Roberto Calasso - Ka

When Ānanda was welcomed back among the monks, when they asked him to repeat all the words of the Law he had heard and explain when and where he had heard them, a subtle distress disturbed the serenity he had just achieved. “The doctrine is inconunensurable,” he thought. “Who could ever collect it and arrange it for display?” As far as he could remember, there had never been any order to the Buddha’s teachings. He waited for whatever came up. Then he spoke, perhaps for a long time, but using all kinds of forms. His words might be the Law, or rules, or stories, or treatises. As long as the Buddha was there, no one had bothered to link the doctrine together in order. The monks recited the sūtras beginning at the tenth section, then going on to the third or the eighth or any of the others. The next time the sequence would be different. And thus it had always been. Now the forest of words loomed up like a great wall. There was nothing left but that forest. The Buddha’s teaching had always been dense. Now they would have to disentangle it, divide it up. “But how?” wondered Ānanda. And finally four sections appeared to him, which in his mind he called what everybody was then to call them: the One-and-more, the Middle-length, the Long, and the Mixed. Those names evoke that element of formlessness of which the Buddha’s teaching ever partook. As if it were a substance that could shrink and expand without limit. So those who came to seek the doctrine asked for the Long Discourses and the Short Discourses, because the doctrine could consist of a few syllables or of vast, effusive treatises.

The gamble the Buddha took was far more radical than a mere challenge to the order of sacrifice. Sacrifice had produced the renouncers, the renouncers had reproduced sacrifice. Brahmā was the first of the renouncers. Śiva is the sacrifice made in every moment in the world, even when there are no longer any places of sacrifice. “Viṣṇu is the sacrifice.” To strike Brahmā then was not the most arduous of undertakings, nor was it the last. One then had to strike Viṣṇu. The Buddha was a renouncer who wanted to strike the one from whom he had arisen: Viṣṇu. But how can one strike he who protects everything and keeps everything in existence? The Buddha concentrated on just one point. He wanted to take away Viṣṇu’s pallet, eliminate the residue. When he spoke of nirvāṇa , what was essential was that this state be defined as “without residue.” such, that is, as to guarantee escape from the cycle. This was the gamble then: to break the circle of existence. What lay in that place beyond any residue could be called neither life nor death, because life and death can only be known as powers within the cycle — and hence are always a new life and a new death. We have no way of saying what life and death might be outside the realm of repetition. Thus the Buddha refrained from defining them.

Yet the Buddha chose not to take his struggle against residue to the limit. Right to the end he kept Ānanda beside him, and Ānanda was his residue. He couldn’t live without him. And to this day it is only through Ānanda that we have access to his doctrine.

Ānanda, ananta: “joy,” “infinite.” The difference between the two sounds is minimal. Ānanta is the bed of serpentine coils Viṣṇu sleeps on as he drifts around the waters. That bed is also called Śeṣa, Residue, what is left over — dissolved, submerged, burned up — from the previous world: what another world will one day rise from. Ānanda is enlightened as his head touches the pillow. That is the moment when Ānanda discovers himself. Because Ānanda is the pillow, the amorous, still sleepy vagueness. But also the Buddha’s only support, the man who for twenty-five years made the master’s bed.

The Buddha’s hidden challenge was directed at śeṣa , the “residue.” nirvāṇa is his most drastic attempt to wipe it out. Residue signifies rebirth. Yet the Buddha did allow the Nāgas, the remote and sovereign serpents, to protect him. And Ānanda was his śeṣa . Ānanda was the “residue” that history leaves — and that allows history to reach its conclusion. The difference the Buddha introduced can be found in the opposite attitudes of Ānanda and Gavāṃpati. Summoned to the assembly at Rājagṛha, the powerful Gavāṃpati, a man given to solitary rumination, refused to come down from his mountaintop: he was afraid they were calling him because they were already fiercely divided over the doctrine. And it was true. But Gavāṃpati wanted nothing more than to join the Buddha in nirvāṇa as soon as possible. Like the ancient ṛṣis , he disappeared in a blaze of fire that burst from his chest. All that was left of him were his cloak and his bowl. A mute residue. These two objects were the only things that would testify on his behalf at the assembly. If the monks had followed Gavāṃpati’s example, the Three Baskets of the Law would have remained empty and the Buddha’s teaching been lost. But there is more: if the only impure one of all the monks, Ānanda, had not agreed to recall the Buddha’s teachings in their entirety, the Law would have been forever incomplete.

