Original subtitles

Hello and welcome back to Bedtime and Historian. In a field in the flat

country of southern Nepal, there stands a broken pillar of polished sandstone,

about 20 feet of it left above ground.

250 years after the man it commemorates had died, an emperor came out to that

field in person, had the pillar raised, and had a line cut into it in the

ordinary speech of the district.

The sage of the Shakyas was born here.

Then he reduced the villagers' taxes, which is how you can tell he meant it.

Before we begin, if you enjoy what is made here, take a moment to like the

video and subscribe.

It is a small thing, and it keeps these long nights going.

And leave a comment telling us where in the world you are listening from, and

what the time is where you are.

There are more of us awake at this hour than you would think, scattered across

every time zone there is.

and seeing your city in the comments is how the next sleepless person finds

their way here.

Tonight, the life of Siddhartha Gautama, who is remembered as the Buddha, a rice

country, a long road, and 45 years of walking.

Settle in, and let the story come to you. A small republic in the rice

country. The country he was born in is flat.

It runs east and west along the foot of the Himalaya, in a belt perhaps 20 miles

deep. and in the cold months the mountains stand up out of the haze at

the northern edge of it, white and very close, with nothing in between.

The soil is old river silt, black and heavy, and it grows rice.

In May the heat comes up off it in sheets.

In the monsoon the rivers come down out of the hills, with more water than their

beds can hold, and spread sideways across the fields, and the villages

which sit on low mounds of their own making, wait for it to go down.

The people who held that ground called themselves the Shakyas, and their main

settlement was Kapilavastu.

It was not a kingdom.

The later accounts make it one, with a palace and a throne and a great king,

because by the time those accounts were being shaped, the world had nothing in

it but kings, and the audience would not have understood anything else.

What the earliest layers describe is something older and stranger, a

ganasanga, which is usually translated as a republic and is closer to a

standing committee of landowners.

Several hundred men of the leading families held the land in common lots.

They met in a hall built for the purpose in the town.

They argued about water, boundaries, marriages and offences.

They voted, and they chose from among themselves a chief to preside.

called a raja, for a term rather than for life.

Suddhodana was one of those men, and at some point one of those chiefs he

farmed. It is generally agreed that the Shakyas were rice growers with

substantial holdings and slaves and hired labour to work them, and that

their assembly hall and the earth rampart around their town were the whole

of their public architecture.

They were also not independent.

A hundred miles to the southwest, at Savathi, sat the king of Kosala, and the

Shakyas were tributary to him. They ran their own affairs and paid for the

privilege, and everyone involved understood the arrangement, and it would

eventually kill them all.

Their western boundary was a river called the Rohini, a modest one, dry in

stretches for half the year.

On the far side of it lived the Kolias, who farmed exactly as they did.

and who had intermarried with them for generations.

Both sides dammed the Rohini and drew off the water into channels, and in a

bad year, when the flow dropped, the men working the two sets of channels would

begin by shouting across at each other about it.

The texts record one of these disputes escalating to the point where both

peoples came down to the riverbank armed and in formation over the level of the

water in a ditch.

and that a member of one family who was related to both sides walked out between

them and asked what the water was worth compared to the men standing in it.

That is the sort of quarrel the place produced.

Nothing was written down in his lifetime or for a long time afterwards.

His teaching was memorised, in verse and in heavily patterned prose built for

memorising, and recited by companies of monks who specialised in one collection

each and checked one another.

It was carried that way for something like four centuries and it was finally

committed to writing in Sri Lanka on palm leaf in the first century BC during

a famine that had nearly finished the order that was carrying it. Other

schools carried their own versions north and east and those survive in Chinese

and in fragments of Sanskrit and where the versions can be laid side by side

they agree closely enough to show a common body underneath.

The oldest hard object that mentions him at all is that pillar in the field.

The dates are worse.

For most of the last century the standard figures were 563 to 483 BC and

they are still printed everywhere.

At a conference in Germany in the late 1980s the whole basis of them was taken

apart and most specialists now put his death somewhere in the region of 400 BC,

give or take a few decades.

which moves his entire life about a century later than the textbooks say.

Nobody can do better than that.

The people who preserved his words had no interest whatever in the calendar.

His mother was Maya.

When her time came, she set out for her parents' house at Devadaha to give birth

there, which was the custom, and she did not get that far.

The party stopped at a grove of salt trees at a place called Lumbini, and the

child was born under the trees.

and they turned round and took mother and son back to Kapilavastu.

Seven days later she died.

That detail is in every version, including the ones with no interest in

making the story sad, and it is the sort of thing that stays true in

transmission, because it is so ordinary.

Women died in the week after childbirth constantly, everywhere, for the whole of

human history up to about 150 years ago.

Her sister, Mahapajapati, took the boy.

She was married to the same man, which was normal in that world, and she had

her own children, and she raised him. He was given the name Siddhata, and he

belonged to the clan of Gotama.

There is a story attached to the first days that the tradition never let go of.

An old ascetic called Asita, who was connected to the household, came in from

the hills to look at the child, examined him, and then wept.

The family took the tears badly.

He told them the child was not in danger, that the marks on him meant he

would be either a great ruler or something else entirely, and that he

himself was old and would be dead before there was anything to hear.

The one memory from the boy's childhood that the earliest texts preserve in his

own recollection is unglamorous and specific.

There was a ploughing festival, an annual thing where the head of the

community broke the first ground of the season and the whole town came out for

it. He was small.

He was set down in the shade of a rose-apple tree at the edge of the field

while the adults dealt with the ploughs and the oxen and the food, and sitting

there, watching, with nobody paying him any attention, he went into a state of

great stillness and ease that he could still describe accurately as an old man.

The rest of his childhood is a wall of legend and there is very little behind

it. What does survive is an account he gave much later.

in a few dry sentences, of how he had been brought up, and it is the closest

thing to a photograph of that household that exists.

He was delicate, he said, extremely delicate.

There were three houses for him, one for the cold months, one for the hot months,

one for the four months of rain, and in the rain's house he did not come down at

all, and there were women musicians in it.

Lotus ponds were kept for him.

one of blue lotus, one of red, one of white.

His turban, his tunic, his lower cloth and his outer cloak were all of Kasi

cloth, which came from Baranasi and was the most expensive textile in the

country. He used sandalwood from Kasi and nothing else.

A white parasol was held over him by day and by night, so that he would not be

touched by cold or heat or dust or dew.

The line that gives it away is about the servants.

In most households of that class, he said, the slaves and workmen were fed

broken rice and sour gruel.

In his father's house, they were given rice and meat.

He married. Her name is oddly unstable in the sources, which is itself

informative, since a woman in that position leaves no trace unless somebody

has a reason to keep her.

She is called Yasodhara in some traditions, Bhadakakana in others.

and sometimes simply the mother of Rahula.

A son was born to them, and the son was named Rahula.

He was 29 years old, and by any measure available in that country in that

century, he had everything.

Three houses, land, standing, a wife, an heir, and a parasol held over him in the

dark, so that the dew would not fall on him while he slept.

The night he walked out, the famous version of what changed him, is a set of

four excursions. He goes out from the house in a chariot and sees an old man

and asks what has happened to him and is told that this happens to everyone.

On a second outing he sees a sick man, on a third a corpse being carried out

and on the fourth a wandering ascetic with a shaved head and a bowl, calm,

owning nothing.

It is a beautifully built teaching story and it is almost certainly a

construction. Because the same four encounters are told in the same order

about earlier Buddhas in the same text, which is the mark of a template rather

than a memory.

His own account of it, preserved in the older material, is flatter and harder to

forget. He said that in the middle of that comfortable life three

intoxications had held him, the intoxication of youth, of health and of

being alive.

And then it occurred to him that he was himself going to grow old, that he was

not exempt from it.

and that if he looked at another person who had grown old and felt disgust and

superiority, something in him was badly out of order, because that person's

condition was his own condition, arriving on a different schedule.

The same went for sickness, the same went for death.

He said that when he had thought that through properly, the intoxication of

youth went out of him, and then the intoxication of health, and then the

intoxication of being alive.

That is a description of a man of 29 sitting in a comfortable house on a hot

afternoon and losing the ability to not think about something.

What he did about it was, in that place and century, a recognised legal and

social move.

Northern India in those years was full of men who had left their households.

They were called samanas, strivers, and there were a great many of them on the

roads, in groups and alone.

belonging to a dozen different schools with entirely incompatible doctrines.

They wore rags or bark or nothing at all. They ate what was put into their

bowls. They argued with each other in the parks outside the towns, and the

settled population fed them and thought well of them for existing.

A man who went forth had no property, no caste obligations, no wife, no name in

the old sense.

He was outside the system.

and the system had a slot for that. The going forth itself has two accounts, and

they do not agree.

The famous one is at night.

He looks in on the sleeping women of the house with their instruments fallen

about them, goes to the door of the room where his wife is asleep with the

newborn child on her arm, does not go in because lifting her hand off the child

would wake her, and leaves.

The groom Channa saddles the horse Kanthaka.

They ride out.

At the river Anoma, some distance off, he cuts off his hair and beard with his

sword, exchanges his clothes for a hunter's, sends the horse and the

servant back and walks away.

The older account, given in his own voice, has no knight and no horse in it.

He said that while he was still young, black-haired, in the prime of life, he

shaved off his hair and beard, put on the yellow robe and went out from home

into homelessness.

and that his mother and father were unwilling and were weeping while he did

it. That is the same event, with the drama taken out and something worse put

in. He did not slip away from them. He stood in front of them and left while

they cried.

He went south, and he went a long way.

From the Shakya country the road runs down out of the wet rice belt and across

the Ganges plain, and he covered something like four hundred miles of it

on foot.

and came to Rajagaha, which was the capital of Magadha and the largest and

most aggressive kingdom in the region.

He was one more shaved man with a bowl in a city that had hundreds of them. The

king of Magadha was Bimbisara, and there is an early poem about what happened,

and it is brief and rather odd.

Bimbisara saw him from the terrace of the palace, going down the street on the

alms round, and noticed him, and sent men to see where he went.

He went out of the city and up onto the side of the hill called Pandava and sat

down. The king came out to him there and made him an offer, which was troops,

wealth and position, and asked what family he came from.

The answer was straight geography.

There is a people over on the flank of the Himalaya, long settled in Kasala,

wealthy and vigorous, called the Shakyas, and he came from there and had

not left it for pleasure.

Bimbisara did not push.

He asked to be told when the search came out somewhere and went back down the

hill. They were about the same age and neither of them can have thought that

conversation would matter to anyone.

Then he did the sensible thing which was to find the best teacher available and

study. The first was Alara Kalama who had a large following and a coherent

method. He went to him and asked to train and Alara told him to stay.

saying that a man of intelligence could master this teaching in a short time and

know it for himself.

He learned the doctrine so quickly, by his own account, that he could recite

the whole of it, and so could everybody else in the group, and he noticed that

he was only repeating words.

So he asked how far Alara himself had gone by direct experience, and Alara

told him, and it was a state of concentration the tradition calls the

sphere of nothingness.

where the mind rests in the absence of any object.

He went off and worked at it and reached it and came back and said so and

described it and Alara checked the description and accepted it. What Alara

did then is the reason the episode survives.

He said that the two of them now stood in exactly the same place, that there

was nothing he knew that this new arrival did not know and that they

should lead the community together.

The most respected meditation master in Magadha offered a man who had been with

him a matter of months half of everything he had.

He turned it down and left because the state he had reached did not go far

enough. It was peaceful and it was temporary and when he came out of it he

was the same man with the same problem.

He went to Udaka Ramaputa and repeated the entire process.

