Part 3
That Buddha was a very real man, inspired by the highest ideals, is a fact which all advance in knowledge proves more and more conclusively. Facts cannot be swept away like cobwebs; indeed, cobwebs are facts, as every housewife knows, and though a besom may annihilate them, their rebirth remains a demonstrable truth. So it is with the Buddha. The travels of Fa Hsien and Hsüan Chwang, Chinese pilgrims, who in the fifth and seventh centuries of our era went to India to collect Buddhist books and study the dogmas and history of the religion, have been recorded with all the scrupulous care and minuteness peculiar to their nation, and show the veneration in which the sites and monuments sacred to the Buddhist story were still held in their day. Nor is that all.
Within the last twenty years, under the authority of the Indian Government, researches have been carried on by a learned Babu named Chandra Mukherji, under the direction of Mr. Vincent A. Smith, and those researches, which are of the highest interest, corroborate the statements of the two Chinese monks, in whose accounts the differences are no more than what would be expected in the work of men separated by an interval of two hundred years.
If we must remember that Prince Siddartha claimed no divinity—nor even divine inspiration or revelation—then stripped of the husk of fable and vain tales with which monkish folly has overlaid and obscured it, there is no more touching story in man’s record than that of the great renunciation with which Buddha entered upon the work to which he felt himself called. Brought up in the soul-stealing languor of an Oriental court, he left everything in order to face the hardships of a solitude and asceticism in which he was to find that peace which the world could not give to him, but which, if only he could attain the supreme wisdom, he might give to the world.
Prince Siddartha, the Buddha that was to be, was the son of Suddhōdana, King of Kapilavastu in the Tarai of Nepal, under the shadow of the giant Himalaya mountains. Suddhōdana was the chief of the Shakya, a proud clan, descended from the solar race of the Gautama. It puzzles the uninstructed reader to find the Buddha often referred to as Shakya Muni, or Gautama Buddha. The first of these titles means the hermit or recluse of the Shakya clan, and Barthélemy St. Hilaire connects the word _muni_ with the Greek μόνος, the French _moine_, etc. Gautama Buddha simply means the Buddha of the Gautama race, in contradistinction to the many Buddhas that preceded him during the countless æons in which the Indians believe, and to those Buddhas that are yet to be, the next of whom is the Maitriya Buddha, the Buddha of brotherly love, for whom we have to wait many thousand years, and who is often represented as lying down and laughing—a favourite subject with Chinese sculptors and artists. The Queen of King Suddhōdana was the daughter of King Suprabuddha, a neighbouring monarch, a princess of such surpassing loveliness, wisdom and virtue, that she was called Maya the Illusion, for men could not believe that so wondrous a being could be aught but a dream, a vision, an unreal phantasy.
One night Queen Maya dreamt a dream: in her sleep it seemed to her that a white elephant with six golden tusks entered her side. She dreamt, moreover, that she was moving in heavenly space, that she ascended a great rocky mountain, and that a vast multitude bowed down before her. When the soothsayers came to interpret her dream, they declared that they meant that she would bring forth a son who should be marked with the thirty-two signs which indicate a great man. Either he would remain in his kingdom and become conqueror and monarch of the universe, or he would forsake home and the world and receive the full light of wisdom as a perfect Buddha. Now, when the time of her delivery came near to being fulfilled, Maya betook herself to her father’s city, and went to the garden which he had dedicated to his Queen Lumbini, and as she stood leaning against a certain tree the pains of travail came upon her—for the mother of a Buddha must bring forth her child standing. Then the great god Indra raised a mighty tempest, and scaring away all Maya’s women, took upon himself the disguise of an old midwife, and prepared to receive the babe in his arms; but the child, pushing the god aside, would have none of him, but by himself took seven steps towards each of the four cardinal points of heaven.
To the East he said: “I will reach the highest Nirvana.”
To the South: “I will be the first of all creatures.”
To the West: “This will be my last birth.”
To the North: “I will cross the ocean of Existence.”
Many signs and wonders followed. A heavenly choir of gods and Yakshas appeared in the sky, hovering over the birthplace and singing hymns of gladness to celebrate the birth of a Bodhisatva, who after years of devotion should one day become Buddha and attain supreme wisdom. Two dragons came out of the clouds, the one spouting warm water, the other cold, and so the god-like babe was washed. Moreover, it came to pass that when the appointed time for the child to be taken, as was the custom among Shakyas, to do homage at the shrine of Shakya Vardana, the statue, instead of receiving obeisance, bowed down in worship at the babe’s feet.
