10

 

 

I stayed awake most of the night, although my meditation was not very successful, my mind fumbling through a murky daze filled with worry over Kavi and my son. Around midnight Kavi fell asleep, slumping against me and filling me with tenderness and grief. I put my arm around him, grateful for his warm, small presence. Tonight was the first time since I’d said goodbye to Ama that I’d touched another human being.

I jolted into full wakefulness at dawn, and my movement woke up Kavi, who immediately began his whispered cemetery chant. I joined him in a rote kind of way, thinking of how I’d confront Devadatta about his practice of sending little boys to the charnel grounds. Once the sun was all the way up, I told Kavi it was time to leave. “We should probably return separately,” I said. “Devadatta might want to see us meditating in solitude.”

“But I thought he wanted me to teach you.”

“He probably intended us to separate afterwards.” I smiled in an artificially confident way, and then l left, wanting to encounter Devadatta without getting Kavi in trouble.

I spotted my cousin as hundreds of monks were silently lining up to embark on their daily almsround. The morning sun dazzled through the bamboo trunks, casting splintered light that rippled over the monks’ robes, ranging from ocher to bright yellow, and a hush hung in the chilly morning air, as if the tree-dwellers were exhausted from yesterday’s feast. Devadatta, in his robe that looked like it had spent its previous incarnation as a pile of cleaning rags, had yet to take his place in the still-forming line. “Venerable Devadatta,” I said, “I encountered a seven-year-old monk in the charnel ground last night who’d mistakenly believed you sent him there.”

Devadatta’s narrow face, raw and nicked from his unmerciful razor, remained unchanged. “It was no mistake,” he said. “It’s a requirement for all monks, no matter what their age, to face death in this way.”

“Ah, I see. He was a little confused. He didn’t seem to think other monks were supposed to accompany him, but of course he would need protection from the animals.”

Devadatta skimmed his gaze over my new white robe, as if pained at having to view such a pristine garment on a mendicant. “Friend,” he said, “it is clear that you still live in delusion about what life and death actually are. If a monk, meditating in the forest or some other dangerous area, meets his physical demise, he is actually fortunate. His meditation will have given him the clarity of mind to understand death as a simple threshold to be crossed, and with this understanding he will pass into a better incarnation, or perhaps leave the endless round of suffering forever.”

“This boy did not seem to be of an age to achieve this clarity.”

Devadatta shook his head. “As I pointed out to you yesterday, many unqualified aspirants have entered the Sangha. For them, accidental death is far superior to failing as a monk, for their subsequent life will be far more benign. But outsiders, with their untrained minds, will never understand this.”

A knell sounded in my heart, similar to the one that I’d felt when the Tathagata told me that women couldn’t enter the Sangha. Be mindful, I told myself. Don’t fly off into all sorts of conclusions. I had no idea whether the Tathagata condoned what Devadatta was saying. Also, I couldn’t afford to turn Devadatta into an enemy, someone who might spend too much time studying me for possible flaws—and in that way begin to suspect my sex. So once again, I held my anger at him in check, not having the time to wait for it to disintegrate in the elixir of mediation.

I bowed deeply. “I didn’t intend to imply that the boy was unqualified,” I said. “In fact, he assumed you wished to have him teach me some Dharma, which he did. I’m beginning to understand, Venerable One! The boy demonstrated perhaps the chief requirement for a monk—the spirit of a warrior. No wonder we Sakyans are so drawn to this Sangha.”

“Quite,” Devadatta said, straightening as if in deference to his own warrior spirit. “Ignorant people fail to comprehend the difficulty of this path. Mara colludes with our human weakness to foil our every step. The only hope for any of us is discipline.” For the first time, I noticed, Devadatta had used the first person plural, and I allowed myself to appreciate that his main battle could well be against himself. But then he added, “And as far as young boys being incapable of facing death in charnel grounds, consider the Tathagata’s own son. He completed this meditation within the first six months of his arrival. Perhaps you should speak to him for inspiration.”

I kept my eyes lowered, lest I betray my outrage. Had my former husband risked my child in this way? “Perhaps I will speak to both him and his father,” I said. “They will no doubt enlighten me.”

 

I watched the long line of alms-bowl-carrying monks file off in the winking sunlight, walking in order of seniority, which meant Devadatta headed up the line and Kavi, arriving just as the line started moving, took his place at its end. The Tathagata and his most senior disciples, I assumed, were dining with the King, making me wonder how much my former husband needed to play up to powerful leaders in order to ensure that he and his monks could spread the Dharma. I also wondered whether he still enjoyed activities such as dining in the King’s palace. I hated to think he was completely indifferent to earthly pleasure, but perhaps my own unawakened nature made me feel that way. What was the word I’d heard to describe how people living in the truth viewed the world? Disenchantment. Overcoming ignorance meant becoming disenchanted with the joys one formerly lived for, whether milk sweets, landscaped gardens, battlefield triumphs, or maternal love.

Kavi beamed at me as he passed by, and he signaled me to take my place behind him where those aspiring to be monks were allowed to walk, collecting alms-food with the others. I smiled back but declined. I needed time alone to consider how I should approach the Tathagata. How much did I want to denigrate Devadatta to him? And what about Rahula? I should at least inform his father that I planned to talk to my son. I wouldn’t want anyone reporting to the Tathagata that I’d gone behind his back.

