The Buddha had always seen old age as a symbol of the dukkha which afflicted all mortal beings. As Pasenedi had remarked, he himself was now old. Ananda, who was far from young himself, had recently been dismayed by the change in his master. His skin was wrinkled, his limbs were flaccid, his body was bent and his senses seemed to be failing. “So it is, so it is, Ananda,” the Buddha agreed. Old age was indeed cruel. But the story of the Buddha’s last years dwells less on the aesthetic disaster of aging than on the vulnerability of the old. Ambitious young men rise up against their elders, sons kill their own fathers. In this final phase of the Buddha’s life, the texts dwell on the terror of a world where all sense of sacredness is lost. Egotism reigns supreme; envy, hatred, greed and ambition are unmitigated by compassion and loving-kindness. People who stand in the way of a man’s craving are ruthlessly eliminated. All decency and respect have disappeared. By stressing the dangers that the Buddha had tried to counter for nearly fifty years, the scriptures force us to confront the ruthlessness and violence of the society against which he had launched his campaign of selflessness and loving-kindness.
Not even the Sangha was immune from this profane spirit. Eight years earlier, the Order had once again been threatened by schism and had been implicated in a plot to kill King Bimbisara, another old man, who had been the Buddha’s devoted follower for thirty-seven years. We find a full account of this rebellion only in the Vinaya. It may not be entirely historical, but it issues a warning: even the principles of the Sangha could be subverted and made lethal. According to the Vinaya, the culprit was Devadatta, the Buddha’s brother-in-law, who had entered the Sangha after the Buddha’s first trip home to Kapilavatthu. The later commentaries tell us that Devadatta had been malicious from his youth, and had always been the sworn enemy of the young Gotama when the two were growing up together. The Pali texts, however, know nothing of this and present Devadatta as an unexceptionally devout monk. He appears to have been a brilliant orator, and as the Buddha got older, Devadatta became resentful of his hold over the Order. He decided to build his own power base. Devadatta had lost all sense of the religious life, and began ruthlessly to promote himself. His horizons had narrowed: instead of reaching out expansively to the four corners of the earth in love, he was centered solely on his own career and consumed by hatred and envy. First he approached Prince Ajatasattu, son and heir of King Bimbisara and commander-in-chief of the Magadhan army. He impressed the prince with flashy displays of iddhi, a sure sign that he was profaning his yogic powers. But the prince became Devadatta’s patron: every day, he sent five hundred carriages to Devadatta in the arama of Vulture’s Peak, just outside Rajagaha, together with unseemly mounds of food for the bhikkhus. Devadatta became a favored court monk; the flattery went to his head and he decided to seize control of the Sangha. But when the Buddha was warned of his brother-in-law’s activities, he was not disturbed. Unskillful behavior on this scale could only bring Devadatta to an unsavory end.
Devadatta made his first move while the Buddha was staying in the Bamboo Grove outside Rajagaha. In front of a huge assembly of bhikkhus, Devadatta formally asked the Buddha to resign and hand over the Sangha to him. “The Blessed One is now old, aged, burdened with years.,. and has reached the last stage of his life,” he said unctuously. “Let him now rest.” The Buddha adamantly refused: he would not even hand the Sangha over to Sariputta and Moggallana, his two most eminent disciples. Why should he appoint such a lost soul as Devadatta to the position? Humiliated and furious, Devadatta left the arama vowing revenge. The Buddha was not much concerned about the leadership of the Order. He had always maintained that the Sangha did not need a central authority figure, since each monk was responsible for himself. But any attempt to sow dissension, as Devadatta had done, was anathema. An atmosphere of egotism, ambition, hostility and competitiveness was absolutely incompatible with the spiritual life and would negate the raison d’etre of the Sangha. The Buddha, therefore, publicly dissociated himself and his Order from Devadatta and told Sariputta to denounce him in Rajagaha. “Formerly,” he explained, “Devadatta had one nature; now he has another.” But the damage had been done. Some of the townsfolk believed that the Buddha was jealous of Devadatta’s new popularity with the prince; the more judicious, however, reserved judgment.
Meanwhile, Devadatta approached Prince Ajatasattu with a proposition. In the old days, he said, people lived longer than they did now. King Bimbisara was lingering on, and perhaps Ajatasattu would never sit on the throne. Why did he not slay his father, while he, Devadatta, killed the Buddha? Why should these two old men stand in their way? Together, Devadatta and Ajatasattu would make a great team and achieve marvelous things. The prince liked the idea, but when he tried to slip into the king’s inner sanctum with a dagger strapped to his thigh, he was arrested and confessed all. Some of the officers of the army wanted to put the whole Sangha to death when they heard of Devadatta’s role in the assassination attempt, but Bimbisara pointed out that the Buddha had already repudiated Devadatta and could not be held responsible for the deeds of this miscreant. When Ajatasattu was brought before him, the king asked him sadly why he had wanted to kill him. “I want the kingdom, sire,” Ajatasattu replied with disarming frankness. Bimbisara had not been the Buddha’s disciple for so long for nothing. “If you want the kingdom, Prince,” he said simply, “it is yours.” Like Pasenedi, he was probably aware of the unskillful and aggressive passions that were required in politics, and perhaps wanted to devote his last years to the spiritual life. His abdication did him no good, however. With the support of the army, Ajatasattu arrested his father and starved him to death.
The new king then backed Devadatta’s scheme to kill the Buddha, providing him with trained assassins from the army. But as soon as the first of these approached the Buddha with a bow and arrow, he was overcome with terror and rooted to the spot. “Come friend,” the Buddha said gently. “Do not be afraid.” Because he had seen the error of his ways, his crime was forgiven. The Buddha then gave the soldier instruction appropriate for the layman and in a very short time the repentant killer had become a disciple. One by one, his fellow conspirators followed suit. After this, Devadatta was forced to take the matter into his own hands. First he pushed a huge boulder over a cliff hoping to crush the Buddha, but succeeded only in grazing the Buddha’s foot. Next he hired a famously ferocious elephant called Naligiri, which he let loose on the Buddha. But as soon as Naligiri saw his prey, he was overcome by the waves of love that emanated from the Buddha, lowered his trunk, and stood still while the Buddha stroked his forehead, explaining to him that violence would not help him in his next life. Naligiri took dust off the Buddha’s feet with his trunk, sprinkled it over his own forehead, and retreated backward, gazing yearningly at the Buddha all the while until he was out of sight. Then he ambled peaceably back to the stables, a reformed beast from that day forth.
Seeing that the Buddha seemed proof against these assaults, the conspirators changed their tactics. Ajatasattu, who had succeeded in his own bid for power, dropped Devadatta and became one of the Buddha’s lay disciples. Devadatta was now on his own and tried to find support within the Sangha. He appealed to some of the younger and more inexperienced monks of Vesall, arguing that the Buddha’s Middle Way was an unacceptable deviation from tradition. Buddhists should return to the tougher ideals of the more traditional ascetics. Devadatta proposed five new rules: all members of the Sangha should live in the forests rather than in the aramas during the monsoon; they must rely solely on alms and must not accept invitations to eat at the houses of the laity; instead of new robes, they must wear only cast-off rags picked up from the streets; they must sleep in the open instead of in huts; and they must never eat the flesh of any living being. These five rules may represent the historical kernel in the story of Devadatta’s defection. Some of the more conservative bhikkhus may well have been concerned that standards were slipping and could have attempted to break away from the main Sangha. Devadatta might have been associated with this reform movement, and his enemies, the proponents of the Buddha’s Middle Way, could have blackened Devadatta’s name by inventing the dramatic legends that we find in the Vinaya.