Then the king knew what manner of son this was, and he perceived that the soothsayers had spoken truth. Of the two alternative futures which they had foretold for him, the king would have preferred that he should become the monarch of the whole world. But the gods knew better. They knew that he was to be not the monarch of the world, but its freer: the sacrifice and renunciation of his life were to strike off from millions the shackles of sin and misery. They knew, moreover, that all the king’s endeavours to turn the Blessed One from his purpose would be vain; yet must the king needs try, and so throughout the prince’s youth every temptation that riches and luxury and pleasure could offer was put in his way. In the life of the Buddha it is easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fairy-tales. The great central truth remains untarnished in spite of all, and so in telling the story we, seeking to show the inspiration of Oriental mysticism, need hardly rob it of the mystic glamour of that poetical embroidery in which the rich imagination of Indian priests has enwrapped it.
Seven days after the birth of her son the beautiful Queen Maya died, and the babe was given over to the care of her younger sister, Prajapati Gautami, who was also one of King Suddhōdana’s wives.
It is strange that in his picturesque Buddhist poem, “The Light of Asia,” Sir Edwin Arnold should have omitted many of the legends with which he must have been familiar, and which would well have fitted the rather sensuous character of his verse. Moreover, he mixes up the stories of the two wives of Prince Siddartha, Yasōdhara and Gopā, and altogether omits any mention of the birth in the Lumbini Garden. Now the Lumbini Garden is one of those places connected with the Buddhist records which have been identified with the utmost certainty. The early Chinese pilgrims were shown the spot, and were careful with accuracy to describe the monuments which now, after all these centuries, the Babu Chandra Mukherji has been able to verify. On the spot where stood the sacred tree under which, grasping one of its boughs, Maya the Queen gave birth to her son, contemporary piety, or perhaps at latest that of King Asōka, who lived two hundred years afterwards, erected a chapel in which stood a sculpture portraying the nativity.
The ruins of the sacred building may yet be seen, and, much damaged, the stone image which it enshrined—a barbaric but expressive group. Hard by there still runs the little stream which Hsüan Chwang tells us was called the “river of oil,” a name which it still bears. Twenty or twenty-five paces from the sacred tree is the tank in which Maya bathed, still full of pure water.
In the days of the Chinese pilgrims there was a great stone pillar which had been erected by King Asōka; but it had been struck by lightning, and lay on the ground when they saw it, split in the middle. The pillar with a perfectly preserved inscription by King Asōka stands close to the temple. But the most striking proof of all is in the name Lumbini, or Lummini, which is preserved to this day as Rummin Dei, the initial R of Sanscrit being changed into L in the Magadhi language of the inscription.
So he who visits the Rummin Dei to-day knows of a certainty that he is standing on the very spot where some twenty-five centuries ago Prince Siddartha was born—he who was to found a religion which, above all others, has, so far as numbers go, dominated mankind. For his disciples have, indeed, been “as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”
The years went on and the child grew in grace and beauty of mind and body. His teachers were amazed at the precocity of his knowledge and wisdom. Learning seemed to come to him by instinct, until at last one of his masters said to him: “It is thou that art the Guru, not I.” His stature and strength were phenomenal, qualities upon which tradition was not slack in embroidering. Was he not sixteen, some say eighteen, feet tall, and did he not toss a dead elephant over a moat with as great ease as an ordinary strong man would fling a cat across a ditch?
But with all this he was a child of moods. At an age when other children are careless of aught save their toys and their games, he would lose himself in the solitude of the forests and remain wrapped in thought, deep in meditation. The king, his father, who watched him narrowly, perceived this, and felt that it boded no good for his own dynastic ambition. He thought of the prophecy of the soothsayers, and had a premonition that his son’s greatness would be spiritual rather than temporal. He foresaw that, however much he might try to turn the boy’s thoughts towards the world, his labour would be but vain.
Still, he would leave no stone unturned to win him over by the perfumed softness of Oriental luxury to the pomp and pride of his rank. Three palaces did he build for him, one for each of the three seasons of the year—spring, summer and winter—and the plenishing of these was such as would appeal to every æsthetic sense. The sweetest singers, the daintiest dancers, were enlisted to brighten the life of the palaces. But against all the spells of the enchantresses the young prince, already almost a recluse, was as hard as adamant.
