Veluvana
These chapters are simply an attempt to record the gist of some conversations and noonday thoughts, which have arisen from time to time in idle moments spent in a garden on the Cotswold Hills, where there are gathered together certain features unusual in Western pleasances. Our thoughts are largely the creations of our surroundings, and when at every step I am met by some work of art or a plant which has travelled perhaps twelve thousand miles to bring me a greeting from afar, then I, too, begin to travel and am carried away beyond the seas. If here and there I think and talk of things nearer home, my thoughts are still those of a wanderer—still those which are suggested by the mysterious thrilling of one of those chords for which there is nothing to account, but which never vibrate as they do in my Veluvana, the bamboo grove of Buddha, which thus becomes a temple dedicated to Mnemosyne.
One thing I wish to disclaim. I am often told that people believe that I have a Japanese garden. I have nothing of the kind. A Japanese garden is a mystery hard to be understood; it is a work of art depending upon certain fixed laws and canons prescribed, many centuries ago, by a school of Aesthetes, whose lives were spent in the punctilious observance of the rules prescribed for tea-drinking and incense-burning and the writing of sonnets, in grounds laid out upon principles, of which the slightest violation would be an outrage upon the decencies of culture. In such gardens flowers play but a small part, but the shapes, the position and the orientation of quaint rocks, the introduction of miniature lakes, and even of the similitude of rivers carried out in sand or gravel, with stepping stones by which they may be crossed without disturbing the smooth surface, these and many other whims are the important but sober and yet fantastic features upon which the Japanese landscape gardener insists.
Trees and flowering shrubs—such as cherries and plums—lianes like the Wistaria and the ornamental vines, are used with the utmost discretion, as they are with us. But the introduction of alien plants, the exhibition of bronze ornaments and lanterns, or the naturalistic arrangement of rockwork with a streamlet crossed by lacquered bridges, no more give a garden the claim to be called Japanese than the possession of a piece of old Greek sculpture would liken a house to the Acropolis of Athens, or than skill in the pretty and very difficult game of kicking shuttlecocks with the heel would entitle a Pekingese boy to claim kinship with a Rugby football player.
A Japanese garden has a certain poetry and secret charm of its own. To those who are adepts in its mysteries it is full of suggestion, but it is highly artificial; everything that you see in it is a contradiction of Nature, who, poor dear! is forced into obeying every craze and vagary of the artist, not being allowed to see a twig or a bud take the direction which she destined for it. In that it lacks the sweet simplicity and countrified untutored grace of our English Edens. It is not a place in which a young maiden would gather a posy bejewelled with May dew, or stoop to consult the ray-florets of a daisy as to the beating of her lover’s heart.
There are many crafts in which we English folk have much to learn from abroad; in gardening that is not so—there we are not unskilled, indeed rather copied than copiers. We have our own gardens and we may rest content with them, since they give us without stint the full joys of form and colour, beauty and fragrance. What more do we want? The gardens of the Japanese may suit the fairies of their own legends, but the great god Pan would surely rather see his Dryads and Wood-nymphs tread a measure on the velvet of a trim English lawn, than picking their way among cruel stones to the torture of their rosy feet.
But though we may not be minded to imitate in our own homes the eccentricities and fancies of Japanese garden experts—whims and fancies handicapped by the severities of austere tradition—there is no law to hinder us from taking a hint from some of the effects which they achieve, nor from introducing into our gardens some great masterpiece of one of those exquisitely imaginative artists whose smaller and daintier works are gems welcomed with such warmth elsewhere.
Some months after the above lines were written there appeared in the Times of May 6th, 1916, one of those charming articles on gardening with which we are from time to time favoured, in which the writer expresses much the same view of the Japanese gardener’s art that I hold. Only in one point I differ from him. It is not “a close study of nature” which guides the Japanese landscape maker; on the contrary, he follows whims and symbols hard to be understood. Every distorted stone which he brings at great expense from a huge distance must be so placed as to be in harmony with some cryptic principle of æstheticism. Nature is not what he aims at.
The Japanese, who have an exquisite system of their own of natural gardening, though of gardening in which all is designed and nothing left to chance, are very sparing of flowers. They would rather have one blossom where it will tell as a delightful surprise than a thousand where they merely make a mass of colour. Placing is everything to them, but their principles of placing and grouping are got from the close study of nature, like an artist’s principles of composition. We must not imitate them, for if we do, we shall merely parody them. Bamboos and stones and lanterns will not make a Japanese garden.
But we can grasp the principles on which they express their love of nature in a garden; we can see clearly what is the difference between formal and natural gardening, and avoid the mistake of trying to combine the beauties of both. One is always uncomfortable in a garden when there are a thousand flowers where a hundred would be better. One may not be aware of the waste, but it wearies one all the same.
The fascination of the East never dies. But there comes a fatal time when, to the voice of the Siren, sing she never so tenderly, there is no response. Age and new duties have forged fetters, sweet and soft as rose-leaves, but so binding that not even the loadstone mountain of Sindbad the Sailor would avail to tear them away from us, and so we are fain to satisfy our travel-hunger as best we may, feeding upon memory. Then it is that the relics gathered together during the adventures of many years acquire a new and almost sacred value. They speed the flight of our thoughts like the wings of Pegasus. The man who has chaffered with the Jew merchants in the picturesque gloom of the bazaars of Stamboul; who has bathed in Jordan and Scamander, and slept in the black tents of the Bedouin; who has wandered through the mysterious portals of the Chĭen Mĕn, the frowning gate of the Tartar city, to sip tea with some art expert in the Liu Li Chăng, the Paternoster Row of Peking, listening to stories of the dilettanti in the reign of Chĭen Lung the magnificent—such a man, if now he can do no more than trim the silken sails of his imagination, bound for the lands of enchantment, must have about him many a treasure which, if he but shut his eyes and give himself up to the luxury of dreaming day-dreams, will bring back to the old wanderer a whiff from the birthplace of the Sun, a whiff sweeter in his nostrils than those cloying perfumes to which the æsthetes, according to their affected euphuist jargon, “listened” centuries ago in the lovely gardens of Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion of the sacred city of Kiōto.1
As for me, I have been all my life bitten by the collector’s mania, and so the wings of my Pegasus have many feathers; for my house, and even my gardens, are full of curious odds and ends, the spoil of many lands. On the terrace standing sentry at the entrance to the house are two huge bronze Kylins (in Pekingese, Chih Ling), representations of the mystic beast which was seen last at the birth of Confucius, and will not reappear until ten thousand years shall have elapsed from that date.
