Brahma Kneels Before the Buddha

He had been sitting under the trees by the Neranjara river for weeks. He had found what he had come to find, and he was at peace, and he sat now at the foot of a banyan where the goatherds rested their flocks, and thought about what to do next.

The thought that came was not a happy one.

"What I have found is deep," he thought. "It is hard to see and hard to understand. It is quiet and fine and beyond guessing at, and only the wise will feel it. And the people of this world love holding on. They delight in it. They are excited by it. How will people who love holding on understand letting go?"

He thought of himself teaching, and nobody understanding, and of how tiring that would be. And his mind turned away from teaching, towards simply staying where he was, at ease.

Far above, in the highest of the heavens, a god knew the thought as it formed. He was Brahma Sahampati, the eldest of the great Brahmas, whom the people below took for the maker of the world.

"The world is lost," Brahma thought. "The world is finished. The one who has woken up is not going to say anything."

In the time it takes a strong man to straighten his bent arm, Brahma left his heaven and stood on the river bank in front of the Buddha.

He put his upper robe over one shoulder, as a pupil does. He knelt on his right knee in the dirt, and put his palms together in front of his heart.

"Lord," he said, "teach. Let the one who has gone well teach. There are beings with only a little dust in their eyes. If they do not hear, they will fall away. Some of them will understand."

Then he said it again, in verse. He asked the Buddha to climb, like a man on a high rock who can see the people all around below him, and look down on a world drowning in sorrow and old age, and open the door.

"Rise up, hero," said the god. "Victor in battle, rise. Wander the world without debt. There will be those who understand."

The Buddha looked. For the sake of living things, he turned on the world the eye of one who is awake, and he saw it as a pond of lotuses: blue and red and white, all born in the same water. Some stayed under the surface. Some rose to the surface and floated there. And some stood up out of the water on their stems, and the water did not touch them.

So it was with people. Some had much dust in their eyes and some had little. Some were quick and some were slow. Some could be taught.

He answered the god in verse.

"Open are the doors to the Deathless," he said, "for those who have ears. Let them show their trust."

Brahma Sahampati understood that he had been heard. He bowed down, walked round the Buddha keeping him on his right, and vanished. And the Buddha got up and set off for the deer park at Sarnath, to find the five men who had once sat with him, and to begin.

Not every Brahma in the old Buddhist books is so humble. There is another, called Baka, who lives in a heaven of his own and believes it will never end. The Buddha is staying in a grove at Ukkattha, at the root of a great sal tree, when the god's wrong idea reaches him there.

"This is permanent," Baka says. "This is everlasting. This does not pass away. There is nothing beyond this."

The Buddha knows his thought, as Brahma Sahampati once knew the Buddha's, and goes up to his world to meet him. Baka welcomes him, and repeats his claim.

"Baka is wrapped in ignorance," the Buddha says, "if he calls the passing permanent."

Then Mara, the tempter, slips into one of the gods of Baka's court and speaks through him. Do not argue with Brahma, the voice says. He is the maker and the master and the father of all that is. Those who oppose him come to grief.

The Buddha is not frightened. He names the heavens above Baka's own, places of light and splendour that Baka has never seen and does not know are there.

Baka tries a last contest. "I will vanish from you," he says, and he tries, and he cannot; wherever he goes, the Buddha can see him.

"Then I will vanish from you," the Buddha says, and does. Baka and his whole court look about and see no one, while from the empty air a voice speaks verses to them about being and not being.

When the Buddha appears again, the court of Brahma is amazed. They have never seen anyone, god or man, with such power. The heaven that Baka thought would last forever is still there, but now everyone in it knows that it will not.