Word: buddhacarita
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Were he alive today, the Buddha would be in jail for child-support violations. Two-and-a-half millenniums of adoration and mythology have obscured the unflattering fact that the Buddha was a deadbeat dad. So a shimmering new English translation of the Buddhacarita, the 2nd century Sanskrit poem chronicling his life, reminds us that in his search for enlightenment and release from samsara - the wheel of rebirths that condemns us to endless lives and thus suffering - he cruelly abandoned his wife and young son Rahula (whose name, making a not-so-subtle point, means "fetters...
...cantos of the Buddhacarita are spectacularly imagined. The theologian Ashvaghosha's ancient epic courses over 80 years, the entirety of the Buddha's journey toward nirvana and death. It fleshes out, warts and all, the more popular image of the Buddha as an eternally serene spiritual master. First, there's his auspicious birth, as Siddhartha Gautama, in the 6th century B.C. in what is now Nepal. His family is so obscenely rich ("like the Indus with the rush of waters") that they sacrifice 100,000 milk cows for the occasion. A diviner foretells Siddhartha's salvific destiny: "This...
...This business of going forth into the woods is a universal symbol of spiritual quest. Thoreau used it in his years at Walden Pond. And as translator Patrick Olivelle - who in his rendering of the Buddhacarita has stressed its exquisite literary qualities - notes, Siddhartha's departure into the forest from his father's palace is itself "modeled after that of Rama in the Ramayana, although cast within a Buddhist theological and moral background." The Buddhacarita, Olivelle argues, is both an extension of Brahmanical texts and a potent challenge to them - repudiating Vedic conservatism and its emphasis on family units...
...culture has tackled the Buddha, from fantastic depictions (see Osamu Tezuka's eight-volume manga interpretation of his life) to the absurd (one thinks of a bronzed Keanu Reeves strutting as Siddhartha in Little Buddha). Yet you would be hard pressed to find anything that ranks close to the Buddhacarita, which still mesmerizes with its vividness and sheer audacity...
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