The male has a single horn and is very fierce, but not more so than his hornless mate, which, with her cruel tusks, grins defiance at the world. Just such another pair in the Imperial Park of the Ten Thousand Longevities at Yuen Ming Yuen used to raise my wonder fifty years ago. Built into the wall of one of the two little gazebos which are at the east and west ends of my terrace are two bricks—the one rough and rugged, sun-dried and splashed with the mortar of more than two thousand years since, from the Great Wall of China at Ku Pei Kŏu; the other white, smooth and richly glazed from the famous Porcelain Tower of Nanking, which was destroyed by the Tai Ping rebels some sixty years ago, before they were overtaken by the Vengeance of Gordon and “the Ever-Victorious Army.”
Shall I ever forget the tramp of a couple of miles under an August sun in 1865 with that huge brick from the Great Wall seeming to bite into my aching shoulder? Over against the little summer-house, guarding the entrance to the garden from the attacks of evil spirits, are small statues of the Ni-ō, the two kings whose ugliness is enough to scare away any inauspicious demons who might be about. They must miss the ritual of their own country where the pious pilgrim, having written his prayer on to a scrap of paper, chews it into a pellet, and spits it at the sacred figure. If it sticks, all is well, and the prayer will be heard; if it falls to earth, the fates will be unkind—so outside a fashionable temple the two gods are bespattered all over with an eruption of moist pellets. Here from that holy rite they are immune.
High up in the wildest part of the wild garden, under the shade of a spreading oak, there stands, or rather sits, turned towards the East, as is fitting, a bronze statue of Buddha of heroic size. His hand is raised in the attitude of preaching; his features are expressive of the holy calm and noble abstraction which are traditional in the effigies of the great reformer; the centre of the skull is slightly raised, and between the brows is a curl, representing the wind, the mystic white lock. These two are among the many secret birth-signs by which the soothsayers and diviners recognize in a newly-born babe the advent of Bodhisatva, or future Buddha. Surrounding the figure are planted chusan palms from China and bamboos from the Himalaya mountains, among which a stag and a hind, life-sized bronze representations of the small Japanese deer, watch over the loneliness of the thinker. Facing the statue is a rest-house, flanked by two huge bronze lanterns bearing the chrysanthemum and the Pawlonia flower, the two crests of the Mikado, and on either side of the door are two small white granite elephants, brought from Ceylon, Buddhistic symbols, full of significance. A little higher up the hill a pergola leads to a tiny spring, with a dolphin spout, from which fitfully, for it is often dry, a runlet of pure water trickles into a stone basin.
Immediately opposite is an ishi-dori, one of those granite lanterns which you will see in every Japanese temple. Lower down the hill is a grand bronze lion, with his paws resting upon a ball of cloisonné enamel, symbolical of the strength of Buddha, and in the middle of the walled garden is a dragon fountain, spouting water into a tiny pond full of pink water-lilies and gold-fish. We Westerns are wont to talk of fiery dragons; not so the Orientals. With them the dragon is a creature of the water, and so is used in art for fountains just as we use the lion’s head, taking the idea from the Egyptian, who imagined that the rising of the Nile took place when the Sun was in Leo. In China the dragon represents the principle of good, the tiger that of evil; the thunderstorm is a fight between the two.
All these things have their meaning, and here, as you sit in the broad verandah of the rest-house, represent two scenes in the life of the Buddha; firstly, the preaching of the first sermon in the Mrighadeva, the deer forest near Benares, where the stags and hinds come to listen to the Holy One, and, secondly, the Veluvana, or Bamboo grove, which King Bimbisara presented to the Buddha and which became the first Vihara, monastery or meeting-place, of the new sect’s adherents and monks. The story of the Veluvana is that of Ahab and Naboth the Jezreelite over again. Some six hundred years more or less before our era—how much more or how much less is a matter of small moment, though the learned must needs break their heads in the vain attempt to fix the exact dates of these events—there reigned in Maghada King Bimbisara, a monarch not a little feared.
Before he mounted the throne he greatly had set his heart upon a certain grove, or garden belonging to a householder who would not part with it. So he determined to bide his time until he should become king, and then to kill the man and take his land. This he did, and the lawful owner, who after death was born again in the shape of a poisonous snake, sought an occasion to fix his deadly fangs in the king. One day the king had gone into the garden with his wives, and fell asleep while only one of the women was by him. Then the snake, crawling close to him, was about to strike, when some Kalantaka birds seized it and began to scream. This woke the woman, who jumped up and killed the snake.
In gratitude to the birds who had saved his life, the king caused the garden to be planted with bamboos, which they love, and the place became known as the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana, or the Bamboo grove of the Kalantaka birds. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, following the story of the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chwang (of whom I hope to speak later), gives a less romantic derivation to the name Kalantakanivasa. Kalanta, as he tells the tale, was a rich merchant, who had originally given his garden to the Brahmans, but having received the sublime Law, he took it away from them and transferred it to the Buddha. I hope that this may not be the true story, for in that case the name would simply mean the Bamboo grove, or garden of Kalanta, and so the birds and the snake must fade into the clouds of fancy.
According to the more legendary version of the story, it is written that when the Blessed One, having attained the supreme wisdom, entered upon his ministry, after six years of meditation, and an asceticism which had almost starved his very life, he came with his disciples to Rajagriha, where he was visited by Bimbisara, King of Maghada. This king had had five wishes: (1) That a Buddha might appear during his reign; (2) that he might himself see him; (3) that he might learn the truth from him; (4) that he might understand it; (5) that he might follow his commandments. When the king saw the Buddha and listened to his preaching, he was converted with many of his people, and invited the Blessed One to come to his city, where he set a great feast before him. When the feast was over, the king solemnly poured water over the hands of the Blessed One, saying, “I give the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana to the Blessed One to dispose of as may please him.” And that is how it came to pass that a grove of bamboos was the first Vihara, or meeting-place of Buddha and his saints.