Udaka's community was working towards something subtler still.

a state the texts call neither perception nor non-perception, which had

been reached by Utaka's father, Rama, but not, as it turned out, by Utaka

himself. He reached it, he reported it, and Utaka, who could not follow him

there, did not offer him half of the community.

He offered him all of it, and made himself the pupil.

He turned that down too, for the same reason.

and walked out of the second school in the same year he had walked out of the

first. He was now a man who had trained under the two most advanced teachers in

the country, had matched both of them, had been offered the leadership of both,

and had nothing to show for it that lasted past the end of a sitting. So he

went off to look for it himself, and he went east into the Magadan countryside,

along a river called the Neranjara, to a settlement called Uruvela.

Six years at Uruvela.

He said afterwards that he chose the spot for practical reasons.

There was a clear stretch of the river with good banks and a ford where you

could get across.

There was a grove that was pleasant to sit in, and there was a village close

enough that a man walking out at dawn with a bowl would get something in it.

That is the whole of the site survey.

It is a farming hamlet on a sandy river in Bihar, and he stayed there or near

there for six years.

Five other strivers attach themselves to him.

Their names are given as Kondana, Vapa, Badia, Mahanama and Asaji, and

Kondana is sometimes said to have been one of the men who had examined the

infant at Kapilavastu, which is the kind of tidy link that appears in later

tellings and cannot be checked.

What the six of them did together can be checked because he described it in

detail, twice, in old age, in the driest language in the entire canon.

The premise was one that everybody in that world took seriously.

The body is the problem.

The body wants, and the wanting drags the mind after it, and if you break the

body's grip by force then the mind is free.

Half the ascetics on the roads of the Ganges plain were working on some

version of it, and the ones who went furthest were admired the most.

He began with the mind alone, clenching his teeth and pressing his tongue

against the palate and beating the mind down with the mind.

and said that the sweat ran out of his armpits while he did it.

Then he tried stopping the breath.

He shut off the breathing through mouth and nose and there was a violent roaring

of air in his ears like the sound of a bellows worked hard.

He kept on with it.

The next stage was a wind cutting through his skull and after that a pain

in his head like a strap being twisted tight and after that a pain in the belly

like a butcher's knife.

and after that a burning like being held over a fire pit.

He recorded all of this in order with the similes, and then noted that his

energy was unshaken, and his mindfulness was clear, and that his body was

overwrought and not at peace, and that this was not the way.

Then he stopped eating properly.

He reduced the food to a little bean soup, then to a handful, then to a few

beans or grains of sesame or rice taken one at a time.

and he stayed at that for a long stretch.

He described the results without any self-pity at all.

His limbs became like jointed reeds. His backside became like a camel's hoof.

His spine stood out in a line of knobs like a rope of beads.

His ribs showed like the rafters of a derelict barn.

His eyes had sunk so far into their sockets that they looked like the glint

of water at the bottom of a deep well.

The skin of his head had shriveled like a green gourd cut and left in the sun.

When he put his hand on his belly, he could take hold of his backbone through

it, and when he tried to urinate or empty his bowels, he fell over on his

face. When he rubbed his limbs to get the blood moving, the hair came away in

his hand, rotted at the roots.

People who came past said different things about him.

Some said the ascetic Gotama was black.

Some said he was brown.

Some said he was the colour of a fish that had been out of the water too long.

He was very famous by then, in the way that a man who has taken a discipline

further than anyone else is famous, and the five stayed with him for the same

reason a crowd stays with a champion.

The tradition says that at one point he fainted and was taken for dead. What

broke it was not a collapse.

It was an arithmetic problem.

He had gone as far along that road as a living body could go.

and he was still exactly where he had been.

Whatever it was that he had come out of his father's house to find, six years of

this had not produced a trace of it, and no amount of additional starving was

going to change the result because there was no more weight to lose.

He said he asked himself whether there might be another way altogether, and

sitting there in that state he remembered the afternoon under the rose

-apple tree at the edge of his father's field, a small boy in the shade.

the ploughs going up and down, and the stillness that had come over him there

with no effort and no method and no pain in it at all.

He asked himself why he was afraid of that kind of happiness.

Then he concluded that a mind cannot go anywhere on a body in that condition and

that he would have to eat. So he took solid food, boiled rice and sour milk

and began putting the weight back on.

The five walked out on him.

They had followed him because he was the most extreme man on the river, and here

he was eating, and they said among themselves that the ascetic Gotama had

gone soft and returned to luxury, and they packed up and went west to a deer

park near Baranasi, about 130 miles away.

He was left alone on the Neranjara with a body slowly becoming usable again, and

no companions, no teacher, no school, no method.

and no reputation left worth anything.

The tradition remembers the meal that turned it, and it remembers it as a gift

from a village woman called Sujata, milk rice cooked thick, brought to a tree

where she was in the habit of making offerings, and given to the man sitting

under it because she took him for the spirit of the place.

Around that simple event, later versions built a golden bowl that floats upstream

and a great deal else.

The core of it is a farmer's daughter and a bowl of rice pudding, and the man

who ate it had not had a full meal in years.

The tree beside the Neranjara.

The tree was a pipel, a fig with a pale trunk and leaves that come to a long

thin point and move in air too slight to feel.

It stood a short way back from the river on rising ground.

A grass cutter called Sotthia gave him an armful of cut grass.

and he spread it at the foot of the tree and sat down on it, facing east, with

the river behind him and his back to the trunk.

In the evening, in the hot season, at the full moon of the month, the

tradition calls Vesakha, which falls in April or May.

He was 35 years old.

He had a plan that consisted of one sentence, which was that he would not

get up until it was finished.

What the later art shows happening that night is an attack.

A figure called Mara, The tempter comes against him with an army of monsters,

with storms and flaming rocks, and then with his three daughters, and finally

with a legal challenge, demanding to know by what right this man occupies

that seat, and calling on his own troops to witness for him.

The man under the tree has no witnesses, because he is alone.

So he reaches down with his right hand and touches the ground, and the earth

answers on his behalf.

That is the gesture in half the Buddha images ever carved, the right hand

hanging down over the knee with the fingers touching the ground.

The oldest surviving version of the encounter is much stranger than the

battle, because in it Mara is polite.

He comes and stands beside the starved man and speaks kindly and tells him he

is thin and near death, that death has a thousand parts of him and life one, and

that living is better.

Because if he lives he can make merit, and merit is a fine thing, and what is

the use of struggling?

And the answer given is a list of who Mara actually is.

Your first army is sensual desire.

Your second is discontent.

The third is hunger and thirst.

The fourth is craving.

The fifth sloth. The sixth fear.

The seventh doubt.

The eighth hypocrisy and stupidity.

And after that come profit and praise and reputation and the honour a man

obtains by his own crookedness.

There is no army standing in front of the tree in that version.

There is a very tired man listing, accurately, the things that had nearly

stopped him in the order they had come.

What is described for the rest of the night is set out in three watches and it

is set out in the same flat, ordered.

slightly repetitive prose the texts use for everything else, which is a strange

way to record the most important night in the history of a religion and is

probably the reason it survived intact.

In the first watch, the accounts say, the mind became concentrated and steady

and he directed it towards former lives and remembered them, one and then two

and then many, in detail, with the name he had gone by and the family he had

belonged to.

and what he had eaten, and what pleasure and pain he had known, and dying there

and reappearing here, over enormous stretches of time, contracting and

expanding. In the second watch, he directed it at other beings, and saw

them dying and reappearing, lowborn and highborn, well-favoured and ill

-favoured, and saw that where they went was determined by what they had actually

done, and not by what had been offered for them at any altar.

That last point is the one with teeth in it, in that society, in that century.

In the third watch, he turned it on the problem he had come out of the house

with, and saw suffering, and saw where it comes from, and saw that the thing it

comes from can be brought to a stop, and saw the way of doing it.

And the accounts say that when he knew this and saw it, the mind was released,

and that he knew it was released.

and that there was nothing further to be done it was by then close to dawn the

formula that came out of it is a chain of conditions and it runs in both

directions when this exists that comes to be with the arising of this that

arises when this does not exist that does not come to be with the stopping of

this that stops everything that follows in 45 years of teaching is an

application of those four lines to particular cases.

He did not move for some time.

The tradition counts seven weeks around that tree and its immediate

neighbourhood, and one of them is spent simply standing a little way off and

looking at the tree without blinking, which is the sort of detail nobody would

invent. In another, there is a week of unseasonable rain and cold wind, and a

great serpent called Muchalinda comes up out of the roots and coils around him

and holds its hood over him until the sky clears.

In another, two merchants named Tapusa and Balika come along the road with a

caravan, give him barley meal and honey, and go away as the first lay followers

there had ever been.

And because there was as yet no order for them to take refuge in, they took

refuge in two things rather than three. Then came the part of the story that

nearly ended it.

He considered what he had understood and concluded that it could not be taught.

It ran against the stream.

It was deep, hard to see, subtle, and only visible to a mind willing to be

very still.

And the people he would have to explain it to were delighting in attachment,

were made of attachment, and would find the whole thing exhausting and

offensive. He thought about the effort involved and about the certain result.

which was that he would explain it and they would not understand, and he would

be tired, and he decided to say nothing to anybody.

The tradition fixes this with the highest god in the local pantheon.

Brahma Sahampati perceives what has just been decided, is appalled, comes down

and kneels in front of him and asks him to teach.

On the grounds that there are beings with only a little dust in their eyes

who are falling away for want of hearing it.

and the image that turns him is a pond.

In a pond of lotuses, some plants are born under the water and grow under it

and never come up.

Some rise to the surface and rest there, and some come right up out of the water

and stand clear of it, unwetted.

People, he saw, are distributed the same way, and the ones already at the surface

only need the light.

So he agreed to speak, and the phrase the texts give him, is that the doors to

the deathless are open.

Then he had the practical problem of an audience.

He thought of Alara Kalama first, which is a considerable thing to notice, since

Alara had taught him a method he had rejected.

Alara had died seven days earlier.

He thought of Udaka Ramaputa, who had died the previous night.

Both men had been within a week of hearing it. That left five men he had

last seen watching him eat.

who had decided he was a failure and had walked 130 miles west to get away from

him. He worked out where they were, picked up his bowl and started walking.

A hundred miles to a deer park.

The road ran west and north across the plain towards the Ganges, and then along

it, through a countryside of villages and rice and the occasional walled town,

in the heat before the monsoon.

It was a walk of about 130 miles and it would have taken him the better part of

two weeks.

Somewhere on it he met a man called Upaka who belonged to the Ajivikas, a

rival order of ascetics, and who noticed that this stranger's face was extremely

clear and asked him the standard questions of the road.

Who is your teacher?

Whose doctrine do you profess?

And he was given by a man who had been awake for perhaps a fortnight.

and had not yet said any of it out loud to anybody, the full answer, that he had

no teacher, that he had no equal, that he was on his way to Baranasi to beat

the drum of the deathless, and that he was the one who was fully awakened,

Upaka heard him out.

He then said that it might be so, friend, shook his head, took a side

road, and left.

The first person on earth to be told chose a different path.

and walked off down it.

The five were at a deer park at Isipatana, outside Baranasi, in flat

country a few miles from the river. They saw him coming across the open ground

while he was still a long way off, and they had time to agree a policy.

The man was a backslider who had abandoned the effort.

They would not rise for him. They would not take his bowl or his outer robe.

They would leave a seat available because that much was ordinary courtesy.

and he could sit on it if he wanted to.

The agreement did not survive his arrival.

