Creation (42 page)

“Bimbisara told me that he hoped to become a monk in a year’s time.”

“Let us pray that he will be allowed to.”

For a time we watched the rain. “How curious,” I said finally, “that Ajatashatru should have wanted me to warn Pasenadi against
his
son.”

“But how shrewd! While we look for a plot in Shravasti, he executes one in Rajagriha.”

“But why go to the trouble of misleading me?”

“To put you off the scent. After all, sooner or later, he must deal with Persia.” Prince Jeta gave me an odd look. “One day all of us will have to deal with Persia. We’ve known that ever since your king seized one of our richest countries.”

“Not seized, Prince Jeta. The rulers of the Indus Valley asked the Great King to include them in his empire.” I sounded rather like an eighty-year-old court eunuch from the time of Cyrus.

“Forgive me. I was tactless.” Prince Jeta smiled. “Anyway, Ajatashatru wants to make as much trouble for Koshala as he can. What cannot be seized from without must be acquired through division from within. So he tries to turn son against father.”

“Has he?”

“He doesn’t need to. Pasenadi wants to be both a king and an arhat. That’s not possible. So Virudhaka is not ... happy. And who can blame him?”

Several days later, Caraka presented me with a personal message from Ajatashatru; it was written on cowhide with red ink, a suitable color. Together we deciphered the difficult lettering. The gist was: “You are as close to our heart as always. You are as beloved in our eyes as if you were our own son. You will then mourn, as do I, the death of my father, the universal monarch Bimbisara. He was in the seventy-eighth year of his life and in the fifty-first year of his glorious reign. The court will be in mourning until the end of the rainy season, when we shall expect our beloved son, Cyrus Spitama, to attend us at our coronation.”

Needless to say, there was no reference to how Bimbisara died. Some days later we learned that Ajatashatru had personally strangled his father with that silken cord which Indian protocol requires in the case of a deposed sovereign.

I passed a number of uneasy weeks in the steaming, rank gardens of Pasenadi’s palace. Neither king nor prince sent for me. There was no message of any kind from Susa. There was even silence from the caravan at Taxila. My isolation was broken, finally, by the arrival of Prince Jeta and the monk Sariputra. They appeared, unannounced, on the verandah. I helped them wring out their clothes.

“I happened to see Sariputra in the garden,” said Prince Jeta, “and I told him how much you would like to talk to him.” I excused the lie. I was desperate for company, even that of a Buddhist arhat with black gums.

While Caraka sent for wine, Sariputra sat on the floor and Prince Jeta sat on a cushion. I perched on a stool.

The old man bestowed on me what I took to be a smile. “My dear—” he began. Then stopped.

“Perhaps you would like to question him.” Prince Jeta looked at me expectantly.

“Or, perhaps,” I said perversely, recalling my own spiritual mission, “he would like to question
me
.”

“The Buddha has been known to ask questions.” Prince Jeta was tactful. “As has Sariputra.”

“Yes.” There was something in the old man’s unremitting benignity that reminded me of a well-fed baby; on the other hand, the sharp eyes were as cold and as unblinking as a serpent’s. “Do you like games, my child?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

“Eternal games, yes!” Sariputra laughed, alone.

“Why,” I asked, “have you no interest at all in the Wise Lord and in his prophet Zoroaster?”

“
All
things are interesting, my child. And since it is plainly interesting for you to tell me about your Wise Lord, you must. This very minute! Truth cannot wait, they say. I can’t think why. Everything else does. But tell me.”

I told him.

When I had finished, Sariputra said to Prince Jeta, “This Wise Lord sounds exactly like Brahma trying to pass himself off as a Persian. Oh, those gods! They change their names from country to country and think that we won’t notice. But we always do! They can’t fool us, can they? Or escape us. But that Brahma! He is by far the most ambitious. He thinks
he
’
s
the creator. Imagine! Oh, you should have heard him when he came to the Buddha that first time. No, not the first time, the second time. The first time was when he begged the Buddha to set the wheel of the doctrine in motion. Oh, Brahma was very insistent, very persuasive. Because he knows that he’ll have to be reborn as a human being before he can obtain nirvana, and when he’s reborn the only way that he’ll be able to achieve nirvana is through the Buddha. He’s not really a fool, you know. He just sounds like one. Anyway, the Buddha allowed himself to be persuaded since Brahma is the best of the gods, which is not saying very much, is it? So the Buddha agreed—that was after their first visit—to set the wheel in motion, which was a great sacrifice for the Buddha, since he himself had already achieved nirvana and is no longer here or there or anywhere, unlike poor Brahma.

