1In the kingdom of Magadha, on the bank of the river Neranjara, there was a village of herders, and its chief man had a daughter named Sujata. In her house served a bondwoman named Punna, who was seventeen, and who owned nothing in the world but a brother.
2The brother was twelve. Their father had died owing grain, and the boy had been bound to a caravan master to work off the debt. In that season the caravan lay camped an hour's walk downstream, waiting for the full moon. Then it would go south with its oxen, a journey of months, into countries whose names Punna did not know. The price of the boy's bond was twenty pieces of silver. Punna had never held one.
3Now in the woods by the river lived six holy men, and the whole village was proud of them. They were seekers who had left their homes to find the end of sorrow, and they sought it by hardship. They ate almost nothing. And one of the six went further than the others. It was told that he lived on a single grain of rice a day.
4This one was named Gotama. He had been a prince of the Sakya people, in the hill-country under the snows, with three houses, and musicians, and a young wife, and a newborn son. At twenty-nine he had ridden out of all of it in the night. That was six years ago. Now his ribs stood out like the rafters of an old shed.
5The villagers spoke of this with wonder. Punna did not. "My brother is hungry also," she said once at the well, "and no one walks out from the village to look at him." She was told to mind her tongue.
6In that year Sujata bore a son, her first. She had promised an offering to the old banyan tree by the river if the child came safely. So she boiled milk down with rice and honey until it was thick, and poured it into the one precious thing her house possessed, a bowl of beaten gold that had come with her mother from the city. At first light she sent Punna ahead to sweep the ground beneath the tree.
7Punna went down with her broom in the grey of morning. There was a man lying among the roots of the banyan.
8She thought he was dead. He was the colour of ash, and so thin that she could see the shape of the skull beneath the face. Then she saw the chest move, hardly at all. It was the prince.
9She ran back for her mistress. Sujata came with the bowl in both hands and the other women behind her, and stood looking down at him.
10The five other seekers had come also, out of the trees. One of them said, "Leave him. He is close. No one has gone so far as he has. If he dies, he dies as a conqueror."
11"If he dies," said Punna, before she could stop herself, "he dies as a dead man. I have seen hunger finish. There is no conquering in it."
12No one rebuked her this time, for the man on the ground had opened his eyes, and he was looking at her.
13Sujata knelt. She was a young mother, with her own child three weeks old at home, and she did not ask the tree's leave. She held the golden bowl to the starving man's mouth. For a moment it seemed that he would turn his face away. Then he drank, slowly, a little at a time, and the colour of ash went out of him.
14The five seekers watched this with stone faces. "He has given up the struggle," one said. "Six years, and he has gone back to a soft life for a bowl of milk." They took up their staffs and their water pots. They left that same morning, north and west, toward the city of Varanasi, and they did not look back.
15Gotama watched them go, and Punna saw no anger in him. He said to Sujata, "You have given me my life, sister. I will try to use it well." And to Punna, who was staring at him, he said, "You spoke truly about hunger. Who taught you?"
16"Hunger," said Punna. And because he had asked, and because he had been a prince and now sat in the dirt with milk on his chin, she asked him what she had wanted to ask for a year. "Why did you do it? You had rice. You chose to starve. There are people who starve and have no choosing."
17He did not take it ill. "I will tell you," he said. "When I lived in my father's house I had everything a man can want, and I fed every wanting as soon as it rose. It did not end the wanting. It was like drinking salt water. So I thought: then I will go the other way. I will starve the body until it wants nothing, and the mind will go free." He looked at his own arm, which was like a stick. "That was the same mistake, made from the other side. I only wanted a different thing, and I wanted it just as hard. This morning I could not think at all. A mind cannot see clearly in a body that is dying, any more than in one that is drunk."
18"Then what will you do?"
19"I do not know yet," he said. "Neither road goes there. There may be one between." And he smiled at her, the first smile she had seen on him. "I shall sit down and look."
20He rested that day in the shade. Toward evening he bathed in the river, and waded across at the shallow place, and went into the wood on the far side. There he spread an armful of cut grass at the foot of a great pipal tree, and sat down with his legs folded and his back to the trunk, facing the east.
21At dusk Sujata remembered the bowl. In all the wonder of the day no one had brought it home. "He left it by the water where he bathed," she said to Punna. "Go quickly, before the light fails. It was my mother's."
22Punna went. She found the bowl in the reeds at the river's edge, rinsed clean and set upright on a flat stone. The last light was in it. She picked it up, and it was heavier than she had thought, and she stood holding it.
23She looked upstream. No one. She looked downstream, where the river bent, and beyond the bend, an hour's walk, were the fires of the caravan.
24It was more gold than twenty pieces of silver would buy. It was more than forty. The caravan master was not a man who asked where things came from. She and the boy could be gone into the hill country by morning.
25Her heart went so hard that it hurt her throat. She put the bowl inside her cloth, against her belly, and waded into the shallows to cross, for the path downstream ran along the far bank.
26The path went past the pipal tree.
