Weep not for such is the life of Man Unasked he came and unbidden he went
Ask yourself again whence your child
To live on earth this little life came
By one way come and by another gone
It is human to die and pass to other births
(From Elders Verses)
The damsel came running to the well to stop the saffron robed one from drinking the well water. She was carrying a message from her aged mother resting in the verandah of their humble abode.
“Noble One,” the girl gasps, “my mother says that it is not fit that you drink this water.”
“Why?” Asks the monk, “is it impure?”
“No. It is that we of low birth are impure. So this water is polluted and not fit for high-borns like you. That is what my mother says.”
The monk laughs and drags the filled bucket of water from the well and fills his vessel.
“Sister. Go, tell your mother that we are Buddhaputras and respect no caste or class distinctions. Every human, to us, is equal”
The monk sent for the water by the Buddha himself is no other than Ananda Thera. The Buddha’s retinue had been traveling to the city of Rajagaha from Savath when they were subject to a severe drought. All waterways by their path had run dry. All the water they had brought was over. Throats were parched.
moreEven the water in the damsel’s house was very little. So Ananda Thera was careful not to draw too much water. The story would have ended there if not for the fact that the damsel fell in love with the young handsome Thera.
She began mooning over him, refusing to eat or drink. Finally she raced the retinue to Rajagaha and proclaimed her love to the utter consternation of the unsuspecting Ananda Thera. It needed the Buddha’s mediation to send her back in her senses to her humble abode where eventually she would have married some youth and settled down. That part of the story is uneventful. It is the first part that is eventful and beautiful.
Some, usually of a cynical turn of mind, contend that to compose a beautiful story you need woman, the beautiful the better. Anyone who follows the stuff that goes to make our films will not disagree with that. Did these tales from Buddhist India too veer towards beautiful women? Maybe, in some that deal with characters like the Nagarashobinis. But the major focus is on women who suffered immensely.
Compassionate
Religious leaders are generally very compassionate towards women and focus on them. The Buddha was attentive mostly to women who suffered. Especially due to their children’s woes. In fact one could generalise that infants’ deaths enriched Indian Buddhist literature. One could surmise that mortality of infants’ deaths was rather high in those distant times of communication gaps and limited medical knowledge.
But no father would run on the streets with the corpse of the dead child. It is always the mother. And of course they would all run to the Buddha. And many of them enter the Sangha Sasana due to the sorrow engendered. I may here quote a Wheel Publication Society of Kandy authored by one Susan E Jootla who opines that a mother-child relationship is always stronger than a father-child relationship.
No explanation is necessary. The bond starts from the time of conception (here we ignore the modern day mother who worshipping Mammon does not hesitate to get rid of the new born by throwing the child into a lavatory pit or selling the hapless one to a stranger).
That book includes a rare statement on the sufferings of women by Buddha (Kindred sayings Vol 15).
“Buddha himself pointed out the five kinds of suffering unique to women. Three are physiological: menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. The other two are social.”
Strangely they are said to include leaving her own family for a stranger’s and having to ‘wait upon a man’. That reminds me of a warning, “do not accept every printed word as Gospel truth”.
Anyway how does all this get connected to Buddhist philosophy? The suffering women, a majority of them. Take to robes and turn philosophical, the intense suffering has served the engineering force to relinquish the mind of its misconceptions and desires. Now they utilize these bitter experiences to perceive the universality and omnipresence of suffering to condition themselves to let go of everything in the conditioned realm.
We now come to the Kisa Gotami story, so well-known almost to be stale but never losing its freshness of approach. Buddha tells her to bring mustard seeds from a house where nobody has died. In those days of extended and joint family systems where the aged live along with the young such families were rare though they could be found now with the new generation in the city and the senior citizens in the village either refusing to leave or just spurned.
So Kisa Gothami carries the baby corpse and does some rounds and comes away disappointed. But richer mentally. She has come face to face with the reality and frequency of death. Now cognizant of impermanence, the basic feature of all existence she recites these lines.
“No village law is this, no city law
No law for this clan or that alone
For the whole world and for the Gods too
This is the law: All is impermanent.”
What beauty in those lines!
Patachara
Have you ever wondered on the character of that Indian dame Patachara? She had the good fortune to live in Buddha’s time i e the 6th Century BC. She comes alive every Vesak season on our pandals in different poses, now coiled in her lover’s embrace, then running away from her mansion with him (a mere menial servant), giving birth to her child in dismal circumstances, wading across the river to save her first born, shooing away the eagle carrying away the infant so on and so on. Crowds gather around emitting Aahs and Oohs. They all feel sorry for her. But she is a woman who has fallen from grace.
At one time she had defied all good norms of decent living. She disobeyed her parents, rejecting the man they had chosen for her and carrying on a clandestine affair. She lived in a city where her father held the foremost position and one can imagine the utter disgrace she brought on her family.
But it is a story that is illustrative of the concept of forgiveness in Buddhism. All her misdeeds are forgotten, the fact that three deaths, one her husband’s, the other two her children’s are caused by her stubborn ways are forgotten. As if jutting out of a miracle she emerges one of the most revered figures in Buddhist history. Subsequent to a torrent of incredible calamities she becomes a great teacher to a group of 500 such grief stricken mothers.
Misery
The scene in which she runs to the Great One, utterly mad in her unbounded grief and nearly naked, people around throwing clothes on her yet Buddha saying: “Sister, come to me,” is one of the most poignant tales painted in the endless human canvas.
Other than conveying of these ideas as earlier mentioned the Patachara story is illustrative of the concept of forgiveness too, illustrated equally by the character of Angulimala “on the male side”. I focus on this fact mostly due to the misconceptions in the west regarding Buddhism as demonstrated in the case of Tiger Woods, the celebrated golf player.
The fate that fell manya man of fame and fortune if he is not careful fell on him too. He became extremely rich and remained attractive enough for romance and illicit liaisons. And he was a globetrotter. You cannot expect him to carry his whole family around along with the golf balls. So like the sailor who found a female companion in every port he found woman to keep him company wherever he went.
Tiger Woods, I forgot to mention, was a Buddhist having got this legacy from his mother, some say a Thai. A viewer who knew of this appealed to him to give up Buddhism.
There is no forgiveness in Buddhism unlike in Christianity he argued. Though left unsaid, he was portraying Buddhism as a vengeful primitive cult that never pardoned a sinner.
He had never heard of Patachara called ‘sister’ by the Buddha nor heard of Angulimala who earned his sobriquet of a name, ‘The necklace of fingers’ via his crimes. He had once been a mass murderer who collected the fingers of those he murdered and then woven a necklace out of them. Initially he had been driven to this crime by his own teacher who wished for his downfall. Jealous colleagues had set the teacher against the bright student concocting a tale that he had flirtatious relationship with the master’s wife.
The master thereupon gave him an assignment i e to collect a thousand human fingers of a thousand victims if he was to become a full fledged pupil.
Fortunately he lived in Buddha’s time that in his vast wisdom saw his background that led him to the life of a criminal.
Women! Half of the population of the universe! They garnered enough attention of the Thathagatha.
(Writer is a former Director of Education)
Daily News by Padma Edirisinghe
