“He felt for a moment that he had stepped outside of the dream he was always inside.”
– John Tarrant from ‘The Story of the Buddha’
The Story of the Buddha, is a sensitive and personal retelling of the life story of the Buddha by Zen teacher, writer and poet John Tarrant. What makes the arc of the Buddha’s story so unique is that he worked to overcome the happy ending where most other searching myths conclude: the easy life and palatial riches. In this excerpt, Tarrant remembers moments from the Buddha’s childhood that gave him the first flashes of insight into the deeper sense of his being. What followed this later in his teens were encounters with the realities of life that had been hidden from him as he was growing up: sickness, old age and death. The effect of these experiences, as well as meeting a traveling mendicant woman, laid the foundations for his own home leaving and journey towards complete freedom of being.
Siddhartha’s childhood was as cushioned and unremarkable as his minders could make it. Years later, though, he remembered an incident that was significant. In the memory, his father, the king, is breaking a furrow in the fields during the annual plowing ceremony. The oxen have a comforting, animal smell, and flower garlands are strung on their horns.
Siddhartha is a child, not quite school age. He lies under a rose apple tree, alone for a moment, unattended. His father is absorbed in his task, and his minders are watching the ceremony; the child is held in no one’s gaze. A light breeze touches his face, there is dappled shade and the scent of grass.
His eyes move slowly over the paddock. Nothing is on his mind. There is no fear, no tension, no desire.
A parakeet flies into the green branches and the sky opens before it and closes behind it, fitting exactly. His breath opens and closes, too. Time stops, the sun stands still in the sky, he is sheltered in the leafy twilight. There is nothing to add, no resistance to strip away; everything is complete and sufficient.
A question appears in his mind, the way a bird appears in the sky. The question is “Am I afraid of this happiness?” and makes no sense to the child. As well as a question, it’s the beginning of a fear, a doubt held up against completeness and the demands that such completeness might make. This fear also tells him who he is, pulls him down into who he is—a child in a field.
Then the spell breaks, the sun begins to move again, and the palace attendants remember the boy under the tree, swooping down to feed him milk rice. He returns to luxury, forgetfulness, impatience, beautiful things, and beautiful manners. He returns to existing at a distance from his life.
“A question appears in his mind, the way a bird appears in the sky. The question is “Am I afraid of this happiness?” and makes no sense to the child.”
Other things happened. He had a cousin who liked to hunt, and one afternoon winged a swan with an arrow.
Siddhartha got to the bird first, and she was still alive. He saw the fear in her eyes, felt her shaking run up his arm into his own body. She was like him, he thought-she wanted to live and go back to her swan life with her mate and cygnets.
He was touched by her: “Everything alive,” he thought, “has its own truth.” He broke the arrow, pulled the shaft through, stroked the swan’s soft neck, and wrapped her to his chest. He kept the bird till its wing healed and he could release it. This enraged his cousin, but Siddhartha didn’t care. After that the cousin hated him.
Whenever the prince went to town, men on horseback hurried ahead to clear the streets. The poor were driven down side alleys, the sick and the old were thrust through the nearest doorway, funerals were interrupted, and wandering pilgrims were ordered to conceal themselves. By the time the prince came through, no blemish marred what he saw. He began to notice that he didn’t fit in. He was a lonely child.
He chose for a best friend his chariot driver, someone he met every day, a boy named Channa. When you saw one of them, the other was somewhere near. Channa knew the hidden pathways, the existence of which had never occurred to Siddhartha, and they sneaked out of the palace unsupervised. The gods conspired with them, making the guards drowsy and distracted.
The first time the young men went into the city together, someone appeared in front of them—a woman ancient and bent over from work in the fields. Her hair was thin and white and floated in cloudlike wisps; her skin was like dark, cracked clay, and her cheeks were sunken. He couldn’t help staring, and she felt his gaze and turned her head like a bird to look up at him. Her black eyes held his.
She was like nothing he had ever seen, and her eyes were open to him. He felt for a moment that he had stepped outside of the dream he was always inside. He turned to touch his friend, but when he turned back, the woman had disappeared.
Four times the two friends went into the town, and each time they met someone strange.
On the second journey, Siddhartha stepped into a shop thinking it was a place to get something to drink, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw a figure on a bed by the wall.
The man was thin and sweating, the bones in his face stood out, he was shaking and talking to himself. He coughed and blood came out of his mouth. Again the man’s eyes caught his. The eyes didn’t ask for anything, and their steadiness was disturbing.
Siddhartha’s friend called out and the prince stumbled outside. When he turned back to the shop, he couldn’t find the man.
“What was that? What is happening to him?” asked Siddhartha. Channa shrugged, and the prince realized that, if his friend had seen the man, he would have found nothing remarkable about this sight. The meeting was for Siddhartha alone. The prince wondered, with the dizziness of someone on a precipice, why he had asked.
On the third journey, a day blue and unshadowed, they were returning at dusk when four men ran by carrying a litter. They held torches in their hands and as they drew level with the boys, they stopped. The litter held a bundle in white linen. As in a dream, one of the men carefully wound back the cloth and uncovered the face for the boys to see. It was a young woman. There was nothing disfigured about her face; it was just that no breath moved through her. Her green eyes were open. Under the gaze of the bearers the prince’s hand rose slowly to touch her cheek; her silence and the shocking chill of her skin was something he remembered all his life.
Channa was concerned. “You know about this though, right?” It was not that Siddhartha didn’t know about death; he knew his mother had died. But these facts had had no weight with him before. He felt as if he were struggling up from sleep.
On their fourth trip outside the palace, the boys ran into a woman in robes, a pilgrim. “Who are you?” Siddhartha asked. “What are you doing?”
She laughed, amused by them, amused by everything.
When they persisted, she said that she was a traveler, like clouds, like the river. Siddhartha felt hurt. He had hoped she would explain things, that she might end his confusion right then. “Well, someone has to put an end to suffering,” she said, and laughed again as if they were sharing a joke. But he took from that meeting the idea that a journey was required.
It’s said that the gods intervened and themselves took the form of the forbidden sights-immortals becoming illustrations of mortality. It is also said that the spirit of the prince’s birth mother, Maha Maya, was watching from above, touching events, moving the conditions, entering the pilgrim’s body.
That was the prince’s last encounter with gods in disguise. The sights disturbed his dreams. He became absentminded during his mathematics classes. He began to wonder what was behind the obvious things he saw.
From The Story of the Buddha by John Tarrant © 2024 by John Tarrant. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
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