The Buddhist scriptures paint a certain image of the Buddha. For one, they call him ‘the Buddha’, literally, ‘the one who knows’, rather than refer to him the way we refer to each other. We are Kaif, Varun, Anita, etcetera. The person I am writing about was Siddhartha.
The scriptures narrate him to have spoken in highly formal, repetitive, poetic ways – “Thus having observed the breath, o bhikkus, you shall have attained a tranquil mind.” “Hence through adapting the right view, the right intention, right speech, right livelihood, the bhikku verily walks on the path to enlightenment.”
They also attribute to him a philosophy – that all things in life are impermanent, attachment to outer objects and inner states results in suffering, the one who sees this reality and sheds attachment reaches a state beyond pain.
As if the scriptures try their best to remove the human being from the figure of Siddhartha, and replace him with a figure to venerate, someone to become like, someone whose thoughts we must incorporate into our lives, someone so in his head that he was constantly analyzing his life and producing ideas. Most of all, a figure who attained something so seductive and alluring that we should replace all our other seductions with this, ethereal one. Part scholar, part object of devotion, always other worldly. But never just a person to just sit with, see eye to eye, and listen to like any human being next door.
Scripture and tradition is inherently hierarchical. It assumes we are inferior. Superior ones have existed before us. We must devote ourselves to their words and become other than who we are now. To do this, it turns persons into symbols and founders of religions. Siddhartha into the Buddha, founder of Buddhism. Jesus into Christ, who established Christianity. But scriptures don’t tell us that neither Siddhartha nor Jesus wrote them. Those who wrote them did so 200 years after Siddhartha died. They did so because they wanted to hold on to something that they felt was slipping away.
Inherent in this impulse to hold on is hierarchy and striving. In dehumanising Siddhartha, tradition also dehumanises us. Like a see-saw, he is up there, accomplished in the spiritual ladder, we are down here, ensconced in samsara. Neither of us is truly human, truly a real person, but only a type. When someone is a type, an ideal, and another is a follower, neither can truly be felt as a presence in our lives.
But when we truly know someone, really know how it feels to be them, then we listen to them with all our heart, and we understand what emotions they experience, what they struggle with, how they struggle, how they embody their uniqueness. We feel them as a presence in our hearts, in our lives.
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If we sift away this erasure of all humanity in Siddhartha, we are left with only a person who sustainedly speaks of being present, of not looking away from suffering, of not devising new ways of not fully experiencing the pain life brings us.
This sifting reveals a personality that is different from the idealised figure of tradition.
What do we know about Siddhartha?
We know that Siddhartha was sometimes referred to as Tathagata – the one who goes – perhaps referring not just to his peripatetic life, that is a life of walking from one place to another, but also of the simplicity, the anonymity, the complete lack of any ambition to be known and acclaimed that was also part of his being.
Dressing just as other monks – ochre robed, walking quietly, gazing downwards, not asking for attention. Simply, the one who goes, or the one who walks.
We know that Siddhartha loved to walk. Everyday, he walked 3 or 4 hours, from one village to another, with his students and fellow seekers.
We know that he walked on the bare earth, barefoot. As was the culture and circumstances at that time. We know that he walked from village to village, and often to one of the few cities of the time. He covered a small area through his life, one no bigger than what can be covered in a 3-day road trip by car today. Kapilavastu, Gaya, Sarnath, Shravasti, Rajgir, Vaishali, and a few other places, almost all in modern day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. There was no world conquering religion with thousands of followers. There was simply a band of a few monks, perhaps 20 or 30, walking with him.
Siddhartha’s landscape was different from the one of our road trip. There were many more forests through which they passed, nature was still wild and alive. There were also many more farm lands. Villages appeared after several hours’ walk, and cities after several days.
Much of these walks were quiet, with nothing but grass, trees, and the animals inhabiting those trees.
We know that Siddhartha experienced a profound equanimity within himself, even when the weather was rough, even when there were strong winds or heavy rains. Even when there were difficult relationships among his students.
We know that this profound equanimity came from a deep presence to what is. In this moment, in the here and now.
He did not constantly suppress uncomfortable feelings and thoughts. He did not constantly try to make things feel good by talking of positive things or thinking about what is comfortable. He knew how to simply be. Not very different from Gingee, the cat who sleeps on my roof sometimes, simply being in the moonlight.
We know that in his daily life, like all of us, he experienced aches and pains. As he experienced these, he saw them from this profound equanimity. He saw that pain passes, and then comes back.
Like others, he ate, slept, attended nature’s calls. Remembered his childhood. The hue of peace waded through all these thoughts and actions.
Walking from village to village with his group of 20 or 30 students, sitting under a tree in the evening and speaking to that group, with another 10 or 20 villagers having joined in. Calling it a day, going to sleep, waking up, and walking forward to the next village. There was no question of being worshipped, of being world famous, of statues being made of him.
He lived a simple life. The language he spoke was not made of the poetic rhymes of Pali or the formal declamations of Victorian English, but a local language of the time, close to Magahi, a dialect in contemporary southern Bihar, spoken by ordinary people today and then – his audience were uneducated farmers, traders, cobblers, sweepers, carpenters, ordinary men and women.
We know that Siddhartha was not the only person who lived a life like this, 2500 years ago, in that part of India. For centuries before and after him, men and women walked away from conventional life, social norms, the new economies of cities and large states, to live quietly in the forest, to discern between the eternal and the ephemeral, to convey to each other that which could not be conveyed in the superficialities of language and the busy-ness of life in the world.
Siddhartha was one among these men and women. History remembers him more than those others, but what history remembers is always determined by many factors in addition to what actually happened. Factors that are social, economic, political, philosophical.
Sometimes history and tradition hide more than they reveal.
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This hue of peace, this air of equanimity. Can we also feel it? If we do, we are close to Siddhartha.
The softly downward gazing eyes, the gentle smile, the self-contained face, a sense of being deeply here.
Whenever I feel peaceful, self-contained, gentle, I find myself thinking of Siddhartha. I wonder if this is the state that he often lived with. I wonder if he reached such a profound rootedness in this state that it always shone through all other experiences. Even through bodily pain, emotional pain, through difficulty and hardship, through joy.
We know that he reached this equanimity after he found the courage to face what was most painful, most dark in him and around him. When he was no longer afraid to be alone, he found equanimity at the centre of his being.
Even in his last moments, as he died.
Equanimity is a plant that grows from the ground of our being. It is nourished by practising presence. It sends out its leaves and flowers outwardly, so its fragrance can be sensed by others.
Siddhartha was equanimous.