Soon the time came when it was fitting that he should take a wife, and upon this the king and his councillors based their last hope of turning his mind to earthly things. We are told that the prince thought long and anxiously before he could assure himself that marriage would not engross him to such an extent as to rob him of the calm which was needful for the contemplation and the search for wisdom, to which he was minded to dedicate his life.
In the end he consented, but he stipulated that the wife chosen for him should be no ordinary woman, but such a one as might be a spiritual helpmate to him. Caste was not to weigh in the scale. She might be a Kshatriya, a Vaisiya (householder), or even a Sudra (serf). That was of no account. The mind alone, or perhaps rather what we should call the soul, must be the test. It is difficult to imagine the consternation which, if it be true, as it probably is, such a declaration on the part of a royal prince would arouse among the bigoted Brahmans of his father’s court.
There was, however, no need to fear a degrading marriage, for when the maidens of the noble Shakya clan were brought together, Yasōdhara was chosen for her beauty and her sweet nature. And greatly blessed the prince was in his choice, for she believed in him as Kadijah did in Mohammed during the humble days of his life as camel driver, and when after his long self-banishment in the wilderness, he at last entered upon his ministration as Buddha, she with her young son Rahula, followed him as a disciple. But many years were to pass—years fraught with great happenings—before that should take place.
It is my misfortune that I have no first-hand knowledge derived from the study in the originals of those books in which the Buddhist legend is enchased. I am ignorant of Sanscrit, ignorant of Pali—as ignorant, indeed, as those holy monks and priests who drone out their texts without any spark of light as to the meaning of the words which they recite by rote. But, after all, I am not attempting to write any learned treatise on the religion of Buddha, but simply to give some account as best I may of the legends which satisfy the spiritual cravings of millions of those people among whom I have spent several years of my life—legends which have inspired the art of the Far East just as our own beautiful religion has inspired that of the West, and which for old sake’s sake, I have tried to represent in my own Veluvana.
And so I have to cull from a whole garden of books written by French and English scholars what flowers I can, trying to weld together into some harmony of story their many dissonances. The chief difficulty begins with the tales of the marriage or marriages of Prince Siddartha. Not Sir Edwin Arnold alone is responsible for the tangled skein which we have to unravel. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Rhys Davids, Rockhill, Beal, and many others, have each of them their own version of the traditional events. With fairy-tales that is inevitable, but the salient facts of truth remain, and these are the same in all the books.
On the day of Prince Siddartha’s birth there had appeared a mystic tree, which was called “The Essence of Virtue.” When the prince was twenty years old this tree was blown down and dammed the water which supplied Devadeha, which was the city of King Suprabuddha. In vain did the people try to remove it; but Chandana, the prince’s charioteer, drove him out to a certain garden whence he could hear the cries of the people, and he was about to go to their help when a wounded wild goose, the Hansa of Indian myth, fell at his feet.
The prince took it up and tended it and bound up the wound. Now the goose had been shot by his kinsman Devadatta, and this was the beginning of a great enmity between them. For Devadatta sent a messenger to the prince to demand the bird of him, claiming it as the prize of his bow; but the prince would not yield it up, saying that the bird belonged to him who had saved its life rather than to him who would fain have taken it. From that time forth Devadatta hated him, and appears throughout the whole story of the Buddha’s life, and even in what are known as the “Birth Stories” of previous existences, as his bitter enemy.
Then the prince left the garden, and seizing the tree which had defied all the strength of the people, threw it into the air so that it broke in two, the halves falling on the two different sides of the stream. As, after having performed this feat, he was returning home, he saw a beautiful maiden who was looking out from the terrace in front of her father’s house. The prince stopped his chariot and a great love sprang up between the two. The damsel was Gopā, the daughter of Dandapani, a noble of the Shakya clan.
When King Suddhōdana heard what had happened, he was overjoyed, and asked the father for the maid as a bride for his son. But Dandapani scorned Siddartha as a dreamer of dreams. The Kshatriya was like the Samurai of Japan, whose sword is his soul, and full of this spirit he declared that it would bring shame upon a warrior were he to give his daughter in marriage to one who cared not a jot for those manly sports and contests which beseemed a Kshatriya, but spent his time in idle thought and vain imaginings. If he wanted Gopā, let him prove his mettle; let him fight for her and win her against all comers. So a great tourney was held, of which Gopā was to be the prize.
