Deepak Chopra - Buddha - A Story of Enlightenment

In a stricken voice he mumbled, “What have I done?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, confused. But she was no longer shy or frightened by him. “We have to get you home. Can you walk at all?”

“In a little while.” Gautama ate the rest of the sweet rice with painful slowness. Then Sujata left him for a moment and returned with some water. He drank it greedily, his cracked lips bleeding slightly as he opened his mouth.

“I’ll carry you as far as I can, and then I’ll get my brother,” Sujata said. Gently she lifted Gautama to his feet. His brittle legs looked like they might snap. He couldn’t walk, but he was light enough so that the girl could prop him against her shoulder. Together they hobbled their way up the narrow trail she had taken to the river. They arrived at a road, and Sujata placed him under a tree, propped up against the trunk like a limp doll.

“Wait here. Don’t let anyone move you.”

Tears started rolling down his cheeks again. Sujata found it hard to watch; she hurried away and soon disappeared around the bend. Gautama wished she hadn’t gone. He suddenly felt alone and desolate. Sujata. He hadn’t heard that name in fifteen years. But he had not forgotten her. This was the cause of his weeping, because five years of austerity hadn’t wiped out his memories. It all came back in a flood: his first sight of Sujata on his eighteenth birthday when his robes were gaudy enough for an elephant. Winding his red turban. The excitement he suppressed when he felt stirrings of desire for her. As soon as he recalled these things, it was as if a dead flower in the desert received the spring rains. His mind unfolded in layers, bringing back image after image from the past, and with them the emotions he had wanted to extinguish. He was badly dehydrated, and soon his tear ducts had nothing more to offer.

Gautama rolled his head back and stared at the jungle. It gave back nothing. It was neither a friendly haven nor a dangerous wilderness. The flowers weren’t smiling, the air was not luxuriously moist and enveloping. The blank face of Nature was all he saw, and a surge of horror ran through Gautama. He wanted to vomit, but with all his will he forced the sweet rice and water to stay down. Weak as he was, he could dimly hear his thoughts, and they told him he had to survive. Karma hadn’t died, and neither had he.

The light began to fade. Gautama knew it was close to noon, so he must be fainting. His head grew light; a cold sweat beaded his chest. It was a relief to lose consciousness, so he allowed himself to sink into the sensation of falling and falling. Scarlet parrots scolded loudly overhead; he lay so still that a couple of curious monkeys began to advance down the tree trunk with caution. Gautama wasn’t aware of this. His mind was captured by the face of Ganaka, which he saw clearly. It wore an expression he couldn’t read. Grief? Contempt? Compassion? Blackness swallowed up whatever it was.

SUJATA’S HUT WAS FLIMSY, its mud walls cracked. There was almost no protection from the weather, which meant that spring could enter as it pleased. Gautama lay in bed, weak and feverish, for some weeks before he noticed this. One morning a white sal blossom floated down from the trees, slid sideways on the breeze, and came in through a large crack in the wall. It landed on Gautama’s face and rested there. The fragrance opened his eyes.

“Aren’t you pretty?”

Sujata laughed and lifted the flower to her nose. “Thank you, noble sir.” She pinned it behind her ear. The girl took her nursing duties lightly, hiding any worries she might have from her patient.

“Nothing seems pretty to me,” Gautama said. He had taken to speaking his mind.

“I don’t believe you,” said Sujata.

They were alone together every day. The hut had been abandoned after her grandmother died, and she had begged her family to let the stranger recover there. Her family didn’t want to set eyes on his skin-covered skeleton anyway, so Sujata got what she wanted without objection.

Gautama lifted himself up on his elbows. It was the most effort he had expended since arriving there. “I want to go outside.”

“I won’t stop you,” said Sujata with mock indifference.

Gautama gave a wry smile. “Since when did you become so cruel?” He fell back onto his pillow. She was right; he wasn’t strong enough to be helped into the sunlight yet. “Are you still marking the days?”

Sujata glanced at a piece of bark nailed to one wall; it had twenty X’s scratched into it. “There, see?”

“You must have left out quite a few. Has it been a month, maybe three months?”

Not wanting him to know that he had been ill for five weeks, Sujata defended herself. “I’d have no fiancé if you stayed three months. It’s bad enough already.” She began to feed him a mixture of boiled rice and lentils. She wasn’t complaining. Her good-hearted husband-to-be didn’t mind waiting a while longer; they had been engaged since she was eleven.

“Will you go home when you’re well?” she asked.

Gautama turned his face away, avoiding the next bite of food. “I’m sorry,” Sujata said. “You’ve taken vows.”

He gave her a serious look. “Would you respect a man who would keep a vow even if he died?”

“You mean you?” She shook her head. “No.”

Gautama didn’t mind that he was as passive and dependent as a baby. All he basically knew how to do was be still. There wasn’t a scrap of enlightenment left. The gods had had their joke. Now he was just another starving wretch who had been found, addled and lost, wandering in the forest.

Because his healing was so slow, time slowed down with it. He’d idle an hour watching a sunbeam move across the floor in the morning. Specks of dust floated hazily in it, and a holy verse came to mind. “Worlds come and go like dust motes in a beam of sunlight shining through a hole in the roof.” He used to think those words were beautiful; now they were flat. He got stronger every day, but inside he never lost his horror. Nature’s blank face continued to stare back at him wherever he looked. His eyes would move from the sores on his skin to the sun shining through the open window, then to Sujata’s face and the sal blossom in her ear. They were all the same dull nothing.

“Starting tonight, I’m going to feed myself,” Gautama announced. “And tomorrow I’m going outside, even if you have to carry me.” Sujata smiled. “You’ve gotten too fat. I’ll drop you.”

Because he couldn’t stop himself from speaking his mind, Gautama said, “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

“Oh!” Sujata had picked up a broom to sweep the packed-mud floor. Her hair was roughly tied back; she was too poor to own any makeup, and she rouged her cheeks with berry stain when she knew her fiancé was coming. “Why do you talk like that? You said you took a vow.” She looked embarrassed and displeased.

“My vow must be very powerful. I can see that you’re beautiful, but I don’t care.”

Now Sujata looked more displeased. Turning her back, she swept the floor with a vengeance, throwing up clouds of dust. For half an hour they had nothing to say to each other. But then two monkeys fighting in the yard made Sujata laugh, and when she adjusted Gautama’s bedclothes, her eyes regarded him mildly, without a hint of resentment.

After that, as promised, he fed himself and was taken on wobbly legs out into the yard. He wasn’t a limp doll anymore, so he could be sat in a wicker chair instead of being propped against a tree. Sujata was surprised that he didn’t care where he was put, in sun or shade. One day she came out to find that he’d stepped on some foraging red ants, and now a hundred of them, fierce biters, were climbing up his leg. Gautama didn’t wince; he didn’t even look down at them.