kapilavastu

1. The walls.

2006-01-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

A city is defined by its walls. They mark the divisions between interior and exterior spaces, separate the small and large volumes of air that create a sense of "inside" and "outside."

Walls are punctuated by openings. We see the large ones and think of them as specific functions (doors and windows). But in truth walls are like dense meshes, or nets, full of little holes that the air (and things upon the air) can move through. Walls are permeable in ways we don't intend them to be.

Rare is the wall that functions in such a way that it completely excludes. That would need to be a very high, very thick wall indeed.

2. Veins.

2006-01-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

If walls are a city's skin and bones, then paths and roadways are its veins and arteries.

That a city is alive is unquestionable. It remains to be seen if a city can be said to have a heart, whether one or several.

3. The bridge.

2005-12-31T14:14:00.000-08:00

There was a bridge in the city, a large one, one of a number spanning out in every direction, and over it there was a constant flow of people going back and forth. A pair of eyes regarded this river of people intersecting the river of water below, not looking at any of the figures themselves but rather the flow of them.

The water below was still enough that the reflection of the bridge could be seen, with its burden of movement. At night, lights would be lit along the bridge, and its twin in the water below would be indistinguishable from it.

4. The watcher.

2005-12-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

The one who watched was quiet. In his own mind he was inseperable from the tide of people on the bridge, from any of them or all of them. For that matter he was no different from the bridge itself, or the river, or the air that moved invisibly over all of these. He could feel every footstep as he made it and as though those footsteps were upon him. He could actually feel these things in his own feet and upon his spine and within his body.

5. The name, part 1.

2005-12-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

This man had once had a name, but it was gone now like a sparkle upon the water, a pretty thing that hadn't lasted, a gleam amidst so many gleams that holding onto it was impossible. With the name had come an identity, partly of his own making, partly of others'. Like the river's water, it whispered distantly to him, but had no more significance than a single footstep or thought or muttered word on the bridge, or on either shore that it connected.

6. Memory.

2005-12-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

Yet he had memory of that life, of that name, and of many lives before that one, some which had come before, others which were yet to be, and others that never were nor would be. He was many lives in the great neutrality of being both foot and path and observer.

Closing his eyes, he observed with a certain interest that nothing was invisible to him. Every current of water and movement upon the bridge still played through his mind. As he breathed, he could taste motes of people who had lived, some of them centuries before, and turned into dust. These memories tickled against his own. He had been some of those people.

Opening his eyes again, he observed that it was sunset. The body that carried him suggested fatigue and hunger, in a distant voice.

But first he must remember. In the life he had led, and the ones that had preceded it, and in the ones that had never been and would never be, were a medium to communicate a great thing he had learned, a thing that would allow him to deliver others from suffering. This was his one task, to which a thousand million lives traced back.

7. The trap.

2005-12-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Of all the traps he had ever faced, all the temptations and distractions, he had met his greatest defeats through cleverness.

At times he hadn't been clever, and was envious of the cleverness of those around him. Then there were the lives in which he had been clever. He expressed it in small, cutting remarks he believed no one understood (not having the memories of what it was like not being clever before). He had carried himself through whole lives in an envy of cleverness or letting cleverness carry him. In all these lives he had realized the essential at the very end. And he had tried to hold on to it, take the lesson with him, but he forgot it in each lifetime. Each lifetime but one.

The image of the bridge was still clear in his mind, though his eyes were trained on the street in front of him.

This is how he would have looked to those watching him, if there had been any: a handsome young man, perhaps a bit tired, but beautiful in a way that no two observers would have easily agreed upon. His eyes were heavy-lidded, like he was just on the brink of falling asleep, had his movements not been so precise, so efficient. The corners of his full lips looked one moment as though they were about to break into a smile, and the next perfectly expressionless, but they hadn't moved. And he walked with a fluid grace that spoke of purposelessness, but there was nothing aimless about him.

He smelled a little of the street around him, but of fear, or exertion, or despair (and all these have scents) there was no trace. A mild sweetness stayed close to his skin, a scent a little like honey, which was also suggested by his gently golden hue, like he had been caressed by the sun. It was a smell of flowers too, of rare wood, of precious spices, but so subtle that the scent never coalesced into any one thing or lingered long enough to be identified.

