Love Dharma. Geri Larkin

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter One

      THE ANCIENTS

      In the sixth century before Christ, in the foothills of the Himalayas, near the present-day border between India and Nepal, there was a small but prosperous kingdom ruled by the warrior people Sakya. The capital city of the kingdom was Kapilavastu, and the land around was thickly dotted with smaller towns and villages. To the south of this kingdom lay the country of Kosala, and beyond that the kingdom of Magadha, in the area of the modern Indian state of Behar around Rajgir. To the east lay the land of Koliya, from which came Queen Mahamaya, the wife of the Sakyan ruler, King Suddhodana.

      — Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Before He Was Buddha

      IN THE YEAR 560 B.C., Queen Mahamaya gave birth to a son who was to grow into one of the great spiritual sages of all time. We know him as Buddha. His is a life well suited to the best story books. Siddhartha, the beloved son of a ruler, gives up everything, including a beautiful young wife and child, to search for the keys to happiness: “Take my clothes and my jewelry back to my father and tell him and my mother and my wife that they must not worry. I am going away to seek an escape from the misery of aging, sickness, and death. As soon as I have found it, I will return to the palace and teach it to my father, my mother, my wife, my son and everyone else. Then everyone will be truly happy.” 1

      Following his renunciation of the princely life and six years of asceticism that included almost starving himself to death, young Siddhartha found his answer to the question of unhappiness in his own experience of complete enlightenment. His consequent message for achieving happiness, called the four noble truths, teaches that life is difficult for everyone and that it is difficult because we are always grasping and craving something we don’t have. Buddha promised a way out of our suffering. Called the eightfold path, his “middle way” is basically a set of principles for living a life of deep integrity. Such a life automatically brings compassion, peacefulness, love, and joy. More specifically, the eightfold path calls for right understanding, or seeing life as it really is; right thought, or doing our best not to succumb to anger, greediness, or denial; kind and tolerant speech; actions that demonstrate our respect for all the things and people in our lives (including those we wish lived far away); a livelihood with the same tendencies; giving everything we do everything we’ve got; mindfulness; and concentration.

      For the rest of his life Buddha wandered the three hundred kilometers between the southern edge of the Himalayas and the Ganges, teaching his truths. His was a landscape thick with woods and jungles, complete with tigers, elephants, and rhinos. Wooded areas were broken up by fields of grains and dotted with villages that had grown up alongside slow and easy rivers. This is a geography that still only knows three seasons: so hot your skin itches, a cold similar to a late New England autumn, and monsoon. If you’ve never experienced a monsoon, it is hard to imagine what this season is like. Torrents of rain fall for hours each day, for weeks at a time. Floods prevent travel, and dirt roads become mud slides. Accompanying the rain? Armies of rats, snakes, and scorpions if you happen to reside at the base of the Himalayas.

      Four kingdoms provided support for the young wanderer and his followers. North of the Ganges River was the kingdom of Kosala. Buddha’s family came from the city of Kapilavastu, which was right on the northern border of Kosala in the republic of Sakyas. Kosala is where one of Buddha’s best pals, King Pasenadi, lived. Southwest of Kosala was Vamsa, home to King Udena and a set of wives who tried to kill each other on a pretty regular basis. To the south of the river was the kingdom of Avanti and to the east of Avanti, Magadha. Buddha and his followers seemed to spend most of their time here. Another of his best friends and later a major donor, King Bimbisara, lived in Magadha. Because his kingdom was prosperous, thanks to iron ore mining, Bimbisara was able to keep Buddha’s followers in food and shelter, even as their numbers grew into the thousands. Marriages linked the kingdoms in one way or another, for better or worse. Mostly, a relatively peaceful coexistence was the order of the day, and people could freely cross the borders between the different kingdoms.

      Much is known about the first people attracted to the teachings of Buddha. His time period was one where the homeless spiritual seeker was a familiar sight. In the decades before Buddha was born, a spontaneous movement supporting spiritual growth had surfaced. People were starting to break out of the existing spiritual disciplines, with their rituals and caste orientation. What some call “a psychosis of spiritual seeking” had seized the young men of the warrior and merchant classes across the four kingdoms. Thousands abandoned their work and turned their wives and children over to their extended families for safekeeping so they themselves could take on the lifestyle of a wandering ascetic. While the young men’s choices of spiritual practices ranged from self-mutilation to vows of complete silence, almost all of them were on a constant lookout for a teacher who could instruct them on genuine spiritual practice.

      Along came Buddha. At thirty-six he was an attractive teacher: handsome, smart, obviously from the princely caste— and enlightened. Men, mostly from the ruling class, began to follow him. First they showed up in small groups, then in hundreds, then by the thousands. Young, eager, and bright, they left families and livelihoods to follow Buddha and embrace his teachings, walking from village to village not so much to preach as to demonstrate, by example, the power of Buddha’s understanding. Yasa was one of these. The epitome of the idly rich young man, he bumped into Buddha in one of the deer parks where the Buddha would go to meditate. Asking Buddha about himself, Yasa was so struck by the innate joy and wisdom emanating from the monk that he immediately renounced his princely life to search for what Buddha had found—bringing his fifty-four best friends along with him.

      Then there were the three Kassapa brothers, “matted-hair ascetics” who had a local monopoly on the spiritual market, with more than a thousand followers between them. Hearing Buddha, they also became disciples. In later years one of the brothers, suddenly realizing how all of what Buddha was teaching could be manifested in a single flower, became Buddha’s first dharma heir, responsible for guaranteeing that the teachings survived Buddha’s own passing. The sons of the headmen of two villages, Sariputta and Moggallana, also became followers, responsible for translating many of Buddha’s words into “the language of the valley,” or local idiom, and teaching the growing crowds of followers when Buddha was unavailable.

      In the meantime, what about the women? What of their lives? It was bad enough that they had to survive at least two miserable seasons every year. It was bad enough to live in a social system, a caste system, where they were utterly dependent upon their extended families and, for married women, the kindness of their husbands’ families. To make matters worse, in addition to facing the natural disasters of their lives—disease, dire poverty, the deaths of beloved relatives—many of the women lost their men—their sons, lovers, husbands, brothers, and fathers—to asceticism. Where did these women fit in?

      For Buddha’s first few years of teaching, the answer was: nowhere.

      But then Ananda surfaced, and he was a surprise advocate for female spiritual seekers. Ananda, Buddha’s cousin and attendant in his later years, was a naturally kind and compassionate monk. He cared about everybody’s welfare—not just the monks but also women and children. As the women relatives of the first followers of Buddha heard about the men’s spiritual experiences studying with the Buddha, many of them wanted to sign up as well.

      Ananda watched all of this unfold.

      One of those women was Pajapati, Buddha’s beloved stepmother. By all accounts Pajapati was a sweet and nurturing parent, nursing the young prince through his childhood and seeing him through his own marriage at sixteen СКАЧАТЬ