White Elephant-Me quickly informed my mother that she was pregnant. “You have conceived a pure and powerful being,” I told her from within her womb. (The moment I was conceived, by the way, the following things occurred: Hunchbacks stood upright, the fires in hell briefly went out and basically everyone in the world was in an excellent mood. (NK) Similarly, when I was born ten months later, the mute sang and the lame danced. How long they continued to do so after my birth, I cannot say. They might’ve sang and danced only for a few moments and then reverted to their lameness and dumbness.) (KDS)
When I took up residence in my mother’s womb, four gods joined me in order to make sure that no one should harm me. (MJ 123) Some people later claimed that billions of other Buddhas lived in my mother’s womb with me, that my mother was somehow the mother of all Buddhas, past, present and future. This is absolutely untrue. My mother’s womb was not, as some people later said, “as vast as the heavens” nor was it “as huge as outer space.” People didn’t walk around in my mother’s womb, taking “steps as big as star systems.” There were no “bejewelled palaces” in Mother’s womb and I definitely wasn’t sitting in one of them being worshipped by 80,000 “Snake Kings,” led by one particular reptile named “Sagara!” (GV 44) None of that is true.
As I was born, the four gods caught me in a little net. I exited my mother’s side because, needless to say, I was not going to be corrupted by the loathsome impurities of her birth canal. (ASV 1:25–32) I emerged pure, clean and shiny, like a precious little gem, which is exactly what I was. (ACC 3:118–24) I actually walked out of mother’s side like a little man striding down a staircase, arms swinging free and easy, until I fell into the gods’ net. I didn’t need to be bathed after my birth because, as I just mentioned, I was born completely free of all “vaginal impurities.” Nevertheless, as an extra precaution apparently, two jets of water sprayed down on me from the heavens, one of them cool, the other warm. After that (for the first, but definitely not the last time) flowers were dumped on me. (NK; ASV 1:29)
As soon as my shower was over, I jumped out of the gods’ net, stood up and looked around. “No one is superior to you,” the gods cried to me. “How could they be?” I gazed around in every direction and, seeing no one equal to me, took several large steps forward. (Brahma, the main god present, hurried alongside me holding a little white parasol over my head to shield me from the sun, which was considerate of him.) I suddenly stopped, pointed one hand at the ground and the other at the sky and proclaimed at the top of my little lungs, “I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD!” (NK; ACC 3:118–24)
After that, I looked directly at my mother and announced, “This will be my final birth. After this lifetime I will achieve extinction.” (ASV 1:34) At that point, my mother passed out. A few days later, she died. This was a sad turn of events, of course, but also, to be honest, necessary. My mother’s womb, you see, was like a little shrine to me. After I was born, no other being could inhabit it without contaminating it. Consequently, Mother had to die. Luckily for me, Mother’s sister, my Aunt Prajapati, stepped in and raised me, acting as a surrogate mother. I was not deprived in any way. (NK; MHP)
I was given the name “Siddhartha,” which means “Every Wish Fulfilled,” because that, in fact, was to be my destiny. I was born to dispel ignorance, help mankind move beyond pain and suffering and end the misery of all living things in the universe. I was born, that is, to be the most profound conqueror the world has ever known, the conqueror of anguish.
Thus my life began.
2
Not long after my mother died, my father, King Suddhodana, invited a group of seers to his palace to predict my future. It was obvious to everyone that I was a special child; I had, after all, emerged from my mother’s side, dashed around and announced that I was the King of the World. My “specialness” was not in question. The only question was: What kind of king would I be, worldly or spiritual?
The seers informed my father that if I ever left his palace and observed what the outside world was like, I would become a spiritual ruler. If, on the other hand, I remained within the palace’s cloistered walls, I would become a worldly ruler. Father decided to keep me in the palace, so there I grew up in pampered luxury, surrounded by every kind of wealth and beauty imaginable, never exposed to ugliness of any kind. (NK) Father indulged my every whim. I had a charming little golden carriage which was pulled by four deer, for instance. (ASV 2:22–29) My bedroom was decorated like a heavenly chariot.
With regard to my physical perfection, well, where to even begin? My voice had sixty-four different pitches, all of them extremely pleasing to the ear; I mainly sounded like a bird (a sparrow), which is a splendid thing for a human boy to sound like. I could touch my ear-holes with my tongue; I could
