As I started to turn away: “You will not survive out there, Siddhartha, you are a boy.”
“I am twenty-nine years old, Father!”
“You are soft, my son. You are not built to endure hardship!”
“I am far tougher than you realize, Father.”
“I’m sorry, Siddhartha, but I cannot allow you to leave.”
“Father—”
He nodded to his guards. “Take him back to his chambers.”
I shook my head in disbelief as they grabbed my arms. “It is not right to stop someone who wishes to escape from a house on fire, Father.” (ASV 5:37)
“But this house is not on fire, Siddhartha.”
“It is on fire, Father—ALL houses are on fire, LIFE ITSELF is on fire—and I am telling you that I must find a way to extinguish that fire!”
“This moment will pass, my son, you will see. Before long you will thank me for this.”
An hour later, I sat on my bed glaring at my two guards and trying to figure out what to do next. Suddenly I realized something incredible: I could turn invisible! (IDD) I quickly did so and slipped out the door. I stopped, passing the large room where my dancing girls stayed. Standing in the doorway, I gazed at their sleeping forms. What I saw was, in a word, disgusting. Some of the women had saliva running out of the corners of their mouths; others were weirdly covered with saliva, as if they had been licking themselves. A few women laid there with wide, gaping mouths, while others were snoring or gnashing their teeth. One woman laid there half-naked, her skirt hitched up, her legs spread. “That is monstrous,” I remember thinking to myself as I looked at her. “All you so-called beauties are not so beautiful now, are you?” I muttered to myself. “You are nauseating, in fact. And before long, you will be even more nauseating because before long you will be dead, you will be stinking, rotting corpses!” (NK; ASV 5:59–63)
“Everything is impermanent,” I remember whispering to myself at that moment. “There is only one permanent thing in life and that is pain.” The point of existence, I suddenly grasped, was escaping that pain. But how to do it?
That is what I now had to figure out.
5
Oh yes, there was one other thing that happened that week: My son Rahula was born. I named him “Rahula” because it means “shackle” and from the moment he was born, I knew that’s what Rahula was going to be to me, a shackle. (DP 345–46) (Not that it matters, but Rahula’s birth was grotesque. When I was born, there had been no blood at all, I was born pristine, like a perfect little gem. Rahula’s birth, I regret to say, was nothing like that, it was bloody, messy and hideous.)
Yasodhara’s door was open as I crept past the chamber where she dozed with our newborn baby asleep on her chest. The lamps in her room were burning low. There was the smell of scented oil and flowers were strewn across her bed. I slipped into the room, stared down at Rahula and shook my head sadly. This child’s life, like all lives, would be filled with nothing but pain and I was responsible for it. There was only one thing for me to do and I knew it: “I am leaving,” I whispered to the baby. “You are a shackle that binds me but now I am cutting you off.” (SV)
Yasodhara woke up and looked at me. “Siddhartha?” she whispered. “Why do you look so strange, husband?”
“I am going forth into the world, Yasodhara.”
She went up one elbow, rubbed her eyes. “‘Going forth,’ what does that mean?”
“I am going to live in the forest as an ascetic.”
“But … I don’t understand. When are you doing this?”
“Now. Tonight.”
“And … when are you returning?”
“Never.”
Her eyes widened. “But Siddhartha … what about Rahula, what about our son?”
“It is unfortunate that Rahula exists, Yasodhara. It would be far better if he didn’t.”
“Siddhartha, don’t say that.”
“But I will not be shackled by him or anyone else, Yasodhara. I henceforth declare myself free of all attachments, for it is only when one’s attachments are extinguished that one’s delusions can be extinguished.” (RH)
“Siddhartha, I love you.”
“And I love all living things.”
“Does that not include me?”
“It does, yes, but no more than that insect on the wall over there.”
“How can you be so cruel, husband?”
“I have a destiny to meet, Yasodhara. It would be cruel of me not to do so.” I started to rise. “I am leaving now.”
Yasodhara grabbed my arm, desperate. “Husband, please. Stay with us. Think of your son, husband—your SON.” (ASV 8:68)
“Rahula will die, Yasodhara, as will you, as will I. All of us will die.”
“But while we are here, can we not live, husband?”
“What you are describing would be akin to pouring perfume onto a corpse.”
“Oh god.”
“Farewell, Yasodhara.”
With that, I turned and walked out of her chamber. It was the proudest moment of my life up to that point.
“Chandaka,” I whispered, five minutes later.
“ … My lord?” Chandaka responded thickly, half-turning to me in his bed.
“Wake up, we are leaving immediately. Get Kamthaka ready.”
“But my lord—”
“I said immediately, Chandaka. It is time for me to attain immortality.” (ASV 5:68)
“Yes, my lord.”
Kamthaka looked marvelous that night, decked out as he was all in gold, with little tinkly bronze bells all over him. Kamthaka was a very tall horse, chalk-white and powerfully built. When I say he was tall, by the way, I mean it; Kamthaka was twenty-five feet tall, an unusually massive horse and consequently very heavy. (ASV 5:3; NK) How would father’s guards not hear his mighty hoofbeats, especially because, as I said, he was covered with little tinkly bronze bells? That wasn’t going to be particularly helpful, I now realized. Still, I left them on him because they looked absolutely charming.
I mounted Kamthaka and stroked his mighty head, then leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “Your speed and energy
