His father, Śuddhodana, was working in the fields. Perhaps he was plowing. Under the jambū, a rose-apple tree, left lying there like some bundle or other, his son watches. He’s a little boy, scarcely more than a baby. He looks around and senses how pleasant the air is, and the hills, the shade, the grass, the branches. There is nothing else on his mind. His father is absorbed in his work and doesn’t turn to look at him. Nobody is looking at him. The world pays no attention. The boy’s eyes slowly scan the whole scene. There is no resistance, there is no tension, there is no desire. Everything is completed, self-sufficient. There is nothing to add, nothing to subtract. Cautiously, the mind penetrates itself, then, almost playing, formulates these words: “Perhaps this is the way that leads to awakening.” And a question forms: “Are you afraid of this happiness?” He thought: “I’m not afraid of this happiness.” Then the boy became a man. He was alone and disheartened. He thought: “What lies hidden in this memory?” He realized he was whispering two words: “Dry twigs.”
Later he resumed his thinking: “Those doctrines they taught me, those harsh exercises, there’s still too much desire in them. That’s the sap that drips. These motionless, rigid wise men would like to become pieces of wood. But it is wet wood.” Supple, loose-jointed, that boy under the tree had wanted nothing. But dry twigs were rubbing together in his mind. He went on thinking: “That obstinate striving does not lead to awakening. It’s a curtain that cloaks the mind. When the curtain is moved aside and happiness flashes out, it frightens us like the sudden movement of a wild animal. And why does that happiness frighten us? Because it isn’t born of desire.” Inside himself he added: “Then it is unlikely that that happiness will flash out if one’s body is exhausted.”
Then Śuddhodana’s son, whom few would now have recognized in this solitary, emaciated monk, got to his feet and set off on his way again. When he went through a village, he asked for the same food everybody else ate, as if he were a normal traveler. Thus the Tathāgata — He-who-came-thus — came down to us, the Buddha.
The Buddha rarely uses images — and when he does so they are very simple, to be cherished like talismans. They said what analytic dissection was unable to say. Often they alluded and referred back to Vedic images, to those times when everything that was said was imagery. But the allusion was not meant to be noticed, as though the images were now being discovered for the first time. The “dry wood” of correct meditation is the araṇi, the twig that serves to start a fire, that conceals Agni and is the first of all sexual creatures. That friction of one wood against another had once lain at the origin of every kindling, cosmic and erotic. Now, as used by the Buddha, what stood out most in the image was this dryness, this draining away of every drop of sap, which made the wood precious. Even the images were dried out.
Tathā, “thus,” was the Buddha’s favorite word. Not just because he liked to go by the name of Tathāgata, He-who-came-thus. But because the Buddha taught others to see the tathatā, the “thusness” of all that is.
When the Buddha taught people the Middle Way, the only way that is free from error, he also said: “One should speak quite slowly, not hurriedly, one should not affect the dialect of the countryside, one should not deviate from recognized parlance.” Only what is neutral, free from glaring features, only what blends in with all that is common, only what least departs from “thusness” can save us.
It was May. There was a full moon. That night the Bodhisattva had five dreams. Upon waking, he thought: “Today I will achieve the bodhi, the awakening. Everything will be exactly as before, as now when I woke up. But I will consider all that happens as now my mind is considering those five dreams.”
A girl, Sujātā, stepped forward. The Bodhisattva had met her before in Uruvilvā. Shyly, she held a golden bowl, brimful. Without a word, she offered it to the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva took the bowl to the riverbank. He sat and ate. Then he tossed the bowl in the river. Meanwhile he was thinking: “If the bowl floats upstream against the current, I will become a Buddha today; if that doesn’t happen, let the bowl follow the current.” No one knows how much doubt he felt, if any at all. The bowl drifted to the center of the stream. Then all at once it darted like a horse across the surface of the water. It was racing upstream on the crests of the waves. Further upriver there was a whirlpool that sucked everything down into itself. A Snake lived there, a Nāga. The bowl sparkled a moment on the eddies, then disappeared. On the bottom it bumped against three other bowls, covered in waterweed. They had been there for thousands of years and had once belonged to three other Buddhas. The new arrival settled on the muddy bed, a little further down from the others.
If we translate bodhi as “illumination,” as most people do, the word is, like it or not, metaphorical and points toward the world, the light that pours down upon the world. If we translate bodhi as “awakening,” the word corresponds exactly to its early usage in Sanskrit, from the root budh-, “to wake,” and points exclusively to the mind, to what happens in the mind and has no counterpart in the manifest. It is only by enhancing this characteristic, which the mind shares with nothing else, that one can achieve that detachment from the existent world, that separation from what is given, that irreversible caesura: the bodhi that transforms Prince Gautama into the Buddha, into the Awakened One.
During the second quarter of the night of awakening, the Buddha remembered his previous lives. First one, then two, then five. Soon he stopped counting. Names appeared — and he would say: “That was me.” He saw places — and said: “That was me.” He saw passions flare and fade. He saw people dying — and said: “That was me.” A throng of faces, clothes, towns, animals, merchandise, roads. He went on watching. He had stopped repeating “That was me.” And suddenly he realized he was watching the lives of others. He didn’t notice any fundamental difference. He pressed on, amazed, but amazement was a constant in these migrations through time. True, he could no longer say: “That was me.” But was that really so important? He could still recognize the joy — and above all the suffering. The scenes he had lived through and those he had not lay side by side, each attracting the other, like leaves in a pond. The light they emanated fused into one. As soon as the eye retreated, they became a thread of beads, each with a slightly different color, and here and there a small chip.
For seven days after the awakening the Buddha remained seated. Then he got up and gazed long at the fig tree that had protected him. He looked over every inch of it with an elephant’s eye. After fourteen days the Buddha got up again and began to walk. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Not far away, Māra collapsed, defeated. He wrote on the ground with his stick. Tantrī and Aratī, his daughters, came to read: “Gautama has escaped from my clutches.” Devoted to their father and used to seeing him triumph, the two girls eagerly asked: “But who is this man? Do you want us to bring him to you in chains? He will be your slave.” Māra shook his head and nodded to the signs he had traced in the dust. Then he said: “He has routed my armies with a cough. He has put my roaring troops to flight by skimming the palm of his hand over the ground.” Then Tantrī and Aratī decided to seek out this stranger. They found him walking slowly along. They followed him, furtively, to get his measure. He was a man — they told themselves — and they knew how to deal with men.