Gautama Buddha

In Life and Legend

Betty Kelen

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781497633513
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

A "reverential and revealing" biography of Siddhartha, the ancient Indian spiritual teacher upon whose teachings Buddhism was founded ( Kirkus Reviews ). The legendary story of Gautama Buddha, told by Betty Kelen in this riveting book, captures the essence of both a man and a spirit. His teachings, characterized by a mystical eastern folklore and an inspirational wisdom, have never been matched by anyone else in history. They are marked by determination and a quest for the sacred, and led him to an enlightenment that shaped the foundation of many Eastern civilizations.

1. The Birth of Buddha

It is the rule that when the Bodhisattva ceases to

belong to the hosts of the Heaven of Delight

and enters a mother’s womb, an infinite and

splendid radiance passing the glory of the gods is made

manifest throughout the world.

– DIGHA-NIKAYA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya awoke. Oddly enough, she had no feeling of fear left over from her dream; on the contrary, she felt filled with blessed happiness, vitality, and joy. Still, she knew that dreams can have hidden meanings, and she thought she had better tell her husband about it. She therefore went with her ladies to the palace gardens where there was a shady grove of asoka trees, while a servant was sent to request King Suddhodana to meet her there.

The king was sitting in judgment upon his throne, surrounded by councilors and courtiers, but upon receiving the queen’s message, he left them, and coming to the grove, asked her why she had disturbed his important business. Maya then related to him her dream, and when she came to the part about the elephant, she said, “It was like unto snow and silver, exceeding the glory of the sun and moon, with stately pace and well-built, with six tusks, and noble, his limbs as firm as diamonds and full of beauty—a splendid elephant!”

And Maya asked her husband, “What do you think it means?”

King Suddhodana did not know what it meant, but he thought it might be wise to find out, especially when Maya began to worry that there might be some evil omen lurking in it. He summoned his Brahmins, his priests and soothsayers, the wise men of his court. They came in their white togas, their topknots gleaming with oil and the sacred cords slanting across their breasts, and they stood as still as bronze statues as they listened to Maya and weighed her words. When she had finished, they gave their interpretation.

“This dream brings no misfortune to your race,” they said, “but a great joy. For a son will be born to you, a worthy descendant of the royal Sakyas. If he dwells in a house, he will become a king, a Universal Monarch, and rule the world. But if he should choose to leave his house, to forsake royal power, and go forth among mankind, out of compassion, then he will become a Buddha, and the wisest of men.”

The king then treated his Brahmins to fine foods and rewarded them with gifts. Their words had filled him with joy and relief, for like anyone who tries to run a country, his head was bursting with more problems than it could hold, and what he wanted most was a brilliant son who would solve them all for him.

In the months that followed, Maya lived in happiness, vital and unwearied, protected from every ill by watchful, invisible gods. When she thought the time had come when she would give birth, she reminded Suddhodana that it was the custom of the women of her family to have their babies under the parental roof. Suddhodana therefore gave his wife permission to travel to her native city, Devadaha, some miles away. He sent out an army of servants to smooth down the road along which she would pass; and lest she should grow tired of looking at the eternal snows of the Himalayas, he commanded potted plants to be set up on both sides of the road. As we shall see, King Suddhodana was not a man who did things by halves.

Maya set out in a palanquin with a company of servants and ladies-in-waiting. When they had traveled for about twenty-four miles to the very edge of her native land, the queen, looking past the potted plants, saw a lovely wooded dell known as the Lumbini Grove, full of giant trees and shrubs. It was springtime, and the legend says that from the roots to the tips of the branches the grove was one mass of flowers, and from the midst of the shrubbery came the hum of bees and bird songs and the cries of peacocks.

The queen commanded her caravan to stop and rest, while she strolled for a while in this grove. She moved from thicket to thicket, from tree to tree, among the flowers; and then at the foot of a great satinwood tree she reached up her hand to touch a low branch which seemed to bend as if to greet her. Just as she grasped this branch, she felt the first pang of birth. She cried out to her women who speedily came, bringing with them silken canopies which they hung on the branches like a curtain around Maya. The queen had her baby then and there, standing up, with the blossoms falling upon her, and without even removing her hand from the branch of the satinwood tree.

It was a beautiful boy, not raw and wrinkled like ordinary babies, but the color of creamy gold; not squalling and snarling, but emitting sweetly modulated and charming sounds similar to the bird songs round about.

Yes, we are knee-deep in legend here! Some of the Buddhist texts say further that on this occasion a great lotus flower sprang up from the earth, bursting it in twain; that joyful Hindu gods made their appearance in the air, revealing themselves up to the waist, and a stream of hot-and-cold running water issued from the sky, in which the baby was bathed. Buddhists have argued about this. Some of them have maintained that a child so pure as this one did not need to be bathed, that in fact he was born clean and bright as a jewel.

Some stories are even more incredible. They tell us that directly after his birth, this child stood on its feet, examined the four quarters of the earth, and then, while gods held a white parasol and jeweled fans over his head, he took seven steps toward the north, roaring like a lion, and proclaiming to the world that he was the chieftain of all of it.