One of them went out and took his bowl and robe, another prepared the seat,

another fetched water for his feet, without any of them apparently deciding

to. Then they addressed him by his personal name and as friend, which is

how you speak to an equal, and he told them not to do that, and said that a

Buddha had come into existence and that they should listen.

and they would know it for themselves.

They pushed back, and he let them, and they pushed back a second time.

Then he asked them one question, which was whether he had ever, in all the

years they had known him, spoken to them in this way before.

They had to admit that he had not.

Then they listened.

What he said to them that evening is the shortest, complete statement of the

whole thing.

There are two extremes, he said.

and a man who has gone out from home should keep away from both.

One is the pursuit of pleasure, which is low and leads nowhere.

The other is the pursuit of self-torment, which is painful and also

leads nowhere, and every man in that deer park had watched him take it as far

as it goes.

Between them is a middle way which produces vision and knowledge and peace,

and it has eight parts, and they are right view, right intention, right

speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and

right concentration.

Then he laid out the four propositions the whole system rests on. That there is

suffering, and that it includes birth, aging, sickness, death, being joined to

what you dislike, being separated from what you like, and not getting what you

want. That it has a cause which is craving.

and craving has three flavours, for pleasure, for existence, and for the

ending of existence, that the cause can be dropped and the thing stops, and that

there is a method, which is the eight parts he had just listed.

He said each of the four three times, once as a statement, once as a task,

once as a task completed, which is a lecturer's structure.

and reads exactly like a man who has spent two weeks on the road working out

how to put it.

When he had finished, Condanna, the eldest, saw it.

The text marks the moment with a phrase that must have been said aloud in the

deer park that night and stuck.

Condanna knows.

Condanna really does know.

They stayed there for the monsoon, the five of them and him.

Within a few weeks the other four had come to the same place Condanna had.

and there were six men in the world who understood it, and no other person who

did. The seventh was a bored rich boy from Baranasi.

Yasa was the son of a merchant of the town, brought up soft in the same way

with a house for each season, and he woke in the night and looked at the

women of the household asleep around the room with their instruments dropped

beside them and their mouths open, and found it unbearable, and went out of the

house, saying over and over, that it was oppressive and afflicted. He walked out

of the city in gold-embroidered slippers, crossed the river at the ford,

and came to the deer park in the early morning.

Still saying it, the man walking up and down there in the open told him to sit

down, and said that here there was nothing oppressive.

His father came looking for him at dawn and tracked the slippers to the river

bank and across it, and arrived and was talked to.

and went home as the first lay follower to take refuge in all three things, the

awakened one, the teaching, and the order which by then existed.

Yasa's mother and his former wife became the first women to do the same.

Then four young men of the leading merchant families of Baranasi came out

because Yasa had gone, and then fifty more from the surrounding country.

By the end of that year there were sixty men in the deer park who had finished

the work.

and he sent every one of them away.

Go, he told them, for the welfare of many, out of compassion for the world,

and let no two of you go by the same road.

He also gave them the authority to admit others themselves, with a simple formula

of three refuges, which meant that from that point the thing could grow without

him being present, and it never stopped growing again.

Then he walked back east to Uruvela, where his own teachers were.

On the way he came across thirty young men of good family in a cotton grove, in

an agitated state, beating the bushes.

They had come out for the day with their wives, and one of them had no wife, and

had brought a woman for the occasion, and while the party was distracted she

had taken their belongings and gone.

He asked them which was better, to spend the afternoon looking for that woman, or

to look for themselves.

They sat down.

At Uruvela there was an establishment of matted hair ascetics under three

brothers named Kasapa, who tended sacred fires and had 500, 300 and 200

followers between them.

The eldest was an old man of great local standing and he did not give way

quickly, and the texts fill the episode with wonders, including a serpent in the

fire hall.

What is agreed is the end of it.

The whole community cut off their matted hair.

and threw it into the river, along with their fire sticks, their ladles, and

their vessels for the offerings. And the brothers downstream saw the hair and the

equipment going past on the water, and came up to see what had happened, and

joined too. He took a thousand men up the hill at Gaea, and told them that

everything is burning.

The eye is burning, and what the eye sees is burning, and the ear, and the

nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind.

and each of them is on fire with greed and hatred and delusion, and with birth,

ageing and death, with sorrow and despair.

To a thousand fire worshippers on a hilltop, sitting in front of a man who

had just watched them throw their fire equipment in the river, that was a joke

and a doctrine at the same time. Then he took the thousand of them and walked to

Rajagaha, because he had told a king he would come back.

Bimbisara's Bamboo Grove

Rajagaha sits in a bowl.

Five hills stand around it in a rough ring, and the old town lies in the

middle of them with a wall of unmortared stone blocks running along the hilltops

for miles, put up by men who moved rocks the size of a cart and fitted them

without cutting them.

There are hot springs on the lower slopes that still steam in the morning.

There is iron ore in those hills, and that is the whole explanation of

Magadha. Iron for plough shares to open the heavy alluvial soil.

Iron for axes to take the forest off it.

Iron for the weapons that let its kings take everybody else's land.

And behind all of it a plain that grew rice in a quantity that no hill country

could match, with elephants in the forests to the south and a river

frontage to control the traffic.

Everything on that plain was new.

Cities had not existed in northern India for a thousand years, and now there were

a dozen of them going up along the Ganges within a couple of generations of

each other, with ramparts and moats and long streets of workshops.

Small flat pieces of silver, stamped with punch marks, were passing from hand

to hand as money.

Merchants moved in convoys of ox carts, along tracks that ran the length of the

plain, and up into the northwest.

There were sixteen substantial states across the region, and everyone alive

could see them being eaten by the four largest, and Magadha was the hungriest

of the four.

A thousand ex-fire worshippers coming down the road into that city attracted

attention, and the king came out to look at them.

He brought a large part of the town with him.

There was a moment of confusion at the grove where they were camped.

because Uruvela Kasapa was an old and famous local holy man, and the man

beside him was neither, and the crowd could not work out which of them was the

teacher.

Kasapa dealt with it by getting up in front of everybody, putting his head on

the ground, and saying who his teacher was.

Bimbisara made a donation afterwards that shaped everything that followed.

He did not give money.

He gave a park called Veluvana, the Bamboo Grove, on the edge of the city,

and the reasoning attributed to him is entirely practical, that it was not so

far out that people who wanted to come would find it a journey, and not so

close in that it would be noisy at night.

It was the first piece of property the Order ever held, and it established the

pattern for all the rest.

What a community of homeless men could accept was ground and shelter, held in

common, given by somebody else.

Two young men, who were about to matter enormously, were living in that city

already, and neither of them was his follower.

Sariputa and Moggallana had grown up in villages a short walk outside Rajagaha.

They were Brahmins, they were close friends, and they had gone forth

together under a teacher named Sanjaya whose position was a systematic refusal

to commit to any position at all.

They had gone through his teaching, found the bottom of it, and made a pact

that whichever of them found the deathless first would come and tell the

other. Sariputta was crossing the city one morning and saw a monk on the alms

round. It was Asaji, one of the original five from the deer park, and what struck

him was purely physical.

The way the man moved, the steadiness of the eyes, the way he took the food and

did not look at anything else.

He waited until the round was finished, and followed him out, and asked him

whose teaching he followed.

Asaji said he was new, that he could not expound the doctrine at length and that

he would give the meaning briefly.

Then he said one sentence about things that arise from a cause and that the one

he followed had explained the cause of such things and also their ending.

Sariputta understood it standing in the road.

He went and found Moggallana who took one look at his face and asked before he

could speak.

Then the two of them went to Sanjaya and said they were leaving.

and invited him to come as well.

Sanjaya asked them to stay, and offered to divide the leadership of his

community with them, and asked twice more, and they went anyway, and 250 of

his students walked out of the door behind them. The tradition says that hot

blood came out of Sanjaya's mouth as he watched them go.

Not everybody in Magadha was pleased.

Within weeks the townspeople had noticed that a great many sons of good families

were shaving their heads.

and a rhyme went round Rajagaha, accusing the ascetic Gautama of coming

to their country to make women widows, to make families die out and to leave no

heirs, and monks going out with their bowls in the morning heard it sung at

them in the street.

They complained about it.

He told them what to say back, which was that the great ones lead by what is

true, and that nobody sensible resents a man who leads by what is true.

The verse went round for a week and stopped.

Another man came in about then, who would end up holding the whole thing

together after his death.

Mahakasapa was a Brahmin of the Magadan countryside, from a family with vast

estates, who by his own account had never wanted any of it, had married by

arrangement to a woman who wanted it no more than he did, and had eventually

walked away from all of it.

He met the Buddha on the road between Rajagaha and the town of Nalanda,

sitting under a tree, and made his request there.

What survives from that meeting is a swap.

Kasapa was wearing an outer robe of good cloth and asked him to accept it and was

given in exchange the worn rag robe off the Buddha's own back, which was not

done for anybody else and which Kasapa's colleagues never forgot.

One more Magadan figure attached himself in those years.

and he was useful in a way nobody else was.

Jivaka had been abandoned as a newborn on a rubbish heap in Rajagaha, picked up

by a prince of the household, and had gone off as a young man to Taxila in the

far northwest, where there was a school of medicine, and studied there for seven

years. The examination he was set at the end of it, according to the story, was

to go out for a distance around the city and bring back any plant that had no

medical use whatever.

and he came back with nothing in his hands.

He became the royal physician of Magadha, treated Bimbisara, and then

Ajatasattu, opened a merchant's skull and closed it again, and was paid

enormously for it, and gave his mango grove to the order.

He also treated the community for nothing, which meant that a body of men

living on other people's leftovers had the best doctor in India on call.

and a number of the medical rules in the code came directly out of his advice.

By this point, the shape of the working life had set, and it would not change

for four decades.

He walked.

He took shelter for the three months of the monsoon in one of a small number of

places, and then moved again, and the circuit was not large, a stretch of the

Ganges plain roughly 200 miles across, between the hills of Magada in the

southeast and the Kozolan capital in the northwest.

with the same handful of towns coming round again and again.

He knew that road, the way a carter knows it.

Where the fords were, which villages fed strangers well, which parks had water,

how long from here to there in the heat, the first stretch of it he walked as a

man, with a large new community and a royal patron.

The next stretch took him home, begging in his own city.

The news travelled up to the Shakya country in the ordinary way.

which is to say slowly and by people going that direction anyway.

And Sudadana in Kapilavastu heard that his son was alive, was at Rajagaha,

and was surrounded by a following of over a thousand men.

He sent a messenger with a retinue to ask him to come home.

The messenger arrived, heard him teach, went forth on the spot, and never

delivered the message.

Sudadana sent another.

The tradition says this happened nine times.

The tenth man sent was Kaludeyi, who had grown up in the household as a companion

of the same age, and who also went forth, but who at least remembered what

he had been sent for and asked.

At the end of the cold weather, when the roads were good and the trees were in

flower and the going would be easy, it is about 400 miles from Rajagaha to

Kapilavastu, and he took two months over it, teaching on the way.

He did not go into the town.

He stopped at a park of banyan trees that the Shakirs had made available

outside it and waited there. What happened when the family came out to see

him is a scene about seniority in a society that ran on it.

The younger Shakirs were willing enough.

The senior men would not bow because he was younger than they were and they had

known him since he was a child and had ranked above him in the assembly all

their lives.

and they stood at the back with the young ones pushed to the front.

The texts resolve this with a display of powers over their heads that the

traditions describe at length.

What they agree on is the ending, that Suddhodana went down first, in front of

all of them, and said that it was the third time he had done so, the first

being when the child was born, and the second on the afternoon at the ploughing

festival. when he had found him sitting under the rose-apple tree with the

shadow of it, in the story, standing still.