“Then Brahma came to him a second time. At Rajagriha it was. We must ask Ananda exactly when and where, he remembers everything, no matter how trivial. This was all before my time. So Brahma told the Buddha, ‘I am Brahma. I am the great Brahma, the king of the gods. I am uncreated. I have created the world. I am the sovereign of the world. I can create, alter and give birth. I am the father of all things.’ Now, we all know that this is perfect nonsense. But the Buddha is always polite. He is also sublime. ‘If you exist, Brahma,’ he said most gently, ‘you were created. If you were created, you will evolve. If you evolve, your aim must be release from the fire and the flux of creation. Therefore, you must become what I already am. You must take the last step on the eightfold path. You must cease to evolve and to be.’ ”

“What did Brahma say to that?” Never before or since have I heard such blasphemy.

“Oh, he was upset. Wouldn’t you be? I mean, there he is, just like your Wise Lord—ever so full of himself and ever so powerful, or so he thinks. Yet if he is all-powerful, then he is quite capable of
not
being, a state that he craves but cannot obtain, which is why he begged the Buddha to set the wheel of the doctrine in motion.”

“You are absolutely certain that this was indeed the Wise—I mean Brahma who spoke to the Buddha?”

“Of course I’m not certain! This is all a dream, my dear, and in dreams some things make less sense than others. I mean, it all depends on where you are standing when you sleep, doesn’t it?”

I confess that I had the sense that I, too, was either dreaming or going mad. “Zoroaster actually heard the voice of the Wise Lord—” I began.

“—just as Brahma heard the answers of the Buddha.” Sariputra nodded encouragingly, as if a dull student had succeeded in adding one to one.

“Out of reverence, I am obliged to say that Zoroaster heard the answers of the Wise Lord, and not the other way around.”

“I say it the other way around, out of reverence for the Buddha. There is only one Buddha at any given moment.”

“There is only one Wise Lord.”

“Except when he sneaks off to India and tries to pass himself off as Brahma. Anyway, he’s not the only god! He’s just the most conceited.”

As best I could, I maintained my rigid courtier’s mask. “You deny that the Wise Lord is the sole creator of all things?”

“Of course, my dear. And so do you.” Then the wicked old man repeated back to me what I had chanted for him from the holiest of our texts: “ ‘Ahura Mazdah, before the act of creation, was not the Wise Lord. After the act of creation, he became the Wise Lord, eager for increase, wise, free from adversity, manifest—’ I’ve forgotten the rest of his attributes that you so kindly recited for us just now. My memory is not what it was.”

I continued grimly, “ ‘—ever ordering aright, bounteous, all-perceiving.’ ”

“Yes, yes. ‘And by his clear vision Ahura Mazdah saw that the destructive spirit would never cease from aggression ...’ And so he goes and makes a trap for the destructive spirit when he invents, out of infinite time, time of the long dominion. Oh, my dear, this is all so elaborate! If he is the all-powerful creator, why did he invent the destructive spirit to begin with? What is the point? But once it was invented, why must he go to the trouble of battling his own invention? This was really not very wise of him, was it? And then to insist that the human race, another of his inventions, must constantly do battle with his very first creation ... Well, that is definitely not kind.”

“The fact of evil is not kind, Sariputra. But as good exists, so does evil, and the battle between the two must continue until good triumphs at the end of time of the long dominion.”

“Since the good will win, anyway, why bother with the battle?”

“Because it is the will of the Wise Lord. Out of himself, he created all human souls at once. And these eternal spirits exist with him until they are obliged to take human form. Then they make a choice. They follow either the Truth or the Lie. If they follow the Truth, they will earn merit. If the Lie ...”

“Yes, dear child. Slow as my brain is, I have grasped the concept. But why make everyone suffer so?”

“How else is evil to be overthrown?”

