of the Babylonians, the _ENUMA ELISH—_ which he considers to be a description of the astronomical events which created our present solar system—Sitchin has constructed a complete narrative history which traces the story of the Annunaki; their origins on the planet Nibiru; their sojourn to Earth; their family relationships, rivalries, loves, and, eventually their departure.

Sitchin's discovery that Nibiru, the home planet of the Annunaki has an orbital period of 3600 years meant for him that one Annunkai year was equivalent to 3600 years for an earthling. Hence the relative immortality of these ancient 'gods'.

Naturally, each approach to the sun by Nibiru was critically important to the Annunaki. But, Sitchin writes, there are also hints that as the approach of the planet Nibiru around the sun swung it into the vicinity of Earth, immense gravitational and electro magnetic forces have—especially on its more recent orbits—gravely threatened the population of the earth.

Sitchin writes that at the time of last approach—in around 550 B.C. the Annunaki all departed from the earth and have not returned.

#  RUDOLPH STEINER'S READING OF INDIAN HISTORY

The techniques of the 'spiritual science' of _anthroposophy_ begun just about a century ago have added another dimension to contemporary understanding. Not dependent upon archeology, linguistics, or scholarship of any kind, Rudolph Steiner's method, which might be considered a round about return to the mentality prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind, was to rely upon a direct 'reading', or clairvoyant experiencing of the _Akashic records_.

Steiner's Christianity did not interfere with his intense interest and admiration for Gotama the Buddha. In a talk given in 1909, transcribed in a book called From Buddha to Christ, Steiner endeavored to present a fresh context for the life of the Buddha, giving his interpretation of the role of Buddhism in world history and its place in human spiritual development. I will quote at some considerable length from this talk of Steiner's in the hope that a patient reader may find, as I did, interest and value pertaining to the present fictional narrative and to the theory, of the birth of consciousness from the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

In characteristic declamatory and authoritative style, Steiner jumps right in;

" _In early times the nature of the soul was such that in a condition_ _between waking and sleeping man gazed into the world that lies_ _hidden in the senses. Our consciousness today alternates between_ _waking and sleeping states and we think of 'intelligence' in_ _connection with the waking life only. In more ancient days,_ _however, pictures continually arose and passed away before_ _the soul of man. These pictures were not as void of meaning as_ _our dreams are today but were related to super sensible events._ _Out of the condition of consciousness arising from these flowing_ _pictures, our present so-called intellectual consciousness gradually_ _evolved. A kind of primeval clairvoyance preceded the gradual_ _development of our modern consciousness. Prehistoric man,_ _gazing into the super sensible worlds with this dreamlike_ _clairvoyance, not only acquired knowledge but experienced a_ _deep inner satisfaction and bliss as he felt the connection of his_ _soul with a spiritual world. It is gradually becoming evident_ _that sublime conceptions of a spiritual world were current_ _among ancient peoples but were clothed in pictorial forms._ _Myths and legends are only intelligible when we trace them_ _back to a primal wisdom that was altogether different in its_ _nature from the intellectual science of today...."_

"... _Man, once united with the spiritual world... has since_ _descended into the world of the senses. And this feeling_ _gradually extended into a general attitude of soul until man_ _could say that he had entered the phenomenal world but that_ _it was Maya, illusion. Only when he was linked with the_ _spiritual world could he know his true being. Among the_ _peoples who preserved this dim remembrance of ancient_ _clairvoyant powers, there arose a sense of loss and certain_ _indifference to the material environment and to all that can_ _be apprehended by the senses."_

India, Steiner said, was such a place; where the religious life which arose was the natural fruit of a looking backward to man's former union with the spiritual world. "We can only understand the nature of the Buddha when we contemplate him in that setting." Steiner says, citing "the deeply devotional mood of Indian culture."