Full of poetry and Indian mysticism are the legends and fairy tales which monkish superstition has woven round the life of the Buddha, doing him and his memory no good service thereby; for when truth is overgrown with fables, like some fair flower choked by weeds, it becomes lost to sight and strangled, and men begin to doubt whether, indeed, it had any existence. In this way some doctors have been led to deny that such a man as the Buddha ever lived upon earth; men of learning have spent much profound scholarship on proving that he was merely a sun-myth; others have explained him away as being in some sort an astronomical allegory. It would be as easy to explain away Napoleon Buonaparte—indeed, did not that cunning logician, Archbishop Whately, making fun out of his own science, prove irrefutably by rule of syllogism that no such man as Napoleon ever did or ever could have existed?
That Buddha was a very real man, inspired by the highest ideals, is a fact which all advance in knowledge proves more and more conclusively. Facts cannot be swept away like cobwebs; indeed, cobwebs are facts, as every housewife knows, and though a besom may annihilate them, their rebirth remains a demonstrable truth. So it is with the Buddha. The travels of Fa Hsien and Hsüan Chwang, Chinese pilgrims, who in the fifth and seventh centuries of our era went to India to collect Buddhist books and study the dogmas and history of the religion, have been recorded with all the scrupulous care and minuteness peculiar to their nation, and show the veneration in which the sites and monuments sacred to the Buddhist story were still held in their day. Nor is that all.
Within the last twenty years, under the authority of the Indian Government, researches have been carried on by a learned Babu named Chandra Mukherji, under the direction of Mr. Vincent A. Smith, and those researches, which are of the highest interest, corroborate the statements of the two Chinese monks, in whose accounts the differences are no more than what would be expected in the work of men separated by an interval of two hundred years.
If we must remember that Prince Siddartha claimed no divinity—nor even divine inspiration or revelation—then stripped of the husk of fable and vain tales with which monkish folly has overlaid and obscured it, there is no more touching story in man’s record than that of the great renunciation with which Buddha entered upon the work to which he felt himself called. Brought up in the soul-stealing languor of an Oriental court, he left everything in order to face the hardships of a solitude and asceticism in which he was to find that peace which the world could not give to him, but which, if only he could attain the supreme wisdom, he might give to the world.
Prince Siddartha, the Buddha that was to be, was the son of Suddhōdana, King of Kapilavastu in the Tarai of Nepal, under the shadow of the giant Himalaya mountains. Suddhōdana was the chief of the Shakya, a proud clan, descended from the solar race of the Gautama. It puzzles the uninstructed reader to find the Buddha often referred to as Shakya Muni, or Gautama Buddha. The first of these titles means the hermit or recluse of the Shakya clan, and Barthélemy St. Hilaire connects the word muni with the Greek μόνος, the French moine, etc. Gautama Buddha simply means the Buddha of the Gautama race, in contradistinction to the many Buddhas that preceded him during the countless æons in which the Indians believe, and to those Buddhas that are yet to be, the next of whom is the Maitriya Buddha, the Buddha of brotherly love, for whom we have to wait many thousand years, and who is often represented as lying down and laughing—a favourite subject with Chinese sculptors and artists. The Queen of King Suddhōdana was the daughter of King Suprabuddha, a neighbouring monarch, a princess of such surpassing loveliness, wisdom and virtue, that she was called Maya the Illusion, for men could not believe that so wondrous a being could be aught but a dream, a vision, an unreal phantasy.
One night Queen Maya dreamt a dream: in her sleep it seemed to her that a white elephant with six golden tusks entered her side. She dreamt, moreover, that she was moving in heavenly space, that she ascended a great rocky mountain, and that a vast multitude bowed down before her. When the soothsayers came to interpret her dream, they declared that they meant that she would bring forth a son who should be marked with the thirty-two signs which indicate a great man. Either he would remain in his kingdom and become conqueror and monarch of the universe, or he would forsake home and the world and receive the full light of wisdom as a perfect Buddha. Now, when the time of her delivery came near to being fulfilled, Maya betook herself to her father’s city, and went to the garden which he had dedicated to his Queen Lumbini, and as she stood leaning against a certain tree the pains of travail came upon her—for the mother of a Buddha must bring forth her child standing. Then the great god Indra raised a mighty tempest, and scaring away all Maya’s women, took upon himself the disguise of an old midwife, and prepared to receive the babe in his arms; but the child, pushing the god aside, would have none of him, but by himself took seven steps towards each of the four cardinal points of heaven.
To the East he said: “I will reach the highest Nirvana.”
To the South: “I will be the first of all creatures.”
To the West: “This will be my last birth.”
To the North: “I will cross the ocean of Existence.”
Many signs and wonders followed. A heavenly choir of gods and Yakshas appeared in the sky, hovering over the birthplace and singing hymns of gladness to celebrate the birth of a Bodhisatva, who after years of devotion should one day become Buddha and attain supreme wisdom. Two dragons came out of the clouds, the one spouting warm water, the other cold, and so the god-like babe was washed. Moreover, it came to pass that when the appointed time for the child to be taken, as was the custom among Shakyas, to do homage at the shrine of Shakya Vardana, the statue, instead of receiving obeisance, bowed down in worship at the babe’s feet.
Then the king knew what manner of son this was, and he perceived that the soothsayers had spoken truth. Of the two alternative futures which they had foretold for him, the king would have preferred that he should become the monarch of the whole world. But the gods knew better. They knew that he was to be not the monarch of the world, but its freer: the sacrifice and renunciation of his life were to strike off from millions the shackles of sin and misery. They knew, moreover, that all the king’s endeavours to turn the Blessed One from his purpose would be vain; yet must the king needs try, and so throughout the prince’s youth every temptation that riches and luxury and pleasure could offer was put in his way. In the life of the Buddha it is easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fairy-tales. The great central truth remains untarnished in spite of all, and so in telling the story we, seeking to show the inspiration of Oriental mysticism, need hardly rob it of the mystic glamour of that poetical embroidery in which the rich imagination of Indian priests has enwrapped it.
