1Many years after the night under the pipal tree, when the Buddha was known in every kingdom of the plain, there was terror in the land of Kosala. Hear this story as his followers have kept it, for it is theirs, and it is a hard one.
2North of the city of Savatthi the road ran through a great forest, and in that forest lived a killer. He did not rob for silver. He killed travellers, and from each one he cut a finger, and he wore the bones of them on a cord around his neck. For this the people named him Angulimala, which means Finger-Necklace. They did not say the name after dark.
3Some said he was the son of a learned house, set on this road by a jealous teacher's wicked command. Some said he was simply mad. It made no difference to those who met him. Villages at the forest's edge stood empty. The king sent soldiers in tens and in twenties, and he outran them or cut them down.
4In Savatthi, in the street of the wheelwrights, lived a girl named Mitta. Her father had been a carter. In the first year of the terror he had taken the forest road with a load of salt because the long way cost too much, and had not come home. His oxen were found. Mitta was twelve then. Her mother sold the cart, and then the yard, and after that the two of them lived by husking other people's rice.
5Mitta did not weep much. She did a thing she thought was stronger. She took her hatred of that man and she kept it. She fed it every day with the memory of her father's hands on the reins. She would not let it grow smaller, for it seemed to her that if it grew smaller, her father would be more dead. By the time she was seventeen it went everywhere with her, and it was the first thing people saw in her face.
6Now it happened that the Buddha was staying near Savatthi, in the grove that a rich merchant had bought for his followers. One morning, when he had eaten, he took his bowl and his outer robe and set out alone, northward, on the forest road.
7The cowherds at the forest's edge ran to stop him. "Do not go that way, holy one! Men go that road in bands of twenty and thirty, and still he takes them." He walked on in silence. They called to him a second time, and a third. He walked on.
8One cowherd boy, braver or more foolish than the rest, followed at a distance and climbed a tree to see the end of it. What he saw he told for the rest of his life, and this is his telling.
9The monk walked down the middle of the road at an easy pace, as a man walks in his own garden. The killer came out of the trees behind him, with a sword in his hand and a bow on his back. He stood a moment as if he could not believe that anyone had come alone. Then he ran.
10The boy swore afterward that the killer ran with his whole strength, the man who could run down a deer, and that he could not close the distance to a walking man. So he swore, and so it has been handed down. Perhaps it was so. Perhaps a boy in a tree, sick with fear, is not a careful measurer of distances. Or perhaps there is a kind of running that fails when the one you are chasing is not afraid of you; for the killer had never before chased anything that did not flee.
11This much is certain. The killer stopped. He stood in the road with his chest heaving, and he shouted: "Stop, monk! Stop!"
12And the monk, still walking, answered him. His followers have kept the words: "I have stopped, Angulimala. You stop."
13The killer stood as if he had been struck. He knew that monks did not lie. And here was a monk who walked, and said he had stopped, and told a man standing still that he had not. He called out, "What do you mean by it?"
14Then the Buddha turned and told him. He said that he had stopped for good: he had laid down the rod, and did no harm to any living thing. But you, he said, have no restraint toward what lives. You are the one still running.
15No one had spoken to Angulimala in years, except to beg. Now a man without a weapon had spoken to him as to someone with a mind of his own, who could stop. The boy in the tree saw him stand a long while. Then he saw him throw his sword into a gully, and his bow after. He came back and bowed with his face in the dust at the monk's feet, and asked to follow him.
16"Come," said the Buddha. And the two of them walked back toward Savatthi together, the monk before and the killer behind, and the boy in the tree did not come down until they were out of sight.
17In those same days King Pasenadi rode out with five hundred horsemen to make an end of the killer. On the way he stopped at the grove, for he honoured the Buddha.
18The Buddha asked him: "Great king, if you were to see this man with his head shaved, wearing the ochre robe, harming no living thing, what would you do with him then?"
19The king said that he would honour such a man as he honoured any monk. "But how could one so cruel come to such restraint?"
20The Buddha stretched out his right arm toward a monk who sat not far away. "That, great king, is Angulimala."
21It is told that the king's hair stood on end. It is told also that when his fear had passed, he spoke to the man, and offered to provide his robes and his food. Then he rode home, marvelling aloud that what he could not tame with weapons had been tamed with none.
22So the terror ended, and the forest road was open. You will think that the city rejoiced. Part of it did. But hear the other part, for the story is not honest without it.
23Mitta heard the news at the husking floor, and was sick on the ground. He was alive. He was fed. Princes bowed to him, and her father's bones lay somewhere under the leaves. She said to her mother, "Is this justice?" Her mother had no answer. There were many in Savatthi who asked it, and I cannot tell you they were wrong to ask.
24The monks of the grove came into the city each morning, walking from door to door in silence with their bowls. And one morning in the cool season, Mitta came round the corner of the street of the wheelwrights and saw a monk she did not know, tall, with heavy shoulders, standing with his eyes cast down before a closed door. An old woman across the way was hissing his name.
