Gautama nodded. In the month he had been wandering, he’d heard tales of criminals and madmen who assumed the disguise of monks so they could roam the countryside undisturbed.
“A blessing on you, brother.” Gautama said this with complete sincerity, and he continued looking into his benefactor’s eyes rather than diving into the food. He knew that his accent gave away that he was high-caste. He touched the man’s arm in gratitude, and the woodcutter was startled. Sometimes, very rarely, a high-caste warrior or noble might take up the life of a wandering monk, but they never touched anyone of low caste, even as beggars.
“And a blessing on you,” the man said. He got up and walked back to the fire.
As a sannyasi, one who has completely renounced the world, Gautama was allowed no possessions other than his saffron robes, a walking stick, a string of prayer beads around his neck, and a begging bowl. A monk ate out of his bowl, and when he was done, he washed it in the river and wore it as a hat to keep off the sun and rain. The bowl was what he drank from, and while he was bathing in the river he rinsed himself with it. Gautama turned the gourd around, admiring its simplicity.
Once he had eaten the food the woodcutter gave him, Gautama got to his feet, trying not to groan from the cracked blisters on his soles. He took a last, longing look at the fire-the men were drinking and laughing loudly now-and began slip-sliding through the mud toward the road. You couldn’t sleep too near the roads because of bandits. As he walked, he wrapped his arms around his thin frame for warmth and tried to find resignation. It’s just rain. This is nothing important. I accept it. I’m at peace. But resignation was empty peace, with no real satisfaction. What else could he try? Reverence.
Holy gods, protect your servant in time of need.
Repeating a prayer felt better, but his mind wasn’t fooled by reverence, either. It injected an ironic aside: If the gods wanted to protect you, why did they leave you out in the rain? Gautama was astonished at how many ways his mind could plague him. It blamed him for everything-for his blistered feet, for getting lost in the forest, for making a bed from tree boughs that turned out to be full of lice. Hadn’t Prince Siddhartha’s mind been calmer before he left home? Sick of arguing with himself, Gautama began to count his steps.
One, two, three.
It was a feeble trick to keep his doubts from attacking him. But he had too many memories, the kind that he couldn’t escape on the longest road.
Four, five, six.
The worst memory was of leaving his wife, Yashodhara. She had refused to watch Siddhartha ride beyond the gates. “Go at night. Don’t tell me when. It would be like having my heart broken twice,” she said. Her face was careworn with the tears she had shed. The two had been married almost ten years. It was such a love match that they had never spent a single night apart.
Yashodhara kept silent the first few days after he made his intention known, but they shared a bed, and one night she found her voice, softly, next to his ear. “Isn’t love enough, being here with me?”
Siddhartha wrapped his arm around her. He knew this question cost her an effort. If he said no, she wasn’t enough, Yashodhara would feel like a widow when he left. If he said yes, he had no argument for leaving. After a moment he said, “You are enough for this life.”
“Are you looking ahead to the next one?” she asked.
“No, not that. This life is only part of who I am. I need to know everything, and I can’t by staying here.” His expression was deeply serious, although she couldn’t see his face in the dark. “How can I know if I have a soul? Ever since I was a boy I’ve assumed I did because everyone says so. How can I know if the gods are real? Or that I came from them?”
“Knowing everything is impossible,” she said. Siddhartha sighed and held her closer. “It won’t be forever,” he promised. Yashodhara tried to believe him despite her experience. Everybody knew of husbands who ran off into the forest and never came back. Becoming a sannyasi was a holy act, but respectable men left it for old age.
Many men waited until they were seventy, especially if they had money, and the richest built lavish summerhouses that were a mockery of spiritual retreat. But all kinds of ne’er-do-wells ran away early. It was something you did if life got too hard or you had too many mouths to feed.
Yashodhara realized that some monks had a genuine calling. One day, despite her sorrow, she told her husband, “I know you have to go. I’m your wife. I feel what you feel.” But scandal burned her cheeks anyway; a prince of the blood deserting his kingdom was worse, infinitely worse, than some farmer deserting his barren rice fields.
Seven, eight, nine.
Gautama’s mind wasn’t falling for the feeble trick. You nearly killed her, it said with bitter accusation.
Ten, eleven, twelve.
People can die of grief. How would you feel then?
Gautama winced, remembering how much Yashodhara had suffered as his departure neared. Every night made her dread that she would wake up alone in the morning. There was nothing she could do for him, not even to pack little things for his new life. On the other side of the palace gates a beggar’s existence awaited. Suddhodana, now enfeebled with arthritis, had mustered up a brief, reproachful rage, as in the old days. “You can’t give me one good reason,” he shouted. But the lit fuse sputtered out, and after that his father ignored the whole subject.
When it was finally time, the prince performed two farewell rituals. He went into his wife’s chamber and kissed her while she slept, a bar of soft moonlight across her lips. This was a familiar ritual from the days when he had first begun to ride out before dawn in order to reach poor, faraway villages. The forgotten city had shriveled to nothing, its last feeble cast-offs taken under the prince’s personal care. He had knelt by the bedside of those who had cursed him the first day he rode into the village.
There was one, a withered scarecrow of a woman named Gutta who was as old as Kumbira, a former ladies’ maid overjoyed to come back to the palace. She knew she was there to die. Siddhartha sometimes imagined that Gutta might have been an auntie to him long ago. During her last days he sat vigil, and one night he trusted her enough to ask, “Does it hurt to die?”
She shook her head. “Not as much as you’re hurting.”
“Why am I hurting?”
“How should I know?” The withered old maid had always been crabby, he knew, and dying hadn’t sweetened her temper. After a moment she said, “I’m luckier than you. I’m throwing off my burden, but you keep adding more to yours.”
“Is that what you see?” He had heard that the dying told the truth and even had prophetic powers.
She snorted. “Everybody does. Just look at you. You’re kind, but you think it’s not enough. You give to the poor and sick, but you don’t feel happy from it.” Her voice grew softer. “You mourn a dead girl there was no hope of finding.”
The prince had looked away, feeling a pang from every word. His mission of mercy began while he was searching for Sujata. It became his custom to lead a pack mule loaded with food, crop seeds, and clothing behind his magnificent white stallion, and the three became a familiar sight in the countryside. For the sake of safety, an armed guard rode behind, but he had made sure that the men kept far back, out of sight.
“What does it say if I ride into a village with soldiers?” he asked his father.
“It says nobody better lay a hand on you,” replied the old king, who wanted to send half the garrison with him.
But his son couldn’t stand the idea of showing people mercy with one hand and a sword with the other. Soon his kindness was the thing that kept him safe. The local thieves and bandits belonged to their own caste of dacoits. Many of them benefited from the food he took to the starving villages, since dacoit families and dacoit relatives lived in them. The younger, headstrong thieves argued that they still had a right to loot any gold a traveler might be carrying, but the elders knew he carried none.