Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud by Sun Shuyun

Author:Sun Shuyun [Shuyun Sun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380923
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Not a Man?

XUANZANG HAD one of his rare lyrical moments when he saw the Nairanjana River, now the Phalgu, in central Bihar, ‘with its pure waters, its noble flights of steps, the beauty of its trees and groves, and the pasture-lands and villages which surround it on all sides’. His emotion reveals itself in every line in which he described to us the road between Patna and Bodh Gaya, the very heart of Buddhism, the sacred spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

Travelling on the same route I felt myself that the scenery could almost be what Xuanzang saw. There were very few modern intrusions save the occasional string of telephone poles. By the roadside, mango groves stretched deep into the interior, a mass of gnarly boughs and dark leaves with sunlight glinting through them. Women in bright saris, carrying their babies, led strings of goats through the trees; bullock-carts driven by old men creaked gently by on the edge of the narrow tar road. A man in a white dhoti walked slowly in the shadow of his elephant carrying a small mountain of wood. I had not seen nature and life in such beauty anywhere on this trip; it was like a dream of another world, as if intact from ancient times. The Phalgu stretched as far as I could see. It was the dry season, but the river was in flow, peacefully reflecting the blue sky and white roaming clouds. Some boys were having a serious cricket match on the wide stretch of land near the bank, while small children enjoyed themselves in the muddy puddles. Their homes, small hamlets in the distance, were nestled against a range of low forested hills.

This was the serene landscape where the Buddha decided he would pursue the final struggle for his enlightenment. He had left his luxurious life in the royal palace at Kapilavastu in the foothills of the Himalayas at the age of twenty-nine. His goal was nothing less than to find a way to end human suffering. He had sat at the feet of holy men and yoga masters in the forests of the Gangetic plain, penetrating the mysteries of discovering the True Self. This True Self had nothing to do with our mundane thoughts, our lusts and hatreds. It was eternal and free; we had only to find it, buried somewhere deep in the recesses of our consciousness. The Buddha was told that yoga would train his mind to focus so completely that he would enter into a kind of trance, pure, empty and infinite: he would feel he was in the realms inhabited by the gods. There he would find the True Self, unperturbed by anything. He achieved it – but it was not what he was looking for; once he was out of the trance he still felt envy, greed and passion. Man could not live in a trance all his life.

He abandoned yoga and turned to extreme austerities, which many believed would lead to the suppression of passion and then to liberation.

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