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Authors: Mark Epstein
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person, a stooped and aged one, and a forest recluse. So startled was he said to be by these “Four Messengers” that he resolved to leave his privileged life to seek one of wandering austerity.
As safe and protected as he may have been throughout the first third of his life, the earliest days of his infancy were tumultuous. There was trouble from the start. Strange omens accompanied his birth, and the strangeness continued into his first week of life. His mother, Maya, said by legend to be a local queen, dreamed of being nuzzled by a white elephant on the night of his conception and delivered her baby from her side exactly ten months after her nocturnal vision. Standing in a fragrant grove of fruit-laden trees called Lumbini, a half day’s journey from the town of Kapilavatthu, where she lived, she steadied herself by grasping a low-hanging limb of a
sala
tree with her uplifted right arm and gazed at the sky as her child was drawn through her right side from her womb. According to legend, he was placed, standing on two feet, on the ground, where he precociously took seven steps to the north, lifted one arm, pointed his finger to the sky, and proclaimed something on the order of “I’m the one!”
One early collection of Buddhist stories, the
, describes how the Buddha and his mother were honored in the immediate aftermath of his birth by two showers of water, one warm and one cool, descending from the sky onto their bodies. And shortly after this heavenly bath, a wise man named Asita, one of those mountain
rishis
, or recluses, who populate the Indian landscape, had a vision while in retreat that a great being had been born. He found his way to the family and, recognizing a series of signs and marks upon the infant’s body, prophesied to his parents that the child would become either a great monarch or a renowned spiritual leader. The joy he felt at discovering such a child was soon tempered by grief as he recognized that he, already old, would be dead before this great being would begin to teach or lead. As Asita began to weep uncontrollably at his realization, the young Buddha’s father became frightened.
“What’s wrong?” the father implored him. “Will something terrible come to pass?”
“No, no,” Asita reassured him, “there will be no misfortune. But a person of this caliber is unlikely to settle for the role of great monarch.” Tears streaming down his face, Asita took leave of the family, the birth of the infant already tarnished by thoughts of impending death.
Three days later, the Buddha’s mother, Maya, died. The newborn, after exclaiming that he was the one, now suddenly was. The only one. Half of a mother-infant dyad, surrounded by surrogates but cut off from the most important person in his young life.
How would he have coped? The rest of his family did not abandon him. They gathered round, gave him wet nurses to suckle on, an aunt to care for him, cousins to play with, and servants to attend to his needs. His father immediately entrusted the baby’s care to his wife’s sister, to whom he was already married, and she raised the infant lovingly as her own. But his father was unnerved by all that had happened in the space of the single week. The sudden and inexplicable loss of his beloved wife, on the heels of Asita’s uncanny weeping, had cast a pall over the entire birth. “A shadow of awe and uncertainty” 1 settled over the Buddha’s father, and he resolved then and there to keep his son from abandoning him as his wife already had. He would give him every luxury, indulge his every whim. “If the prince found nothing more to wish for, the king thought, the notion of abandoning the palace would never occur to him.” 2
The Buddha, some years after forsaking his wife, newborn son, father, palace, and extended family despite his father’s best-laid plans, thought back to what his childhood had been like. His recollection functions as a kind of screen memory, telegraphing meaning
As safe and protected as he may have been throughout the first third of his life, the earliest days of his infancy were tumultuous. There was trouble from the start. Strange omens accompanied his birth, and the strangeness continued into his first week of life. His mother, Maya, said by legend to be a local queen, dreamed of being nuzzled by a white elephant on the night of his conception and delivered her baby from her side exactly ten months after her nocturnal vision. Standing in a fragrant grove of fruit-laden trees called Lumbini, a half day’s journey from the town of Kapilavatthu, where she lived, she steadied herself by grasping a low-hanging limb of a
sala
tree with her uplifted right arm and gazed at the sky as her child was drawn through her right side from her womb. According to legend, he was placed, standing on two feet, on the ground, where he precociously took seven steps to the north, lifted one arm, pointed his finger to the sky, and proclaimed something on the order of “I’m the one!”
One early collection of Buddhist stories, the
, describes how the Buddha and his mother were honored in the immediate aftermath of his birth by two showers of water, one warm and one cool, descending from the sky onto their bodies. And shortly after this heavenly bath, a wise man named Asita, one of those mountain
rishis
, or recluses, who populate the Indian landscape, had a vision while in retreat that a great being had been born. He found his way to the family and, recognizing a series of signs and marks upon the infant’s body, prophesied to his parents that the child would become either a great monarch or a renowned spiritual leader. The joy he felt at discovering such a child was soon tempered by grief as he recognized that he, already old, would be dead before this great being would begin to teach or lead. As Asita began to weep uncontrollably at his realization, the young Buddha’s father became frightened.
“What’s wrong?” the father implored him. “Will something terrible come to pass?”
“No, no,” Asita reassured him, “there will be no misfortune. But a person of this caliber is unlikely to settle for the role of great monarch.” Tears streaming down his face, Asita took leave of the family, the birth of the infant already tarnished by thoughts of impending death.
Three days later, the Buddha’s mother, Maya, died. The newborn, after exclaiming that he was the one, now suddenly was. The only one. Half of a mother-infant dyad, surrounded by surrogates but cut off from the most important person in his young life.
How would he have coped? The rest of his family did not abandon him. They gathered round, gave him wet nurses to suckle on, an aunt to care for him, cousins to play with, and servants to attend to his needs. His father immediately entrusted the baby’s care to his wife’s sister, to whom he was already married, and she raised the infant lovingly as her own. But his father was unnerved by all that had happened in the space of the single week. The sudden and inexplicable loss of his beloved wife, on the heels of Asita’s uncanny weeping, had cast a pall over the entire birth. “A shadow of awe and uncertainty” 1 settled over the Buddha’s father, and he resolved then and there to keep his son from abandoning him as his wife already had. He would give him every luxury, indulge his every whim. “If the prince found nothing more to wish for, the king thought, the notion of abandoning the palace would never occur to him.” 2
The Buddha, some years after forsaking his wife, newborn son, father, palace, and extended family despite his father’s best-laid plans, thought back to what his childhood had been like. His recollection functions as a kind of screen memory, telegraphing meaning
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