These words were not strange; every holy man knew that the world was an illusion. The Vedas talked about it endlessly. But each monk who heard Gautama shook his head and looked away guiltily. “Your truth is too harsh, brother. I’m already living a life that ordinary people consider impossible. One day I will meet God, but if I try to force his hand, the only reward I may get is that I kill myself.”
Some put it this way, some another, but no one braved Gautama’s challenge. The more eloquent he grew, the more reluctant they became. “You look holy, but you may be a silver-tongued demon,” one old monk reminded him. Eventually Gautama did find company, but not with his words. He ceased to eat more than a handful of rice a day. His body wasted away, and as his skin became a taut, translucent membrane clinging to his bones, Gautama acquired a glow. His hands, which he held out to bless anyone who asked, looked larger, as did his deep brown eyes. This aura of saintly emaciation attracted five other monks, and once the band had gathered, Gautama led them upriver into the high country, where they found a large isolated cave.
It was a breathtaking place to suffer in. The sentinel peaks of the Himalayas ringed the far horizon. The air was crisp and cold as the first ice crust on a pond in winter. Gautama would wake up with supersensitive hearing. The faint air currents sweeping up the valley sounded like the breathing of the world. But rain made his bones ache, and thunder split his head open-it would throb with pain for days. For some months he and the five monks sat in their cave, doing the minimum of speaking, collecting roots for food, filling their gourds from a stream.
At first Gautama was worried that he was indulging himself, because no matter how austere the conditions, he loved the life of austerity. Perhaps too much. He tried sitting in the snow for hours to see if he could make his body hurt so much that it would give up all its hopes for pleasure. Day after day he repeated this, and then a miracle happened. Through the heavy falling snow he saw a stranger walking toward him. At first he was only a blurred dark shadow against the whiteness, but as he came nearer, Gautama saw that it was not a man who had braved the storm but the god Krishna. He had the most serene and beautiful face; his skin was a deep blue-purple that was all but black.
Gautama prostrated himself in the snow. “I have waited to meet you all my life,” he murmured. “I have abandoned everything for you.”
“I know,” Krishna said. His voice rang among the mountains like dull thunder. “Now go home and don’t do anything so stupid again.”
The god turned his back and walked away. At that instant Gautama woke up, shivering and starving. The skies were clear; there was no snowstorm. He returned to the cave but said nothing to the five monks. Maybe he’d only had a dream; maybe Krishna was real. In either case Gautama was determined not to heed a delusion. But he needed some kind of sign that his war against death was succeeding. All he got was that his mind started to rebel. At first it complained of being lonely and afraid. It argued that Gautama was hurting himself needlessly. In this phase the voice Gautama heard in his head was whining and weak, like a small child’s. As the weeks passed, however, his mind grew fiercely angry.
Gautama wanted to hasten its surrender, so the more his mind ranted, the more he deprived himself. He would sit naked all night on a frozen lake while his mind screamed in agony.
If you want to kill me, do it now, Gautama said defiantly. He didn’t know who he was addressing, exactly. Perhaps not his mind but Yama, the lord of death. When dawn came and he wasn’t dead, Gautama exulted. He had gotten his sign, because the cold and the elements had not defeated him. He was still alive, which proved that he was stronger than sun, wind, and cold.
Bolder now, he wanted to push further. More extreme austerities lay ahead. He could pile rocks on his chest or pierce his cheeks with sharpened sticks. There were legendary yogis who tore their own arms off and threw them into the fire. But the five monks resisted. They had been given no signs of their own. Gautama knew that he had to preach conviction into his brother monks. Otherwise, he would open his eyes one day after a cruel austerity and find that they had vanished.
“You doubt my methods, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” said the eldest monk, who was named Assaji. “If you could see yourself, you would be frightened. Why do you think that inviting death is the way to defeat it?”
“Because when everything else has failed,” said Gautama, “whatever is left must be the answer. I’ve done nothing yet to earn your respect, but believe me when I say that I have tried everything to become free. I learned the Dharma of the higher self, but I never met my higher self or heard a word from it. I learned the Dharma of the soul, which was supposed to be my speck of the divine, but no matter how blissful I might feel, the time always came when I was overwhelmed once more by anger and sorrow. Much the same must be your experience.”
The five monks said nothing, which Gautama took to be assent.
“In time I concluded that my struggles could last a lifetime, and to what end? I will still be a slave to karma and a prisoner in this world. What is this karma that visits us with so much suffering? Karma is the body’s endless desires. Karma is the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to avoid. It’s the delusions of ego and the storm of fear and anger that besieges the mind. Therefore, I have resolved to cut karma out by the roots.”
“How? You think you know something that no one else knows?” Assaji asked. His rail-thin body already showed the effects of years of austerity.
“Myself, no. But you live the ascetic’s life. Haven’t you already spent years sitting in silence, repeating your prayers, contemplating images of the gods, reciting a thousand and eight names of Vishnu?” The eldest monk nodded. “Has any of it made you free?”
“No.”
“Then why should you continue to do more of what doesn’t work in the first place? The temple priests taught you how to reach God-priests who have not found freedom either, but who claim title to the holy teachings the way a farmer puts a brand on cattle.” Gautama had eaten nothing for days and barely slept. He wondered briefly if he sounded delirious.
One of the younger monks interrupted. “Tell us your way.”
“On the road I met an old sannyasi named Ganaka, and he told me something important. Let the world be your teacher. I couldn’t understand what he meant at first, but now I do. Every experience that traps me is a worldly experience. The world is seductive and hard to interpret for what it really is. Yet this world is nothing more than desire, and every desire makes me run after it. Why? Because I believe it’s real. Desires are phantoms, concealing the grinning face of death. Be wise. Believe in nothing.”
It took many nights around the fire, but Gautama and the five monks came to an agreement. They would give their bodies nothing to live for in the world, no desires to fulfill, no cravings to become a slave to. They would sit like statues facing a wall, and no matter how many desires arose, each one would be coldly turned away. “Even if we are tied to our karma by ten thousand threads,” said Gautama, “we can break them one at a time. When the last attachment is gone, karma will be dead instead of us.”
He believed every word. Perhaps the five monks didn’t, but they followed him. They sat like statues facing a wall and waited. Gautama was so fervent that he expected to reach his goal soon. Assaji wouldn’t commit himself. “Unhappiness is born of expectations that don’t come true,” he reminded his brother monk. “Even to expect nothing can be a trap.”