The Night Under the Tree

A prophecy at a cradle: the prince becomes either the greatest of kings, or — if he ever sees suffering — the greatest of renunciants. His father builds a paradise with the sick, the old and the dead edited out. It works for twenty-nine years and fails in four chariot rides: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a calm wanderer in a yellow robe. All beings, my prince.

He leaves at midnight, cuts his hair with his sword, and spends six years starving himself to the edge of death — mastering every austerity and gaining nothing. A childhood memory of effortless stillness turns him: he accepts a bowl of milk-rice, his disgusted companions walk out, and he sits down alone under a fig tree with a vow — let flesh and blood dry up; I will not rise unawakened.

What comes at dusk is Māra: the army whose weapons turn to flowers in the stillness, the three daughters he ignores, and the last, best weapon — by what right do you sit there? Who witnesses for you? The man touches the earth with his fingertips, and the earth roars its testimony, and the armies scatter. Through the three watches of the night he sees his past lives, the karmic wheel of all beings, and the twelve-linked chain of craving — run forward it builds the world of suffering; run backward, it stops.

At the morning star he is the Buddha, the Awakened One. He nearly keeps it to himself — too subtle, against the stream — until the god Brahmā pleads for the beings with little dust in their eyes. At the deer park of Sarnath the five deserters rise to greet him despite themselves, the wheel of the teaching turns, and the quietest apocalypse in the archive begins to travel: no exemption, no substitute, no wall — just the machinery of death seen through, on the testimony of no god at all.