This tale sounds as if it had been made up to please people who cannot imagine greatness except in terms of worldly power. Such a man was King Suddhodana. When Maya brought her child back to him at Kapilavastu, he completely forgot that it was the custom of the Gautama family to give names that recalled the pleasing qualities of rice. Instead he gave his son a conqueror’s name: Siddhartha, “The Victorious One.”

Siddhartha Gautama was placed in a cradle cushioned in the finest white cotton, where he lay “like molten gold in a crucible.” The Brahmins came to view him there and they stared in amazement. “Rejoice, sire,” they told the king, “for one of the mighty ones is born. Fortune is yours, sire, good fortune is yours!”

They said that they could see plainly on Siddhartha’s small person all of the thirty-two signs that mark a man of noble destiny. Most of these magical signs are such that loving eyes might see on the body of any newborn baby: his frame was straight, his hands and feet were soft and tender, his ankles were like rounded shells, his skin was delicately soft, his jaw was strong as a lion’s; and so on.

But there were other signs visible to the Brahmins that were occult and peculiar. They said that on the soles of the baby’s feet were the designs of little wheels; that the small hairs of his body, instead of growing downward like other people’s, grew upward, “blue-black, like eye-paint, in little curling rings and curling to the right.” Most particularly they noted a curious cluster of hairs, not black, but white, where his eyebrows grew together, like a hairy mole or a tiny silver chrysanthemum. His head, furthermore, had a knob on it which gave it the shape of a royal turban.

If you look closely at the statues of Buddha, you can often find some of these special signs indicated on them.

Some modern Buddhas, like this bronze statue erected in the 1950s in Central Taiwan, look as ancient as the hills. It is 72 feet high, the tallest Buddha in the world.

Siddhartha’s birth is said to have taken place on the full moon of May. It caused a brilliant light to spread over the earth, an infinite and splendid radiance which penetrated even to the murky dark regions below the world. The deaf heard; the lame walked; bad-tempered people thought sweet thoughts; and everywhere the multitudinous gods of India sprang into the sky to dance, sing, and wave their glittering scarves about them.

There was a holy man named Asita who lived as a hermit in a cave of the Himalayas, where he spent his life staring at the eternal snows, immersed in thoughts of God. When suddenly his meditations were interrupted by this great light and the sound of heavenly music, he dragged his fixed eyes from their sublime contemplation. With uncanny knowledge, he realized that a great event had taken place on the plains below. He got to his feet and began to travel in the direction of the light, down from the mountains and across the low-lying hills towards Kapilavastu. At the entrance to the king’s palace, he rapped on the gates and told the gatekeepers to lead him to King Suddhodana.

No doubt Asita was dressed in rotting rags. Certainly he had forgotten to comb his matted hair. Probably for years he had not eaten more than would feed a rabbit, so that his bones almost rattled as he stalked past the fine frescoes, across the polished floors of the royal palace. But it is the way of India to revere her holy men and to forgive them their careless habits. No one thought of denying Asita his wish; in fact, King Suddhodana himself received him, bowing to the ground. He made Asita sit down on a fine chair and commanded the prince to be brought.

Siddhartha was carried in and Asita gazed on him lying “like shining gold beaten out by a very skillful smith.” At first he praised the child and made the father beam. But then, to the king’s alarm, the holy man turned aside and wept.

“Why are you weeping,” exclaimed the king, “shedding tears and heaving sighs? Do you see any danger threatening the prince?”

And Asita replied, “I do not weep for the prince, and no danger threatens him. Nay, I weep for myself. Great king, I am old, full of years and worn with age. This prince without doubt shall attain the highest and most perfect wisdom. And I shall not live to see it. Therefore I weep, O king!”

This is the traditional story of the birth of Gautama Buddha as described in age-old legends. They were not recorded in his lifetime, but passed by word of mouth for two centuries until in the time of King Asoka, the great ruler of the Maurya Empire, and a convert to Buddhism, Buddhist scholarship began. The surviving traditions came to be regarded as sacred text, and in time were written down. But whether spoken or written, they grew and changed. The parts people liked best to hear, the miracles and the tales of royal extravagance, became ever more elaborate, and many dry facts dropped out.

Modern scholars, historians, anthropologists, philologists, and archaeologists have looked closely into the legends, comparing them one with the other, and they have examined other evidence in an effort to rescue the “historical Buddha.” They agree that a man who came to be called the Buddha really lived, and they fix the date of his birth at about 563 b.c.

Kapilavastu was probably one of the many small city-states that peppered northern India in those early times. But within the next ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Foreword
• In the Beginning . . .
• 1. The Birth of Buddha
• 2. Growing Up
• 3. The Great Renunciation
• 4. The Noble Quest
• 5. Enlightenment
• 6. The Wheel of Dharma
• 7. The Samgha
• 8. Home to Kapilavastu
• 9. The Lord Buddha: The Sage
• 10. The Lord Buddha: The Teacher
• 11. Ill Winds
• 12. The Great Decease
• And in the End . . .
• Bibliography
• Copyright