[Illustration: FIGURE OF THE BUDDHA IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN.
_See p. 8._
[_To face p. 24._]
The prince and his two kinsmen, Ananda, who loved him and afterwards became his disciple, and Devadatta, the betrayer, with all the young braves of the clan, entered the lists. But it mattered little who opposed him; none could hold his own against Prince Siddartha. Disputing with the most learned Gurus, he was always the conqueror. In manly exercises, horsemanship, wrestling, archery, and many other sports, he defeated all rivals. He alone could bend the mystic bow of the ancient Shakyas, and when he shot an arrow into the air and it fell to earth, from that spot there sprang a jet of healing water, which to this day is shown as the Arrow Fountain. And so Gopā fell a willing prize to the bow and spear of the king’s son whom she loved. But Devadatta, beaten at all points, went his way more than ever bearing hatred and jealousy in his heart.
In spite of all the charms and gentle goodness of his wives, in spite of the arts and graces of the singing and dancing girls of his palaces, Prince Siddartha was haunted by pity for the world’s sin and sorrow, which he divined but which he had not yet seen face to face. The king had been very careful that all ugly and disquieting sights should be kept out of his way. But it was all in vain; sooner or later the revelation must needs come. The four famous drives furnished the certainty. It happened that once, when he was in his chariot with Chandana, his charioteer, on their way to the Lumbini Garden, before coming to the city gate, they met a man bowed, decrepit, toothless, white-haired, tottering feebly with the help of a stick, stumbling at every step. The prince asked Chandana what this meant, and Chandana explained to him the misery of old age. Sadly he turned back, unwilling to go further. Another time they met a leper stricken with foul disease; a third time they were met by wailings and lamentation, men carrying a bier, women weeping and beating their breasts. This was death. Yet once again they drove out, and this time they met a bikshu—a pious mendicant—with his alms-bowl. Poor, indeed, he was and ragged, but in his face was written the calm of holy happiness.
Then Prince Siddartha knew that he had found his calling. “Vanity of vanities,” said the Jewish preacher some four hundred years before Buddha’s time, “all is vanity.” It was in the spirit of King Solomon that the prince went to his father and prayed to be relieved of all the pomp and burthen of royal state and to be allowed to fly the world in quest of wisdom. But the king would not listen to him, and, on the contrary, caused the gates of Kapilavastu to be closely guarded lest by any chance his son should try to escape.
Let me insert here a wonderful coincidence. At the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries of our era there lived in the monastery of Marsaba, that wonderful laura in the wilderness of Judæa, a monk of great piety and learning, St. John of Damascus, the greatest ecclesiastical writer of his age, and so eloquent a preacher that, like another John, the famous Patriarch of Constantinople, he was known as Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, or Chrysorrhoas, gold-flowing. What, it will be asked, has this Syrian monk to do with Prince Siddartha and the four drives? Listen!
Amongst the many books which St. John of Damascus wrote, or is supposed to have written, is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. St. John said that he received it from travellers coming from India, and so firmly did he believe in its truth, that at the end of the story he appealed to the two saints for their intercession on his behalf.
Max Müller sums up the tale as follows: “A king in India, an enemy and persecutor of the Christians, has an only son. The astrologers have predicted that he will embrace the new doctrine. His father, therefore, tries by all means to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian hermit, however, gains access to this prince, and instructs him in the doctrines of the Christian religion. The young prince is not only baptized, but resolves to give up all his earthly riches; and, after having converted his own father and many of his subjects, he follows his teacher into the desert.”[2]
But that is not all. In the story of Josaphat, as told by St. John, we have also the tale of the drives—with this distinction: Whereas the Buddhist canon, the Lalita Vistara, represents Buddha as seeing on three successive drives, first an old, then a sick, and at last a dying man, St. John makes Josaphat meet two men on his first drive, one maimed, the other blind, and an old man who is nearly dying on the second drive. That is but a slight difference which would be accounted for by oral tradition. The coincidence is striking, and has been pointed out independently by English, French and German scholars; and, as Max Müller says, it is “as clear as daylight” that “Joannes Damascenus took the principal character of his religious novel from the Lalita Vistara.” The first European scholar to notice this was M. Laboulaye.