A carven stone monument marking the spot—one that stands to this day—was erected in later years by King Aśoka. Bereft of his birth mother, the prince had been raised by the king’s second wife, the princess Maha Pajapati, who was Māyā’s sister. Though both father and mother showered the prince with their affection and spared nothing in his education, he had not grown up to become the cakravarti-rājan—the universal sage-monarch to unify and rule the world—his father had wished he would become. Had the prince wanted such a role for himself, he might very well have succeeded in becoming that great ruler. Yet his grief over the loss of his mother Māyā and his understanding of the unhappiness and destruction fated for all men had led him ever further from the expectations and the passions of those around him and toward a life of solitary thought.
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Even though there were times that the prince looked upon Yaśodharā and saw in her face the image of the late Māyā and felt himself saved not once but twice, the love of the princess was not enough to keep the prince from leaving.
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Siddhārtha was twenty-nine years old. He already had a child with the princess, a boy named Rahula. As it was the primary obligation of the head of the household in ancient India to ensure that the bloodline was continued, one could say that the prince had already fulfilled the most essential part of that duty. In truth, there was nothing in his heart that held him back from leaving the palace. He had been waiting for this day for a very long time.
“Be well, my princess. And take good care of Rahula. And my father, as well—he is nearing the age when his legs and back will pain him. He will need your help.”
Siddhārtha leaned over and gently pried Yaśodharā’s fingers from his foot. The princess’s hand was as soft as an infant’s to the touch. Then he lifted her up and hugged her close. She wore a thin, silken gown and her breasts were warm against his chest.
“I will always be beside you.” He gazed down at the clinging princess and, suffering a pang of worry, he caught his breath and looked up to the sky.
Subhuti called out to the prince, asking him to make haste, and joined Pūrna in making a vajra mudrā, the mudrā of thunder, with his hands.
Then the sharp voice of a woman rang out behind them, and to Siddhārtha, it felt like a blow to his back. “My prince! Wait!”
The prince stopped and turned around to see the wet nurse Vamsa running toward him, her footfalls upon the stones breaking the hush in the courtyard. She was dressed in finery but her hair was disheveled, and the jeweled crown she wore as a sign of her nobility was hanging from one ear. She carried an infant in her arms, and she laid it at the prince’s feet.
“Why, this is Rahula!” Siddhārtha exclaimed.
“My prince, you must tell me why you would abandon your only child in this way!”
Siddhārtha sighed. “The time for such explanations has passed, wet nurse. I entrust his care to you.”
Vamsa bit her lip. Below them on the stones, the young Rahula was now sitting up, crying.
“My prince! If you will insist on leaving us, then tread upon your own son as you leave.”
Vamsa stared directly into Siddhārtha’s eyes. A stillness sharp as glass filled the courtyard. Uddaka still stood, his kora frozen in the air just above where the prince’s head had been, while Maudgalyayana and the other Brahmins did not move so much as an eyebrow as they watched beneath the blazing sun. The only noise came from the surging sea of cicadas.
Without a word the prince strode forward. In his heart he felt only the vastness of the void. When his foot touched Rahula, the child screamed as though burned.
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The five palanquins passed through the ornate gates of the palace like a shadow before the throngs of onlookers.
The prince, gazing out through the wisteria hangings, saw a flower growing off to the side of the road, its large yellow bloom swaying wildly despite the lack of a breeze.
“To Tuṣita,” he heard Maudgalyayana say from one of the palanquins ahead of him. The bearers quickened their pace and turned at the next corner.
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“To Tuṣita.”
The voice reached Siddhārtha deep in his clouded consciousness.
At this very moment, he was on his way to meet the world’s ultimate being, and the thought made him shake like a child with anticipation.
Could this be the fear that comes before attaining enlightenment?
Gingerly, the prince put his hands together.
Snow was falling all around.