Nanda and Ānanda. The attractive, fatuous brother. The obliging and tenacious cousin. Sometimes their stories get mixed up, overlap. They were counterweights to the Buddha: the terrestial twin, the Residue, Śeṣa. The Buddha could never exist alone. Even when he sits to meditate, his lotus seat is a coiled snake. The Buddha never sets foot on the bare earth. His foundation ( pratiṣṭhā ) is a flower and a snake. They have taken the place of the black antelope skin. But how could the Buddha sit on himself? And the antelope presupposes sacrifice. The Buddha wishes to presuppose the world and no more: flower and snake. Then, when he preaches, he is supported by his friend and faithful servant, his cousin Ānanda. Thus the two birds of the great aśvattha live on, “inseparable companions,” through transformation after transformation.

In the woods of Kuśinagara the Buddha stopped by twin śāla trees, each growing as a mirror image of the other. He told Ānanda that he wanted his bed made here. And he added: with the head toward the north. Ānanda prepared the Buddha’s bed just as he had been doing for twenty-five years. But he knew that toward the second watch of this particular night, the Buddha would enter the nirvāṇa without residue. He was gripped by terror. The Buddha lay on his right side, his legs slightly bent, feet together, like a lion. He looked ahead, with the same expression he always wore. Before lying down, the only thing he said was that he was very tired. Meanwhile the branches of the two śāla trees had bent toward each other a little, and though it was not the season, soft flowers began to fall on the Buddha’s body and the ground around him.

An old monk, Upavāna, came by. Sitting next to the Buddha, he fanned him. Ānanda, who had gone off somewhere for a moment, recognized him immediately: he had been the Buddha’s servant before him. Now he had turned up again without even asking to be introduced to the Buddha. What cheek! He was waving a large fan in a dense, heavily charged silence. Then Ānanda was amazed to see the Buddha send Upavāṇa packing with just a few curt words. The Buddha had never treated anyone like that, Ānanda thought. And a torrent of questions flooded his mind: “How can the Buddha, on the very night he is about to enter into extinction, mistreat a monk who is trying to do him a kindness? How can the Buddha, at this of all moments, do something that I might do? What inaccessible stores of anger lurk within the Buddha? Or is it just me again not understanding what’s going on?” “For twelve yojanas around. this place is thick with gods, their heads knocking against each other: they have all come here to watch, and they are complaining because Upavāṇa’s fan is preventing them from seeing what is happening.” said the Buddha, answering the thoughts of his bewildered servant. Then Ānanda suddenly felt he was onstage in an immense theater, with thousands of eyes staring at him from the darkness. Numbed, he thought: “The Buddha hasn’t told me everything.” And so it was. A little later the Buddha went on in a lower voice: “Of course Upavāṇa isn’t only that foolish monk whose place you so proudly took. It’s a long story. All stories are long stories. One day, thousands of years ago, in the times of the Buddha Kāśyapa, Upavāna was left alone in the monastery to sweep the floor and prepare the fire for the other monks. That blaze was so intense that it still illuminates him today. The gods are disturbed, dazzled by the light that shines from Upavāṇa’s face. And they are afraid they won’t ever see the Buddha again, because Buddhas are unpredictable, no one knows when they will appear, the way no one knows when the udumbara will flower. But that’s still not the end of the story: because Upavāṇa is just one of many gods, who chose to come along ahead of the others by assuming the form of the monk who lit the fire. But as far as I’m concerned, all the gods have to be kept at the same distance. That’s why I sent him packing,” said the Buddha, and he went back to gazing into the still air where the śāla petals were silently falling.