Once the presiding chief had bowed, nobody else could stay upright.

Then everyone went home, and nobody thought to say anything about the

following morning.

He got up at dawn, took his bowl, and went into Capilla Vastu on the alms

round, house by house, standing silently in front of each door and moving on, his

own town.

Streets where every family knew exactly who he was.

Yasodhara saw him from an upper window and sent word to Sudadana, who came out

into the streets so fast that his clothes were disordered, got in front of

him and asked him why he was doing this to them, and said that no one in their

line had ever gone from house to house for food. Not one.

Ever. And he was told, standing in the road with his son's begging bowl between

them, that this was the custom of the line his son now belonged to.

They argued about it briefly, the old man losing, and then Suddhodana took the

bowl out of his hands and led him back to the house and fed him there, which is

what he had wanted in the first place.

Yasodhara did not come out.

The commentaries say she refused to, on the grounds that if she had any worth in

his eyes he would come to her, and that he did go to her, and that she came down

and took hold of his ankles and put her head on his feet.

and that his father spoke up in her defence and described what she had done

in the seven years since he left, which was to hear that he had taken to one

meal a day and take to one meal a day, to hear he had left off garlands and

scent and leave off garlands and scent, and to wear yellow when word came that

he wore yellow.

Then there is the matter of the boy.

Rahula was seven.

His mother dressed him and sent him out to where his father was.

and told him to go and ask for his inheritance.

He went and stood in front of him and said something about how pleasant his

shadow was, and then followed him when he left, asking for the inheritance, and

kept following, and nobody stopped him.

At the park his father told Sariputa to admit him, and Sariputa did, and the

seven-year-old was shaved and given a bowl.

The effect on Sudadana was severe.

He had lost a son, and his grandson was the head of the line.

and now the grandson had been taken to, in an afternoon, without anyone asking

him. He went out to the park and made a request, which was that from then on no

child should be admitted to the order without the consent of its parents.

And that request was granted, and it was made into a rule, and the rule is still

in the code, in the same words, with the reason attached to it.

A man came from Kapilavastu and asked, because it had happened to him. We

cannot know for sure.

But we can imagine that Suddhodana must have felt the line he had spent his life

holding together going out from under him, because in the space of a week he

had lost his second son and his only grandson as well.

That is how the entire body of monastic law was built, one grievance at a time,

and there were to be several thousand of them. There was more of it that week.

His half-brother Nanda, Mahapajapati's son, was in the middle of the ceremonies

of his own marriage.

when his brother came to the house for the meal and, on leaving, handed him the

bowl to carry.

Nanda carried it, out of politeness, waiting to be asked for it back.

He was not asked for it back. He followed the bowl out of the house and

out of the town and into the park, with the girl he was to marry calling after

him from the doorway to come back quickly, and he was ordained that day,

and by his own admission spent a considerable time afterwards thinking

about the girl in the doorway, rather than about anything else.

Then the assembly of the Shakirs met and decided that since a man of their own

people had become what he had become, each family should send a son.

Six of the young nobles went out together to a town over the border to be

admitted, and they took their barber, Upali, with them to see to their hair.

When it was done, they gave him their turbans and jewellery in a bundle and

sent him home.

He walked a little way with it.

and worked out what it looked like, one servant coming back alone with the

ornaments of six missing noblemen, and how a shakier family would read that. He

hung the bundle in a tree for whoever found it, and went back to the six and

asked to be admitted too.

They arranged something for him. They asked that Upali be ordained first,

ahead of all of them, so that for the rest of their lives, the six of them

would have to rise and bow to the man who had cut their hair.

Since seniority in the order runs from the hour of admission and nothing else,

not birth, not wealth and not age. It was done that way, deliberately, to

break their pride.

And it worked.

Anupali went on to become the man who knew the monastic code better than

anyone alive.

One of the six was called Ananda, and one of them was called Devadatta, the

merchant who bought a park.

Savati was the largest city he ever worked in.

It stood on the south bank of the Asiravati in the middle of the Kosalan

plain, behind an earth rampart with a ditch, and the road from the northwest

to the Ganges ran through it. So the caravans came in with horses and

blankets from the hill country, and went out with cloth and rice and iron.

Pasenadi was king there.

He was, by the reckoning of the texts.

born in the same year as the man who would end up spending half his working

life in his capital, and he was a heavy, talkative, uneasy person who kept coming

back with questions, and once turned up to admit that he had just eaten a bucket

of rice and could hardly breathe.

The reason the order ever went to Savati at all was a businessman on a trip. He

was called Sudatta, and almost nobody used that name, because he had a

nickname the whole city used instead.

anathapindika, which means the one who gives food to the helpless.

He was in Rajagaha on business and staying with his brother-in-law, and he

arrived to find the household in an uproar of cooking and cleaning that went

on late into the evening.

He assumed it was a wedding, or that the king was coming.

He asked, and was told that the family had invited the Buddha and his monks for

the following day.

He asked to have the word said again.

Then he asked whether he could go and see him now.

and was told that it was the middle of the night and it would have to wait

until morning. He went to bed and could not stay in it.

The account says he got up three times in the dark thinking it was dawn.

In the end he went out through the city gate, and the ordinary version of the

story is that the gate was opened for him and that the light went out as he

came into the open ground beyond it, which was the charnel ground where the

bodies were taken, and that the hare stood up on his arms and he wanted to

turn back.

and that a voice urged him on, and that he went on and came to a park in the

last of the night and saw a man walking up and down in the open air.

The man stopped and sat down and called him by his personal name.

Come, Sudatta.

Nobody in Rajagaha called him Sudatta.

By the end of that conversation he had asked the whole community to come to his

city for the rainy season and gone home to organise it.

and what he organised is a merchant's idea of hospitality.

He had rest houses put up along the road at intervals of a day's walk, the whole

way from Magada to Kasala, and paid for them. Then he needed a park, and the

only ground of the right size and the right distance from the walls belonged

to Prince Jeta, who did not want to sell.

The prince named a price meant to end the conversation, which was that the

ground could be had for as many coins as would cover it.

Anathapindika accepted.

and the case went in front of the city's arbitrators, who ruled that a price

named was a price named.

Then Karts came out from his treasury, and men laid the coins down on the grass

side by side until the park was covered.

The story is told with a great deal of pleasure in the sources, and it has one

detail that gives it away as something that happened rather than something

invented. When they had finished, there was still a strip near the entrance not

covered, and the prince, by then thoroughly involved, asked to be allowed

to give that piece himself and built the gatehouse on it with his name attached.

Both men are named on the arrangement and both got what they wanted out of it.

What went up on that ground over the following years was the closest thing

the order had to a headquarters.

Cells for individual monks, a hall large enough to hold the whole community,

storerooms, sheds, a bathing tank.

Wells, covered walkways of packed earth for pacing on in the rain, and a wall

around it.

Of the 45 rainy seasons after his awakening, the tradition says he spent

19 at Jetavana and six more at another park on the other side of the same city,

which means that a man remembered for walking spent well over half his

monsoons inside the same two miles of one town. The other park was paid for by

a woman.

Vizaka had come to Savatthi as a bride from a wealthy Magadan family and had

brought her wedding ornament with her, a huge jewelled headdress and cape called

the Great Creeper that took a workshop months to make and was worth more than

most houses in the city.

She wanted to buy land for the order and put the ornament up for sale, and there

was nobody in Savatthi rich enough to buy it, so she bought it herself and

spent the money on the ground and the buildings.

She also went and asked for eight standing permissions, and every one of

them came from something she had watched happen. Cloth for the rains, because she

had seen monks caught in a downpour with nothing to change into and bathing in

the rain with no clothes on and had thought they looked like beggars.

Food for monks arriving in the city who did not know the streets and went hungry

on their first morning.

Food for monks setting out so they did not start a journey empty.

Food for the sick, and food for those nursing the sick, and medicine, and rice

gruel in the morning, and bathing cloths for the nuns, because she had seen nuns

bathing in the river with nothing on while men watched from the bank.

In those years a length of cloth passed through more hands than almost anything

else people owned.

Cotton came off the fields in the black soil country and went to households

where women cleaned it and spun it on a hand spindle in whatever light there was

after the other work. The weavers lived in their own quarter of the town and

belonged to a guild with an elected head who fixed the rates and settled quarrels

and stood surety for members in court.

The dyers were downwind of everybody, with vats of madder root for red and

indigo leaves rotted in water for blue.

and turmeric for yellow, and a smell that was the reason for the arrangement.

The finest work was done at Baranasi, and Kasi Muslin was so fine that it was

talked about all over the plain, and a single length of it could cost as much

as a pair of oxen and a field to keep them in, and it was kept and given as a

gift and counted as part of an estate in the way that jewellery was.

What a person wore, said what they were before they opened their mouth.

The men who worked the fields and the ferries wore hemp, bark fibre or coarse

undyed cotton, one piece round the waist and one over the shoulder in cold

weather, and went barefoot.

A householder of substance wore white cotton, washed with a turban, and put on

his good cloth for a festival, and kept it in a chest the rest of the year.

The nobles of the northern republics wore dyed cloth with everything matched.

and a party of them coming down a road in blue or all in yellow, with their

carriages and their harness and their ornaments in the same colour, was a

thing people came out to watch.

Slaves and hired workers wore what they were given.

Food ran along the same line, and the gap between an ordinary day and a good

one was the whole of the difference.

On an ordinary day, a household ate rice or millet, boiled, with a bean broth,

some greens, a pickle, curd if there was a cow.

The poor ate broken rice and sour gruel, which is why he had thought it worth

remarking that the servants in his father's house had not.

On a festival day, or when guests came, the cooking started the night before and

went on until morning, and what came out of it was milk rice thickened with ghee,

sugar from cane, honey, cakes fried in oil, fruit, and meat or fish

for those who ate them.

People slept on mats on floors of beaten earth plastered with cow dung, which

sets hard and clean and keeps the insects down, and a rope bed with legs

was a thing a family bought when it was doing well and talked about afterwards.

Anathapindika, who could have covered a park in silver, was by every account

still going out most days to see about feeding people who had nothing, which is

how he got the name that displaced his own. The bowl, the robe.

and the rains.

The day started before it was light.

A monk woke, folded his sleeping mat, arranged the lower robe and the upper

one, and the outer one over the left shoulder, and went out at the hour when

there is enough light to see the lines on your own palm.

He carried an iron or clay bowl in both hands against his body, and he walked

into the village with his eyes down, looking a plough's length ahead of him

and no further.

At a door he stood.

He did not knock, He did not speak, he did not ask, and if nothing came, he

waited a short time and moved to the next house, and if the house before had

given nothing, and the house after gave nothing either, that was the day.

Whatever was put in went into the same bowl, rice on top of curry, on top of a

lump of sugar, and was eaten mixed, sitting down somewhere outside, before

noon.

After noon there was nothing until the next morning except water.

and later a few permitted drinks made from fruit.

Then the heat of the day, sitting.

Then the evening, and the night split into three parts, one for sitting, one

for lying down on the right side with the feet placed one on the other and the

time of rising fixed before sleeping, and one for sitting again.

He carried three pieces of cloth and no fourth. The number was set on a

particular winter night at Vasali.

when the cold that comes off the Himalaya in the middle of the season had

settled on the plain and he sat outside in it to find out how much a man

actually needs.

In the first part of the night he put on one robe, in the middle part he added

the second, in the last part, when the frost was coming down, he added the

third, and he was warm enough.

So the allowance was fixed at three and stayed at three.