As far as food was concerned, it could wait, although my stomach was hollow with hunger. My life as a monk required a balance between keeping up my strength and staying as lean as possible, which reduced not only my curves but also my monthly bleeding. Fortunately, a monk’s life included opportunities for solitary meditation that I could use to my advantage to conceal womanly functions as well as for bathing on secluded banks of rivers and streams. I’d also devised various pads and plugs and had become adept at binding the different parts of my body as necessary. Finally, I could take advantage of the monastic practice of modesty. Monks were supposed to keep their bodies to themselves and covered at all times. I would prove exemplary in this way.

The last of the monks were disappearing into the narrow passageway between the trees, the leaf shadows jiggling over their yellow robes. For now, I’d stave off my hunger with water. At the far end of the grove was a small stone well with a clay bucket where flurries of tiny blue butterflies had come for the moisture as the day heated up. I wandered over to the well and quenched my thirst, then sat down under a tree to ponder my strategy, the hum of insects around me and birdsong sparkling above.

I took a deep breath, prepared to call my mind to order, and looked up to see the Tathagata walking toward me, his yellow robe flashing in the sun. No, too early! I wanted to shout out to him. Instead, I sprang to my feet, took a couple of steps forward, put my hands together, and bowed. Had he come here deliberately to seek me out? He seemed half-dissolved in the sunlight dazzling on his robe. In the glare I couldn’t focus on his face, much less enter into the otherworldly unity of the last time we spoke.

“I assumed you’d be here,” he said, without explaining how or why he’d interrupted his important day to encounter me. “Now that you’ve meditated in the charnel grounds,” he said, “do you still wish for the life of a monk?”

His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, an impression that was perhaps a result of my dismay. I wasn’t ready for this interview. “I met a little boy among the dead bodies,” I said. “He seemed far too young for this sort of meditation.”

“Only monks over eighteen stay in charnel grounds.”

“Not according to Devadatta.” I took a breath. “He mentioned Rahula”—I couldn’t bring myself to say “your son,” and saying “my son” or “our son” was out of the question—“also spent the night there early in his training.” Simply stating this possibility out loud reawakened my outrage.

“Rahula is an exception. He will achieve enlightenment before he turns twenty-one.”

“Luckily, then, the dogs didn’t devour him.” I did not conceal my sarcasm.

“He was watched over.”

I felt some relief, but my anger had been aroused and my suspicion not fully allayed. “The little boy I saw last night was completely alone,” I said. “Devadatta seemed to think that a premature death would do him good.”

“That’s Devadatta’s view. He believes that we’ve all spent enough time on the samsaric wheel of life and death to fill the oceans of the world with our tears. To die meditating can reduce our misery by cutting the number of future lives we’ll have to endure—or even eliminate them altogether.”

“And you agree?” I fought off an attack of vertigo. Once again I was thinking that the man who had been my husband had gone beyond humanity, his mind as vast and impersonal as the winter sky.

His eyes remained steady. “It doesn’t matter whether I agree with him or not. More important is the intention to do no harm. Placing children in danger is doing harm.”

“But you allowed him to do it!”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“I thought you had psychic powers!”

“Even a Tathagata’s powers are limited.”

“And yet you knew I was here.”

“Perhaps I was lucky.” He fastened his gaze to mine. “You will not be of help to me if you need to see me as a god.”

“I don’t believe in gods,” I reminded him.

“That’s just one point of view, you know. Although I may not be a god, some of my teachings concern deities, because this is the only way some people can understand the Dharma. As my follower, you would have to memorize and spread these teachings.”

“So do you believe in deities, or is this your way of talking down to humans?” I couldn’t shake my mistrust.

An ordinary man would have exhibited some annoyance by now, but his voice remained smooth and soft as a river after the rains have passed. “There are many ways the unawakened mind perceives this universe,” he said, “and every one of them is conditioned by ignorance. My perception, except in that it results from a human body, is no longer conditioned. I can choose to see deities or not. So you see your question concerning my beliefs is impossible to answer.”

I folded my arms, realizing I had wanted him to be annoyed. Then I would have had some power in this exchange, in spite of his slippery answers and non-answers to my questions. “If you’re not a god, what am I to make of you?” I asked.

“The question is, what are you to make of the Dharma? You have to see the truth for yourself. This is also one of my teachings.”

Right now I wasn’t sure about the Dharma or his teachings. “I need to know the truth about Devadatta,” I said. “How can you let men like that remain in the Sangha, let alone grant him so much power?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I will certainly stop him from sending young boys to the cemeteries, but I can’t force him to disrobe.” As he stepped back out of the blinding sun, I noticed a faint network of creases under his eyes and a certain sharpness of his cheekbones, as if the resilient youthful flesh had worn away, showing the fatigue of teaching day after day for hours at a time. I had the thought that his body would have preferred to remain in the bliss of meditation for his entire lifetime, rather than trying to convince us humans to go against the raging current of our obsessions and delusions. Surely, a body would live longer bathed in eternal peace than traveling on foot from city to city, facing endless questions and controversies. But this was the choice he—or the Dharma—had made.

“If you can’t force Devadatta to disrobe, I don’t understand why you think you can stop him from doing anything he wishes.”

“By instituting a rule. When I started, we had hardly any rules, but the behavior of some monks has made them more and more necessary.” He half-smiled. “At least Devadatta likes rules, especially when he gets to enforce them.”

“He could refuse to obey your rule.”

“Then he’ll disrobe on his own. But he won’t, any more than I would force him to.”

“So by saying you can’t force him means that you won’t.”

“As I said, you don’t understand.” And now his eyes seemed to dim with true sadness. “This Sangha is divided. Monks quarrel about all sorts of things, particularly issues of discipline, and many agree with Devadatta. If I asked him to leave, the Sangha would not survive the division, not at this point, and the Dharma would be lost for hundreds of generations. Devadatta knows this, and he’s no more willing to take the risk than I am.”