What Steiner has to say about _Manu_ and the birth of Indian culture after the flood I also want to include here, without much comment, again begging the reader's indulgence for a second long series of quotations. Arcane and unscientific, Steiner's observations are, of course, not verifiable through deductive reasoning, and upon these grounds, readers may wish to disregard them. But I include them for their colorful suggestiveness, and—not disrespectfully— _imaginativeness_. Much to my surprise, when I discovered them after completing the story, I noted that, by providing specific background details for the broad historical aspects of my fictional narrative, they have helped me to imagine more thoroughly my own story .

Going back to Atlantis, which came up so often in my research, Steiner states that,

" _the entire culture went out from a great initiate associated_ _with 'the Sun Oracle.' The 'Manu', as this leader of the Sun Oracle was called did not choose the bearers of post Atlantean culture from among the so-called scientists and men of learning, nor from the clairvoyants and Magi of that time._ _He chose plain people who were gradually losing the clairvoyant faculty. Our present stage of consciousness_ _only began to develop at the end of the Atlantean epoch. The great Manu gathered around him those who could_ _think intellectually... those who understood and developed_ _the rudiments of counting and reckoning... such were the_ _men who... journeyed with Manu to the Asian sanctuary_ _from which post Atlantean culture was to emanate._ _Leaving America aside, Europe, Asia and Africa are_ _populated by the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans_ _who journeyed to these lands under Manu's guidance..._ _from the very beginning he had to take care that everything_ _might prove of value to a future development should be_ _carried over from the past into the future..."_

" _In the case of ordinary man the etheric body separates_ _from the astral and ego soon after death, and gradually_ _dissolves in the universal ether. The same occurs with the astral body after a certain time but this law is_ _sometimes broken in the interest of spiritual economy. Such was the case of the Seven Great Initiates... It is known in the Mysteries how to preserve the valuable etheric and astral bodies developed by the greater initiates... These bodies were kept intact... The initiate of the Sun_ _Oracle (Manu) journeyed to the other Atlantean oracles_ _to collect the seven etheric bodies of the greatest initiates._ _Those he took along with him. His wisdom attracted a_ _number of people who gathered around him, and under his influence their capacities developed and they gradually grew purer... After a certain time had elapsed,_ _it was possible to incorporate the seven most important_ _etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the_ _ancient Atlantean oracles into seven human beings._ _In regard to their egos, their power of judgment, etc.,_ _they were quite simple people of no importance_ _whatever from an external standpoint. They bore_ _within them, howsoever; the seven most highly_ _developed etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of Atlantis. These etheric bodies had streamed into_ _them, making it possible for them to send out at certain_ _times, through inspiration from above, the great,_ _powerful visions and truths of evolution. Thus, they_ _were able to speak of all this exalted wisdom."_

" _The Great Initiate sent those Seven men, those Seven_ _bearers of wisdom, to India when the people still had_ _a deep comprehension for spiritual things and for the_ _spiritual worlds... These seven men were called the_ _Seven Holy Rishis. It was they who inaugurated our_ _post-Atlantean culture."_

#  POSTLUDE: Part One

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## "Truth exists for the wise; beauty for the susceptible heart. They belong together—are complementary".

### Ludwig van Beethoven (written in a friend's autograph book in 1797)

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The view that every natural process is fundamentally inexplicable, that we are faced with an awesome difficulty in arriving at certain knowledge about anything at all, that beneath cause and effect lies process, and that we do not know the true nature of a single causality was first forcefully expressed in the writings of some of the earliest Greek philosophers. The vocation of Plato's Socrates, several generations later; to challenge certain knowledge, is perhaps this view's clearest expression. In this light his famous maxim, to "know thyself", is interpreted as "know your limits", or "know how limited you are".

When we follow reason, inevitably, eventually, we do come into contact with the unfathomable. As far as we _know,_ truth is unknowable. It was 'Axial Age' man, realizing this, who first learned to make conjectures systematically to get closer to certainty. Modern man, following the same philosophic and scientific procedures, has gone further and shown that the best we can do, in each case, is to identify the setting in which the actual drama unfolds.

Like philosophy, and like science, aesthetics is a way of knowing. But unlike these, and like the wisdom of early India, which pays attention to the wholeness of the world, aesthetics is based on an emotional, intuitive understanding, and on a feeling of and for the unknown, which is behind the visible and tangible.