8. The fire, part 1.

2005-12-26T14:57:00.000-08:00

And then, with all of this gentle beauty, there was something else. In the serenity of his eyes, there was an edge of flame, as though it were reflected on his surface as he regarded it coldly, like he was maintaining a tension between the fire and the void and walking slowly along that line.

This fire was many things: his enemy; his protector; his lover, of a time long past. It was the shape of desire and the sting of fear.

With the fire, along his arms and on the back of his neck, another thing rested: an electrical force, enormous but carefully and quietly coiled: the power of absolute annihilation.

9. The crossing.

2005-12-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

He walked across the bridge. He still didn't wish to be seen, and so he was not looked at. The vehicles that sped along the roadway at the bridge's center contained people who were looking out--as one must, it seems, when crossing a bridge--over the water, and he crossed their line of sight, but it was as if a cloud moved across their vision when they saw him, and they continued gazing out.

The surge of walkers on the bridge had subsided and there were only a few, and these ignored him too.

10. Kapilavastu.

2005-12-24T21:46:00.000-08:00

He thought of a time long ago, when he had moved with similar purpose to the center of another city far away, toward a grove filled with the sweetness of nature, a deer park. (That grove had later been paved in gold.) There too he had moved without being seen, until he had chosen the correct place, and then gathered people to him. This is how it would be again.

The names danced on his tongue: Kapilavastu, Maghada, Sarnath. He remembered walking, the feeling of his footsteps on the road, and the footsteps of the road on him, he his own antipodes and the receiver of all steps, unmoved, immovable, moving always.

11. Union Square, part 1.

2005-12-23T21:47:00.000-08:00

He arrived at a square that wasn't a square, a park that wasn't a park. He could taste the hollowness and misery around him, the suffering of the whole world. This was the one thing that held him to the ground, kept him from drifting up and away into dissolution, the flame and the void pulling apart: this little shard, the rough silver cord, that caught the silken banner of his essence and held it.

Here the misery took as much a physical form as it had those long days ago, with the same methods of holding at bay. Containers of anguish moving along, even smiling and laughing, rivers of sorrow held in thin glass thimbles.

12. Ascent, part 1.

2005-12-22T21:48:00.000-08:00

He ascended shallow stairs. His steps slowed as he rose. Around him, the people began to look.

13. The correct place.

2005-12-21T22:24:00.000-08:00

Past the debris of discarded paper cups, cigarette buts, the bottle caps of beer, he walked. Skateboarders sped by him, then turned, kicked up their boards, and watched him.

He came to a circle of benches beneath the shade of some trees. An old man--unconscious and reeking--was slumped to one side. An old woman, a portrait of loneliness with swollen ankles, clutched her purse on the bench opposite, staring straight ahead. A couple broke off from each other to watch him, one of the two young men extinguishing his cigarette with his shoe and absently forgetting to exhale.

He had found the correct place. The pigeons fluttered around him, then descended. In Sarnath, they had been doves.

14. One life.

2005-12-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

His earliest lives were vague and blurred, even to the clear sight he now possessed. It had been a matter of awareness. Though he had the faculties to recall every event of every life, to compare and correlate them, to examine neutrally how there were lessons he failed to learn life after life (all this irrelevant now, and unimportant, because he had arrived where he was, regardless of the path and the steps), awareness had eluded some of his past forms. Their memories were streaks of fear and agitation, each with its ocean of feelings unconnected to those of the others, though interwoven.

In some lives he had been a monster, a predator. In others ostensibly gentle, but no less destructive. In some lives hot metal had run through his veins, in others he had spent years within four sets of walls, imprisoned.

As he readied himself to speak, one life suggested itself, drew itself into his memory.

He had been beautiful in that life too: very beautiful.

15. The coal eyed woman.

2005-12-19T22:27:00.000-08:00

In that life, in fact, he'd been a woman. From her earliest days as a girl, she had fascinated everyone who watched her. Her eyes were like coals, and her hands and feet had the texture of petals.