“That reflects on the Dharma,” I said. “If Devadatta is required to maintain it.”

“The Dharma is not maintained, it unfolds.” His voice was gently corrective, making me wonder if his sadness, along with his fatigue, belonged only to his flesh and not to the mystery of his being. “There’s a chance that Devadatta will awaken into a great teacher,” he said. “His emphasis on discipline has much to offer, especially to those monks who think meditation means lolling in the grass all day and enlightenment happens after parroting a few sentences from a Dharma talk. This case of the boy monks is an opportunity for Devadatta to learn. Perhaps I can persuade him of the moral wrongness of his point of view.”

“I doubt it.” Yes, I told myself, even a Tathagata’s powers were limited, perhaps too limited to maintain the integrity of his Sangha.

“Doubt is permitted,” he said. “But you must make a decision whether to ordain or not.”

I couldn’t answer. Although I feared I had nowhere else to go, how could I live in a spiritual community that not only tolerated but in some ways endorsed someone like Devadatta?

“You do have a choice,” he said, and once again he seemed to have read my thoughts. “If you decide not to join the Sangha, I’ll ask King Bimbisara to admit you as a member of his court. You’d have more freedom there than among the Sakyans, and as you see, I come to this grove often. You’ll still have some contact with the monks.”

It was almost noon, and hot white sunlight bore straight down on my bare scalp. His offer stunned me. Here was a chance to return to life as a woman without living under my brother’s thumb. I could give up my current deceptive, half-starved existence, where I’d already made a powerful enemy. As a laywoman I could continue my meditation practices—granted, they would necessarily be more superficial—but did I really trust the Tathagata’s Dharma? In Bimbisara’s court perhaps I could unite the women around an independent spiritual life, not as extreme as what the Tathagata taught. Or—although it was almost impossible to conceive of it at this point—I might even remarry. Best of all, I’d have a chance to meet with Rahula in a way that, even if there were rules against physical contact, he’d know me as his mother.

“You can do this?” I said, a whole new future lighting up inside me.

“Bimbisara and I have been friends since boyhood.”

Of course, I knew this to be true.

Just as I was about to agree to this arrangement, I heard the hollow thunk of bamboo trunks striking each other. Someone was entering the clearing. Emerging from the shadows was Kavi, holding up a banana-leaf package. “Look, Ananda! I brought you pokaras and cheese!”

He was smiling so happily at being able to make this offering.

My throat caught. How could I leave my little friend, let alone all the other lower-caste child monks, in Devadatta’s heartless realm?

By now, Kavi had recognized the Tathagata. Still clutching the package, he dropped to his knees. “Please forgive me, Blessed One! I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

My former husband smiled, and his warmth confused me all the more as to what I should do. “You didn’t disturb me, Kavi. In fact, you have gained merit by your practice of generosity.” He nodded in my direction, in a way that told Kavi to go ahead and give me the package, warm and fragrant with cinnamon and ghee. He handed it to me, eyes lowered.

“Thank you so much!” I took the package, feeling my stomach lurch in anticipation of food in spite of everything else that was happening.

“You’re welcome,” Kavi whispered, and vanished as suddenly as he’d arrived.

I stood holding the package, my mind and heart in disarray. The prospect of King Bimbisara’s court beckoned me like a soft breeze leading to a gentle lake, one I hadn’t known existed until now. Yet such a life of ease was a temptation I could withstand. The opportunity to reunite with Rahula as his mother was a whole other matter.

I looked directly at the Tathagata. “Before I decide, I have to talk to Rahula,” I said, offering no pretext.

“You’ll find him here just before sunset. I trust you’ll say only what’s necessary.”

I bowed. The truth between us felt like the clearest day in the coldest part of the year.

I returned to this secluded part of the grove late in the day, having been too agitated even to attend the afternoon’s Dharma talk. The light was fading quickly and in my current mood I heard the distant peacocks’ cries as edged with desperation. “Dukkha! Dukkha!”—Suffering! Suffering! I took deep breaths to calm myself, trying to feel soothed by the cool evening smells of moss and damp soil as I sat in the same spot I’d occupied earlier, near the well.

Then, there he was, my dearest son, beaming down on me. “The Blessed One said you wished to ask me some questions,” he said.

For a moment I just sat still and drank in the sight of him, the glowing brown eyes and strong Sakyan cheekbones just beginning to emerge in his nearly nine-year-old face. I missed the wild softness of his thick black hair, but perhaps his shaved head—that hint of strangeness in his appearance—would keep me from being overwhelmed with the desire to clutch him to my bound-up bosom. I motioned him to sit.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak with me,” I said. I tore my gaze away from him, telling myself I was relieved that he didn’t recognize me—only just now realizing how much I had longed for him to do so. I steadied my breath. “I’m thinking of ordaining, but I wonder about some of the practices here. Is it true that children are sent to meditate in the charnel grounds?”

“Not that I know of,” he said.

“But didn’t you do this meditation yourself?”

“Yes, but I volunteered.”

I wasn’t surprised, but I was still worried. “Was someone there to protect you from the beasts?”

He laughed his warm, full-throated laugh, a kind of laugh he’d probably have all his life, and which I had missed so much. He was laughing as if I’d asked an obvious question. “Of course I had protection, more than I knew what to do with!”

Greatly relieved that the monks, other than Devadatta, had proved themselves responsible, I asked, “So who went with you?”

He was still smiling. “Hundreds! The same ones who are always with me, whenever I need them.”

Hundreds? Reflexively, I looked around, half-expecting to see a monk behind every clump of trees. But there was nothing. “It must have been quite a sight, so many of the Tathagata’s followers surrounding you as you meditated.”