Seven days after the birth of her son the beautiful Queen Maya died, and the babe was given over to the care of her younger sister, Prajapati Gautami, who was also one of King Suddhōdana’s wives.
It is strange that in his picturesque Buddhist poem, “The Light of Asia,” Sir Edwin Arnold should have omitted many of the legends with which he must have been familiar, and which would well have fitted the rather sensuous character of his verse. Moreover, he mixes up the stories of the two wives of Prince Siddartha, Yasōdhara and Gopā, and altogether omits any mention of the birth in the Lumbini Garden. Now the Lumbini Garden is one of those places connected with the Buddhist records which have been identified with the utmost certainty. The early Chinese pilgrims were shown the spot, and were careful with accuracy to describe the monuments which now, after all these centuries, the Babu Chandra Mukherji has been able to verify. On the spot where stood the sacred tree under which, grasping one of its boughs, Maya the Queen gave birth to her son, contemporary piety, or perhaps at latest that of King Asōka, who lived two hundred years afterwards, erected a chapel in which stood a sculpture portraying the nativity.
The ruins of the sacred building may yet be seen, and, much damaged, the stone image which it enshrined—a barbaric but expressive group. Hard by there still runs the little stream which Hsüan Chwang tells us was called the “river of oil,” a name which it still bears. Twenty or twenty-five paces from the sacred tree is the tank in which Maya bathed, still full of pure water.
In the days of the Chinese pilgrims there was a great stone pillar which had been erected by King Asōka; but it had been struck by lightning, and lay on the ground when they saw it, split in the middle. The pillar with a perfectly preserved inscription by King Asōka stands close to the temple. But the most striking proof of all is in the name Lumbini, or Lummini, which is preserved to this day as Rummin Dei, the initial R of Sanscrit being changed into L in the Magadhi language of the inscription.
So he who visits the Rummin Dei to-day knows of a certainty that he is standing on the very spot where some twenty-five centuries ago Prince Siddartha was born—he who was to found a religion which, above all others, has, so far as numbers go, dominated mankind. For his disciples have, indeed, been “as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”
The years went on and the child grew in grace and beauty of mind and body. His teachers were amazed at the precocity of his knowledge and wisdom. Learning seemed to come to him by instinct, until at last one of his masters said to him: “It is thou that art the Guru, not I.” His stature and strength were phenomenal, qualities upon which tradition was not slack in embroidering. Was he not sixteen, some say eighteen, feet tall, and did he not toss a dead elephant over a moat with as great ease as an ordinary strong man would fling a cat across a ditch?
But with all this he was a child of moods. At an age when other children are careless of aught save their toys and their games, he would lose himself in the solitude of the forests and remain wrapped in thought, deep in meditation. The king, his father, who watched him narrowly, perceived this, and felt that it boded no good for his own dynastic ambition. He thought of the prophecy of the soothsayers, and had a premonition that his son’s greatness would be spiritual rather than temporal. He foresaw that, however much he might try to turn the boy’s thoughts towards the world, his labour would be but vain.
Still, he would leave no stone unturned to win him over by the perfumed softness of Oriental luxury to the pomp and pride of his rank. Three palaces did he build for him, one for each of the three seasons of the year—spring, summer and winter—and the plenishing of these was such as would appeal to every æsthetic sense. The sweetest singers, the daintiest dancers, were enlisted to brighten the life of the palaces. But against all the spells of the enchantresses the young prince, already almost a recluse, was as hard as adamant.
Soon the time came when it was fitting that he should take a wife, and upon this the king and his councillors based their last hope of turning his mind to earthly things. We are told that the prince thought long and anxiously before he could assure himself that marriage would not engross him to such an extent as to rob him of the calm which was needful for the contemplation and the search for wisdom, to which he was minded to dedicate his life.
In the end he consented, but he stipulated that the wife chosen for him should be no ordinary woman, but such a one as might be a spiritual helpmate to him. Caste was not to weigh in the scale. She might be a Kshatriya, a Vaisiya (householder), or even a Sudra (serf). That was of no account. The mind alone, or perhaps rather what we should call the soul, must be the test. It is difficult to imagine the consternation which, if it be true, as it probably is, such a declaration on the part of a royal prince would arouse among the bigoted Brahmans of his father’s court.
There was, however, no need to fear a degrading marriage, for when the maidens of the noble Shakya clan were brought together, Yasōdhara was chosen for her beauty and her sweet nature. And greatly blessed the prince was in his choice, for she believed in him as Kadijah did in Mohammed during the humble days of his life as camel driver, and when after his long self-banishment in the wilderness, he at last entered upon his ministration as Buddha, she with her young son Rahula, followed him as a disciple. But many years were to pass—years fraught with great happenings—before that should take place.
It is my misfortune that I have no first-hand knowledge derived from the study in the originals of those books in which the Buddhist legend is enchased. I am ignorant of Sanscrit, ignorant of Pali—as ignorant, indeed, as those holy monks and priests who drone out their texts without any spark of light as to the meaning of the words which they recite by rote. But, after all, I am not attempting to write any learned treatise on the religion of Buddha, but simply to give some account as best I may of the legends which satisfy the spiritual cravings of millions of those people among whom I have spent several years of my life—legends which have inspired the art of the Far East just as our own beautiful religion has inspired that of the West, and which for old sake’s sake, I have tried to represent in my own Veluvana.
And so I have to cull from a whole garden of books written by French and English scholars what flowers I can, trying to weld together into some harmony of story their many dissonances. The chief difficulty begins with the tales of the marriage or marriages of Prince Siddartha. Not Sir Edwin Arnold alone is responsible for the tangled skein which we have to unravel. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Rhys Davids, Rockhill, Beal, and many others, have each of them their own version of the traditional events. With fairy-tales that is inevitable, but the salient facts of truth remain, and these are the same in all the books.