It fell endlessly whirling, soundlessly filling the land around them with pure white. With every breath of wind, he caught a glimpse of vast plains, visible only as a dim, bluish shadow beyond the thick white curtain of snow. The sun was out somewhere between the snow and the ice that seemed to cover both heaven and earth—he could see its brilliant light reflected in one part of the storm.
“The Eight Cold Hells!” Siddhārtha muttered, and he moved to draw his robes more tightly together at the neck. This was when he noticed that he seemed to have no arms. And not only did his arms appear to have vanished, but he also lacked a chest to cover with robes, a waist to tie with a sash, and legs below . . . in fact, his entire body seemed to be missing.
Perhaps I am meant to face the world without form?
Lose the self, and you destroy suffering. All that is left is the barren snow and ice. Strangely, he felt no pain. Though there was thought, there was no sensation—even though he had always assumed there could be no consciousness without the five senses.
“What I don’t understand is, how can I see all of these inanimate things around me without having returned to my body?”
Next to him, Maudgalyayana nodded. “We are in the Trayastriṃsa, my prince. Already we are 320,000 yojana distant from Jambudvīpa, the island of man.” Maudgalyayana said the numbers as though he were reading them aloud.
“Jambudvīpa, as I understand it, floats in the seas to the east of Mt. Sumeru,” said Siddhārtha, his voice echoing too loudly. “This is the world where men live. I did not expect the heights above that, the Heaven upon Heaven—this Trayastriṃśa—to be such a desolate place.”
“My prince, we are currently on the second level of the Six Heavens of the Realm of Desire, those being Cāturmahārājika of the Four Heavenly Kings, Trayastriṃśa through which we currently pass, Yāma, Tuṣita, Nirmāñarati, and Paranirmita-vasavartin. Here we find our paradise. Alas, in no more than eighty thousand years, it will perish.”
“But why is this, Maudgalyayana? Where in this second of the Six Heavens, this celestial world beyond the realm of man, do you find this shadow of destruction?”
The four Brahmin monks were standing in a circle now with Prince Siddhārtha at its center in the ice and snow. The wildly sweeping flakes passed both within and without their bodies.
“We believe the origin of the problem lies in a warping of the space between imaginary coordinates two and three in the Delta quadrant, just above the Cāturmahārājika.”
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Two suns burned in a copper sky overhead. One was large and somewhat oblong and gave off a dull orange light. The other was small and possessed a brilliant white incandescence at its core, ringed farther out by a silver corona. Large eruptions of reddish gas flowed from the surface of the orange sun, swirling through the void at a frightening pace, extending toward the smaller, bluish white sun. The flowing gases painted land and sky in startling colors, and whenever the gases wrapped entirely around the smaller sun, the void between them filled with an incandescent brilliance. The light cut the long flatness of space in half, sweeping aside all other illumination and shadow. Then the crimson gas flow would spiral inward and vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving the two suns to shine in the copper sky once more.
A silence, like death, came next, followed a short while later by another plume of gas that rose from the waves of flame rimming the dusky orange sun, then extended into space. So the two suns traveled through the black sky, alternately emitting flaming gases and brilliant flashes of light, a symphony of brilliance that washed away all the other stars in the sky. When the two finally passed out of sight, another pair came racing up from the opposite horizon, one of them a giant fireball, ringed with silver, with a long tail of burning gas that stretched far off into the void.
Two pair of suns made four suns in total that burned in the vast solar region of Trayastriṃśa.
The blizzard had disappeared, as though a blanket had been removed from the world. Now everywhere Siddhārtha looked was a barren icy plain. Not even the four suns burning in the void seemed to have any warming effect on the frozen ground. Nothing moved in that bluish expanse, nor was there any sign of life; everything was frozen hard as steel. Even a portion of the atmosphere had crystallized into a translucent remnant scattered across the surface.
The temperature was minus 272.8 degrees Celsius. If any civilization had once existed here, there was no trace of it now.