“Yes! And all wearing gold, or shimmering rainbows! All flooding down from the heavens and singing songs from their thousands of lives.”

I stared at his bright eyes, his wide, innocent brow. But of course he must be teasing me. “Truly,” I said, “how many monks were there in this amazing chorus?”

“Monks? I’m talking about devas. The ones who swarm around me when I meditate, or even when I’m just walking along! They protect me all the time.”

My throat went numb. “Please, don’t tease me about this. Who really protects you?”

He looked into my eyes, a quizzical expression on his face. “I’m not teasing. The Blessed One tells us never to lie, even as a joke.”

I hoped he couldn’t read the mixture of horrors on my face. “And so when did you start seeing these deities?” I asked.

His smile belonged to a good-natured boy who only wished to be helpful. “Not long after my mother left me.”

I felt as if he had pushed me off the edge of the earth.

I had to force myself not to scream out a denial. Instead, I nodded, as if with my own knowledge. “There are many stories about you,” I said, “told to inspire other monks. One is that you’d already joined the Sangha when your mother left your home, and that your willingness to live apart from her was a sign of your dedication to the monastic life. Surely, your mother didn’t abandon you.” No, I begged him in my mind, please don’t ever have felt that way, not for a second.

His smile widened. “She did it for me! You see, otherwise I would have yielded to my worldly loneliness and returned to my grandfather’s house. Because I missed her so terribly, you see.” He hesitated and my heart stopped. Then he smiled again, even more widely than before, as if he gladly accepted any sadness that remained. “But my Ama knew my destiny, and she didn’t want to tempt me to abandon it, because that would have been the will of Mara.”

I pretended to be arranging my robes so he wouldn’t see the tears that it took all my strength to keep from overflowing. A year ago, I’d berated myself for my self-centered blindness to the possibility of endangering Rahula by taking him on the road with me as a seeker, but now it seemed that this self-judgment had enabled me to hide behind another, far more pernicious, blindness. I’d never considered the chance that he’d want to return to me. And why hadn’t I? Perhaps because part of me wanted an excuse to embark on a spiritual journey of my own.

“So you’re saying that your mother sacrificed herself?”

“Of course. But her spirit is always with me, along with the devas.”

Devas. Had loneliness driven him mad? No, I told myself. Many people saw devas. Maybe I was the mad one. What did I know about anything?

And how would I learn, living a pampered existence confined in King Bimbisara’s court, squeezing meditations between formal dinners and beauty routines? And how would Rahula feel, his mother suddenly returning to his life, to tempt him back to his childhood?

“So you’re happy in your life here?” I said. “And you don’t regret your choice?”

“How could I? Even more than the bliss that comes down on me when I meditate, each day is clearer than the last. I’m so grateful to both my Ama and my father for allowing me to learn the Dharma in this way.”

He had the same luminous skin as the Tathagata. And I thought I saw in his open face his father’s clarity and joy. Yet whether this clarity and joy belonged to this world, another world, or no world at all, I couldn’t say.

“Just tell me one last thing,” I said, trying to keep my voice from buckling. “When you were in the charnel ground with the devas, were there also monks?”

“Oh yes, including the Tathagata.”

I had to settle for relief.

“Thank you so much,” I said to my son, “for showing me the benefits of ordination.”

As he took his leave, smiling and bowing in the way he would to any other unrelated grownup, I was transported back to the desolation of our little room on the day he left me to become a monk—the silence, the empty windowframe, the dangling ropes. If I ordained, I would lose my son all over again, in the sense that he would never know who I really was, and no matter how often our paths crossed, never would I see a son’s love for me in his eyes.

I covered my face with my hands.

 

The next evening, I met with the Tathagata in the little wooden hut where we’d had our first talk. The weather had turned; a slow rain ticked on the hut’s thin walls, and the smell of damp sandalwood soothed my nostrils, if not my mind. For half the day I had been standing in line for the opportunity to see him in this little room where he met with everyone from senior monks to street sweepers in bad weather. Near the front of the line a woman carried her white-shrouded dead child in her arms, hoping the Tathagata would restore it to life.

Now I finally was sitting opposite him, both of us cross-legged on the polished wooden floor. “I met with Rahula,” I said. “He speaks of hundreds of devas that swarm around him like so many gilded gnats—how can these devas be real?”

The Tathagata’s eyes were both sympathetic and remote. “I could reassure you,” he said, “but you have no more reason to trust my words than you do Rahula’s. The only way is to find out for yourself. This requires faith.”

“Faith in what?” Not in devas, I hoped.

“In the possibility of awakening. In the glimmers of truth that you experience as you cultivate the Way.” He paused and for just a moment, we merged again into the Dharma conversing with itself, the small wooden room dissolving and simultaneously expanding—as much mental as physical and beyond both these concepts. I blinked, and this sense of truth—and the peace that went with it—evaporated. Or was it a form of madness? “Faith,” I said. “But not certainty.”

He nodded.

“What did you say to the woman with the dead child? I asked.

“I told her I could grant her request if she visited the houses in this city and brought me a mustard seed from a family that had never known death.”

“I don’t see what that will do.”

“She won’t find the family. But her search will teach her that everyone knows tragedy and that no one can escape death. She will begin to follow the Dharma.”

Yes, but. “What if she wants to ordain? She won’t have the opportunity.”

He gave me a sharp look, no doubt remembering when I was his wife and he gave me his reasons why women couldn’t join the Sangha. “Surely by now you know the monks would never accept such a thing.”

“But with more and more monks becoming enlightened, couldn’t they persuade the others?”