On the day of Prince Siddartha’s birth there had appeared a mystic tree, which was called “The Essence of Virtue.” When the prince was twenty years old this tree was blown down and dammed the water which supplied Devadeha, which was the city of King Suprabuddha. In vain did the people try to remove it; but Chandana, the prince’s charioteer, drove him out to a certain garden whence he could hear the cries of the people, and he was about to go to their help when a wounded wild goose, the Hansa of Indian myth, fell at his feet.
The prince took it up and tended it and bound up the wound. Now the goose had been shot by his kinsman Devadatta, and this was the beginning of a great enmity between them. For Devadatta sent a messenger to the prince to demand the bird of him, claiming it as the prize of his bow; but the prince would not yield it up, saying that the bird belonged to him who had saved its life rather than to him who would fain have taken it. From that time forth Devadatta hated him, and appears throughout the whole story of the Buddha’s life, and even in what are known as the “Birth Stories” of previous existences, as his bitter enemy.
Then the prince left the garden, and seizing the tree which had defied all the strength of the people, threw it into the air so that it broke in two, the halves falling on the two different sides of the stream. As, after having performed this feat, he was returning home, he saw a beautiful maiden who was looking out from the terrace in front of her father’s house. The prince stopped his chariot and a great love sprang up between the two. The damsel was Gopā, the daughter of Dandapani, a noble of the Shakya clan.
When King Suddhōdana heard what had happened, he was overjoyed, and asked the father for the maid as a bride for his son. But Dandapani scorned Siddartha as a dreamer of dreams. The Kshatriya was like the Samurai of Japan, whose sword is his soul, and full of this spirit he declared that it would bring shame upon a warrior were he to give his daughter in marriage to one who cared not a jot for those manly sports and contests which beseemed a Kshatriya, but spent his time in idle thought and vain imaginings. If he wanted Gopā, let him prove his mettle; let him fight for her and win her against all comers. So a great tourney was held, of which Gopā was to be the prize.
The prince and his two kinsmen, Ananda, who loved him and afterwards became his disciple, and Devadatta, the betrayer, with all the young braves of the clan, entered the lists. But it mattered little who opposed him; none could hold his own against Prince Siddartha. Disputing with the most learned Gurus, he was always the conqueror. In manly exercises, horsemanship, wrestling, archery, and many other sports, he defeated all rivals. He alone could bend the mystic bow of the ancient Shakyas, and when he shot an arrow into the air and it fell to earth, from that spot there sprang a jet of healing water, which to this day is shown as the Arrow Fountain. And so Gopā fell a willing prize to the bow and spear of the king’s son whom she loved. But Devadatta, beaten at all points, went his way more than ever bearing hatred and jealousy in his heart.
In spite of all the charms and gentle goodness of his wives, in spite of the arts and graces of the singing and dancing girls of his palaces, Prince Siddartha was haunted by pity for the world’s sin and sorrow, which he divined but which he had not yet seen face to face. The king had been very careful that all ugly and disquieting sights should be kept out of his way. But it was all in vain; sooner or later the revelation must needs come. The four famous drives furnished the certainty. It happened that once, when he was in his chariot with Chandana, his charioteer, on their way to the Lumbini Garden, before coming to the city gate, they met a man bowed, decrepit, toothless, white-haired, tottering feebly with the help of a stick, stumbling at every step. The prince asked Chandana what this meant, and Chandana explained to him the misery of old age. Sadly he turned back, unwilling to go further. Another time they met a leper stricken with foul disease; a third time they were met by wailings and lamentation, men carrying a bier, women weeping and beating their breasts. This was death. Yet once again they drove out, and this time they met a bikshu—a pious mendicant—with his alms-bowl. Poor, indeed, he was and ragged, but in his face was written the calm of holy happiness.
Then Prince Siddartha knew that he had found his calling. “Vanity of vanities,” said the Jewish preacher some four hundred years before Buddha’s time, “all is vanity.” It was in the spirit of King Solomon that the prince went to his father and prayed to be relieved of all the pomp and burthen of royal state and to be allowed to fly the world in quest of wisdom. But the king would not listen to him, and, on the contrary, caused the gates of Kapilavastu to be closely guarded lest by any chance his son should try to escape.
Let me insert here a wonderful coincidence. At the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries of our era there lived in the monastery of Marsaba, that wonderful laura in the wilderness of Judæa, a monk of great piety and learning, St. John of Damascus, the greatest ecclesiastical writer of his age, and so eloquent a preacher that, like another John, the famous Patriarch of Constantinople, he was known as Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, or Chrysorrhoas, gold-flowing. What, it will be asked, has this Syrian monk to do with Prince Siddartha and the four drives? Listen!
Amongst the many books which St. John of Damascus wrote, or is supposed to have written, is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. St. John said that he received it from travellers coming from India, and so firmly did he believe in its truth, that at the end of the story he appealed to the two saints for their intercession on his behalf.
Max Müller sums up the tale as follows: “A king in India, an enemy and persecutor of the Christians, has an only son. The astrologers have predicted that he will embrace the new doctrine. His father, therefore, tries by all means to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian hermit, however, gains access to this prince, and instructs him in the doctrines of the Christian religion. The young prince is not only baptized, but resolves to give up all his earthly riches; and, after having converted his own father and many of his subjects, he follows his teacher into the desert.”2
But that is not all. In the story of Josaphat, as told by St. John, we have also the tale of the drives—with this distinction: Whereas the Buddhist canon, the Lalita Vistara, represents Buddha as seeing on three successive drives, first an old, then a sick, and at last a dying man, St. John makes Josaphat meet two men on his first drive, one maimed, the other blind, and an old man who is nearly dying on the second drive. That is but a slight difference which would be accounted for by oral tradition. The coincidence is striking, and has been pointed out independently by English, French and German scholars; and, as Max Müller says, it is “as clear as daylight” that “Joannes Damascenus took the principal character of his religious novel from the Lalita Vistara.” The first European scholar to notice this was M. Laboulaye.
