Sometimes I slept on thorns; other times I slept on the sharpest, pointiest rocks I could find. One time, I found a dead body and used its skull as my pillow. One morning I remember waking up feeling what I thought was warm rainwater sprinkling down on me, but when I opened my eyes it turned out to be some local boys urinating on my head. Afterwards the largest and most aggressive boy jammed two sticks in my ears and dangled me around like a puppet. (MJ 12) (I probably weighed all of seventy pounds by this time.) It was deeply humiliating. I remember pressing lightly on my stomach one day and thinking, “I can feel my spine. You’re not supposed to be able to feel your spine when you touch your stomach.” I remember stroking my hair not long after that and it instantly starting to fall out in dull, ragged clumps in my hand.
Years passed this way. I was thirty-three … then thirty-four … then thirty-five years old. My health began to falter. My skin dried up; I started to look like a piece of dried fruit. “There must be a better way of finding the truth,” I remember thinking to myself on one particularly uncomfortable day. “Starving myself cannot possibly be the path to enlightenment. I am literally destroying myself here and I don’t understand anything more about how to escape suffering than I did when I started.” I felt like I’d been beating my head against a wall for a very long time by this point.
One day I became so frail and exhausted that I fell face forward into a pile of my own excrement. (MH 1:240–49) I remember rising wobbily from my squat and looking down at the small brown pile, and at that point I must have blacked out because my next memory is waking up with my face half-buried in my own feces. As I lay there, semi-conscious, I heard the gods whispering worriedly about me. “He’s dead,” one of them said. “No no, he’s only resting,” replied another. (Why he thought I would rest facedown in a pile of my own shit, I do not know. One of these gods even went to my father and told him I was dead. “I don’t believe you,” Father instantly replied and not long afterwards the god had to return and admit, “Actually, he’s fine.”) (NK) Then I heard a third voice, thin and girlish, right next to me. “Are you alright, sir?” the voice asked.
I turned and looked up. “Sojata” (for that was the child’s name) gazed down at me, a concerned look on her sweet young face. “I fell face-forward into my own feces, child,” I whispered.
“You need food, sir, you are quite thin. Would you like some rice porridge?” I stared at the child, uncomprehending. “You must eat, sir,” she repeated.
My mind was feverish, disoriented. Rice porridge? How could I possibly eat that? I was an ascetic, devoted to suffering and self-abnegation. How could I indulge myself with milk and honey-infused porridge?
Sojata gently helped me to sit up and tenderly wiped the feces off my face with a rag. She removed a small wooden bowl from her basket and, kneeling next to me, dipped a spoon into the bowl and lifted the rice porridge to my mouth. “I cannot, child,” I whispered. “I have vowed to suffer.”
“Eat, sir,” the child said, tenderly touching the spoon to my lips.
“I will not open my mouth,” I thought to myself. “I will not, I will not, I will—” I opened my mouth and ate the porridge. It was warm, sweet, soft—almost indescribably delicious. I swallowed and opened my mouth again. Sojata refilled the spoon and fed me. Then she did it again—and again—and again.
Five minutes later the small wooden bowl was empty and Sojata, with a sweet, shy smile, turned and headed home. (MH 1:240–49)
“That little girl just saved my life,” I thought to myself as I watched her depart. “Someday I must find a way to repay not only her but her entire sex.” (I never did so because before long I realized that women were all dangerous crocodiles who should be avoided as much as humanly possible, but at that moment I did think it.)
After eating the rice porridge, I quickly felt more clear-headed. “What I’ve been doing has been madness,” I remember thinking. “Humans cannot live on rocks or their own feces—humans are meant to eat normally, like animals do. If you saw a tiger that only ate rocks or its own feces, you would think to yourself, ‘That is an insane tiger.’” Extreme asceticism was not the path to enlightenment, I now understood. I began to eat normally again and before long I didn’t look like a fleshtone-painted skeleton anymore.
When I rejoined my five ascetic friends, they were instantly appalled at the change that had come over me. “What have you done, Gotama?” Kondanna asked in a hushed, disbelieving voice as I approached them.
I told him the truth. “To start with, Kondanna, I ate some rice porridge.”
“Rice porridge,” Kondanna sputtered, as if these two words constituted the worst obscenity imaginable. The other ascetics shook their heads in horror.
“I feel better now that I am eating normally, friends,” I continued. “My mind is much clearer.”
“You are no longer an ascetic, Gotama,” Kondanna announced firmly. “You have broken the ascetic vow and therefore we want nothing more to do with you.”
“Kondanna, listen to me, there is another way, a better way, a middle way.”
But Kondanna wouldn’t listen. With a small dismissive wave of his hand, he and the others turned and hurried away from me. (At least as much as men who weigh sixty-five pounds can be said to “hurry,” that is. They “speed-hobbled” away from me is perhaps a more accurate description.) After they were all gone I stood for a moment in silence. “What next?” I