He shook his head. “More and more monks are also entering the Sangha. It’s hard enough for these unenlightened beings to accept the lower varnas—and for monks of the lower varnas to accept the equality here. Not to mention that our supporters in the lay community would lose faith. I’d be accused of whoremongering, and the Dharma would be spurned by all.”

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with my own inadequacy to the task before me, not the least of which was persuading him to change his mind about women. “I’m not sure I have the faith necessary,” I said.

“The choice is yours.”

“Very well,” I said perfunctorily—then all at once it seemed that Mara the Evil One was making one of his all-too-frequent visits to my mind. For I had the following conceited thought: I wasn’t going to let this or any other Tathagata defeat me. I winched myself forward. “I’ll stay and cultivate faith—I’ve heard you teach that this can be done, in the same way as we talked about fostering the growth of impersonal love.”

He nodded, as if this was what he’d wanted from me all along.

Which made me realize that, in my Mara-induced confidence, I’d forgotten my most crucial concern. What if he told me to speak against women’s ordination? “I have one serious problem,” I said. “Will I have to transmit teachings before I come to trust them? I don’t mean about the supernatural—I can always begin the discourses with ‘Thus have I heard,’ and I won’t be perjuring myself. But things that go against my sense of right and wrong are another matter.”

He kept his eyes on me, his black pupils each with a single still point of reflected white light. Was this a warning look, I wondered. “I trust that as you mature in the Dharma,” he said, “you will find that none of it violates your morality.”

“I will assume this to be true,” I said, but I wasn’t going to promise anything more.

“I know that this path is difficult for you,” he said softly. He glanced out the narrow window, by now gone the color of slate, then turned back to me. “I’ll help you as much as I can.”

I nodded, my heart clutching. Had I seen a flash of some personal concern in his eyes? I could not assume this. I was relieved, though, to observe that I wasn’t hoping for any sort of husbandly love from him. No, that hope and the self that went with it would stay buried with Bahauk. Yet perhaps there was something between me and this Blessed One, some humanness that one day would let us be together in an entirely new way.

“I’m ready to ordain,” I said.

Before I left, he explained some of the precepts I’d have to keep, which included eating only one meal a day and sewing and patching my own robes—we were permitted to own a maximum of three. The Sangha was completely dependent on the lay community. We weren’t even allowed to serve ourselves food, let alone handle any sort of money. We simplified our lives so we could focus on awakening, but we were also responsible for teaching the Dharma to the laypeople so that everyone, monastics and otherwise, could live lives of both service and gratitude.

After we agreed on a time for my ordination, the Tathagata rose to his feet, but not with his usual single, effortless motion as if he were temporarily without weight. His one extra heave showed his body’s strain as he ushered me to the door. Outside, the line remained, still waiting for him in the black fog. His conferences would continue far into the night.

 

I was ordained after the Dharma talk on the following afternoon, in a very simple ceremony, which was the practice in those early days of the Sangha before the community’s growing popularity made it the target of, you might say, less sincere applicants. I climbed the five stairs to the Tathagata’s marble pavilion and stood before him and his disciples Sariputta and Mogallana, the four of us facing out over the assembled community. The night’s rain had moved on, and a white silk canopy shaded us from the damp sunshine while under the trees the rows of bowed shaven heads seemed immersed in a sun-fluttering lake of yellow robes, the monks looking like a single radiant being, the sun glorifying even Devadatta’s faded garment. Soon I would be immersed in this living light, I thought, and I recited the precepts and declared three times my desire to join the Sangha as a monk.

 

The next day my monastic education began. After memorizing the afternoon’s Dharma talk, I sat in a bamboo grove to meditate. It was windy, the tree trunks ponging one another as I practiced “guarding the sense gates,” which mainly meant staying out of temptation’s way. In the simple world of monastic life, made even simpler by the stillness of the mind, the merest whiff of a curry or a handful of notes from a flute (or for that matter the prospect of relieving the pain of sitting for half a day or more) had the power to set off strings of fantasies. These in turn led to longings, regrets, and recriminations I thought I’d given up long ago. Over the weeks and months that followed, the mind’s Mara spewed forth empires of craving, which required selves to have these cravings. Some were trivial—the self craving sex or lusting after a rich pudding. Some were more profound—the mother devoted only to her son, the seeker demanding to know the origins of the cosmos, the sister crusading in the name of her sibling’s soul—and the judge who condemned all these selves as selfish. I understood the Tathagata’s statement that there was no enduring, essential self—but I’d had no idea there were so many temporary, non-enduring selves that in the heat of the moment I mistook for my soul. And once I did, that momentary craving self became Mara.

This was the purpose of meditation: to develop my powers of concentration so I could watch my mind without being dragged into the worlds and personal identities it conjured up. Then I would understand how the mind was creating pain and misery when it grabbed on to what inevitably will cease. Once understood—yes, this grabbing and clinging is itself truly suffering, then I’d let go of the whole mess, the same way I’d drop a hot coal.

But I found certain obsessions impossible to drop, especially the ones that revolved around injustice. Once they got hold of me, a sinkhole opened up in my concentration and dragged every shred of discipline into its murky depths, sometimes for days at a time. How I longed for my brother to pay for murdering Bahauk and his people! And what about the injustice when it came to women’s access to the Dharma? How could these monks, and male householders dare call themselves enlightened when it was women who kept their holy lives free from the drudgery of cooking and cleaning up after themselves?