And now comes the strangest part of the story. So popular did St. John’s tale become, that it was translated into every European language. Barlaam and Josaphat were canonized both in the Eastern and Western Churches. In the Greek Church the 26th of August is their saints’ day, in the Western Church the 27th of November. “If all that is human and personal in the life of St. Josaphat is taken from the Lalita Vistara, what follows? It follows... that Josaphat is the Buddha of the Buddhist canon. It follows that Buddha has become a saint in the Roman Church; it follows that, though under a different name, the sage of Kapilavastu, the founder of a religion which, whatever we may think of its dogma, is in the purity of its morals nearer to Christianity than any other religion, and which counts even now, after an existence of 2,400 years, 455,000,000 of believers, has received the highest honours that the Christian Church can bestow. And whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story of his life in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life that is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one, either in the Greek or Roman Church, need be ashamed of having paid to Buddha’s memory the honour that was intended for St. Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint.”3
One night, when the palace was hushed in sleep, the prince roused his faithful charioteer Chandana, and bade him to saddle his horse Kantaka and prepare to follow him. He passed through the many halls where the women, beautiful and graceful by day, were lying asleep in careless and ugly attitudes. It was the reverse of the medal, the repulsive side of luxury, and the sight filled him with loathing. Accompanied by Chandana, he left the palace and entered the slumbering streets of the city. By a miracle they cheated the watchfulness of the guard at the gate and rode out into the open country. When they had gone some way the prince took off all his jewels and sent Chandana back with injunctions to give them to Prajapati Gautami, who had been a mother to him when her sister Maya died. Then he went on alone into the wilderness. By the way he met a hunter, with whom he exchanged his stately attire for rough countryman’s clothes, and in this fashion entered upon the six years of an asceticism such as the world has perhaps never seen. In his loneliness five men came and joined him as his disciples, sharing the hardships of his self-imposed penance.
At the end of those six long years of starvation and wretchedness and mortification of the flesh, when the Blessed One, resisting all the temptations of Mara, the evil spirit, and his three beautiful daughters, had reduced his body to a mere shadow, there came a moment when it was revealed to him that not by asceticism alone could he hope to attain his goal. Not in that way could he destroy the power and misery of sin. He determined to go back to the world, not, indeed, as a warrior-prince, a mighty conqueror, but as a poor and humble teacher, striving to bring help and virtue to his fellow-men. A young village maiden, whose name was Sujata, took pity upon his abject state, and brought him bowls of sweet milk to comfort him and restore his wasted strength. Naturally enough, legend worked upon this pretty idyll, telling how Sujata milked a thousand cows, and “with their milk fed five hundred cows, with theirs two hundred and fifty, and so on down to eight. Thus aspiring after quality and sweetness, she did what is called working the milk in.” Then she boiled the milk of the eight cows, and, to the accompaniment of many miracles, fed the Buddha with this restoring essence of milk. (Rhys Davids, “Birth Stories,” Vol. I., page 91, etc.) But his five friends, angry with him for leaving the ascetic life, turned away from him as a renegade and left him.
So the Blessed One departed out of the wilderness and came to Rajagriha and entered the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, hard by the city. There for seven days and nights he sat in meditation under the Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), until at the end of that time he became conscious that he had attained the supreme wisdom and was now Buddha. Under that tree he preached the first sermon, and the five friends who had deserted him were converted and came back. Countless numbers of people from the king of that country, Bimbisara, downwards, flocked to listen to his teaching. Among others came his own wife Yasōdhara, bearing him no grudge for having left her, and bringing her young son Rahula. By that name there hangs a tale. When it was told to the Blessed One that a son had been born to him, he answered: “There has been born to me an impediment.” This answer was repeated to King Suddhōdana, and he said, “Let the boy be called Rahula, The Impediment.”
When the king heard that his grandson and his mother had gone to follow in the wake of the Buddha, he was sorely grieved. His son had left him. Eight messengers whom he had sent begging him to return had failed in their mission, and themselves remained as disciples with the Blessed One; and now he had but this child to look to for the perpetuation of his name and of his dynasty. Blind—and no wonder, for who can read the future?—he could not see that this son of his would win for himself and for his father a name beside which all the glory and pride of their Heaven-born ancestors would be but a cloud dispelled by the first ray of morning sun. Three influences have ruled the spirits of men since the dawn of the world—Buddha, Mohammed and One other, the greatest of the three. But that other was God.
What would have been the winning of one or more provinces, what the slaughter of a few hundreds or even thousands of bowmen and spearmen, compared with the conquest of the souls of billions of fellow-creatures through the length and breadth of Asia? The old king’s name lives, but it lives as that of the father of no warrior, but of a great teacher whose doctrine has given peace and happiness to the souls of men instead of shedding the blood which clogs the footsteps of the earthly conqueror.
We, holding fast the Christian creed, may say with confidence that of all mere men who have lived since the creation of the world Buddha was the greatest. Next to him, I should count Confucius, and after Confucius, Mohammed.
Nothing in Buddha’s life seems to me greater than the victory which he achieved over himself when he became convinced of the aimlessness of the ascetic life. He had left his palaces, his wife, and all the pomp of his father’s court, in order to fly from the world and its temptations and lead a life of privation and meditation. After six years he saw the futility of such a life. His aim was to do something that should redeem the world from sin and its miseries. How could solitude, starvation and mere meditation achieve that?
So, in spite of the indignation of the five men who had followed him into the ascetic life, he determined to go back into the world and live for the good of others instead of sitting wrapped in his own thoughts. He believed that he had achieved the great good, and he realized the fact that his attitude was one of utter selfishness, barren of all result, and leading to nothing. The disappointment and the desertion of his five followers must have been bitter. But comfort came to him in time, for they grew to know that he was right and were converted as trusty disciples to his new creed. From the time that he left the shade of the Bodhi tree his ministration began. He knew that he had received the sublime gift of wisdom, and that the gift was not for himself alone, but for the purification and happiness of all mankind. It was no doubt a great struggle to give up the illusion of six long years and the dream of many more. But it was also a great triumph, the turning-point of a life that was so full of destiny.