The cloth those robes were made of was, at the start, whatever nobody else would

touch. A monk went to the cremation ground on the edge of the town where

bodies were burnt or exposed and took the wrappings that had been thrown away

there or picked up cloth from a rubbish heap or from the roadside or the pieces

gnawed by rats and scorched at the edges.

He washed it, boiled it and dyed it with the bark and heartwood of trees and with

tubers boiled up in a pot.

which gave the brown-yellow that has been the colour of that order ever

since, and it was the colour of cloth that had already been ruined.

Then he cut it into pieces and sewed the pieces back together, deliberately, so

that it could never be worn by anybody else or sold in a market.

The pattern of those pieces was decided on a walk.

The two of them, he and Ananda, were on the road out of Rajagaha in the south,

on rising ground.

looking out over the rice fields of Magada, laid out below in a grid of

small squares divided by raised buns and cross buns and channels, and he asked

Ananda whether he could make robes in that pattern.

Ananda said he could.

The robe of every monk in that tradition, from that day to this one, is

cut into panels and sewn back together in the shape of a Magadan paddy field

seen from a hillside. They walked all year at first.

and the complaints came in from the farmers.

In the rains the seed rice is up and the fields are soft, and men going through

them were treading down the young plants and killing the small creatures that

come out in the wet. And even the other orders of wanderers, people said, had

the sense to stop somewhere between the rains and the harvest.

So the rule was made.

From the full moon of about July to the full moon of about October, a monk stays

in one place.

declares it, and does not travel except for a few defined reasons, and never for

more than a week.

That is the rain's retreat, and it is the reason there is any monastic

architecture in the world at all, since a community that stops for three months

needs a roof, and a roof needs a donor, and a donor needs to be in a town.

Twice a month, at the full moon and the new moon, everyone within a defined

boundary came together.

and the code of rules was recited aloud from memory by one of them, and each

rule was asked about three times, and silence counted as a declaration that

you were clean.

A monk who was not clean was expected to say so beforehand to another monk and

settle it. The code itself was not handed down complete.

Every single rule in it was made after somebody did something, and the text of

the code preserves the incident attached to each one,

the name and the circumstances, which makes it the most peculiar legal

document in the ancient world and also the most human. The first of them, the

one the compilers put at the head of the whole thing, concerns a young man from a

merchant family at Vasali called Sudina, who had gone forth against strong

opposition and had been away some years.

He came back to the district on the alms round and his mother found out.

The family's problem was not religious.

It was that there was no heir and that if the line ended the state would take

the property.

His mother put it to him directly and asked him for a child.

And he agreed to it and went with his former wife into a wood outside the town

and afterwards she was pregnant and the property was safe.

Then he could not live with it.

He grew thin and would not say why and the other monks eventually got it out of

him and brought it up.

and he was questioned in front of everybody, and he admitted the whole

thing. He was not thrown out, because there was no rule against it yet, and a

man cannot break a rule that does not exist.

The rule was made that day, and from then on any monk who did that ceased to

be a monk automatically, without trial and without the possibility of return.

The order was still small then, and everybody in it had gone forth for their

own reasons.

It got large.

and large communities contain everything.

There was a famine year on the Vagumuda River in the Vajian country, when the

crops failed and arms were thin, and the monks who had settled there for the

rains were looking at three months of empty bowls.

They came up with an arrangement.

They went to the households along the river and praised one another in front

of them, saying that this one had attained such and such a state, and that

one had reached a stage higher still, and the villagers...

who were themselves eating badly, gave them the best of what they had, because

feeding a man who has actually got somewhere is worth more than feeding an

ordinary one.

At the end of the rains those monks arrived at the general assembly well fed

and glossy, while everyone else came in thin, and it was noticed at once, and

asked about, and admitted.

That produced the fourth of the four irrevocable offences, false claim to

spiritual attainment, and it stands alongside sex, theft and killing.

Most of the rest are much smaller and red like the minutes of a residence

association. A monk dug a pit and the townspeople said the earth was alive and

complained, so digging the ground was forbidden.

A monk went out in the dark in a storm and a pregnant woman drawing water saw

him by lightning and took him for a demon and lost the child, and eating and

wandering at night were restricted.

A group of monks accepted gold and silver, and that was stopped.

In the autumn, after the rains, monks came out of retreat thin and yellow and

unable to keep food down, and five medicines were permitted to be kept and

taken. Ghee, butter, oil, honey and molasses, which is a physician's

prescription written into a religious code.

He was also perfectly willing to tell a man to ease off.

Sona had come from a wealthy family in the south, a man whose feet were

famously soft because he had never walked anywhere, and he took to pacing

the meditation walkway with such determination that the skin went and the

walkway was marked with blood and the crows came down to it, and he still got

nowhere, and began thinking about going home to spend his money on merit

instead.

He was asked whether he had played the lute in his old life.

he had.

He was asked what happened when the strings were too tight, and said the

instrument was not playable, and what happened when they were too slack, and

said the same, and when they were tuned evenly, neither tight nor slack, and he

said that then it played, the women who walked to Vesali.

Sudadana died at Kapilavastu as an old man, and his son came north for it, and

the household that had produced all this was left with Mahapajapati at the head

of it.

The woman who had taken the weak old baby when her sister died and raised him

as her own, she came out to the Banyan Park with a request.

She wanted to go forth, to shave her head and put on the dyed cloth and live

the homeless life, as her son and her stepson and her grandson and half the

young men of her people had already done.

He said no. She asked again and he said no again and a third time and the answer

did not change.

Then he left Kapilavastu and went south, on the ordinary circuit, down towards

Visali. The reasons for the refusal are not given anywhere.

What she did next is not in doubt.

She cut off her hair herself.

She put on the dyed robes.

And she walked out of Kapilavastu with a group of Shakya women behind her, all of

them from the same families, all of them having done the same thing to their hair

that morning.

and they went south on the road to Visali, which is about a hundred and

fifty miles, in the heat, on foot, without carriages, because women of

their class did not walk anywhere, and now had to. They got there. The

community was staying in a hall in the great wood outside the town, and Ananda

came out and found the old woman standing in the porch with her feet

swollen and split, her body grey with road dust, crying.

He asked her what had happened and she told him, and he went in and made the

request on her behalf and got the same refusal three times over in the same

words. So he changed the question.

He asked whether a woman who went forth was capable of getting to the end of the

path all the way, the same as a man. The answer to that was yes, without

qualification, and once it was said out loud in front of witnesses the argument

was effectively over.

Ananda then put the personal case, which was that Mahapajapati had been his

mother's sister and his nurse and his foster mother, and had given him her

milk when his own mother died.

Permission was granted, with eight conditions attached, and the conditions

are as blunt as the permission.

A nun of a hundred years' standing must rise and bow to a monk ordained that

morning. Nuns must not spend the rains in a place with no monk within reach.

Every fortnight they must go to the monks for the date and for instruction.

Their formal ceremonies must be held before both communities, not their own

alone.

A nun may not abuse or scold a monk and may not correct a monk, though a monk

may correct a nun.

Attached to the episode, in the same passage, is a statement that because of

this, the teaching would stand for 500 years rather than a thousand.

That sentence sits badly with everything around it.

including the plain yes given a page earlier, and a great many specialists

read it as an insertion made later by men who had inherited the arrangement

and were uncomfortable with it.

It is impossible to settle.

What is clear is that within a few years there were communities of nuns at

Savati, Vasali, Rajagaha and Kosambi with their own quarters, their own code

and their own seniority.

Yasodhara went forth.

So did Kema, who was Bimbisara's queen and famous for her looks and had avoided

the whole subject for years on the grounds that this was a teacher who

spoke slightingly of beauty, and who eventually went to the park at Rajagaha

because she had heard how pleasant the grounds were.

The verses those women composed were memorised alongside everything else and

are still in the canon.

and they are the oldest surviving collection of poetry by women anywhere

in the world.

They are not devotional, and most of them are not gentle.

One of them, a former slave, said she was free of three crooked things, the

mortar, the pestle, and her husband.

Another, who had been the daughter of a rich house and was now living in a

forest, remarked that she had never in her life been able to go where she liked

before. Two of them came in from further down than that.

Patakara had run off with a servant of her father's house and gone to live in a

village, and when her second child was due she set out to walk home to her

parents. Her husband followed her. He was cutting brush to make a shelter for

the birth when a snake struck him and he died.

She gave birth by the road in the rain, and in the morning went on with the

newborn and the small boy, and came to a river swollen with the storm.

and could not carry both across at once.

She left the older child on the bank and waded over with the baby and put it down

on the far side and turned back into the water for the boy.

She was in midstream when a hawk came down on the baby behind her, and she

shouted and waved to drive it off, and the boy on the bank saw his mother

waving and stepped into the river to come to her, and the current took him.

She came out of the water with neither of them.

Walking on into the town, she met a man from her own street and asked after her

family and was told there had been a storm in the night and the house had

gone down on them and that her parents and her brother had just been put on one

pyre. Her mind broke there in the road. She went about for some time out of her

wits, with her clothes gone, until she came near the park at Savati where a

crowd was sitting and someone tried to drive her off.

and the man teaching told them to leave her alone and spoke to her, and

something in her steadied.

She stayed.

Years later, she was one of the senior nuns, and the woman other nuns were sent

to. The other one is the story everybody knows.

Kisagotami had a child that died when it was old enough to walk.

She would not accept it.

She went from house to house through the town with the body on her hip asking for

medicine for her son, and people told her there was no medicine, and some of

them told her she was mad, until one man sent her out to the park to ask the

ascetic there.

She asked him for medicine for her child.

He said he would need mustard seed.

She could get that in any kitchen in the town, and she turned to go, and he added

the condition, which was that it had to come from a house where nobody had died.

So she went back and knocked on the first door and asked for mustard seed.

and they brought it out at once, and then she asked her question, and the

woman of the house said that the dead here are more than the living, and told

her who.

She went to the next house.

There was seed there too, and a father who had died in the spring.

The next house had lost a daughter.

She went the length of the street and into the next one, and every kitchen in

that town had mustard seed, and not one of them could meet the condition.

Towards evening she stopped asking.

She took the child out to the burning ground and laid it down there, and then

she went back to the park.

He had not argued with her, and he had not consoled her, and he had sent her

out to be told the same thing forty times by her neighbours until she could

hear it. Other teachers on the same roads.

The parks outside the towns were crowded with schools, and they were noisy.

A wanderer's park held a hundred men from a dozen different traditions.

living in the shade and arguing, and the texts, which had no reason to flatter

them, described the general conversation as being about kings and thieves and

ministers, about armies and battles, about food, drink, clothing, beds,

garlands, perfume, relatives, villages, the sea, and whether things will be one

way or another.

It was a coffee house with begging bowls.

A single night at Rajagaha gives the whole landscape of it, because a king

went out looking for a teacher and worked through the alternatives out

loud.

Ajatasattu of Magadha came out on a full moon night in the autumn with a large

party and a train of elephants to the mango grove of Jivaka, the royal

physician, and as they came near the grove where over a thousand monks were

sitting, the king pulled up because the place was making no sound at all.

and said so, and asked his physician whether he was being led into a trap.

Inside, he asked his question, which was practical.

Every trade produces something you can see.

A ploughman produces rice, an elephant driver produces trained elephants, an

archer produces a service the crown pays for.

What does a man produce by shaving his head and going out with a bowl in this

life that anyone can point at? Then he said, that he had already put this

question to the six best-known teachers in the country and got nothing back from

any of them, and he ran through them.

Purana Kasapa had told him that action does not exist in any morally meaningful

sense, that a man who went along the south bank of the Ganges killing and

burning everything he found would incur no evil at all, and a man who went along

the north bank giving everything away would gain nothing.

