Love Dharma. Geri Larkin
his renunciation of the princely life and six years of asceticism that included almost starving himself to death, young Siddhartha found his answer to the question of unhappiness in his own experience of complete enlightenment. His consequent message for achieving happiness, called the four noble truths, teaches that life is difficult for everyone and that it is difficult because we are always grasping and craving something we don’t have. Buddha promised a way out of our suffering. Called the eightfold path, his “middle way” is basically a set of principles for living a life of deep integrity. Such a life automatically brings compassion, peacefulness, love, and joy. More specifically, the eightfold path calls for right understanding, or seeing life as it really is; right thought, or doing our best not to succumb to anger, greediness, or denial; kind and tolerant speech; actions that demonstrate our respect for all the things and people in our lives (including those we wish lived far away); a livelihood with the same tendencies; giving everything we do everything we’ve got; mindfulness; and concentration.
For the rest of his life Buddha wandered the three hundred kilometers between the southern edge of the Himalayas and the Ganges, teaching his truths. His was a landscape thick with woods and jungles, complete with tigers, elephants, and rhinos. Wooded areas were broken up by fields of grains and dotted with villages that had grown up alongside slow and easy rivers. This is a geography that still only knows three seasons: so hot your skin itches, a cold similar to a late New England autumn, and monsoon. If you’ve never experienced a monsoon, it is hard to imagine what this season is like. Torrents of rain fall for hours each day, for weeks at a time. Floods prevent travel, and dirt roads become mud slides. Accompanying the rain? Armies of rats, snakes, and scorpions if you happen to reside at the base of the Himalayas.
Four kingdoms provided support for the young wanderer and his followers. North of the Ganges River was the kingdom of Kosala. Buddha’s family came from the city of Kapilavastu, which was right on the northern border of Kosala in the republic of Sakyas. Kosala is where one of Buddha’s best pals, King Pasenadi, lived. Southwest of Kosala was Vamsa, home to King Udena and a set of wives who tried to kill each other on a pretty regular basis. To the south of the river was the kingdom of Avanti and to the east of Avanti, Magadha. Buddha and his followers seemed to spend most of their time here. Another of his best friends and later a major donor, King Bimbisara, lived in Magadha. Because his kingdom was prosperous, thanks to iron ore mining, Bimbisara was able to keep Buddha’s followers in food and shelter, even as their numbers grew into the thousands. Marriages linked the kingdoms in one way or another, for better or worse. Mostly, a relatively peaceful coexistence was the order of the day, and people could freely cross the borders between the different kingdoms.
Much is known about the first people attracted to the teachings of Buddha. His time period was one where the homeless spiritual seeker was a familiar sight. In the decades before Buddha was born, a spontaneous movement supporting spiritual growth had surfaced. People were starting to break out of the existing spiritual disciplines, with their rituals and caste orientation. What some call “a psychosis of spiritual seeking” had seized the young men of the warrior and merchant classes across the four kingdoms. Thousands abandoned their work and turned their wives and children over to their extended families for safekeeping so they themselves could take on the lifestyle of a wandering ascetic. While the young men’s choices of spiritual practices ranged from self-mutilation to vows of complete silence, almost all of them were on a constant lookout for a teacher who could instruct them on genuine spiritual practice.
Along came Buddha. At thirty-six he was an attractive teacher: handsome, smart, obviously from the princely caste— and enlightened. Men, mostly from the ruling class, began to follow him. First they showed up in small groups, then in hundreds, then by the thousands. Young, eager, and bright, they left families and livelihoods to follow Buddha and embrace his teachings, walking from village to village not so much to preach as to demonstrate, by example, the power of Buddha’s understanding. Yasa was one of these. The epitome of the idly rich young man, he bumped into Buddha in one of the deer parks where the Buddha would go to meditate. Asking Buddha about himself, Yasa was so struck by the innate joy and wisdom emanating from the monk that he immediately renounced his princely life to search for what Buddha had found—bringing his fifty-four best friends along with him.
Then there were the three Kassapa brothers, “matted-hair ascetics” who had a local monopoly on the spiritual market, with more than a thousand followers between them. Hearing Buddha, they also became disciples. In later years one of the brothers, suddenly realizing how all of what Buddha was teaching could be manifested in a single flower, became Buddha’s first dharma heir, responsible for guaranteeing that the teachings survived Buddha’s own passing. The sons of the headmen of two villages, Sariputta and Moggallana, also became followers, responsible for translating many of Buddha’s words into “the language of the valley,” or local idiom, and teaching the growing crowds of followers when Buddha was unavailable.
In the meantime, what about the women? What of their lives? It was bad enough that they had to survive at least two miserable seasons every year. It was bad enough to live in a social system, a caste system, where they were utterly dependent upon their extended families and, for married women, the kindness of their husbands’ families. To make matters worse, in addition to facing the natural disasters of their lives—disease, dire poverty, the deaths of beloved relatives—many of the women lost their men—their sons, lovers, husbands, brothers, and fathers—to asceticism. Where did these women fit in?
For Buddha’s first few years of teaching, the answer was: nowhere.
But then Ananda surfaced, and he was a surprise advocate for female spiritual seekers. Ananda, Buddha’s cousin and attendant in his later years, was a naturally kind and compassionate monk. He cared about everybody’s welfare—not just the monks but also women and children. As the women relatives of the first followers of Buddha heard about the men’s spiritual experiences studying with the Buddha, many of them wanted to sign up as well.
Ananda watched all of this unfold.
One of those women was Pajapati, Buddha’s beloved stepmother. By all accounts Pajapati was a sweet and nurturing parent, nursing the young prince through his childhood and seeing him through his own marriage at sixteen to her cousin, Yasodara. Following Buddha’s enlightenment, and after hearing him teach, many of his relatives wanted to become disciples. His father and his six siblings and cousins, all male, were the first group to insist that they be allowed to study with him. Pajapati wanted in as well, but was held back by familial obligations. Then, when Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, died in 524 b.c., she finally had the freedom to become a mendicant follower. Determined to become one, and knowing that Buddha had refused all female disciples to date, Pajapati cautiously asked Buddha for permission to become his student. Now elderly, she sought him out in the Nigrodha Grove, just outside Buddha’s hometown. “It would be good, she said, if women too could go forth into homelessness in the Dharma proclaimed by you.” 2
Buddha flat-out refused. “Do not be eager to obtain the going forth of women from home to homelessness in the Dhamma and Discipline proclaimed by the Tathagata.” 3 His stepmother was crushed. Pajapati talked with female friends and relatives about her yearning only to discover a groundswell of shared feelings. Many women wanted to be nuns, wanted to follow Buddha. Not easily dissuaded, the women began to organize.
The women decided to approach Buddha as a group and formally ask his permission to follow him as traveling mendicants. Three times he rejected their appeal. After the third refusal he and the monks left for Vesali, about a hundred miles away. To demonstrate their spunk and determination, Pajapati and a handful of women followed him anyway. They wanted to prove that they could survive as wanderers as well as the monks could. They cut off their hair and put on the yellow robes of a disciple to show the sincerity of their hope to become disciples.
The group made it to Vesali. When Buddha spotted them, feet swollen, filthy, and crying from exhaustion, he was not happy. Ananda, on the other hand, couldn’t bear to see Pajapati treated the way Buddha was treating her. He decided to intercede on behalf of the women. Buddha also said no to him. Three times. “Do not be eager, Ananda, to obtain the going forth of women from home into homelessness in the Dhamma and Discipline proclaimed by the Tathagata.” 4
Ananda