I have already told how the first Vihara was established in the Veluvana, the pious gift of King Bimbisara, but the chief home of the Buddha was another garden or grove called the Jétavana, which a certain minister named Anatha Pindaka had bought at a great price from Jéta, the son of the King of Sravasti. Here the Buddha dwelt for more than twenty years, and there he uttered the Jātakas, or Birth Stories, which have been preserved mainly thanks to his kinsman Ananda. For it is a strange coincidence that, as in Christianity so in Buddhism, there is no written word by the Master. These Jātakas are of the nature of parables by which the Buddha was wont to illustrate the events of the present by stories of what had taken place in a former state of existence; and as the Buddha’s life was one long struggle against the treacherous designs of his enemy Devadatta, so in the Jātakas we find a constant reference to the feud as having existed in previous incarnations.
When first the Buddha began to preach, women were not admitted into the Holy Order; but there soon came a moment when they, too, yearned to listen to the teaching of the Master. A certain noble of the Shakya clan took his wife and a number of Shakya ladies to sit at the feet of the Blessed One. Among them it is to be inferred were Gopā and others of the Buddha’s wives. But Yasōdhara was not among the very first, for she still longed for her lost husband, and hoped against hope that he might yet come back to her. But when she saw that this could not be, she, too, was converted and became a saint, earning the praise of the Blessed One for her modesty and virtue.
Now Devadatta, seeing the great power of the Tathāgata (Buddha), had, against his will, for it would deprive him of all chance of sovereignty, become a Bhikshu, and carrying the beggar’s bowl, had set up a Vihara in rivalry to that of the Buddha. He, too, must needs convert disciples, both men and women. It chanced that among the latter there was a young married woman, who, though she knew it not, was with child when she joined the sisterhood. When she discovered how matters stood with her, she made no attempt at concealment, but told her superiors of her case. Upon report being made of this to Devadatta, he was wroth, and declared that as she had broken her vows she must be disgraced and banished from the community. In shame and sorrow she came to the Blessed One and laid her case before him.
He was moved with pity, but saw that it would do harm to the Holy Order and give offence to the weaker brethren and sisters if he were to admit a nun who had been rejected as unchaste by Devadatta, unless she could prove her innocence. So he ordered that an inquiry should be made, and upon the assurance of a wise woman, named Visakha, that the girl’s condition was not due to any violation of the rules of the order, but was only the natural result of her marriage before she entered the sisterhood, he accepted her, and when the nun’s child was born, he was known as Kassapa the Prince, and was brought up in royal state. The Master justified his action by the story told in the following Jātaka, which is given at great length by Rhys Davids.
Long ages ago the Bodhisatva came to life as a deer. When he was born he was of a golden colour, his eyes were like round jewels, his horns were white as silver, his mouth was red as a cluster of Kamala flowers, his hoofs were bright and hard as lacquer-work, his tail as fine as the tail of a Tibetan ox, and his body as large as a foal’s. He was known as the Banyan deer, and lived in a forest with an attendant herd of five hundred deer, over which he was king. Near him dwelt another deer, also gold-coloured, with a like herd of deer under him. He was known as the Monkey deer.
Now the King of Benares at that time was a mighty hunter, and made his people neglect their work in order to go and beat for him. So the people took counsel together, and resolved to make an enclosure, driving all the deer into it and giving them over to the king, so that their work should be no longer hindered. So the two herds were driven into the enclosure, and when the king went there, he saw the two gold-coloured deer and granted them their lives. But he, loving venison, would go sometimes to shoot a deer and at other times sent his cook to kill one. At last, when the deer, terrified and often wounded, were in despair, they went to the Bodhisatva and told him of their piteous case. So he made a bargain with the king of the other herd—the Monkey deer—that the two herds should in turn each day by lot send a deer to the place of execution, so that at the least there should be no more wounding.
One day it happened the lot fell upon a hind in the herd of the Monkey deer. But she being great with young, went to the Monkey deer and said: “Lord! I am with young. When I have brought forth my son, we will both take our turn. Order that the turn shall pass me by.” But the Monkey deer refused, saying that he could not make her lot fall upon others, and sent her away.
Seeing that there was no help in him, she appealed to the Bodhisatva, and he took pity upon her, and went himself and put his neck upon the block of execution and lay down. When the cook came and saw that the king of the deer whose life had been promised him was there, he went and told the king, who, seeing the Bodhisatva, said: “My friend, the king of the deer! Did I not grant you your life? Why are you here?” The Bodhisatva answered: “O great king! A hind with young came and told me that the lot had fallen upon her. How could I transfer her miserable lot to another? So I, giving my life for hers, am lying here. Have no suspicion, O mighty king!” Then was the king moved to great compassion, and saying that never, even among men, had he seen so great pity, gave their lives both to him and to the hind. But more than that, after listening to the Bodhisatva, he decreed that no beasts or birds or fish should thenceforth be killed.
After that, the deer, sure of their lives, began to lay waste and eat the crops of the people, so they complained to the king, who bade them begone, for he might give up his kingdom, but not his oath. Then the Banyan deer called together the herds and forbade them to eat the crops; and he sent a message to the husbandmen, telling them that they need put up no fences, but that it would be enough if they tied leaves round the edge of the fields as a sign. But he continued to instruct the deer thus throughout his life, and passed away with his herd according to their deeds. The king also hearkened to the words of the Bodhisatva, and then in due time passed away according to his deeds.
When the Master had finished this story of the Banyan deer he explained its meaning to the assembled disciples.
“He who was then the Monkey deer was Devadatta, his herd was Devadatta’s following, the hind was the Nun, her son was Kassapa the Prince, the King was Ananda, but the royal Banyan deer was myself.” (Rhys Davids, “Birth Stories,” Vol. I., pages 201-210.)