Makali Gosala, who led the Ajivikas and was the most successful of the six, had

told him that there is no cause of anything, that no effort of any kind

alters an outcome, and that every being simply runs out its allotted course

through an unimaginable number of lives like a ball of string thrown out and

unwinding until it comes to the end.

Ajita of the hair blanket, who wore a garment woven from human hair that was

cold in the hot season and hot in the cold, had told him that a person is four

elements and nothing else, that at death the earth in him goes back to earth and

the water to water, that his body is carried out on a bier by four men who

talk about him as far as the burning ground, that the bones turn the colour

of a pigeon, and that fools and wise men alike are cut off and destroyed and

there is nothing whatever afterwards.

Pakuda had told him that there are seven bodies in a person, unmade and

unchangeable, and that when a sword goes through a man's head it does not kill

anybody, it merely passes between the seven. The leader of the Jains had given

him a formula about being restrained in four ways.

And Sanjaya, the eel wriggler, whose two best students had walked out to join the

order, had refused the question in every direction at once, declining to say that

it is so.

or that it is not so, or that it is both, or that it is neither.

The answer he got that night is not what makes the scene worth having. What makes

it worth having is that the man asking is the one who would shortly kill his

father, and that he says so before he leaves, in front of everyone.

Of the six, the one who mattered was the Jain.

Nigantha Nataputta, whom his own people call Mahavira, was an older

contemporary.

working the same towns with the same kind of following, and a great deal more

asceticism. His monks went naked or nearly so, strained their drinking

water, swept the ground in front of their feet, and starved themselves to

death at the end by choice, all of it in earnest pursuit of doing no harm to any

living thing.

The two orders were in constant contact.

They begged in the same streets, took gifts from the same merchants, and lost

followers to each other, and there was one wealthy Jane layman at Nalanda who

came to argue and lost the argument and changed sides, and was told to go on

supporting his old teachers with food as he always had.

The rivalry produced one nasty episode at Savati.

A woman wanderer named Sinka began going out to Jetavana in the evening in front

of witnesses, and coming back in the morning, and over some months bound

cloth and then a wooden disc under her clothes to make herself look pregnant,

and then came into the hall in the middle of a teaching in front of a full

assembly and accused the man on the seat of being the father and of doing nothing

about it.

The story says the disc fell out and rolled on the floor.

It survives only in commentary written down a long time afterwards.

No one has ever confirmed a word of it.

and a great many people in Savatthi believed a version of it at the time,

and his own community had to sit in a hall and listen to it being said. The

one thing he would not do was speculate.

A monk called Malankyaputta got tired of this and came to him with an ultimatum.

He wanted to know whether the universe is eternal or not, whether it is finite

or infinite, whether the soul is the same thing as the body, and what happens

to an awakened man after death.

and he said that if he did not get answers he was going back to lay life.

The reply was a scene rather than an argument.

A man is shot with an arrow smeared with poison, he said, and his friends and

relatives bring a surgeon, and the man says, Wait, do not draw this arrow out

until I know whether the man who shot me was a noble or a merchant or a worker,

and what his name is and what village he comes from, whether he was tall or short

or of middle height.

Whether the bow was a longbow or a crossbow, whether the string was made of

hemp or sinew or bark, whether the shaft was reed or cultivated wood, whether the

feathers were from a vulture or a heron or a peacock.

That man will die, he said, and he will still not know any of it. Then he said

what he did teach, and it was four things and no more. There is suffering,

there is where it comes from, there is the ending of it, and there is the way

to the ending of it.

and those are useful and the rest is not.

There is a scene from the same years at Savathi where he interfered directly

with the king.

Pasenadi had ordered a great sacrifice on the advice of his Brahmins and the

preparations were underway outside the city.

500 bulls, 500 bullocks, 500 heifers, 500 goats and 500

rams had been brought to the ground and tied to the posts and the pits were dug.

and the wood laid.

What the account fixes on is not the animals.

It is the slaves and the servants and the workmen doing the preparation, who

were being driven at it with threats and with beating, and who were doing the

work with tears running down their faces.

Pasanadi heard the objection and cancelled it, and had the animals turned

loose and the posts pulled up, and the grass they had been tied to was left to

grow. The quarrel at Kosambi.

Kosambi stood on the Yamuna, west of everything else in the story, at the

point where the river traffic met the road coming down from the north-west,

and it was a cotton and cloth town, with a rampart of packed earth that is still

there as a long grassy ridge.

Three of its merchants had each given a park, and the order used all three. The

trouble started in a washroom.

A monk who was an authority on the discourses went to the toilet and left

the water vessel with water still standing in it.

which was a minor breach of the rules of that place.

A monk who was an authority on the discipline came in after him, saw it,

and said nothing at the time.

Later he asked whether a monk who did that had committed an offence. The first

man said he was not aware of it being one.

He was told that it was, and he said that in that case he had not known, and

he was told that if he had not known there was no offence at all, and that

appeared to settle it.

Then the discipline expert went back to his own pupils and told them that this

famous teacher of the discourses did not even know when he had committed an

offence. The pupils repeated it. The other man's pupils heard the report and

said that their teacher was being slandered.

Within a few weeks, the community at Cozumbe had formally suspended one of

its senior members.

His following refused to recognise the suspension as valid.

The two groups were reciting the fortnightly code separately inside the

same boundary, which is the technical definition of a split order, and they

were quarrelling in the refectory in front of the servants.

The lay people of the town took sides, and so, according to the text, did the

monks who arrived later from elsewhere.

He came to them three times.

The first time he told them to sit down together and settle it.

The second time he told them that a community that recites separately is

broken. The third time he told them a story, and it is the longest thing he

ever put in front of a group of angry men.

There was a king of Kusala called Digiti, he said, who was beaten in war

by Brahmadatta of Kasi and lost everything.

He and his queen got out of the country in disguise and lived in the workshop

quarter of the enemy's own capital, in a potter's house.

under other names, and their son was born there and grew up there under the

name Digavu and was sent away to learn a trade.

In time, a man who had once served Diggity recognised him in the street and

informed on him for the reward.

The old king and his wife were tied up and taken through the town and out to

the execution ground.

Their son had come back into the city that day and saw his parents being led

along the road and went towards them.

His father saw him coming and knew he could not speak to him directly, so he

called out into the air, as a madman might, that Digavu should not look long

and should not look short, because hatred is not settled by hatred.

The boy took service in the palace of the man who had killed his parents.

He worked in the elephant stables, then in the household, then became the

personal attendant of Brahmadatta, and he was good at it, and the king came to

rely on him.

They went hunting and got separated from the rest, and the king was tired and put

his head in the young man's lap and went to sleep in the open under a tree.

The sword came out of the sheath, and the young man held it there and

remembered his father calling out from the road and put it back, and a second

time, and a third time, and put it back.

Then the king woke up in a fright from a dream in which the son of Diggity was

coming at him with a sword.

and the hand of the man who had been holding it took him by the head and told

him who he was.

The two of them made a settlement out there in the forest.

The king gave back the kingdom that had been the young man's father's and gave

him his daughter, and neither of them, afterwards, could explain to anyone else

why. The point he made to the men at Kosambi was that if kings who go to war

with each other over land can find a way to stop, then men who have gone out from

home and are living on other people's food, ought to be able to manage it over

a dipper of water.

The reply he got is the reason that town is remembered.

A monk stood up and asked him to keep out of it, and to live at ease, devoted

to his own comfort in this life, and to let the community deal with its own

business, because the responsibility for this quarrel was theirs.

So he stopped.

In the morning he dressed and took his bowl and went on the alms round in

Kosambi as usual.

and came back and put his lodging in order, and picked up his robe and his

bowl and walked out of the town on his own, without telling anybody where he

was going, which is a thing he never did before or afterwards.

He went first to a village where a monk called Bagu was living alone, and then

to a bamboo park in the east where three of them were, Anuruddha, Nandia and

Kimbila, and the man who kept the park tried to turn him away at the gate on

the grounds that there were ascetics in there.

who did not want to be disturbed.

The three of them had worked out an arrangement, and when he asked how they

were getting on they described it.

They did not discuss it much, but each watched the others.

Whoever came back first from the alms round set out the seats, put out water

for washing and for drinking, and put the spare food where it would be found.

Whoever came back last ate what was left, and if there was nothing left he

went without.

Whoever saw the water pot or the washing pot standing empty filled it, and if it

was too heavy for one man, he beckoned to another with his hand, and they

lifted it between them, and it was not discussed.

Then he went to a forest at a place called Paraleiaka, and lived at the foot

of a sal tree, by himself, for the whole of the rains.

The story that came out of that season, and was never dropped, is about an

elephant. There was a bull who had had enough of the herd.

of being crowded at the water and having the tops of the grass taken before he

could get at them and the young ones pushing at him, and who had gone off and

come to the same wood for the same reason, and who took to clearing the

ground around the tree with his foot and bringing water in his trunk.

Later versions add a monkey with a honeycomb.

The core of it is one man and one elephant in a wood for three months,

both of them out of patience with their own kind.

Kosambi settled it in the end, but he did not settle it.

The lay people of the town did, and they did it by refusing.

They stopped bowing to the monks when they came down the street.

They stopped putting anything in the bowls.

Their position, stated plainly, was that these men had driven the teacher out of

the town and were not going to be fed for it. It took a very short time.

The monks of both factions walked from Kosambi to Savati, which is a good many

days on the road with no food in the bowl, went to him, apologised, and

carried out the formal act of restoration in front of the whole

assembly there.

And the man who had been suspended, and the man who had suspended him, each

stood up and said their part of it. A cousin and two princes.

Devadatta had gone forth with the other Shakya nobles at Anupia, in the year of

the return home, and for a long time nothing about him is recorded except

that he was competent.

He trained, he attained the states of concentration that go with the training,

and he was regarded as one of the senior men of the order.

Then he was in Rajagaha, and there was a young prince there.

Ajatasattu was Bimbisara's son and heir, and Devadatta made a point of him and

won him.

and the tradition says he did it with a display of powers that frightened and

delighted the young man at the same time.

What followed was 500 cartloads of food a day sent out to Devadatta's residence,

and a following of his own, and a new position in the city as the ascetic that

the crown prince supported.

The remark that survives about it is a horticultural one, a plantain, a bamboo

and a reed.

are each destroyed by their own fruiting, he said, and a mule is

destroyed by conceiving, and a man is destroyed by honour and gain.

Then, in front of a full assembly at the bamboo grove, with the king's men

present,

Devadatta stood up and asked him to hand over the community, on the grounds that

he was old now, and worn out, and had done enough, and should live at ease,

and that the leadership should pass.

The refusal was public and it was not gentle.

He was told that the order would not be handed to him and that it would not be

handed even to Sariputta and Moggallana, so it certainly would not be handed to a

man like him.

Afterwards, a formal act was carried out and Sariputta was sent into the streets

of Rajagaha to make the announcement in public that whatever Devadatta now said

or did was his own and had nothing to do with the order.

and Sariputta, who had praised him in that same city not long before, went and

did it. Three attempts on his life are recorded, and they get less subtle as

they go.

Men with bows were sent, and did not shoot.

A rock was levered off the side of the hill called Vulture's Peak while he was

walking below on the path, and it caught on an outcrop and broke, and a splinter

came down and cut his foot badly enough that Jivaka, the royal physician of

Magada, was called to dress it and he was laid up.

The third one happened in the town. There was a state elephant called

Nalagiri, an animal with a record, and the keepers were told to give him liquor

and let him out into the street on the morning the monks came through. People

got up on the roofs and the upper stories to watch.

The elephant came down the road with his trunk up and his ears out, and the monks

got out of the way, and Ananda stepped in front of his teacher on the road.

and had to be pulled back.