As I sat cross-legged in my hut, all sorts of fantasies engorged me, such as raising an army of women to demand ordination or take blood revenge on their male oppressors, starting with my brother. Fortunately, like all else, these scenarios were subject to the law of impermanence, eventually petering out until nothing remained but the outlines of their foolishness and cruelty. Have faith, the Tathagata had advised, and keep practicing until your mind is clear enough to see what truly needs to be done. Yet, as the days wore on, I feared that meditation would not be enough.

 

Barely a month after I’d ordained, Kavi came up to where I was meditating under a lemon tree, the faint scent of blossoms tickling the air. He was accompanied by a pinched-face boy a year or so older than himself. The boy wore a filthy dhoti and had scabs on his feet.

“This is Naveen, my new friend,” Kavi told me. “I met him on almsround. He wants to join the Sangha, but we’re afraid that the Venerable Devadatta will say no.”

“I hear you’re the Tathagata’s cousin,” the older boy said to me, in a man-to-man tone. He gave me a quick wavering smile, making me think of a merchant trying to sell a barrel of moldy betel nuts on the cheap.

“I’m one cousin of many, and a distant one at that,” I told Naveen, while giving Kavi, who had been beaming at me with pride, an admonitory glance. He was too young to realize that if I went over Devadatta’s head, it would only create more division in the Sangha—and put me under unwanted scrutiny.

Kavi looked dubious, perhaps realizing he’d presumed too much. “Naveen’s family’s poor like mine.”

“Not exactly,” Naveen said, picking at the black under his fingernails. “I come from a better varna. My father was a scribe, but he went blind.”

So even this child believed in the varna system and thought it might help his cause. “In this Sangha, we are all poor in the same way,” I said, an important concept to get across, had not my feeling of righteousness tightened like a strip of leather around my chest. There it was, dukkha, suffering.

“So you won’t help me get in?” The boy had dropped his fellow-adult facade, his narrow little eyes filling with worry. He peered up at me. “I can teach you to write.”

Write? Why would I want to learn the markings of scribes, used mainly to tally up crop totals and construction costs? Neither the Tathagata nor any of his enlightened disciples had ever written a word in their lives. Still, I supposed writing could serve the practical needs of the Sangha. Even more, this little boy reminded me of myself when I’d tried to offer my services to the Tathagata and before him, Stick Woman—all the while fearing that my services weren’t worth offering.

The leather strap of my righteousness disintegrated. “Thank you for your offer,” I said and, even as I spoke, realized he had indeed offered me something valuable. Not so much the writing but the idea that I might perform concrete tasks for the Sangha. Generous acts were a practice in themselves, the Tathagata taught. Not only did they provide a respite from thinking of oneself, they were satisfying on their own, engendering the contented mind-state essential for concentration.

“I’ll talk to the Blessed One,” I said.

 

“You’re getting too attached to these boy monks,” the Tathagata said.

We were standing in front of the King’s palace, its rose pink brick tiers mirrored in the long rectangular pool in front of its arched doorways. It was after the midday meal, and most of the monks had dispersed to meditation spots deep in the forest.

I’d just told him about Naveen and his family’s poverty.

“There will always be poor people,” he said, glancing soberly at a small bent man with a net and a cleaning brush leaning over the pool, the knobs of his spine shining bare and brown in the sun. “But there will not always be the opportunity to learn the Dharma. In this respect, Devadatta has a point. As a Sangha, we can do only so much.”

“I can train the younger monks,” I said, hating to think of him and Devadatta on the same side against me. “And Naveen offered to teach me to write. This might be of use to the Sangha.”

He shook his head. “What about your own training? At this point, your primary focus must be yourself.”

“My meditations are clarifying my mind,” I said. “And because I’m not so fogged up with old identities the way I used to be, I can see ways to conduce a better atmosphere for training everyone in the Dharma—including me.”

“And the other monks, in their meditative clarity, have failed to see this?” This was the closest to sarcasm I would ever perceive in him.

“Perhaps they lacked the opportunities I had in my former life.” I made sure not to give him a knowing, let alone accusing, look. “A lot of these younger monks don’t know how to live on their own—and even the older ones have spent much of their lives being waited on by women.” I held my neutral gaze. “And because they can’t tell one end of a broom from another, their kutis look like refuges for spiders and smell like privies for mice—hardly conducive for developing a pristine consciousness.”

“Certainly you would not wish to have women waiting on them again.” And here, although he didn’t sound sarcastic, he did sound dry.

“I’ll instruct them in ways so they won’t need anyone to wait on them,” I said, “such as how to use a dust rag.”

The Tathagata lowered his eyelids, perhaps to contemplate all these mundane chores or perhaps to enter some meditative absorption to wait for a reply to arise by itself. Behind him, a peacock fanned out his teal-eyed tail, as if he’d been waiting to display his worldly splendor when the Tathagata wouldn’t see it. Or perhaps the bird’s glory was merely reflecting the meditative state my former husband was currently enjoying.

“Very well,” he finally said, “I’ll admit Naveen.” He bowed in a gesture of dismissal. “Just make sure you keep on meditating. That’s my instruction to you. Life is very brief and you could die at any time. Meditate as if your head was on fire.”

I looked out over the pond, with its reflected arches wavering in and out of themselves as breezes rose and fell. Although the shimmering duplicates hinted at the instability and impermanence of all things, the colors and shapes undulating on the water’s shining surface seemed clearer and richer-toned than the solidities they reflected. I could enjoy them for what they were, I thought, impermanent like all else.

 

I tried to keep up with my meditations, but the more I meditated, the more I saw what needed to be done around the Sangha. At first this worked out well for me; even Devadatta could see my usefulness. To this end, I took up Naveen’s offer to teach me to write—a strange process of trapping words on birch bark, using a wing feather to apply markings made of a mixture of soot, crushed nuts, and myrobalan dye. I was glad I hadn’t engaged in this activity until now. Otherwise, I might never have bothered to learn how to keep words locked in my mind, although of course words describing the Dharma could never be written down, because they would always mean different things to different people and had to be spoken with care.