Purged of its wild extravagances, the Lalita Vistara, the story told by Ananda, gives much insight into the purity and sweet reasonableness of the Blessed One’s teaching. Shortly before descending upon earth to be born of Queen Maya, he is seated in the Tsushita (Heaven) surrounded by gods and saints, to whom he delivers this last parting message (I am translating from the version of Foucaux, quoted by Barthélemy St. Hilaire):
“Be careful to avoid all immodesty. All the divine and pure pleasures are the fruit of good work. Take heed, then, of your deeds. If you have not laid up for yourselves these previous virtues, you are hurrying to that goal where, far from happiness, we experience misery and suffer every ill. Desire is neither lasting nor consistent; it is even as a dream, a mirage, the lightning, the foam of the sea. Observe the practice of the Law; the man who faithfully observes these holy practices meets with no evil. Loving tradition, morality and charity, be constant in patience and purity. Act in a spirit of mutual loving-kindness, in a spirit of helpfulness. Remember the Buddha, the Law and the congregation of the faithful. All that you see in me of supernatural power, of science, and of strength is produced by the agency of virtue, which is its cause, and comes from tradition, from morality and from modesty. Do you, too, practise this perfect restraint. It is not by phrases, nor by words, nor by crying that we can attain the doctrine of virtue. Acquire it by deeds; act according to your professions; never cease in making efforts. Not every one who acts is rewarded, but whoso does not act obtains nothing. Beware of pride, of haughtiness, and of arrogance; always gentle, and never straying from the straight path, be diligent in following the road which leads to Nirvana. Bestir yourselves in the search after the Road of Salvation, and with the lamp of wisdom dispel utterly the darkness of ignorance. Rid yourselves of the net of sin which is accompanied by repentance. But what skills it to say more? The Law is full of reason and of purity. When I shall have obtained the supreme intelligence, when the rain of the Law which leads to immortality shall fall, then come back to listen anew to the Law which I shall teach you.”
Then were the Gods consumed by sorrow at the loss of the Blessed One; but he comforted them by leaving in his place the Bodhisatva Maitriya, whom he consecrated by giving him his tiara and his diadem. Maitriya, then, will become Buddha (vide supra), when the corrupted world shall have lost all memory of the teaching of Shakya Muni.
The Buddha’s life upon earth was prolonged far beyond the span which is allotted to most men. He was some thirty years old when he first began to preach, and his ministration lasted fifty-three years. Surely it is not irreverent to apply to him the words of the Hebrew Psalmist: “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” Render “Peace” by “Nirvana,” no bad translation, indeed, and you have the Buddha. When at the last he felt that the dark mystery of death was overshadowing him, and that the end was at hand, he bade Ananda go and tell the Mallas of Kusinārā that their master would pass away at midnight, and invited them to come to him. There was at that time in Kusinārā an old and decrepit man a hundred and twenty years of age, upon whom the people looked as a saint. His name was Subhadra. This venerable man, believing in the greatness of the Blessed One, begged of him the boon of passing away before him; and, this being granted, Subhadra gave up the ghost. But when the assembled Bhikshus, being astonished at this favour, inquired the reason, the Blessed One told two last Birth Stories.
“Bhikshus, in days gone by there lived in a valley a deer, the master of a thousand deer; he was prudent, wide-awake and of quick perception. One day a hunter espied him and told the king. So the king assembled his army and surrounded all the deer and their leader. Then the leader thought: ‘If I do not protect these deer they will all be destroyed.’ So looking about the place in which they were penned, he perceived a torrent flowing through the valley; but the stream was so swift that the deer feared lest it should carry them away. But the leader jumped into the water, and finding foothold in the middle, cried to the herd: ‘Come, jump from the bank on to my back and thence to the other bank; it is the only means of saving your lives; if you do not do this you will surely die!’ The herd of deer obeyed, and though their hoofs striking his back cut the skin and tore the flesh, he never flinched. When as it seemed all the deer had crossed the water, he looked back, and saw a calf that had been left behind and could not cross over. Then, torn and bruised and racked with pain, he took the calf on his back, and crossed the stream with it. All the herd had now passed over, but the great stag knew that death was near, and he cried: ‘May what I have done to preserve the joy of life to these deer and this calf make me cast off sin, and obtain boundless and perfect light; may I become a Buddha, cross over the sea of regeneration to perfection and salvation, and pass beyond all sorrow.’...
“What think ye, Bhikshus? I am he who was then the leader of the herd. The deer are now the five hundred Mallas and the fawn is Subhadra.” (Adapted from Rockhill’s “Life of Buddha,” page 137 et seq.)
One more Jātaka he uttered, and that was the last. He warned his weeping disciples not to mourn for him, or to look upon him as lost, for inasmuch as they had his law and his doctrine, he would still be with them. He spoke to them of the four places where pious men would rear monuments in his honour: (1) The Lumbini Garden, where he was born; (2) the place under the Sacred Fig-tree, where he became Buddha; (3) the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, from where the first sermon was preached; (4) the place where he died at Kusinārā.
At the last the Blessed One, uncovering his body, said to the Bhikshus: “Brethren, look well at the Tathāgata’s body, for it is as hard to find a Tathāgata as to see a flower on a fig-tree. Bhikshus! never forget it: decay is inherent to all things!” These were the last words of the Tathāgata. And so in the fullness of time, calm and holy, he entered Nirvana, that state in which all the desires, all the cares and all the sorrows of life have ceased to be. Is not that the ideal of “Peace, perfect peace?”
There is a Japanese proverb which says: “Meeting is the beginning of parting.” Pregnant, indeed, are those six words, for in them are summed up all the sorrows and the one inevitable certainty of life. When the parting with those who are dear to us takes place, how we treasure some trifle which brings to life recollections of the sweet communion of the past! And so it is with those relics of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. When Assheton Smith, the famous sportsman, was told that he must take his ailing wife to the South of France, he, being a wealthy man, answered: “That I cannot do, but I can and will bring the South of France to her.” And so there arose that marvellous conservatory, a glass palace, which I remember well, when nearly sixty years ago I used to go and stay with Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, who rented the place. In our humble way we bring home to ourselves the lands endeared to us by the careless gaiety of former days, scenes which are peopled by the ghosts of old friends whom we conjure up, living once more in the sunshine of happy youth. Is not that the chief sanity of the collector’s madness?