Ānanda got up from his pallet. It was still dark outside. He walked through the forest until it opened out on the clearing where the monks slept. He approached the door that Mahākāśyapa had shut behind him only a few hours ago, but as though forever. Ānanda knocked. Mahākāśyapa’s strong and vigilant voice answered at once: “Who is knocking?” “It’s me, Ānanda.” “Why have you come here?” “Last night I finally stilled the currents.” “We won’t open the door for you. Come in through the keyhole.” Ānanda went in through the keyhole. In the darkness he recognized the eyes of the monks, all staring at him. He fell down before them and confessed his crimes. Then he looked at his accuser and said: “Mahākāśyapa, do not reproach me.” “Do not harbor rancor toward me,” said Mahākākāśyapa. “I did it all so that you might find the way. Now go back to your place.”
When Ānanda was welcomed back among the monks, when they asked him to repeat all the words of the Law he had heard and explain when and where he had heard them, a subtle distress disturbed the serenity he had just achieved. “The doctrine is inconunensurable,” he thought. “Who could ever collect it and arrange it for display?” As far as he could remember, there had never been any order to the Buddha’s teachings. He waited for whatever came up. Then he spoke, perhaps for a long time, but using all kinds of forms. His words might be the Law, or rules, or stories, or treatises. As long as the Buddha was there, no one had bothered to link the doctrine together in order. The monks recited the sūtras beginning at the tenth section, then going on to the third or the eighth or any of the others. The next time the sequence would be different. And thus it had always been. Now the forest of words loomed up like a great wall. There was nothing left but that forest. The Buddha’s teaching had always been dense. Now they would have to disentangle it, divide it up. “But how?” wondered Ānanda. And finally four sections appeared to him, which in his mind he called what everybody was then to call them: the One-and-more, the Middle-length, the Long, and the Mixed. Those names evoke that element of formlessness of which the Buddha’s teaching ever partook. As if it were a substance that could shrink and expand without limit. So those who came to seek the doctrine asked for the Long Discourses and the Short Discourses, because the doctrine could consist of a few syllables or of vast, effusive treatises.
The gamble the Buddha took was far more radical than a mere challenge to the order of sacrifice. Sacrifice had produced the renouncers, the renouncers had reproduced sacrifice. Brahmā was the first of the renouncers. Śiva is the sacrifice made in every moment in the world, even when there are no longer any places of sacrifice. “Viṣṇu is the sacrifice.” To strike Brahmā then was not the most arduous of undertakings, nor was it the last. One then had to strike Viṣṇu. The Buddha was a renouncer who wanted to strike the one from whom he had arisen: Viṣṇu. But how can one strike he who protects everything and keeps everything in existence? The Buddha concentrated on just one point. He wanted to take away Viṣṇu’s pallet, eliminate the residue. When he spoke of nirvāṇa, what was essential was that this state be defined as “without residue.” such, that is, as to guarantee escape from the cycle. This was the gamble then: to break the circle of existence. What lay in that place beyond any residue could be called neither life nor death, because life and death can only be known as powers within the cycle — and hence are always a new life and a new death. We have no way of saying what life and death might be outside the realm of repetition. Thus the Buddha refrained from defining them.
Yet the Buddha chose not to take his struggle against residue to the limit. Right to the end he kept Ānanda beside him, and Ānanda was his residue. He couldn’t live without him. And to this day it is only through Ānanda that we have access to his doctrine.
Ānanda, ananta: “joy,” “infinite.” The difference between the two sounds is minimal. Ānanta is the bed of serpentine coils Viṣṇu sleeps on as he drifts around the waters. That bed is also called Śeṣa, Residue, what is left over — dissolved, submerged, burned up — from the previous world: what another world will one day rise from. Ānanda is enlightened as his head touches the pillow. That is the moment when Ānanda discovers himself. Because Ānanda is the pillow, the amorous, still sleepy vagueness. But also the Buddha’s only support, the man who for twenty-five years made the master’s bed.
The Buddha’s hidden challenge was directed at śeṣa, the “residue.” nirvāṇa is his most drastic attempt to wipe it out. Residue signifies rebirth. Yet the Buddha did allow the Nāgas, the remote and sovereign serpents, to protect him. And Ānanda was his śeṣa. Ānanda was the “residue” that history leaves — and that allows history to reach its conclusion. The difference the Buddha introduced can be found in the opposite attitudes of Ānanda and Gavāṃpati. Summoned to the assembly at Rājagṛha, the powerful Gavāṃpati, a man given to solitary rumination, refused to come down from his mountaintop: he was afraid they were calling him because they were already fiercely divided over the doctrine. And it was true. But Gavāṃpati wanted nothing more than to join the Buddha in nirvāṇa as soon as possible. Like the ancient ṛṣis, he disappeared in a blaze of fire that burst from his chest. All that was left of him were his cloak and his bowl. A mute residue. These two objects were the only things that would testify on his behalf at the assembly. If the monks had followed Gavāṃpati’s example, the Three Baskets of the Law would have remained empty and the Buddha’s teaching been lost. But there is more: if the only impure one of all the monks, Ānanda, had not agreed to recall the Buddha’s teachings in their entirety, the Law would have been forever incomplete.