Even back then, I was beginning to worry about who would preserve the Dharma after the Tathagata was gone. I couldn’t bear the thought that the likes of Devadatta would be in charge. For this reason alone, I was determined to remain in this Sangha and exert as much influence as I could when the time came.

As the years went by, I became more and more dedicated to the truth as I ascertained it. I had no idea that it might well require a personal falsehood far worse than the concealment of my sex, one that many might argue would send whatever remained of me after my death to the deepest realms of hell or at the very least, ban me from the Sangha for life. But this choice was many years in the future.

For now, I figured out a schedule for everyone’s use of the washhouse (this had the added benefit of guaranteeing my privacy). With the help of writing, I communicated (sometimes through scribes) with merchants and other laypeople who supplied firewood, cleaning materials, and eating utensils, including begging bowls, and kept them informed about our actual needs, so we wouldn’t end up with, as we had the year before, privy brooms enough to supply the entire Magadhan kingdom. Also, I instructed doctors and herbalists and even prescribed medicines and treated patients on my own. There were few hard-and-fast monastic rules against this yet. Finally, I kept up with my studies, getting proficient enough to lecture laypeople and the younger monks on basic Dharma.

I was also the one who asked the Tathagata questions that others were afraid to ask, often because the monks thought they should already know the answers. Many years later, my manner of asking these questions, like so much else, would be distorted to make me sound like an idiot who thought he knew all the answers in advance. “The Chain of Dependent Origination is easily understood,” I’ve been quoted as saying, when everyone knew this doctrine was unfathomably complex, describing in minute detail how the ignorant mind creates worlds of suffering out of merely pleasant or unpleasant experiences. As the story goes, the Tathagata reprimanded me: “Never think such a thing, Ananda!” Although I’d never thought it in the first place.

But these distortions happened long after the time I’m describing. For the first few years of my life in the Sangha, things went smoothly, even with Devadatta, who spent days on end meditating in the forest—when he wasn’t trying to impress King Bimbisara’s family with magic tricks, which he declared were supernatural powers. The Tathagata seemed to ignore him, and I did likewise, concentrating on meditation, my Sangha duties, and refining my role as a male. Fortunately, a monk doesn’t have to learn a prince’s strut or a warrior’s swagger, and my year in the hills had deprived me of my courtly femininity. I kept up the practice of hauling buckets for the sake of a masculine physique, carrying water from the river to the washhouse, one of the few worldly tasks that monks were still allowed to perform. My willingness to do this was favorably received by the other monks, who were thereby spared it, although occasionally I feared I saw some monk, especially among the older ones, studying me with slitted eyes, but nothing ever came of it. Except for Devadatta, the monks seemed to like me, partly, I’m sure, because I made it my business to be of use to all—much as I had learned to do in the women’s compound at Suddhodana’s household so long ago.

Yet as my mind became clearer as to what I needed to do, the more my sense of injustice gnawed at me, especially when it came to women’s ordination. Since my one argument with the Tathagata, I had done nothing to further its cause. In my travels with the Sangha I met plenty of women who would have given anything to join us—not only aristocrats such as King Bimbisara’s wife but also ordinary women and girls ground down by poverty, brutal husbands, or demanding relatives and who, unlike their male counterparts, had no hope of freedom of any sort. I began to wonder whether I’d been deceiving myself about why I joined the Sangha. Perhaps I’d done so for selfish reasons after all—out of a need to escape death rather than to help others awaken.

By then I’d been in the Sangha for five years. Rahula was almost fourteen, as tall as I was, and although I still couldn’t imagine him as just another monk, I no longer wept in secret after every casual encounter. Kavi, aged eleven, had turned from a wispy to a sturdy little friend, as well as a receptacle for my motherly feelings, disguised as fatherly affection. Around this time, I made my first big mistake.

It started with the matter of the monks’ robes. Most of our robes were donated by the lay community, with us responsible for hemming them and keeping them in repair. However, many of the monks—particularly the ones from higher varnas—had never picked up a needle in their lives. I decided to organize a group where monks could sit together in the evenings and learn to sew seams and patches—something the Tathagata wanted done, for he felt it important to respect the laypeople’s gifts. Even so, to prevent anyone from wondering how I had such skills, I took the precaution of telling everyone that I’d learned them as a teenager, enlisting a local tailor’s help as soon as I knew I wanted to ordain.

At first, everyone seemed to delight in these meetings, sitting under the trees in one of the many pleasure parks we stayed at during those times, listening to evening birdsong, smelling the jasmine, and talking of whatever the monks needed to talk about as I demonstrated sewing knots and cross stitches. It turned out many monks, young and old, missed their wives and mothers, and I was happy to give them a place to vent their feelings. Then one evening not long before the rainy season—we were currently staying in a deer park belonging to a local Sakyan leader—about fifteen of us were sitting in a circle on one of his smaller stone pavilions. We’d brought lamps burning citrus oil to discourage mosquitoes as well as to provide light for our work. It was a soft black night, with the moon nowhere to be seen.

The youngest monk in the group spoke up. He was ten, small for his age, with deep brown downturned eyes. “I miss my Ama,” he said.

“I miss mine, too,” said Kavi. “But it helps if you meditate on the Divine Abodes, the way Ananda teaches.” He smiled at me. Over the years I’d taught this meditation to him and others, having used it myself to dissolve the pain over the superficiality of my relationship with my son.

