Roberto Calasso - Ka

All at once they stepped out from a bush and came gracefully, obsequiously, to meet him. “We would like to adore your feet, O happy creature,” they whispered. The Buddha kept on walking. Then the two girls started following him, walking right beside him so that they were almost brushing against him. “Many are the desires of men. Many are the desires of men…,” they repeated, concentrating on their words. The Buddha showed no sign of having heard them. The two girls stopped to consult. “Let’s transform ourselves. Let’s each become a hundred fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girls,” said Tantrī. Gravely, Aratī agreed. Now the Buddha was walking in the midst of a procession of girls, all making one of the twenty-three gestures of female seduction. They all kept saying: “We would like to adore your feet, O happy creature.” The forest was full of tripping chatter. The Buddha kept right on walking. Soon the girls disappeared.

The Buddha was sitting under a tree. Tantrī and Aratī reappeared. This time Aratī spoke in a cold, sober voice: “Are you in the forest because you are overwhelmed by some grief? Do you plan to pass your life in thought? Have you insulted the inhabitants of your country and are unwilling to make peace with them? What other reason is there for being so alone?” The Buddha answered as if picking up an old conversation: “I have torn up the roots of grief. I have no thirst for life.” Then Aratī remembered that adulation can prove the supreme weapon. She started again, wheedling this time: “If that is so, many will follow you. Already I see multitudes behind you.” The Buddha interrupted her: “You are scratching a mountain with your nails. You are biting on iron. Why are you following me, if not out of envy?” The two girls stood up, pale and beautiful. They went back to their father. Aratī said: “Father, today I was defeated.” Māra looked up: “He brushed you off like a ball of cotton.” Then he got up and, still gloomy, left his daughters alone.

The Bodhisattva’s first live companions left him because they disapproved of his decision to eat normal food. They were convinced that this amounted to giving way to the world. One day they were sitting beside the road when they saw him reappear, some time after his awakening. They were already thinking of something sarcastic to say when his expression froze them. Throats tight, they were about to utter his name and nothing more: Gautama. The Buddha sketched the barest of gestures with his hand to stop them, and said: “I am the Tatbāgata, He-who-came-thus. That is the name you must call me by.”

Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana were young, rich, handsome. and noble. Together they experienced the feeling that the world is vanity. Together they set out to seek the truth of the matter. They agreed that the first to find it would tell the other. Thus one day, in the narrow streets of Rājagṛha, Śāriputra met a monk who immediately made an impression on him. He had an enchanting way of moving, of going forward and backward with his beggar’s bowl. A way of holding his arms, of always looking at a point some distance away on the ground, and always the same distance. All his gestures were as if supported by threads. Śāriputra followed him for a long time before speaking to him, and when he did so it was with the politeness of someone who has been tempered by a strict education. “How long is it since Your Lordship left his family?” he said. “Not long,” answered the monk. It was Aśvajit, the slowest to understand of the Buddha’s first five companions. With due respect for good manners, which abhor questions that are too direct, but at the same time urged on by an impulse that demanded he find out, Śāriputra continued to converse with the monk. He wanted to know what doctrine could lead to such gracious behavior. For it must be a perfect doctrine.

Aśvajit was cagey. He was well aware of his own inadequacy. He had never been able to reconstruct the Buddha’s doctrine in all its various steps. He remembered his four companions, who had been illuminated before him. He thought how he always got there late, and was always plagued by a sort of blur, which, however, he now accepted without fuss. Looking at the ground he whispered: “I shall never be able to expound the doctrine in all its vastness. All I can do is hint at its spirit.” For a moment Śāriputra dropped his wary, delicate manners. With great excitement in his eyes, he simply said: “That is what I want.” So then Aśvajit said: “The Master has shown how phenomena spring from one cause. He has said what the cause is and what the cessation of the cause.” At that very instant, immaculate, free from any speck of dust, the eye of the Law opened in Śāriputra.

Immediately, the monk and Śāriputra set off on their separate and opposite ways. Śāriputra was desperately eager to find Maudgalyāyana. He was proud to be in a position to keep their pact. He searched far and wide for a long time, but without success. He stared at all the travelers as if in a daze. But it was Maudgalyāyana who saw him one day from a long way off along a flat road. He immediately sensed a change in his friend’s face. His skin was as if brightened by serenity. As soon as he was within earshot, Maudgalyāyana said: “You’ve found it.” “I’ve found it,” said Śāriputra. “Now I’ll tell you.” Śāriputra then recounted his meeting with Aśvajit in every detail. He stopped a moment before repeating the monk’s words on doctrine. As had happened with Śāriputra, the eye of the Law opened in Maudgalyāyana. Now they walked along together, in silence. When the Buddha saw them approaching, and while they were still far away, he told the monks around him: “You see those two who are coming toward us? They will be my two best disciples.” And he welcomed them. People who had known Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana in the past said: “They have set out on the path of that monk who steals children. A path full of widows. A path that destroys families.” The Buddha ordered the monks to answer only that it was the dharma that had taken away Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana. Say no more. The murmuring would end after seven days.

Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana were illuminated by two sentences. “Phenomena spring from one cause” is the first. There are those who might pass over this sentence as obvious. But it is a continent. Śāriputra immediately saw something new in those words. The world is a throw of the dice. And the worlds that follow are successive throws of the dice. They are phases of the līlā , the cosmic game. From infancy on, Śāriputra had been picking up this doctrine here and there, the way one gets to know the secrets of sex. But how can one recognize one cause, one origin, in a sovereign game that unfolds in the totality of things? Now someone was teaching: “Phenomena spring from one cause.” And then immediately afterward opening vistas on a further continent: “He has said what the cause is.” So it was possible, then, to have a vision of the precise point from which dependence arose, the way one can see, on the ground, the place where a spring of water rises. But perhaps the most momentous words for Śāriputra were those that followed: “He has said what is the cessation of the cause.” Cessation, extinction, nirvāṇa : the most popular, the most abused, and the most mysterious word the Buddha used. Śāriputra was still thinking how wonderful it was to be able to say what the cause is, when he heard that one could also announce the cessation of the cause. But had anything ever really ceased in this world, this perennial, endlessly repeated buzz? Such a doctrine was truly unheard of.

The Buddha’s life was ever tinged by colors of sunset and uncertainty. He wanted nothing better than to appear, announce the doctrine, and disappear. For him, everything sprang from the casual occasion, from what he encountered along the road. As for the doctrine, he decided to announce it only on the insistence of an unknown brahman with whom he had fallen into conversation one day — and who turned out to be Brahmā himself. The Buddha let events take him to the point where the word dropped from the branch. Thus even what was soundest seemed precarious, chancy. The epoch demanded it. Things had changed from the days of the preceding Buddhas, when life was long and men accumulated merits. The Law’s sun still shone, but the light it spread was weak now. As the venerable Mahākāśyapa said: reality was sick.