Roberto Calasso - Ka

While the Buddha was wandering around northeast India, stopping from time to time to expound the doctrine to his followers, history went on just the same. So the day came when the Śākyas were massacred. That morning the Buddha told his monks that he had a bad headache, as if a stone were pressing down on his head, a stone that was a mountain. Meanwhile, one by one, his relatives were being exterminated, and with them the entire tribe of the Śākyas. Virūḍhaka, king of the Kosalas, had launched a surprise attack. Following an ancient tradition, the Śākyas were excellent archers. But because they had heard the words of the Buddha, they were no longer willing to kill. Hence, though their arrows were able to slow down the massacre, they could not stop it. Virūḍhaka had brooded long over his vendetta, ever since those wretched provincials at Kapilavastu, who spoke as if they were guardians of the dharma when in the end they were just his subjects like anybody else, had called him “son of a slave.” He wanted that arrogant, unarmed tribe to die in agony. He had a large number of pits dug and ordered that the men and women be piled in them, packed tight. Then he had them trampled on by elephants. There were only a few, desperate survivors. They reached the Buddha in the forest and told him what had happened. When they left, they asked if they could take some relics with them. The Buddha gave them a few hairs and nail parings. After that, he never saw them again. It is said that they founded a kingdom in Vakuḍa, a place no one has ever seen.

The Buddha was alone now. He had no relatives, nor any home to go back to. Kapilavastu had been razed to the ground — and likewise his much loved Park of the Banyans. Of his family, his cousin and constant shadow, Ānanda, was the only survivor. Together they made no comment. Not even when a few days later they heard that Virūḍhaka and his troops had been drowned in a torrent of flood water that had swept down the stony bed of the Aciravatī River. Gloating over their loot, the Kosalas had camped there for the night.

Like Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha can only appear close to the “dissolution,” the pralaya . Behind these two there is always a massacre. Before them, a stretch of water swollen with wreckage. At least Kṛṣṇa had fought, and intrigued, though he never bore arms. The massacre came about just the same. Not so the Buddha. He did not intervene. And once again the massacre took place. Had they stood in its way somehow? Had they instigated it? Had they let it happen? Perhaps the massacre was just a premonitory sign of the real and inevitable event: the rushing floodwater that would dissolve all, wipe away the profile of a world and return it to what it had originally been: a residue. And among those residues, among the uprooted trees, the sodden timbers and washed-out rags, barely distinguishable from the endless watery surface, a coiled snake, soft as a cushion, would one day emerge. An adolescent body lay on that bed, carmine lips opening to the sky.

Why was the residue granted this privilege? Why, rather than representing the insignificant, did it become the place that conceals the essential? When the vrātyas played in the sabhā , first with heaps of nuts, later with two dice, the winning throw was kṛta : a number divisible by four with nothing left over. After that came tretā and dvāpara ; respectively the throws that gave remainders of three and two. The losing throw, kali , the “dog’s throw,” was the throw that gave a remainder of one, the irreducible remainder. The names of these throws were then transferred to the different eras, or yugas: kṛta was the perfect age; kali the age of conflict and ruin, which continues to this day, ever more vividly prefiguring the “dissolution,” pralaya , the longer it goes on. Even when they divided up time into the calendar, they realized that there was always a remainder, an intercalary period that obliged them to make adjustments and new, more complicated calculations. The game, in which destiny is decided, and time: following these two trails, they reached a conclusion: one can only eliminate any residue in the realm of the discontinuous. The continuous, by contrast, is ever elusive. The discontinuous rests, drifts, on the continuous. Through the residue, the continuous forcibly reminds us of its existence. However subtly broken up, the discontinuous never quite manages to superimpose itself over the continuous. The difference is the surplus: that which must be sacrificed, in order for the equation, if only for a while, to come out. For a while: that is, until a new residue forms and is noticed. Obliging us once again to bow down before the continuous.

Something does get transmitted from one avatāra to another: a weak trace of the history that went before, the disaster that went before. The peculiarity of an aeon just concluded is passed on to the next aeon as a flavor, a tone, a veiled memory. Being ripens, is streaked, speckled, made anew with pieces that are already worn out. And much is lost. Something of Kṛṣṇa the negotiator, the military adviser of the Pāṇḍavas, ever absorbed in a plan obscure to all but himself, gets rubbed off on the prince of the Śākyas who left his home: the Buddha. Something unites them, even if the words they used were now so different, as likewise the things they did. Their detachment unites them. Their turning away from the fruit.

Following the Buddha, a throng of monks was approaching Vaiśālī. There were one thousand, two hundred and fifty of them. They were dumbstruck when the Buddha led them into the Park of the Mango Trees, a vast area of thick and silent woodland. The monks lined up between the plants, like schoolboys. They knew the Buddha liked to stay in parks not far from the towns, but not too near either, with plenty of entrances, not too busy by day, quiet at night. They had been to many others, given as gifts to the Buddha by sovereigns or merchants. But none possessed the subtle enchantment of the Park of the Mango Trees, this place where they entered as if into their own home, where only the odd ribbon or bead dropped along the paths showed that someone had passed that way before them.

Then the Buddha began to speak: “Monks, be ardent, perfectly conscious and attentive. Āmrapālī, the courtesan, is coming. Her beauty is without equal in the universe. Yoke your minds and do not produce false notions. The body is like a fire covered by ashes that a foolish man walks on.” Āmrapālī, Guardian of the Mango Trees, was mistress of the park. To spend a night with her cost fifty kārṣāpaṇas , equivalent to a value of five dairy cows. People had immediately whispered to her the news of the arrival of the Buddha and his monks. “The Buddha is staying here among my mangoes,” said Āmrapālī, thoughtfully. Her son, Vimalakauṇḍinya, offspring of a regal love, had left her to become a monk. “Now I will see.” Āmrapālī said to herself. She chose the finest clothes she had and ordered her pupils — there were five hundred of them — to put on their finest clothes. She set out at once in a welter of subdued murmurings. The procession penetrated the park like a dagger plunged to the speckled hilt. How often they had laughed together along those paths, among those trees.

The Buddha was finishing what he had to say to his monks. Āmrapālī got down from her carriage and bowed at his feet. The one thousand, two hundred and fifty monks lowered their eyes, to protect themselves. “Why have you come?” the Buddha asked Āmrapālī. “Because you are venerated in heaven,” said the courtesan. She had sat down on a stool beside the Tathāgata. The Buddha went on asking her questions. Did she like her work? “No,” said Āmrapālī. “The gods ordered me to do it.” “Who ordered you to gather together your five hundred pupils?” the Buddha asked. “They are poor girls, and I protect them,” said Āmrapālī. The Buddha said nothing. The silence was total. The ocher patches of the monks mingled with the colorful patches of the courtesans. “That’s not true,” said the Buddha in a soft voice. Āmrapālī bowed and said she wanted to become a follower of the Buddha. Then she felt she could say no more. She put the palms of her hands together in a sign of farewell and mustered up the courage to say one last thing: “My only desire is that the Buddha and the community of monks accept an invitation to my house.” Saying nothing, the Buddha accepted.