27He was sitting as she had last seen him. It was almost dark. She meant to go by. But her legs were shaking, and she thought: I will sit one moment, here behind this bush, until my breath is quiet.
28She sat. She held the bowl in her lap in both hands. And because there was nothing else to look at, she looked at him.
29She had never seen anyone sit like that. He was not asleep and he was not stiff. He was like a lamp in a place with no wind. The mosquitoes came, and he did not move. A jackal cried near at hand, and he did not move. It came to her that he was looking at the very thing he had spoken of that morning: the wanting. He had sat down to look.
30And then, because she was seventeen and frightened and holding stolen gold, she looked at her own.
31It was the first time in her life she had done so. Until that hour she had only ever looked at the things she wanted: the silver, her brother's face. Now she looked at the wanting itself, the heat of it under her ribs. It was strong. It said: Get up. Go now. He is your brother. She did not get up. She watched it. And she found, with great surprise, that it was not one thing. There was love in it, and that was clean. But there was more wound round the love. There was a hard bright greed for the weight of the gold itself. There was an old anger at Sujata for having a mother, and a house, and a bowl. There was a wish to be someone who took, for once, where she had always been taken from.
32She watched these, and they rose and fell like breathing. When she did not obey them at once, they changed. That astonished her more than anything. She had thought her wanting was herself. But here she was, watching it, and so there was something in her that was not the wanting, something that could hold it up to the light and turn it, as she held the bowl.
33With that something, she began for the first time to think, and not only to burn.
34She thought: they will know by morning that it was I. They will send to the caravan first of all. A boy bought with stolen gold is a thief's brother; they will take him back and beat him for it. And Sujata, who knelt in the dirt today to feed a stranger, will learn that she cannot send a servant to the river. She will not kneel so quickly the next time. All of that I meant to do in the name of love.
35The night went over. Twice she nearly rose, and twice she sat and looked again at what was pulling her, and it loosed its hold a little, like a knot that has been wetted.
36What he met that night, he told afterward in his own way. He spoke of a tempter who came against him with an army, with fear and with desire and with doubt, and of how he did not rise from his seat. Those who follow him keep that telling, and it is theirs. Punna could not see into him. She saw only a man sitting still while the night did what it could, and she saw that near morning he reached down with his right hand and touched the earth, as a man touches a thing he is sure of.
37Then the morning star came up over the river, very bright. He lifted his face and saw it. And Punna, who was watching him and not the star, saw his face.
38She had no word for what she saw there. She used to say, when she was old, that it was like the face of a man who has put down a load he had carried so long that he had thought it was part of his back. His followers say that in that hour he awoke, and they have called him ever since the Buddha, the Awakened One.
39Punna stood up, stiff with cold, the bowl in her hands. He saw her then. He saw the bowl. He said nothing. He only inclined his head to her, as if she too had come through something. Then she waded back across the river, away from the caravan, and went up through the fields to the house.
40Sujata was at the door, with the child on her hip, white with worry. "All night? I thought a leopard had you."
41Punna held out the bowl. Her hands were not steady. "I did not come home," she said, "because I meant to take this to the caravan and buy my brother with it. I had it inside my cloth. I sat all night by the river with it. I have brought it back. I will not lie to you about where I was."
42Sujata took the bowl. For a long time she looked at it, and not at Punna. Punna waited for the blow, or for the headman to be called.
43"What brother?" said Sujata.
44And Punna understood that in three years of grinding this woman's grain she had never once been asked.
45She told it: the debt, the twenty pieces, the full moon. When it was done Sujata said, "You should have come to me." Then she said, "No. A bondwoman does not come and ask. I did not look. Yesterday I fed a stranger because he was dying in front of my eyes. Your brother was not in front of my eyes. That is the whole difference, and it is not a good one."
46She went that day to her father. It is not told that the boy was made free; such things were not quickly done. But the debt was bought before the full moon, and the boy came to herd the cattle of Sujata's house, and slept under the same roof as his sister.
47As for the man under the tree, he stayed some weeks in that wood. Then he took the road toward Varanasi, on foot, alone, to find the five who had left him. He found them in a deer park outside the city, and there he taught for the first time: the road between the two mistakes, and how sorrow grows from craving as a plant from its root, and how the root may be cut. The first of the five to understand was named Kondanna.
48Travellers brought word of it down the river in later years, and of more. They said he had stood on a hill not far from Sujata's village and told a thousand seekers that the whole world was burning. The eye is burning, he said, and the ear, and the mind: burning with the fire of craving, the fire of hate, the fire of not seeing. And he taught that a person may stop laying wood on that fire.
49Punna heard this while she was grinding grain, and she stopped the stone.
50"I know that fire," she said. "I sat with it one night, by the river. I had it in my lap."
51She set the stone turning again. "It burned lower when I looked at it," she said. "All my life it had burned me, and I had never once turned round to see what was alight. But there was something else that night. There was whatever it was in me that did the looking. That was not burning. That was more like a lamp."