“By removing first world, then self. Or if you like—and can—first self, then world.”

“The world is. The self is. Evil is. Good is. Contest is—inevitable, and ordained.”

“Then it is better
not
to be at all, isn’t it? And that can be achieved by following the eightfold way.”

The old man was even more maddening than the worst of our local sophists. “All things struggle—” I began.

“—except those that don’t,” he ended. “But your Wise Lord, just like our own proud, if rather tricky Brahma, is as in the dark as the rest of his creations. He has no idea where he is going any more than he knows where he came from.”

“The Wise Lord knows that he will trap and destroy the evil Ahriman in time of the long dominion. When he does, all souls will be saved.”

“So he
says
.
But he, too, evolves. There was a time when he was not. Then was. Now is. But
will
he be?”

“Before the Wise Lord was the Wise Lord.”

“And before that? He says, if you quote him correctly, ‘before the act of creation, I was not lord.’ If he was not, who was? And where did this creator come from?”

“Time—”

“Ah, time! But where does time come from?”

“Time was. Is. Will be.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I talk, dear child, of first things because they interest you. They do not interest us. We have no curiosity about the origin of things, about creation. We have no way of knowing what was first, or if there is such a thing as a first thing in time or space, or outside time or space. It is all the same. Gods, men, ghosts, animals, fish, trees ... these are all manifestations of a creation in which pain is a constant because all is in flux and nothing remains the same. Is that not true?”

“There is a single source—” I began.

But Sariputra was no longer listening to me. “The first thing I do with our novitiates is to take them to cemeteries where I show them decomposing bodies. We study the new life that springs from the dead. We watch the maggots lay their eggs in the putrefying flesh. Then the eggs hatch and a new generation of maggots eats its fill until in time—of a very very short dominion, my dear—there is nothing but bone left and the poor maggots starve and die. But out of their dust come plants, insects, invisible kernels of life, and the chain goes on and on and on—and who would not want to break that painful chain if he could?”

“The chain breaks when the Wise Lord prevails and all is light.”

“I must say that sounds very like Brahma. But as he himself admits—that is, when he’s not telling lies—he has no more idea just how things will end than he knows how he himself started. He is in mid-river, like the rest of us. Naturally, his river is greater than ours, but the principle of any river is the same. As you yourself sang so beautifully ... no, no,
really
beautifully, ‘Time is mightier than both creations—the creation of the Wise Lord and that of the destructive spirit.’ With
us
,
child, time is only a part of the dream from which you must awaken if you are to be enlightened.”

“And extinguished?”

“You have learned the lesson, Cyrus Spitama!” The wicked creature applauded me.

Although not one of Sariputra’s arguments could be intelligently defended, I remembered Darius’ command. I was to learn as well as to teach or, to put it another way, one cannot teach without first knowing just what it is that others believe to be true. In those days I never doubted my mission, which was to bring all men to the Truth. But at the same time I was deeply curious about the origin—if any—of creation; and, somewhat embarrassingly, Sariputra had drawn attention to a curious gap in Zoroaster’s perception of divinity. Yes, Democritus, you, too, have noticed the same omission. But that is because you are interested only in what is material. We are interested in what is holy.

I agree that it has never been clear how or when or why the Wise Lord was born out of infinite time, which itself can never be truly understood, since what is infinite is, by definition, not only not yet but
never
yet. But until I met the Buddhists, I did not think it possible for a religion or philosophy or world view of any complexity to exist without a theory of creation, no matter how imprecise. But here was a sect or order or religion which had captured the imagination of two powerful kings and many wise men, and the order had done so without ever taking seriously the only great question: How did the cosmos begin?

Worse, Buddhists regard all gods with the same sort of amiable contempt that educated Athenians do. But the Athenians are fearful of prosecution by public opinion, while the Buddhists are indifferent to the superstitions of the Brahmans. They do not even care enough about the gods to turn them into devils the way Zoroaster did. The Buddhists accept the world as it is, and try to eliminate it.

Meanwhile, in the here and now, they suggest that it is probably better than not for the ordinary Buddhist layman to be joyful, friendly, equable and compassionate; members of the order, however, must relinquish not only the sorrows of this world but the joys as well.