Chapter 6 – Parinibbana

one afternoon, forty-five years after the Buddha’s enlightenment, King Pasenedi called on him unexpectedly in the town of Medalumpa in Sakka. He was now an old man, and had remarked recently to the Buddha that political life was becoming more and more violent. Kings were “drunk with authority,” “obsessed with greed,” and constantly engaged in “fighting battles using elephants, horses, chariots and infantry.” The Ganges basin seemed ablaze with destructive egotism. For years, Kosala had been fending off the Magadhan army, which was making a bid to achieve sole hegemony in the region. And Pasenedi himself was desolate. His beloved wife had died recently, and he had fallen into a profound depression. This was what happened when you put your trust in other moribund human beings. Pasenedi no longer felt at home anywhere in the world; in a parody of the wandering monk’s “Going Forth,” he had taken to leaving his palace and driving for miles with his army, going aimlessly from one place to another. He had been out on one of these pointless excursions into Sakka when he heard that the Buddha was staying in the vicinity. Immediately he felt a great longing to be in his presence. The, he reflected, reminded him of a huge tree: he was quiet, aloof, above the petty disturbances of the world, but you could shelter there in a crisis. Immediately, he drove to Medalumpa, and when the road became impassable, he dismounted, left his sword and royal turban with his general, Digha Karayana, and made his way to the Buddha’s hut on foot. When the Buddha opened the door, Pasenedi kissed his feet. “Why are you doing this poor old body such honor?” asked the Buddha. Because the arama was such a comfort to him, replied the king; because the peace of the Sangha was so different from the selfishness, violence and greed of his court. But above all, Pasenedi concluded: “The Blessed One is eighty and I am eighty.” They were two old men together, and they should express their affection for each other in this dark world.

When Pasenedi left the hut and returned to the place where he had left Digha Karayana, he found that the general had gone and had taken the royal insignia with him. He hurried to the place where the army had encamped and found the spot deserted; only one of the ladies-in-waiting remained behind, with one horse and a single sword. Digha Karayana had gone back to Savatthl, she told the king, and was organizing a coup to put Prince Vidudabha, Pasenedi’s heir, on the throne. Pasenedi should not return to Savatthl if he valued his life. The old king decided to go to Magadha, since he was related to its royal house by marriage. But it was a long journey, and on the way, Pasenedi had to eat coarser food than usual and drink fetid water. When he arrived in Rajagaha the gates had closed, and Pasenedi was forced to sleep in a cheap lodging house. That night, he became violently ill with dysentery and died before dawn. The serving lady, who had done her best for the old man, began to rouse the whole city: “My lord the king of Kosala, who ruled two countries, has died a pauper’s death and is now lying in a common pauper’s rest home outside a foreign city!”

The Buddha had always seen old age as a symbol of the dukkha which afflicted all mortal beings. As Pasenedi had remarked, he himself was now old. Ananda, who was far from young himself, had recently been dismayed by the change in his master. His skin was wrinkled, his limbs were flaccid, his body was bent and his senses seemed to be failing. “So it is, so it is, Ananda,” the Buddha agreed. Old age was indeed cruel. But the story of the Buddha’s last years dwells less on the aesthetic disaster of aging than on the vulnerability of the old. Ambitious young men rise up against their elders, sons kill their own fathers. In this final phase of the Buddha’s life, the texts dwell on the terror of a world where all sense of sacredness is lost. Egotism reigns supreme; envy, hatred, greed and ambition are unmitigated by compassion and loving-kindness. People who stand in the way of a man’s craving are ruthlessly eliminated. All decency and respect have disappeared. By stressing the dangers that the Buddha had tried to counter for nearly fifty years, the scriptures force us to confront the ruthlessness and violence of the society against which he had launched his campaign of selflessness and loving-kindness.

Not even the Sangha was immune from this profane spirit. Eight years earlier, the Order had once again been threatened by schism and had been implicated in a plot to kill King Bimbisara, another old man, who had been the Buddha’s devoted follower for thirty-seven years. We find a full account of this rebellion only in the Vinaya. It may not be entirely historical, but it issues a warning: even the principles of the Sangha could be subverted and made lethal. According to the Vinaya, the culprit was Devadatta, the Buddha’s brother-in-law, who had entered the Sangha after the Buddha’s first trip home to Kapilavatthu. The later commentaries tell us that Devadatta had been malicious from his youth, and had always been the sworn enemy of the young Gotama when the two were growing up together. The Pali texts, however, know nothing of this and present Devadatta as an unexceptionally devout monk. He appears to have been a brilliant orator, and as the Buddha got older, Devadatta became resentful of his hold over the Order. He decided to build his own power base. Devadatta had lost all sense of the religious life, and began ruthlessly to promote himself. His horizons had narrowed: instead of reaching out expansively to the four corners of the earth in love, he was centered solely on his own career and consumed by hatred and envy. First he approached Prince Ajatasattu, son and heir of King Bimbisara and commander-in-chief of the Magadhan army. He impressed the prince with flashy displays of iddhi, a sure sign that he was profaning his yogic powers. But the prince became Devadatta’s patron: every day, he sent five hundred carriages to Devadatta in the arama of Vulture’s Peak, just outside Rajagaha, together with unseemly mounds of food for the bhikkhus. Devadatta became a favored court monk; the flattery went to his head and he decided to seize control of the Sangha. But when the Buddha was warned of his brother-in-law’s activities, he was not disturbed. Unskillful behavior on this scale could only bring Devadatta to an unsavory end.

Devadatta made his first move while the Buddha was staying in the Bamboo Grove outside Rajagaha. In front of a huge assembly of bhikkhus, Devadatta formally asked the Buddha to resign and hand over the Sangha to him. “The Blessed One is now old, aged, burdened with years.,. and has reached the last stage of his life,” he said unctuously. “Let him now rest.” The Buddha adamantly refused: he would not even hand the Sangha over to Sariputta and Moggallana, his two most eminent disciples. Why should he appoint such a lost soul as Devadatta to the position? Humiliated and furious, Devadatta left the arama vowing revenge. The Buddha was not much concerned about the leadership of the Order. He had always maintained that the Sangha did not need a central authority figure, since each monk was responsible for himself. But any attempt to sow dissension, as Devadatta had done, was anathema. An atmosphere of egotism, ambition, hostility and competitiveness was absolutely incompatible with the spiritual life and would negate the raison d’etre of the Sangha. The Buddha, therefore, publicly dissociated himself and his Order from Devadatta and told Sariputta to denounce him in Rajagaha. “Formerly,” he explained, “Devadatta had one nature; now he has another.” But the damage had been done. Some of the townsfolk believed that the Buddha was jealous of Devadatta’s new popularity with the prince; the more judicious, however, reserved judgment.