The accounts agree that the animal stopped and stood and let itself be led

away and the people of Rajagaha spent the rest of that day talking about who

had ordered it and why and a verse about the prince and his ascetic went round

the city.

The prince was busy in any case.

He took his father.

Bimbisara had ruled Magadha for over 50 years and had given the order its first

ground and he was put under arrest by his son.

and shut in a house with the doors sealed, and nobody was permitted in

except the queen, his wife.

She brought him food, and when that was noticed and forbidden, she brought it

hidden in her clothes, and when that was found, she brought it in the knot of her

hair, and when that was found, she washed and covered her body with a paste

of honey and flour, and went in with nothing in her hands, and he lived on it

for a while.

Then she was barred altogether.

He was still alive.

because he had spent years walking up and down in meditation and went on doing

it in the sealed house, and the order was given that his feet be cut so that

he could not walk.

Barbers were sent in with knives and it was done, and he died.

A son was born to Ajatasattu on the day it happened, and the two messages, from

the prison and from the birth chamber, are said to have reached him within an

hour of each other.

He was told later by his own mother what his father had done for him when he was

an infant with an infected finger, which was to put the finger in his mouth in

the middle of a council meeting and hold it there.

What the record establishes is that he did have a great deal of trouble with it

afterwards and that he said so out loud, at night, in a mango grove, in front of

a thousand men.

Devadatta had one more move.

Since the order would not be given to him, he set out to split it.

and he did it with a proposal that was very hard to argue against.

He asked, in the assembly, that five rules be made binding on every monk for

life. That they live in the forest and never in a village.

That they live only on food begged door to door and never accept an invitation.

That they wear only rags from the dust heap and never accept a robe from a

donor. That they live at the foot of a tree.

and never under a roof, that they never eat fish or meat. The answer was that

any monk who wanted to do all five was free to do all five and always had been,

and that they would not be made compulsory.

Devadatta went out and told the city, correctly, that he had proposed a life

of austerity and that the ascetic Gautama had refused it and preferred

abundance.

In a country full of people who admired asceticism above everything, that

landed. 500 newly ordained monks from the Vajjian country, young men who had

been in the order a matter of weeks, walked out with him to the hill at Gaya.

Sariputta and Moggallana went after them.

Devadatta saw the two most famous monks in India come into his assembly and took

it for a defection and was pleased, and by then it was late.

and he told them the assembly was theirs for the evening, lay down on his right

side to sleep, and left them to it.

They taught all night.

In the morning they walked back to Rajagaha with the five hundred behind

them. The man who had been left in charge woke Devadatta with his foot in

his chest, and the account says blood came up out of his mouth, hot, and that

he did not recover his health after that.

He is said to have died on the road.

near the gate of the park at Savati, on his way to make an apology.

The other kingdom went the same way within a year or two of that, and rather

faster.

Pasenadi of Kosala had a commander named Bandula, a Malan by birth, and Bandula

and his sons were killed on the strength of an accusation the king had accepted

from his own judges and later discovered was false.

The dead man's nephew, Diga Karayana, was made commander in his place, and he

took the appointment, and he waited. The king went out into the countryside to a

small town called Meditalumpa, where he had heard the Buddha was staying, and

did what he always did on those visits.

He took off his sword and his turban, which were the insignia of the kingship,

and handed them to Kariana at the door with his slippers, and went in alone to

talk. They were both about eighty by then, and Pasenadi spent the

conversation saying so.

and remarking that they had been born in the same year and that his own body was

being carried about by other people now.

Karayana stood outside holding the crown of Kusala in his hands, waited long

enough to be sure of the distance, and rode back to Savathi with the army and

put Vidudaba on the throne.

Pasenadi came out of the building to find one horse, one servant woman, and

nobody else.

He rode for Rajagaha to ask his nephew Ajatasattu for troops.

three days' journey, at eighty, in the heat, on the road, eating what he could

get. He reached the city in the evening after the gates were shut for the night,

and lay down in a shed outside the wall, and was ill in the night with wind and

with what he had eaten, and died there before morning, with the woman calling

out for help, and Ajatasattu was told about it at dawn, and came out and gave

him a funeral.

We can imagine that Pasenadi must have felt the whole arrangement of his life

come apart in that shed because three days earlier he had handed his sword and

his turban to a servant at a door as he had a hundred times before and had

walked in to talk about growing old.

Vidudaba was Pasenadi's son by a Shakya woman and the Shakyas were the reason

for everything he did next.

Years before, Pasenadi had asked them for a bride from one of their families.

since a connection to a very old lineage was worth having.

They did not want to give a daughter to an outsider, and they did not want to

refuse the king they paid tribute to, so they sent him a girl named Vasabhakatia,

who was the daughter of one of their leading men by a slave woman of the

household, and said nothing about the second half.

She became a queen of Kosala and the mother of the heir.

He found out as a young man.

on a visit to Kapilavastu to see his mother's people, where he was received

without much warmth and given a seat and not much else.

On the way out of the town one of his party went back for something and heard

a slave woman washing down the seat he had been sitting on with milk and water

and complaining while she did it that this was the seat used by the son of the

slave girl.

He heard the report on the road and turned it over for years.

When he came to the throne, he took the army north to Kapilavastu. The story

that the tradition preserves about that march is a small one, told three times

over. He came along the road and found the Buddha.

Then, in his last years, sitting at the foot of a tree with almost no shade in

it, on the Shakya side of the border, when there was a large shady banyan a

short distance away on his own.

Vidudaba stopped and asked him why he was sitting in the thin shade in that

heat, and was told that the shade of one's relatives is cool.

He turned the army round and went back to Savatthi.

He came again, and it happened again.

He came a third time, and a third time he turned around.

The fourth time he did not stop.

The Shakyas were not soldiers.

They were farmers with an assembly hall who had spent generations paying tribute

to avoid exactly this, and the accounts say that many of them would not fight

properly for religious reasons and shot to miss.

The town was taken and the killing was general, and it included the old and the

children, and the survivors of the family scattered into the hills and into

the neighbouring states and were never a people again.

What Vidudaba did to the women of the ruling houses is set out in the

commentaries in a bare line and there is no reason to go past it.

Coming back, the tradition says, he made camp for the night in the dry sand of

the Asiravati riverbed and rain fell in the hills upstream and the flood came

down on them in the dark. The last road to Kusinara.

Sariputta went first and he went home to do it. He was ill, he asked for leave.

and he took a novice and walked north to the village of Nalaka, where he had been

born, and he did it because his mother was still alive and still a Brahmin and

had never approved of any of it. He died in the room he had been born in, and the

novice, whose name was Kunda, gathered his bowl and his outer robe and what was

left after the burning, tied the relics into a water strainer, and walked to

Savatthi with them.

Ananda took the bundle in, and said he had gone weak in the body and could not

see straight.

What was said back to him was flat.

The man had not taken away the teaching when he went.

A very large branch had come off a very large tree, and that was all.

Within about a fortnight Moggallana was dead as well, and his death was violent.

He was living on the side of a hill outside Rajagaha, and men were paid to

kill him, and the accounts say they came several times.

and could not do it, and came again, and did.

The order lost both of its senior figures inside a month.

He said afterwards to the assembly that it seemed empty to him now, and that

when those two were somewhere he had never had to think about that direction

again. He was eighty.

What follows is the most detailed sequence in the whole canon.

a long text that follows him day by day along a road of perhaps 200 miles, and

it starts with a minister of state coming up a hill to ask a question about

a war.

Ajatasattu had turned his attention north across the Ganges to the Vajayan

Confederacy, the same kind of assembly-run republic that the Sheikyas

had been, only much larger and richer with its centre at Vasali.

He sent his chief minister Vasakara up to Vulture's Peak.

to say that the king intended to destroy them, and to see what the reply would

be. The reply was not addressed to Vasakara.

He turned to Ananda, who was standing behind him fanning, and asked him a

series of questions about the Vajjians.

Do they still hold their assemblies, and hold them often?

Do they meet and rise and do their business in unison?

Do they refrain from making new laws and abolishing old ones on a whim?

Do they still respect their elders and listen to them?

Are their women and girls left unmolested?

Do they keep up their shrines and their old observances?

Are holy men from outside safe among them and made welcome?

Ananda answered yes to everyone, and the answer to the minister was that as long

as those things held, they could be expected to prosper and not decline.

Vasakara took his leave and said as he went, that the Vajjians could not be

taken by war, but only by diplomacy and by setting them against one another.

Then he went back down the hill to arrange it.

He left Rajagaha not long after and went north, in stages, teaching the same set

of things at each stop.

At Nalanda, Sariputta was still alive and made his famous declaration of

confidence there.

At Pataligama, on the south bank of the Ganges, he found the ground being turned

over by an army of workmen because Vasakara and another minister were

building a fort at the ferry crossing to hold the river against the Vajians.

He stayed in the new rest house that night and the villagers came, and in the

morning he remarked that the place would become the chief city of that country, a

great centre for the unpacking of goods, and that three things would threaten it,

fire, water and quarrelling among its own people.

That fort became Pataliputra, and within a century it was the largest city in

India and the capital of an empire, and the gate he went out of was named after

him, and the ford where he crossed was named after him.

At Visali he was given a park by the most famous woman in the city.

Amber Pali was a courtesan in a formal, civic sense, a position of the sort

those republics maintained and taxed, and she was very rich.

She drove out to where he was staying in her own carriages, invited him and the

community for the following day's meal, and got the acceptance.

On the way back, she met a party of Licavi nobles coming out at speed to

make the same invitation, in their carriages, in their matched colours, all

in blue with blue ornaments, all in yellow, all in red, all in white.

They found out she had got there first.

and offered her a hundred thousand pieces to give up the meal.

She told them she would not give it up for the city and all its territory, and

the account says they snapped their fingers and said out loud that they had

been beaten by a mango girl, and drove on anyway, and there was a collision,

axle against axle, wheel against wheel, yoke against yoke. The rains that year

he spent at a village called Beluva, just outside the town.

and he told the monks to go and take shelter wherever they had friends or

acquaintances, because there was not enough support at Beluva for all of

them. He kept Ananda, and in the middle of that retreat he became seriously ill

with sharp pains, and it was very bad, and he came through it by deciding to.

When he could sit up, Ananda came and said that he had watched him and had

been in a bad way about it.

but had taken some comfort from the thought that he would not go without

leaving some instruction about the order, and he was told, in a passage

that has been argued over for two and a half thousand years, that the community

should not expect that, that there was no teaching held back and nothing kept

in a closed fist, that he had never thought of himself as running the order

or having it depend on him, and that he was now old, worn out, eighty years of

age, and that his body kept going the way an old cart keeps going, by being

strapped up.

Then he told him to live as islands to themselves, with the teaching as the

island, and to take no other refuge.

Later, at a shrine outside the town called Kapala, he said something else to

Ananda that the tradition never got over.

He remarked that anyone who had developed the path fully could, if he

wished, remain for the rest of the age.

He said it three times in the same words on the same afternoon in an empty place.

Ananda, sitting in front of him, did not take it up and did not ask him to stay

and afterwards was told to go and sit under a tree a little way off.

And while he was gone the decision was made and the earth is said to have

shaken. When Ananda came back and was told, he asked, he was told it was too

late and that it had already been laid down.

that everything born comes apart, and that even a teacher's request could not

now unmake that.

He said goodbye to Vasali on the way out of it.

He stopped on the road and turned his whole body round to look back at the

town, the way an elephant turns, because his neck by then would not do it on its

own. The last meal was at Parva, at the house of a metalworker's son called

Kunda, and it was offered with respect and eaten with his community present.