She had been named after a flower too, a rare flower known only in the language of the place where it grew, which was the only place in the world it grew, where she grew, from a girl with flashing eyes into a woman of such grace that her flower-name seemed mundane.

Every man in her town wanted her, made constant pleas to her father for her hand in marriage. Because this had been in the days and in a place where women were property: first their fathers', then their husbands', and finally the property of their graves. Her father brought each suit to her though, to seek her agreement, because she was precious to him and he couldn't have endured her anger. She rejected each one.

This woman, for all her beauty, did not want to be possessed by an earthly man, or woman for that matter. Since she had been a girl she had stared up at the skies and wished to commune with the gods.

16. The rejection, part 1.

2005-12-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

Each festival in the town was consecrated, marked by dancing and celebration and voices raised up. But festival times were also times for marriages. The woman spun and sang with wild abandon, devoted herself over and over again to the gods. Her mind left the baseness of the earth while the others feasted and watched her: some with lust, others with concern.

She soared, reaching her arms up. Just beyond the tips of her fingers, she could feel the hands of the gods reaching down to her from above.

It was two days after the festival of the harvest that she told her father. He brought two more suits to her, imploring her to accept one of the men. She watched him with her coal-black eyes, and finally said it:

"I reject this earth."

Her father stared. What did she mean?

Just that, she said. The earth was not for her. She belonged to the gods. Her life was not made to be rudely touched by the rough hand of a man, to birth his whelps, to carry wood, to slave in his fields. The gods were there, she could feel them, and she would become theirs. As her father stammered, she walked out of their home, to the center of the town, and proclaimed this aloud.

Some of the men who had been pressing their suit upon her were in the market. Crowds of people have possessed a savagery throughout time. Jealousy, covetousness, hatred, all these amplify. A circle formed; stones flew, hands shot forward and clutched and tore.

When the mob withdrew, as all mobs ultimately break of their one mind and shatter into a hundred regrets before running from the crime they have committed, the body of the woman lay on the ground, bleeding and broken.

The ending of every life is brutal, as the spirit fights to hold on to the scraps of flesh that remain. But this death had been different. This woman, who all that time ago so far away (but not that long ago, and not that far) had rejected the earth, moved beyond the tearing of her flesh and the blows raining down upon her.

In her death there had been ecstasy. She could feel the gods reaching down to embrace her and lift her away. Finally the men's hands had touched her, as rough and brutal as she had imagined them to be and worse, and finally the gods had taken her.

As she rose up through the air, it was a filigree, her body, though mangled, was like blossoms on white. The shocked faces of the onlookers didn't matter to her. She had left behind caring about them long ago, when she was a girl.

17. The story.

2005-12-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

Other lives called to him too. Each one had a thousand lessons in it, each life an overflowing well of knowledge that could deliver all these people who now began to gather around him as he stood.

He selected instead a life he had never lived, a world he had never lived in. He selected a story he had used before. Let him begin with something they could all understand.

18. The arrow.

2005-12-16T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is what he said:

"Let me tell you all a story."

By this time a dozen people were within the sound of his voice. Those who hadn't been watching him, which was most of them, turned as they heard him.

"Once, there was a man who was hunting in a forest. He was hunting a swan.

"As he ran through the forest, he spotted the swan. He raised his arrow and took aim. But just as he was about to take a shot, he felt himself get hit, just below the shoulder. The shot had grazed his heart. The arrow was embedded in him, protruding from his back."

He paused. Everyone was listening.

"The hunter's companions rushed to his side, knowing that he was about to die.

"His first words were, 'Who shot me?'"

19. The answer.

2005-12-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

A young woman spoke first. "I've heard that story before. It's a Buddhist parable."

He waited.

"The idea," she said, "is that, instead of accepting that he was about to die and making peace with the world, he wasted time thinking of revenge."

A few of the people muttered. The woman continued watching him. She sipped from her cup of lukewarm coffee.

"That is the point, and it isn't," he said. The woman scoffed, got up, and left, although she did cast a backward glance. The old woman was now staring at him.

