India, Cont.

Those people who could or would not leave home and hearth behind to experience fires in their bellies and sun and moon fusions in their brains, had to remain in their towns and villages and, as means of securing the good life, choose between the voodoo of the Brahmans, the dry intellectualism of the Samkhya, the fear and loathing of the Jains, and the human sacrifice of the Shudras and Pariahs. For them, life continued without an awful lot of spiritual hope.

Until, of course, in the year 563 B.C., in northeast India, there was born to King Suddhodana and Queen Maya of the Shakya Clan of Aryans, a blonde son whose eyes were "as wide and as blue as the lotus" (Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra). The royal pair, whose family name was Gautama, named their heir Siddhartha, "All-prospering." Thirty-five years later he would claim another identity: The Awakened One. The Buddha.

We know very little about him. He was an only child. His mother died soon after his birth and the aunts who raised him spoiled him as doting aunts invariably do. "I wore garments of silk and my attendants held a white umbrella over me..." he is said to have confided, "and my perfumes were always from Benares."

Writing had probably not yet come to the kingdom. Beyond the hunting, drinking, singing, dancing, and uninhibited lovemaking of life at court, there was little for an introspective youth to learn. In what by this time must surely have been the fashion of Kshatriya princes everywhere, he grew tired of all the fun, so that when, at nineteen, he married his cousin Yasodhara, he doubtless was as jaded as a Turkish pasha and as bored.

As H.G. Wells reconstructs Siddartha's situation, "A great discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday - a holiday that had gone on too long."

Beyond the palace gates, sitting immovably in distant ashrams, were those yoga masters who knew how to end the picnic.

But as we have seen, Samkhya truth was not the kind that could be casually acquired. Training demanded undivided attention and the young prince had, at that time, other matters to attend to. As his father's only son, he surely felt obliged to produce an heir. However, after years of marriage, he and Yasodhara were still childless. Leaving court to enter an ashram was unthinkable.

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