From the beginning language has been both the greatest asset and the greatest problem. Holding logic captive, it ever enables and limits perception. When, with the clue of logic, thinking (always in words) strives to penetrate the uttermost depths, again and again reason is led to its limits, coiling itself around, snake like, finally biting its own tail... until... as Schopenhauer (inspired by the newly translated axial age Indian philosophy) observed, a new perception is released which, in order to be endured, _will require Art as protection and remedy_.

In art, a totality of events and values, the illusive world, too extensive and too complex for our understanding, in and through symbol, is given limits and measures.

The method of art, requires the application of creative power for a reconstruction and representation, in visible or audible forms, of the perception of a harmonious interconnected unity. Success of this procedure rests upon the fact that the artistic creation must be simply a different expression of the same unity. Through the setting up of this symbolic relationship the artist may learn and also reveal much that he did not know before.

Art of this type is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but is, in fact, a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature. It is in this sense that art is understood as the highest task and proper activity of man.

Art that does not reveal mysteries, which does not add to the knowledge of being, or lead to the sphere of the unknown, is a parody of art.

'Wisdom', as the professed goal of philosophy and of some religious thinking, belongs to art in so far as it fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical purpose.

#  POSTLUDE: Part Two

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## "Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? So that all one's perceptions halfway to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?"

### Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

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Inspired by Democritus, a contemporary of Gotama, who first taught that to arrive at a truth conjectures must be made, approaching the end of this project still seeking to illuminate the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience, I want to consider further, in this context, the role of culture and society in Gotama's life.

Even the highly personal, individual nature of both aesthetic and religious experience can be seen and evaluated best within the greater context of culture and society. In the _INTRODUCTION_ _—_ it was Jane Harrison's idea about the aspects of patriarchal propaganda in later Greek mythology that had served to both anchor and stimulate conjecture, here in the _POSTLUDE_ , an idea of John Berger's, from his book "The Success and Failure of Picasso", may serve in a like manner.

I doubt that he was the first to express it, but Berger makes the point very clearly that when a culture is established—stable and secure and its values certain, it presents its artists with subject matter and there is, then, agreement about what is or is not significant.

Examples abound which illustrate the point, and its corollary, that artists, at such moments, identify with tradition and that their work is dictated by it. This seems a universal principle; analogous and applicable in many different mediums of expressions and in diverse periods and cultures.

Likewise conversely, when a culture is in a state of transition or disintegration, the freedom of the artist to choose his own subjects increases. Likewise, (as the three sisters say in chapter one) the artist's responsibilities will increase, as then he must choose for society.

Though it is apparent that distinctions between, and categorizations of, certain artists and cultures within these two broad types proposed by Berger might be proportionately difficult, yet, there is power and validity to this idea.

Berger observed Pablo Picasso's work functioning as an artistic expression of the social and cultural disintegration of the twentieth century. The violence of the two world wars, the technological and population explosions of the twentieth century, the many shifts in perspective through which humanity went during Picasso's long lifetime were influences which might be said to have contributed to the freedom of his expression with regard to subject matter and style. He did not work within a tradition, except for traditions of his own creation like 'cubism' or the 'blue' or 'rose' periods, and in those he did not remain long.

Looking for a time and artist most representative of Berger's category of ordered stability, the 13th century (especially as it was imagined and written about by Henry Adams) came to mind.

Not of the generations which created the great cathedrals described by Adams, though he uses the same symbols to tell the same stories, the first great modern pictorial artist to express this stability is Giotto. It's his individuality that's separates him.

Giotto is hard to place within Berger's two categories and the ways in which he doesn't fit seem instructive. Apparently, a great and perceptive artist, while operating within accepted parameters in a (relatively) stable culture and society, can still—through the manipulation of traditional symbols in a novel manner, create (and exemplify) radical, transformational change in that culture and society.