"What is the point then?" the old woman asked, in a dry old voice. She seemed mildly surprised that she had said anything at all.

"The point is that the man did nothing about his suffering, and consumed the last moments of his life trying to find its source: an irrelevant thing."

The old woman didn't react. He walked toward her as the others watched.

"Imagine what it was like. He had been shot. He could feel his chest tightening, the fluids building up around his lungs. His breath quickened. Dark spots appeared at the edges of his vision. Through a sickening, wet warmth that spread now up to his neck and into his abdomen below, he could feel the first sharp stabs of pain."

The old woman's eyes widened.

"The pain had become a searing agony by the time his companions arrived. Death was an absolute certainty. He had forgotten what he was hunting, had forgotten his family, had nearly forgotten who he was. And through all this, he believed that knowing who shot him would bring him some comfort, some great answer. Instead of removing the arrow, or in some other way reducing his suffering, his mind craved information as irrelevant as the name of the midwife who had helped deliver him."

"I'm a Christian," the old woman said finally.

One of the young men spoke up next. "So is the point that we're all suffering, and doing the wrong thing about it?"

He turned to them and regarded them carefully. "Knowing the nature of the suffering is irrelevant. The source of the suffering is irrelevant. It is relevant that we are suffering, that all material life is suffering."

"But then there's no answer," the other young man said.

"Man," a passerby commented. "Pretty depressing stuff. There's a reason they call it a nihilistic religion."

20. Nightfall.

2005-12-14T18:35:00.000-08:00

He waited there until nightfall. Some of the onlookers had lingered to see if he would say anything further, and seeing that he did not, they left. The old woman had continued to watch him for a moment, poised as she was to get up and hurry away, and as soon as he turned away from her she did so, apparently convinced that he was quite insane. Others came, but he wasn't speaking, wasn't putting stories out into the world, so they took no notice of him, and ultimately they left too.

On the bench across from him, the sleeping vagrant shifted and muttered.

21. The return.

2005-12-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

He waited.

Finally, she returned: the young woman with the lukewarm coffee, though now a different cup, still lukewarm. He looked at her.

She watched him cautiously, her eyes darting to the sleeping indigent near him. "I wondered if you'd still be here."

"I am still here."

She brought her cup to her lips again, hesitated, and then lowered it. "So, are you homeless or something?"

"I have no home."

She approached, sitting a full body's length away from him along the bench, still occasionally glancing at the vagrant. "You want some coffee or something?"

22. The name, part 2.

2005-12-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

They sat across from each other on hard wooden chairs in a brightly lit coffee shop. He smelled the aroma of the coffee, waiting for it to cool. She watched him carefully. The place was still crowded. No one paid any attention to them. She spoke first.

"My name is Nan," she said. There was a pause. "What's yours?"

He began to speak, then stopped. She waited. He spoke, very deliberately. "What would it matter what my name is?"

"Well, then I would have something to call you by."

"You can call me anything you wish."

She sipped her coffee. "Okay." Another pause.

"So, how does a guy with no name wind up reciting Buddhist parables in Union Square?"

The coffee had cooled enough that he could drink it. "Is there a better place?"

She frowned. "It's getting a little chilly out there. Do you have some place to go?"

"There wasn't any place I was thinking of going in particular. And it's not too cold out there."

"You must be hungry."

He watched her for a moment, as though listening to a whisper. "Yes. I am a bit hungry."

She gathered her things. "This isn't the place to get food, trust me. I used to work at one of these. Come with me." And they left.

23. Brown paper bags.

2005-12-11T21:46:00.000-08:00

As they walked, she chattered nervously. "My parents were hippies--but I grew up here, so I've seen just about everything."

The avenue they were walking down was a carnival of activity and they weaved between other people, young and old. He had been here before. He matched his pace to hers.

She continued to speak. "I guess every now and then the hippie wins out and I see someone I want to help, you know? But you've got to be so careful in this city. Are you from here?"

"No."

"Huh. Talkative. So why Buddhism? I mean, if you want to get into a rant in Union Square, why not Bush, or racism, or the rights of the American worker?"

