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.
And now comes the strangest part of the story. So popular did St. John’s
tale become, that it was translated into every European language. Barlaam
and Josaphat were canonized both in the Eastern and Western Churches. In
the Greek Church the 26th of August is their saints’ day, in the Western
Church the 27th of November. “If all that is human and personal in the
life of St. Josaphat is taken from the Lalita Vistara, what follows? It
follows ... that Josaphat is the Buddha of the Buddhist canon. It follows
that Buddha has become a saint in the Roman Church; it follows that,
though under a different name, the sage of Kapilavastu, the founder of
a religion which, whatever we may think of its dogma, is in the purity
of its morals nearer to Christianity than any other religion, and which
counts even now, after an existence of 2,400 years, 455,000,000 of
believers, has received the highest honours that the Christian Church
can bestow. And whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let
those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story
of his life in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life that is there
described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and
no one, either in the Greek or Roman Church, need be ashamed of having
paid to Buddha’s memory the honour that was intended for St. Josaphat,
the prince, the hermit, and the saint.”[3]
One night, when the palace was hushed in sleep, the prince roused his
faithful charioteer Chandana, and bade him to saddle his horse Kantaka
and prepare to follow him. He passed through the many halls where the
women, beautiful and graceful by day, were lying asleep in careless and
ugly attitudes. It was the reverse of the medal, the repulsive side of
luxury, and the sight filled him with loathing. Accompanied by Chandana,
he left the palace and entered the slumbering streets of the city. By a
miracle they cheated the watchfulness of the guard at the gate and rode
out into the open country. When they had gone some way the prince took
off all his jewels and sent Chandana back with injunctions to give them
to Prajapati Gautami, who had been a mother to him when her sister Maya
died. Then he went on alone into the wilderness. By the way he met a
hunter, with whom he exchanged his stately attire for rough countryman’s
clothes, and in this fashion entered upon the six years of an asceticism
such as the world has perhaps never seen. In his loneliness five men
came and joined him as his disciples, sharing the hardships of his
self-imposed penance.
At the end of those six long years of starvation and wretchedness and
mortification of the flesh, when the Blessed One, resisting all the
temptations of Mara, the evil spirit, and his three beautiful daughters,
had reduced his body to a mere shadow, there came a moment when it was
revealed to him that not by asceticism alone could he hope to attain his
goal. Not in that way could he destroy the power and misery of sin. He
determined to go back to the world, not, indeed, as a warrior-prince, a
mighty conqueror, but as a poor and humble teacher, striving to bring
help and virtue to his fellow-men. A young village maiden, whose name
was Sujata, took pity upon his abject state, and brought him bowls of
sweet milk to comfort him and restore his wasted strength. Naturally
enough, legend worked upon this pretty idyll, telling how Sujata milked
a thousand cows, and “with their milk fed five hundred cows, with theirs
two hundred and fifty, and so on down to eight. Thus aspiring after
quality and sweetness, she did what is called working the milk in.” Then
she boiled the milk of the eight cows, and, to the accompaniment of many
miracles, fed the Buddha with this restoring essence of milk. (Rhys
Davids, “Birth Stories,” Vol. I., page 91, etc.) But his five friends,
angry with him for leaving the ascetic life, turned away from him as a
renegade and left him.
So the Blessed One departed out of the wilderness and came to Rajagriha
and entered the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, hard by the city. There for
seven days and nights he sat in meditation under the Bo tree (_Ficus
religiosa_), until at the end of that time he became conscious that he
had attained the supreme wisdom and was now Buddha. Under that tree he
preached the first sermon, and the five friends who had deserted him were
converted and came back. Countless numbers of people from the king of
that country, Bimbisara, downwards, flocked to listen to his teaching.
Among others came his own wife Yasōdhara, bearing him no grudge for
having left her, and bringing her young son Rahula. By that name there
hangs a tale. When it was told to the Blessed One that a son had been
born to him, he answered: “There has been born to me an impediment.” This
answer was repeated to King Suddhōdana, and he said, “Let the boy be
called Rahula, The Impediment.”
When the king heard that his grandson and his mother had gone to follow
in the wake of the Buddha, he was sorely grieved. His son had left him.
Eight messengers whom he had sent begging him to return had failed in
their mission, and themselves remained as disciples with the Blessed One;
and now he had but this child to look to for the perpetuation of his name
and of his dynasty. Blind—and no wonder, for who can read the future?—he
could not see that this son of his would win for himself and for his
father a name beside which all the glory and pride of their Heaven-born
ancestors would be but a cloud dispelled by the first ray of morning sun.
Three influences have ruled the spirits of men since the dawn of the
world—Buddha, Mohammed and One other, the greatest of the three. But that
other was God.
What would have been the winning of one or more provinces, what the
slaughter of a few hundreds or even thousands of bowmen and spearmen,
compared with the conquest of the souls of billions of fellow-creatures
through the length and breadth of Asia? The old king’s name lives, but it
lives as that of the father of no warrior, but of a great teacher whose
doctrine has given peace and happiness to the souls of men instead of
shedding the blood which clogs the footsteps of the earthly conqueror.
We, holding fast the Christian creed, may say with confidence that of all
mere _men_ who have lived since the creation of the world Buddha was the
greatest. Next to him, I should count Confucius, and after Confucius,
Mohammed.
Nothing in Buddha’s life seems to me greater than the victory which he
achieved over himself when he became convinced of the aimlessness of the
ascetic life. He had left his palaces, his wife, and all the pomp of
his father’s court, in order to fly from the world and its temptations
and lead a life of privation and meditation. After six years he saw the
futility of such a life. His aim was to do something that should redeem
the world from sin and its miseries. How could solitude, starvation and
mere meditation achieve that?