Yudhiṣṭhira was silent. At that moment the dog jumped awkwardly, happily, onto Indra’s chariot. Voilently, Indra kicked it out. Yudhiṣṭhira felt a sudden rush of anger. “That dog is devoted to me. He must come with me. My heart is full of compassion for him,” he said. Indra immediately returned to his more coaxing tone: “Yudhiṣṭhira, today you have become immortal like myself. The happiness of heaven is yours. Why bother about this dog? Get rid of it.” “I spent my life on earth practicing justice,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. “I cannot cross the earth’s borders by committing an act of injustice.” Indra could not conceal his impatience. “There’s no room in heaven for people who arrive with their dogs. Just leave it behind. Here and now, it’s not an act of cruelty.” “It was once said that to abandon a creature devoted to you is a crime as great as the murder of a brahman. I shall never be able to abandon someone who is frightened, who is devoted to me, who is weak and who asks for my help.” Indra made an effort to behave with a patience and politeness hardly natural to him. He explained: “Here in heaven, the fact that a dog looks at a sacrificial flame is enough to take away all value from the ceremony. Hence dogs are not allowed. Yudhiṣṭhira, you have renounced everything, lost everything, including your brothers, including Draupadī. whom you loved in earnest. Why do you not renounce this dog?” “The others are all dead, and I can do nothing to resurrect them,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. Then he added: “But this dog is alive.”
Indra fell silent. His eloquent persuader’s expression fell like a scale from his face. The dog was playing at Yudhiṣṭhira’s feet. They had nothing more to say to each other. Then they realized that another being, of sovereign authority, was standing between them, as if he had been listening to what had been said from the beginning. “I am Dharma,” he said. “I am your dog. And you, Yudhiṣṭhira, are a portion of me. I take pleasure in you. You have survived many difficult trials, but none so difficult as this. You have refused to climb on the Celestials’ chariot without your dog. Because of this, you are now one of the Celestials yourself.”
XIV
Shortly before the Bodhisattva entered into his last existence, the house of the noble Śuddhodana, chief of the Śākyas in Kapilavastu, suddenly appeared “free from weeds, free from dead tree trunks, free from thorns, free from gravel, free from sand, free from waste, well watered, well purified, free from eddying dust, free from darkness, free from dirt, free from gadflies, mosquitoes, moths, free from snakes, full of flowers, smooth as the palm of a hand.” It seemed everything was preparing to take on its definitive form. The countless and the shapeless were put to one side, like a crowd of extras waiting in the wings. A small number of elements, not further reducible, prepared to submit themselves to the gaze of the great decomposer of the existent world.
Māyā was lying on her left side. Numerous metal rings circled her ankles, wrists, and arms. An embroidered cloth was wrapped around her hips. A round breast rested on the back of one hand. It pushed out as though from a balcony. The other hand was bent back behind her head. A small, white elephant came down through a crack in the ceiling. It sank through the air toward Māyā’s uncovered right flank. Then it slipped in there, opening a passage for itself in the soft, smooth surface. When he was inside his mother’s body, the Bodhisattva settled down in contemplation. He looked through the transparent skin. He never moved until he was born. Meanwhile, Māyā dreamed of an immense white elephant, experiencing a pleasure she had never known before.
The Bodhisattva was born the way a king descends a flight of stairs. Contemplative and knowing in the heaven of the Tuṣitas, he descended mindful and knowing into Māyā’s body. During the months of pregnancy, when she was alone, his mother watched him in the crystal casing of her womb. And she always found him motionless. composed, attentive. When Māyā felt her hour approaching, she wanted to go home to her parents. She traveled on a chariot drawn by young girls. Halfway there she ordered the procession to stop in the woods at Lumbinī. She could feel the first pains of labor. She sought out the shadow of a tall śāla tree and gripped a branch. Eyes staring into the void, she remembered a white elephant she had dreamt of one night. Her maids hung an embroidered veil on the branches of the śāla, as a screen. The only sound was the humming of bees on a hedge thick with flowers. Māyā gave birth to the Bodhisattva standing up. The child was laid on an antelope skin, then a silk cushion, then the ground. They protected him with a white parasol. From then on, wherever he went, a white parasol always went with him. After the birth, Māyā, the baby, and their entourage went back to Kapilavastu. Seven days later, Māyā was dead.
Remembering his childhood and youth, the Buddha said: “I was delicate, monks, extremely delicate, too delicate. They laid out three lotus ponds for me in my father’s house: blue lotuses in one, red in another, white in the third. I wouldn’t use any sandalwood that did not come from Vārāṇasi, my clothes — my tunie, my robe, my cloak — were made of Vārāṇasī cloths. Night and day I was protected by a white parasol to keep me from the cold and heat and dust and weeds and dew. I had three palaces, one for the cold season, one for the hot season, one for the rainy season. During the rainy months, I would shut myself high up in the top of the palace and never come downstairs. The only people around me were minstrel girls. I didn’t even think of leaving the palace. And, while in other houses people offer a broth of rice husks to slaves and laborers, in my father’s house we gave the slaves and laborers bowls full of rice and meat.”
Eighty thousand girls could claim to have been born the same day as the Bodhisattva. They took turns in his three palaces, became his lovers and musicians, for thirteen years, as earlier they had taken turns as his playmates. His chosen wife was called Gopā. One thing we know about her is that she refused to wear a veil of any kind. Nobody could understand why. It was an allusion to the preceding age: when Kṛṣṇ’s gopīs heard his flute approaching, their plaits would come undone of their own accord and the veils supporting their breasts fell away. Yet something kept the memory of Kṛṣṇa at bay. For everything that happened to the Bodhisattva happened, as it were, at a remove, was the merest copy. He belonged to the many who are called on not to invent gestures but to repeat those of others. But he was also the only one who would be called upon to extinguish gesture itself. By the time the Bodhisattva appeared, all events of whatever kind seemed to have lost their epic profile. Their only value was as a pretext for thought. And it was there, perhaps, that something new was about to happen. There, ever since time began, something had been awaiting the arrival of the Buddha.
The Bodhisattva’s life was coated by a uniform film, like the thin walls his father, Śuddhodana, had had built around the palace park. Whatever happened, there was always something slightly artificial and suspect about it. Why did the Bodhisattva only meet creatures of his own age? Why, whenever he approached the boundaries of the park, did the path veer off into thick vegetation that hid any trace of the walls and turn back? Was this the world — or a piece of temporary scenery whose real purpose was to hide the world? One day the Buddha would sum up those years in a single sentence: “Once, before I left my father’s house, I could easily obtain the five qualities of sensory pleasure.” That was all he said. Characters, faces, adventures, emotions: all smoothed out in just one sentence — cold, technical, quite without resonance.