“The loving-kindness Abode belongs to everybody and nobody,” I said. “So when you enter into it by wishing every being well, you can remember that your Ama’s love is part of it. By feeling love, you can know that your Ama is with you.”

“And then you don’t have to be sad anymore,” Kavi said.

“Good, Kavi,” I said, “but we also can’t ignore these emotions of sadness.” I looked over at the younger boy. “Only when we admit sadness is inside us are we able to let go of that feeling and watch it fly away. But if you still feel sad, you can always talk about it to me.”

“Talk?” The furious voice came from behind me.

I whirled around. It was Devadatta, back from the forest and flickering like a demon in the collective lamplight, his face taut with rage. “What’s going on here? A ladies’ gossip fest? This is precisely the kind of chattering social group that the Tathagata abhors! Any monk who derives his happiness from this sort of insipid togetherness will never know the bliss of solitude, or of awakening. Trivial social concerns will bog down your every meditation—you’ll obsess over what others think about you rather than contemplate the Dharma. You might as well simply disrobe now and go back to your Amas and your big fat beds.”

Silently the monks began to disperse, their shame thickening the air. I lacked the authority to call them back, let alone raise objections to Devadatta’s views, and to some extent I shared the monks’ shame. Perhaps my efforts to make our monastic life easy had damaged my solitary quest, blunted my once keen dedication to the truth.

“We were simply repairing our robes,” I said.

“That’s nothing to be proud of, monk,” Devadatta said. “Personal vanity to go with your idle chatter! The townspeople are spoiling this Sangha by plying it with cloth suitable for princesses—you should be digging for your robe material in the trash, the way I do.”

Kavi, who’d remained seated, wrinkled his nose. “At least our robes don’t stink,” he muttered.

Devadatta glared at him. “What did you say?”

I cleared my throat. “I think the Venerable Kavi was expressing his gratitude that his nose-consciousness is undistracted by the odor of bodily fluids and rat droppings. In this way, he can direct his attention to the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the contemplation of wholesome states of mind.”

I couldn’t help myself. Yes, this was my mind-Mara judging Devadatta. But just then my mind was tired of judging me.

Devadatta kept his hard gaze on Kavi. “Monk,” he said. “You need to confront your aversions, not escape them.” Devadatta switched back to me. “You are teaching these boys sentimentality, idle chatter, and cherishing the body, and I know why you’re doing it.”

He raised his arms and announced it to the entire grove: “You are a woman!”

My vision turned dark and mottled, and the ringing of a thousand insects filled my head.

I have destroyed the Sangha was all I could think. The python around my chest made it impossible to breathe, much less speak in my own defense. Not that there was anything to say.

Had he just guessed? Or had he somehow found out?

I sat paralyzed in my cross-legged position, my hands limp in my lap, the yellow robe I’d been repairing crumpled in front of me. But even if I could have moved, I wouldn’t have known what to do. Try to lie my way out of it? And be publicly stripped and dragged to jail?

One of the older monks, with mole-speckled ocher skin and deep grooves in his forehead, cleared his throat. “My humblest pardon, Venerable Devadatta, but you have violated the Precept of Right Speech. You have insulted the Venerable Ananda by calling him a woman. I suggest you apologize.”

I stared at him numbly. Apparently, he hadn’t understood the accusation.

But then Devadatta turned in my direction. “I apologize that your unmanly behavior resulted in my wrong speech,” he said, inclining his head in a bow that seemed more like a glance down at a pile of dung. “I am nonetheless going to report the unwholesome conduct of this group to the Tathagata.”

I felt my ears pop. He didn’t know about me, after all. I inclined my head, my relief temporarily blotting out my fear of the Tathagata’s reaction. “Your apology is accepted.” Even though it was no real apology at all.

“Be warned, monk,” he said, marching off into the blackness.

Years later, many people claimed it was the Tathagata himself who had come upon our group. The division in our Sangha continued, you see, and perhaps the strict ascetics wanted to use the event to their advantage. By then there were many more monastics hoping to undermine me, who—ironically—had the reputation of being the monk liked by all.

 

And the Tathagata did order me to disband my group. We were still camped near the Sakyan clan leader’s sprawling teak mansion, located on a flat plain where a ruffle of clouds on the horizon marked the distant mountain range, some of whose foothills I knew so well. Would that I could have been wandering in them, heedless and free, instead of retreating in defeat from the hut where the Tathagata had told me that although spiritual friendship was vital as a means to discuss Dharma and shore one up in times of doubt, I couldn’t draw attention to myself by alienating Devadatta.

I understood his point, of course, but as I walked away it occurred to me how men always used the word “woman” as an insult, and I’d never given this a second thought, until now. But now the word flipped back on me, igniting the coal of anger I always hoped I’d meditated away. My anger had a new object: the world, samsaric or not, controlled by men. I couldn’t keep living in an all-male community, no matter how holy. I had to do something, although not in my current state. I sat under a tree to let my rage disassemble itself along with my underlying nostalgia for the hills, observing my tendency to gild memories with a perfection that never was. Gradually, a new clarity dawned, as if I’d camped in the darkness and awakened outside a city that had been there all along.

And in that clear dawn, my mind presented me with an actual city: Kapilavatthu, my former home and that of my former mother-in-law, Pajapati. For the first time since I’d joined the Sangha, we were headed for Kapilavatthu—and Pajapati, I’d heard over the years, wanted enlightenment above all else. I would persuade her to plead her case with her stepson and prove to him the existence of women who wanted to live as ordained monastics. I would help her in whatever way I could, even if I had to go against the Tathagata—and my brother—to do it.