Giotto, like an artist of the first type, accepts the themes dictated by the culture (such as the events of the Gospels, or of the life of St. Francis). It's his employment of these subjects that makes him an artist of the second type.

The originality of Giotto's narrative depictions reveals a new focus, one more expressive of emotion, intelligence, and of individual character. In keeping with this new subject matter, he creates and employs a new pictorial technique, one of refreshing naturalism.

The spirit of the handling, the mode of handling, becomes an end in itself, penetrating every part of the matter. Mere subject matter, the actual details/circumstances of a particular event, gives way to form.

Are Giotto's innovations in the direction of individuality and human feeling reflective of proportionate societal shifts? Or, does his art originate these shifts? And... in which of one of Berger's categories, _shall_ we put him?

Despite Giotto's embrace of stereotypical thematic materials, prior dogmatisms are left behind. More expansive, alternative values replace them. The expression of his own individuality implies or becomes prophetic of a larger transformation of culture and prepares the way for the emerging developments of the Renaissance.

Even though his paintings depict events with which his audience is familiar, Giotto never submits his imagination completely to external demands. Instead, he employs it to gain an ever-increasing control over the disciplines and elements which best reflect and express his own artistic talents and spirit. Giotto's real subject matter is his own viewpoint, his individual way of seeing.

Ironically, this is what makes it possible for others to identify with his vision. His influence becomes a turning point, sparking a second axial age. With Giotto, one era fades, a new one dawns.

The very notion of 'subject matter', for all subsequent, post-Giotto great artists, is transformed. In one way or another it becomes their own individual way of seeing... and even the function of sight itself.

Consideration at such length of this apparent tangent is already rewarded as it has made possible imagining the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe as an echo of the axial age, that earlier period when man first began to look within for his direction and the period of time with which this project has been concerned.

In the earlier civilizations, prior to the axial age, the influence of the gods is all pervasive. Within this context, all art is 'religious' art. Alike, among the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Hebrews, for instance, this is readily apparent. Within these powerful societies, in all aspects of life, we encounter the unflagging rigor and devotion to its gods expressive and characteristic of an unchanging, hierarchical vision. At this point, there are only artists of Berger's first type.

Reading the biblical writings we see that, gradually, over time, an increasingly expressive religious individuality may emerge within a hierarchical culture. Simultaneously reflecting and recreating that stable and established religious tradition that defined them, a Hebrew poet or prophet's own personal way of seeing, his 'vision', becomes generally and widely influential.

In this sense certain biblical writers resemble, at least to some extent, artists of Berger's second type. Yet, proportionately, in so far as the themes of these religious creators indicate a characteristic cultural identity and an orientation of submissiveness to a particular greater than human divinity, then each biblical writer is more like an artist of the first type.

In the way that I imagine that Giotto's individual and naturalistic art emerged from an older pictorial tradition of iconography, this story has imagined the birth of Buddhism from the traditions and spirit of the Vedas.

Looking within for his life's direction and purpose, like Giotto's, Gotama's devotion was, finally, not to the dictates of tradition, but was directed to the logic of his own vocation, and to developing his own relative strengths, so that he might gain an ever increasing control and perfection of his own nature.

And comparable to Giotto again, Gotama developed an original conception; a way of experiencing that led to new ways of being, becoming a standard for the future. Becoming both model, subject, and expression, Gotama's conception changed forever the way man saw himself in nature.

With this brief consideration of Giotto and Gotama—two highly individuated types of creative genius—we are brought back around once more to the theme of the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience.

In an essay "What is Art", Leo Tolstoy defined art, as an activity "based on the fact that a man receiving, through his sense of hearing or sight, another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who experienced it."

Accordingly, with the authority of a broad common sense, he reasons, that any true aesthetic experience will be characterized by a sense of union or identification of the receiver of the artistic impression with the creator of it. In this state not only is consciousness of the separation between the receiver and the creator destroyed, but also that between all whose minds experience this work of art.

And so, art, he quite reasonably points out, is at its best only when it is communicated with sincerity; that is, when it is an inner need that compels the artist to express the feelings which have accumulated within him.