25There were stones in that street, where the wheelwrights broke them for their rims. Mitta did not decide. Her hand had the stone before she knew it. She threw it with all the strength of five years.
26It struck him above the ear. He staggered. Then, as if her stone had opened a gate, the whole street let go. Clods came, and sticks, and broken pots. A piece of tile cut his brow open. Someone struck the bowl out of his hands and it broke on the ground. His outer robe was torn half off his shoulder.
27He did not run. He did not raise his arms to guard his head. He did not look up. He stood in the middle of it with blood running down his face, the strongest man in Kosala, who could have broken any three of them, and he took it as a field takes hail.
28Mitta had a second stone. She pushed forward through the others until she stood before him, close enough to touch him, and she lifted it in both hands. She wanted him to look at her. She wanted him to know which of his dead this was for.
29"My father was a carter," she said. Her voice came out of her like something torn. "Five years ago. A load of salt. He had a scar on his chin."
30He raised his eyes then. They were not the eyes she had imagined all those nights. She had imagined a demon's eyes. These were a man's, tired and steady.
31"I do not remember him," he said, low. "I would give a great deal to be able to tell you that I do. There were so many, and I did not look at their faces. That is the worst thing I have to say to you, and it is true."
32She had wanted him to beg. She had wanted him to lie, to say it was madness, that he was not himself. He stood and gave her the plain truth, with the blood dripping from his chin onto his broken bowl.
33"You should be dead," she said.
34"Yes," he said. "By every account I should."
35The street had gone quiet. Everyone was waiting for the stone to come down. And Mitta, with her arms above her head, found that she was waiting also, as if for someone else to do it.
36She looked for the hatred. It was there. But she had never before held it over the living man. Now that he stood within reach, bleeding and making no defence, she saw clearly what the stone would do. It would break the head of a man who had stopped. It would not touch the man who had killed her father, for that man had been thrown into a gully with the sword. And it would not bring one hair of her father back.
37And she saw a thing about herself, which was worse. For five years she had carried her dead and counted her wrong and worn it where everyone must see it first. She had gone about with a necklace too.
38Her arms began to shake. She did not forgive him; do not think it. She was not able to, that day or that year. But she lowered the stone, slowly, and let it fall beside her foot. "I will not be made into you," she said. Then she turned and walked through the crowd, which opened for her, and went home, and wept for her father for the first time since she was twelve. The weeping lasted three days. Her mother said afterward that it was like a fever breaking.
39The wounded monk went back to the grove with his broken bowl. It is told that the Buddha saw him coming from far off, and said to him: Bear it. Bear it. What you have done would have burned you through ages; you are meeting it here and now. And it is told that he did bear it, on that morning and on many others, and that he never once lifted his hand, and that he lived out his life gently and died in peace.
40Mitta went, after some weeks, to the grove. She did not go for his sake. She went because she could not understand the teacher who had walked into the forest. She stood at the back among the laypeople, with her arms crossed, and heard a monk recite the teacher's sayings to the crowd. One of them went into her like a nail, and she never afterward got it out:
41"Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal."
42She asked one of the older nuns, afterward, the question that still burned her. "He killed more people than a plague. Now he is called venerable. Where is the justice?"
43The nun did not give her a smooth answer. "I do not know that there is justice in it," she said. "I know only this. There was a road that no one could walk, and now it is open. There was a man who did nothing but end lives, and now he ends none. If he had been hanged, the first of those would be true. Not the second." She looked at Mitta. "And you threw one stone and not two. Something was opened there as well. I would not close it again."
44Mitta went on husking rice. She married a wheelwright. She was never a soft woman, and to the end of her life she walked out of any room where that monk's name was praised too easily.
45But in the third rainy season after the stone, she did a thing that she told no one. She cooked a measure of rice, more than she and her mother could spare. In the morning, when the monks came down the street in their silent line, she stood at her door. The tall one stopped before her with his eyes cast down, as the rule was. His bowl was a new one, of plain clay. There was a white scar above his ear.
46She put the rice into his bowl. Her hands were steady. Neither of them spoke. He moved on to the next door, and she went in and shut hers, and sat for a while on the floor with her back against it.
47She said when she was old that it was the heaviest thing she ever lifted, that one measure of rice, and that when she had set it down she could stand up straight.
48The teacher who walked into the forest lived to be eighty. He walked the roads of the plain for forty-five years, and taught kings and barbers and sweepers alike. When he lay dying, between two sal trees, his followers wept and asked who would lead them. He told them to be their own lamp and their own refuge. He left no heir. He left a road, and the word that it could be walked.
49And the word went along the trade roads: north over the snow passes, and east, in time, across the deserts. But east of those deserts another people were already asking their own questions, beside another river, in another tongue. Now hear what came after.