The women were silent for a moment, then one of them asked, “Have you yourself ever been a woman, Tathagata?”
“I have indeed, sister, and thank you for asking. Once, nuns, in a previous lifetime, I was a beautiful, intelligent and charming queen named Rubyavarti. Sadly, there was a famine in my country. People were slowly starving to death, some of them were literally preparing to eat their own children. I knew I had to do something to help people and so, as a woman, I did the one thing that no man could possibly do: I fed others with my body.”
“You breast-fed your people, Tathagata?”
“In a manner of speaking. I cut my breasts off and people ate them.” (RUJAT)
“ … You cut your breasts off?”
“People were extremely impressed with my decision to do so. ‘Rubyavarti’s wise choice contrasts with her sex!’ they cried in joy. Afterwards, of course, my husband wished for my beautiful breasts to grow back and they magically did, but then do you know what happened, nuns?”
“You cut your breasts off again to feed more people, Tathagata?”
“That is an excellent guess, nun, but no. What actually happened is that the king of the gods came to me and asked what I wished for most of all and I told him, ‘My one and only wish is to be a man.’ He then granted my wish and I became a man. So you see, nuns, by cutting off my breasts I escaped the horrible fate of being a woman. Isn’t that an excellent story?”
The women stared at me in silence.
As we were heading back to our chambers, Ananda turned to me: “Master?”
“What is it, Ananda?”
“Why would a butcher do such a thing?”
“ … What?”
“Why would a butcher cut all the meat off a cow and then stitch it back together as an empty husk?”
“Oh be quiet, Ananda.”
“Yes, master, I’m so sorry, master.”
I did have one moderately successful encounter with a woman during this stretch of time. It occurred when I flew up to heaven and visited my dead mother there. (MV 10:1)
“Siddhartha?” Mother whispered in amazement when she first saw me. She rushed to embrace me but I pushed her away. “I am not here to hug you, Mother. I am here to teach you the truth regarding Absolute Reality.”
“But my son—”
“We will begin with the Four Noble Truths, Mother.”
“But Siddhartha—”
“Do you want to hear about my profound insights or not?”
“Yes … yes, of course I do, my son,” she whispered. I lectured my mother for the next hundred hours. She mainly sat silently and listened to me, but at one point she did interject. “But my son,” she murmured, “life is not all pain, is it? Here you are before me, for instance, my beloved Siddhartha, and there is no pain in that.” Once again, she tried to embrace me; once again, I rebuffed her. “Soon I will leave you again, Mother, and you will never see me again because soon I will be extinct, so think of the pain of that, eh?” I replied. That shut her up.
After I finished describing Absolute Truth to my mother, I rose and started to leave. She touched my arm. “Please, Siddhartha, before you go, tell me, did you marry? Did you become a father? Am I a grandmother, my son?”
I hesitated, sighed. “I married and had a son, Mother.”
“What is his name?”
“Rahula.”
“Rahu—? But Siddhartha, that means ‘shackle.’”
“Exactly, because that’s what Rahula was to me, Mother, a shackle, as was my wife, Yasodhara. I left them both the day Rahula was born because that was when I first understood that attachments were nothing but traps and that I was not going to be trapped and please stop crying Mother or I will leave immediately.”
When she didn’t stop crying I left and as I flew back down to earth, I remember thinking to myself, “Why did I even bother with that?”
20
Yasodhara’s return to my life brought a second problem with it: Rahula. He was eleven years old now, quite handsome like me, but somewhat sour-looking, I thought. He was around a great deal and I often had no idea what to say to him. One night as he was washing my feet, however, I had an idea. “Do you see the water in your dipper, Rahula?” (MJ 61)
“Yes, Father.”
“Unless you are careful to avoid lies, you will be no better than that dipper,” I said, then roughly knocked the water out of the dipper onto the floor. “Did you see what I just did, Rahula?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Unless you are careful to avoid lies, whatever is good in you will be lost in that same exact way.” Now I grabbed the dipper out of his hand and turned it upside down. “Do you see what I am doing now, Rahula?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Unless you are careful to avoid lies, you will become nothing but an empty vessel, like this dipper.” As Rahula stared back at me, I could see confusion in his eyes; “But Father, I’m not lying,” he was clearly thinking. Which was true, he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t even saying anything, how could he have been lying? A moment later, I tried a different approach. “Imagine an elephant, eh, Rahula? Imagine that this elephant is large, powerful and battle-hardened. Until this elephant has devoted his life to the king, however, Rahula, I tell you that he is not fully trained. Similarly, unless you avoid telling lies, you are not fully trained.” (RAH)
Again, Rahula stared back at me in obvious confusion. I found myself shifting uncomfortably. “The point I am trying to make here is that I am like a lion, Rahula, the king of all beasts. People are scared of me is what I am getting at, they tremble before me. ‘But we thought we were permanent, Tathagata,’ they whine to me. ‘Well, guess what, fools, you’re not permanent, you’re impermanent, just like everything else.’ That makes them shit, just like elephants do in my presence.