Here again he paused. She was becoming accustomed to this. It was as if he wanted to carefully think through everything he said, or as though he was consulting an inner council on each word. After the pause, and the weaving around people, came his answer. "I wanted to reach them, with a story."

"I was into Buddhism and all that stuff in college, but after a while, it just felt too much like I was turning into my parents." She stopped in front of a tiny storefront, crowded with people. "This is the place."

They waited in line. When they reached the counter, she placed her order, then looked at him, then placed his order as well, and paid for both. They walked out with their little brown paper bags.

24. The meal.

2005-12-10T21:47:00.000-08:00

They were sitting in a different park now, eating their meals. He chewed slowly, considering every bite. She had devoured hers before he was half way through.

Her attitude told him that she was waiting for answers.

"I'm here to teach people," he said.

She crumpled up wax paper and shoved it inside her brown paper bag. She was still chewing her last bite. "Like, real teaching? In a school?"

"No, not in a school."

She swallowed. "What kind of teaching, then?"

"I'm here to teach people how to free themselves from suffering."

She cocked her head, examining him closely.

"I'm not under the influence of any drugs," he said.

She shook her head. "No, I didn't think you were. Your pupils are okay and you're not shaky or tweaked out on anything." A pause. "My parents are hippies, but they're also shrinks. I'm trying to figure out if you're crazy or not."

He took another bite and chewed it deliberately. "Sanity is an intricate question. If acceptance of delusion is sanity, then I am insane."

"Again with the Buddhism. How old are you?"

He had no answer for her.

"You don't know how old you are?"

"That is also an intricate question."

"Okay. In this incarnation, in this life, in this body, how old are you? How long have you been on the earth in this form?"

"Twenty two years."

"Yeah. You look around my age. Are you a college student?"

He sorted through his memories. "I was. Then I found a different path. I became enlightened. Now I am here to teach."

She didn't react. She just sat next to him, holding her crumpled brown paper bag, and watched him.

25. The rejection, part 2.

2005-12-09T11:31:00.000-08:00

In another life he had been a man who felt pain very acutely. Not just pain, but all sensations, to such a degree that even pleasure was an agony, too strong a feeling.

To this man the finest silk felt like burlap. The sweetest taste was sickening, and foods that were sour or salty he couldn't bear at all. This is when he would succumb to eating. To him, the act of feeding the body was an act of raping it, to pump rough matter through the tiny tube of a throat, to grind it sickeningly (each step of which he could feel), then press it through a mile of coiled intestines. The most horrifying sight he had seen as a child was a diagram of the insides of the abdomen on a doctor's wall. It was a clean drawing, without gore; there was nothing inherently frightening about it. But to the man (then a boy) each turn of the guts, each foot of tubing, spelled out an infinity of disgust and discomfort.

And no sooner was the mass expelled from the body, the painfully few nutrients ground out of it until it was hard and stinking, that the hunger began. Whenever he could, the man drank soup or quietly chewed oatmeal for sustenance. His ribs protruded from his chest, stretching the skin painfully. He crushed up vitamins and gagged at their taste as he swallowed them, mixed with milk.

Blinking his eyes as he watched television through sunglasses in his shaded room, the man longed to die, but couldn't bear the thought of the pain he might endure if he brought it upon himself. Even to swallow single a pill was a misery to him, and his oversensitive stomach would expel a fatal dose before he was able to choke it down. Crushing the pills was out of the question because he would not have been able to force the foul-smelling powder into himself. The thought of poison made him shudder. Each day he spent hours trying to think of ways to destroy himself, or trying to work up the courage to face one instant of terrible hurt, so that he could find an end to the million needles of discomfort he felt all the time.

One day, the man walked to the window, not bothering to turn off the television. He slid the pane up (feeling agony in his joints as he did so), and got up onto the sill. Something within him was calm as he stared down upon the street far below, so bright, so loud.

"I reject this pain," he said in a whisper. His ears hurt from the din of the traffic that reverberated all around him, wafting up, beckoning him. And he fell.