Tolstoy's understanding is that this freeing of one's individual personality from its separateness and isolation—in the uniting of it with others, is the chief characteristic of aesthetic experience and the great attractive force of art.

This sense of a union or identification of the receiver of the impression with what creates it, becomes useful in trying to think freshly about the comparisons between aesthetic and religious experience, both of which establish authentic relation to all that is around us.

The reader will have observed that a 'meditation' upon the complex relationship between aesthetic and religious experience has been a _sub dominant_ theme of this project. An initial _PRELUDE_ of _aesthetic_ arrest (the Giorgione painting) brought cascading forth something like an historical novel centered around the most famous of all _religious_ experiences; that of Gotama Siddhartha beneath the Bodhi tree.

Finally... this question begins to settle and it becomes possible to better understand Gotama's experience... and to imagine how, inspired and compelled by inner need to express and communicate the feelings built up within him that derived from his own experiencing of reality, of his own individuality in relation to _infinite being_ , he became a religious artist.

#  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

# \--- --- ---

## "The learned reader must have observed that in the course of this mighty work, I have often transcribed passages out of the best ancient authors, without quoting the original, or without taking the least notice of the book from whence they were borrowed."

### Henry Fielding, Chapter one, book xii, Tom Jones

# \--- --- ---

Readers familiar with the lore of Buddhism may have recognized some passages from the sutras put into the mouths of my fictional characters, but ideas and passages and phrases have been 'borrowed' also from outside the realm of Buddhism.

F. Nietzsche's voice, especially as he speaks in "Twilight of the Idols", informs Kama Mara and sometimes, also Desire. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, Albert Schweitzer informed the narrator's view of Buddhist ethics; likewise, Jean Genet, his concept of ritual drama. The reader may divine others.

Quotations have been a large part of this enterprise, and are identified as such, but the reader, as if on a scavenger hunt, also may look for and find a phrase or two of Gerard Nerval, Alan Watts, Sri Auribindo, A.N. Whitehead, Jack Kerouac, Anita Desai, Marcel Proust, Georg Lukacs, Joseph Campbell, Martin Heidegger, Albert Barnes, G.I. Gurdjieff, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Heraclitus.

I have tried to use these voices the way a jazz musician sometimes will quote a melodic phrase of another tune altogether in one of his improvisations; with humor and with the hope that the source may be recognized and given renewed attention because of the fresh context.

It has been remarked that the Age of the Seven Sages was not very concerned about the attributions of wise sayings, but considered it very important when someone adopted a saying.

Spanning about three thousand years, taken mostly in India, but also in other countries where Buddhism has been practiced, the photographs in this book, were compiled from many sources, but I would like to acknowledge especially three books; The Art of Indian Asia, by Heinrich Zimmer, completed and edited by Joseph Campbell and published by the Bollingen Press, The Art of India Though the Ages, by Stella Kramrisch, published by Phaidon, and the Art of India; Temples and Sculptures, by Louis Frederic, published by Abrams.

Looking through the photographs in these books I began to notice that here were the characters I had imagined. Of course there is Gotama, but when I found Kama Mara and his daughters, so strikingly represented and in such detail, across the ages... my manuscript came alive.

Nearing the end of this project, a quest for a detailed, but still clear map of ancient India to accompany this book led me to the map room of the library of Dartmouth College where I encountered a librarian, Peter Allen. His general expertise and willingness to help led, finally, to the three original maps, created especially for this book, which contribute so much to amplify and illuminate the text.

Two relatives played important roles. My daughter Luette Saul was the first reader. Her incredulous remark, "You don't describe anything!" got me to rethink—to very positive effect—all my sentences. Thank you Luette. Bethany Carland Adams did laborious, significant, professional editing, contributing many useful suggestions, all the while with great respect for the original text. Thank you Bethany.

Finally, I want to acknowledge a woman named Helen Barrett whose suggestion, now almost two decades ago, of a back and forth writing exercise initiated this project. Some of her phrases may have survived.

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