Among the dishes there was one the text names and does not explain, Sukhara

Madhava, which means something like the delicacy of pigs, and nobody has ever

established what it was.

It may have been pork from a domestic animal.

It may have been a fungus or a truffle of the kind pigs root up, which is how

the northern tradition took it. He ate that dish himself and asked that none of

it be served to anyone else, and that whatever remained be buried in a pit.

Then he became ill with dysentery and blood, with sharp pains, and he got up

and said they would go on to Kusinara.

It is about ten miles.

It took the rest of that day and it took everything he had. He stopped and asked

Ananda to fold the outer robe in four so he could sit down at the side of the

road and asked for water, and Ananda said the stream just there had been

churned to mud by five hundred carts going over the ford a moment before.

and that there was a river further on. He was asked again, and a third time,

and went with the bowl, and the account says the water was running clear when he

got to it. While they were sitting there, a man of the Mala people called

Pukusa came along the road, a former pupil of Alara Kalama, and stopped and

talked and ended by giving him two lengths of cloth of gold.

When one of them was laid on him, the story says, the cloth looked dull.

which is the only thing in the entire death sequence that reads as ornament.

They went down to the Kakuta river and he bathed and drank and lay down in a

mango grove and gave Ananda one instruction to carry out later.

Somebody was going to tell Kunda, the smith's son, that he had given the meal

that killed the Buddha and Kunda was going to hear it.

And Ananda was to go to him and tell him that of all the meals ever offered in

the world, two are of the highest fruit.

the one taken before the awakening and the one taken before the final passing,

and that he should not blame himself for anything.

Kusinara was a small place, a market town of the malas with mud walls, in the

jungle, off the main routes.

He went into a grove of sal trees on the far side of the river, between two of

them, and asked Ananda to prepare a place with his head to the north and lay

down on his right side with one foot on the other.

Ananda said, out loud, that he thought this was a poor little town in the

middle of nowhere and a bad place to do this and that there were great cities

and he should go to one of them. He was told that the place had been a capital

once, called Kusavati, with a king in it and chariots and music at all hours and

that nothing had come of that either.

Ananda asked him what they were supposed to do afterwards.

since for forty-five years the monks scattered around the country had come in

at the end of the rains to see him, and now there would be nothing to come to.

He named four places instead, the place where he was born, the place where he

had understood it, the place where he had first said it out loud, and the

place where he was going to die, and said that anyone who came to those with

a settled mind would be doing well enough.

The monks came in from the surrounding district through the night.

A senior man called Upavana was standing in front of him and was asked to move

aside because he was blocking the view of the people arriving.

Ananda went and stood in the doorway of a building nearby, holding the doorpost,

and cried, saying to himself that he was still only a learner with work left to

do and that the one who had shown compassion to him was going.

Somebody was sent to bring him back.

What he was told, in front of everybody, was that he had served for twenty-five

years with unfailing kindness in act, in speech and in thought, and that he

should make the effort and he would finish it.

And then his teacher turned to the assembly and told them that a man like

this comes along rarely and that they should know what they had.

The last person to be admitted came in that night.

Subada was a wanderer of Kusinara, an old man, and he heard what was happening

and came to the grove.

and asked to put a question and Ananda refused him three times on the grounds

that the teacher was worn out. The voice from between the trees said to let him

in. He asked whether the six famous teachers had all really known what they

claimed and got no answer to that because it was not a useful question and

got instead a short statement about where the path is found.

He asked to be admitted and was.

and the usual four months of probation for a wanderer coming from another

school was waived.

Then he gave the last instructions, and they are administrative.

The community was not to think that the word of the teacher was finished and

that they had no teacher.

The teaching and the discipline that had been set out would be the teacher.

The monks should stop addressing one another as friend, regardless of

seniority, and use the proper forms.

If the order wished, After his death, it could abolish the lesser and minor

rules. He asked three times whether anyone had a doubt or a question about

anything at all, and nobody spoke.

The last thing he said was that everything put together comes apart and

that they should complete the work with diligence.

Then he went up through the stages of concentration and down through them and

up again, and at the top of the fourth he stopped in the last watch of the

night. in the jungle, in a small town, between two trees, eight portions of

ash. The malas of Kusinara took the funeral over as a civic matter.

They spent six days on honours, with dance and music and garlands and

canopies in the grove, and on the 7th they carried the body out through the

middle of the town, because they tried to take it round the south and could

not, and the crowds were too thick to get through any other way.

The wrapping is described exactly.

New cloth, then carded cotton, then new cloth again, and so on for five hundred

layers, and then into an iron vessel with oil, with another iron vessel put

over it, and the whole thing set on a pyre of fragrant wood. It would not

light. Four senior malas tried, and it would not take, and they were told that

it would not until Mahakasapa arrived.

Maha Kasapa was coming up the road from Pava with 500 monks and had stopped at a

tree to sit out the heat, and a naked ascetic came past from the direction of

Kusinara carrying a coral tree flower, which was not a local flower, and he

asked the man whether he had any news of their teacher.

He was told he had been dead a week and that the flower had been picked up at

the place.

Some of the monks who heard that lay down on the ground, and one of them, An

old man who had gone forth late in life said out loud that they should stop

crying, that they were well rid of the great ascetic, that they had been

plagued by being told what was allowable and what was not, and that now they

could do as they liked.

Kasipa heard it and said nothing at the time.

Then he walked to Kusinara and went round the pyre three times and uncovered

the feet and paid his respects, and the fire took.

The remains were collected, and the malas put them in their assembly hall

behind a lattice of spears with a rampart of bows around it, and the

messages started arriving.

Ajatasattu of Magadha sent to say he was a warrior, and the dead man had been a

warrior, and a share was due.

The Likavis of Vesali sent.

So did the Shakyas of Kapilavastu, what was left of them, and the Bulis, the

Kolias, a Brahmin of Vethadippa.

and the malas of the neighbouring town of Parva.

The people of Kusanara replied that he had died in their territory, and they

were keeping him.

Every one of those states then sent its army, and they camped around a small

market town in the jungle over a jar of bone.

A Brahmin called Dona went out and stood between them and said, in effect, that

these were the remains of a man who had spent his life teaching patience.

and that it was not a good look to be fighting over them with edged weapons.

Then he proposed a division into eight equal parts, and the parties accepted

it, and he measured it out, and he kept the vessel he had measured it in for

himself.

A ninth group, the Morias, arrived after everything had been distributed and were

given the ashes of the fire.

Ten monuments went up.

Kasapa was still thinking about the old monk on the road at Pava.

Within a few months he had put a proposal to the senior monks.

If they did nothing, the rules would be forgotten within a generation, and every

community would be running on the opinion of whoever was oldest in the

room. He proposed that 500 of them sit down together during the coming rains

and recite the whole of it, out loud, and fix it.

Ajatasattu, who by then had lost his father, taken his kingdom and turned

into a patron.

had a hall built for it at the mouth of a cave outside Rajagaha.

499 were chosen.

Ananda had heard more of the teaching than anyone alive, having spent 25 years

standing behind him, and by the standards of the assembly he had not

finished his own work, and the others said so to his face.

The tradition says he sat up through the last night working at it, and got there

in the small hours, on the point of lying down.

with his feet off the floor and his head not yet on the pillow. The procedure was

interrogation. Upali was questioned on the discipline, rule by rule, and for

each one he was asked where it had been laid down, and about whom, and over what

incident, and what the offence was, and what counted as an exception, and he

answered, and the assembly repeated it back until they had it. Then Ananda was

questioned on the discourses in the same way, one at a time.

where it was given, and to whom.

And each one was fixed in a form that begins by stating that this is what the

speaker heard on a particular occasion, in a particular place, which is why

every discourse in the canon still opens that way.

The one thing they could not settle was the permission to abolish the lesser and

minor rules.

Nobody had asked which rules were minor.

There was an argument about it, with some saying it meant everything but the

four gravest offences.

and others drawing the line in different places, and in the end they decided to

change nothing at all, on the grounds that if they started, nobody could say

where it would stop.

The code has been recited fortnightly ever since, with the rules about how to

sit down in a village, and how to accept a bowl of soup still in it.

Then they turned on Ananda and put five charges to him, that he had not asked

which rules were minor, that he had once stepped on the teacher's robe while

sewing it, that he had let women see the body first and they had wept on it, that

he had failed at the shrine outside Vasali to ask him to remain, and that he

had pressed for the admission of women to the order.

He answered each one and said he did not see any fault in them and confessed them

anyway out of respect for the assembly.

What that assembly produced was not a book, it was a division of labour.

Companies of monks took one collection each and recited it in unison, checked

one another, and taught it to the next intake, and that was the entire

mechanism of transmission for about four centuries, until the order in Sri Lanka,

halved by famine and war and afraid of losing it, wrote the whole thing down on

palm leaves.

A little over two centuries after the funeral, A king of the same magged hand

line that Bimbisara and Ajita Satu had ruled took most of the subcontinent, and

after a war in the east that he seems to have found unbearable, took up the

teaching.

Ashoka had the mounds opened and the relics divided again and sent out across

his territory and put up pillars of polished sandstone at the places

associated with the story, with his own words cut into them in the ordinary

language of the districts.

In the 20th year after his consecration, he went to Lumbini himself and had a

pillar raised there with a line saying, The sage of the Shakyas was born in that

spot, and he reduced the village's dues to an eighth.

That is the oldest object in the world that mentions the man by name, and it is

still standing in the field. The rest came up out of the ground much later.

In 1898, an English landowner named William Pepe was draining and clearing

part of his estate at Piprawar, a few miles south of the Nepal border in the

Shakya country, and cut into a large brick mound on the property.

Eighteen feet down, his men reached a coffer of hard sandstone with a lid that

took several of them to shift.

Inside were soapstone vessels, a crystal bowl with a fish-shaped handle, ashes,

bone fragments, and small offerings of golden beads.

On one of the vessels there was a line of early Brahmi writing, and when it was

read it turned out to say that this was the relic deposit of the Buddha of the

Shakyas, placed there by his own kin, with their sisters and their children

and their wives.

The bones went to the king of Siam, who divided them again.

The coffer and much of the rest went to the museum at Calcutta, where they are.

Almost nothing else survives.

The eight monuments are mounds or foundations or nothing.

Kapilavastu is a dispute between two archaeological sites.

Rajagaha is a valley with a wall on the hills above it and hot springs at the

bottom. Savatthi is grass and brick outlines and Vesali is a tank and a

stump. What is still running, unbroken, is smaller and harder to photograph.

Twice a month, in monasteries from Sri Lanka to Thailand to Burma.

Men sit inside a marked boundary and recite the code that was fixed in that

hall outside Rajagaha and are asked three times whether they are clean and

answer with silence.

Their robes are cut into panels and sewn back together in the pattern of a rice

field seen from a hillside outside Rajagaha on an afternoon two and a half

thousand years ago.

And every morning before it is properly light in a great many countries, Men

walk out of a gate with a bowl held in both hands and their eyes on the road a

plough's length ahead and stand at a door without saying anything and wait to

see what they are given.

Two and a half thousand years from a man who owned three pieces of cloth and a

bowl and would not let anybody carry them for him.

Stories like this one were told out loud a long time before anybody wrote them

down. This one was carried in people's heads for 400 years, recited at night,

in halls and under trees, to listeners who were mostly lying down and mostly on

the edge of sleep, and it came through with the water dipper and the swollen

feet and the muddy ford still in it.

Nothing here needs remembering.

It has been kept by other people for a very long time, and it will be there

tomorrow. Let the room get further away. Let your breathing go slow.

Sleep well.