His Life Is Your Life

I’ve never paid much attention to the facts of the Buddha’s life story. A woman who is impregnated in a dream about an elephant, a child who can walk and talk at birth, a young man who never sees an old or a sick person, a man who survives on one grain of rice per day: I didn’t buy those things. They seemed silly to me.

In studies I’d read about the Buddha’s life—including The Life of the Buddha According to the Pali Canon and Karen Armstrong’s well-received short biography—I’d also felt that the figure that emerged was not quite human. A man who refused (three times) to admit his beloved stepmother to the sangha and had to be persuaded to do so by his cousin, a man who was so opposed to sex that he would not allow one of his monks to cohabit with his wife to beget an heir, a man who even in fraught situations showed no emotion at all: He seemed to have some exceptional understanding but not much human feeling. 

The Story of the Buddha
by John Tarrant
Shambhala Publications, 2024, 144 pp., $19.95, hardcover

I felt that the story was meant to be exemplary, based on facts, perhaps, but intended to instruct. And I thought, in any case, that it was not all that important. In contrast to Jesus, whose life virtually is his teaching, what was important for Westerners about the Buddha was the teaching that followed his enlightenment at midlife.

However, I was intrigued by this new rendering of the Buddha’s life by John Tarrant. As readers of Bring Me the Rhinoceros know, Tarrant has an uncanny knack for bringing historical figures to life, most notably the great Chan master Zhaozhou from the koan “Ordinary Mind Is the Way.” He imagines himself in the situation in a way that no one else has. 

Early in this book, Tarrant takes us to his youth in Tasmania, when he sat in a library and read the Greek and Egyptian myths of the past, which entranced him In contrast to those myths—to Odysseus, for instance, whose whole long journey is an effort to get back home and to the people he loves—the Buddha is at home when the story opens, in a luxurious palace where he has everything he could want. He leaves that home because he is looking for something it doesn’t provide: a reason for existing, a meaning to life. His journey is interior, which nevertheless involves external events. It’s as mythical as any of the Greek stories: the elephant who enters the woman’s womb, the seer who recognizes the child’s greatness before he teaches, the prophet who says he will be a great secular or religious leader, the father who schemes to bring about the outcome he wants.

But Tarrant inhabits this story in a way that I’d never imagined. He becomes the mythological story of the Buddha’s life, rendering it in an imaginative and beautiful prose that had me believing all along. Not in the way we believe a factual story but in the deeper way we believe a myth. He changes things as he wishes, just to spin a better tale, flipping genders, saying that Siddhartha saw the four signs before marrying Yasodhara and before Rahula was born, taking minor characters who played small roles and giving them their due (he calls the milkmaid the muse of the meditation story), even seeing Mara not as a personification of evil but as a lonely spirit who wants attention. And when he gets to the moment that most Western biographers consider the starting point, when the Buddha has his enlightenment and is ready to teach, he drops the story altogether. “That’s another story, for another time.” The Buddha’s life up to his enlightenment is front and center. And it reads like an adventure you’ve never heard before.

Around the narrative, Tarrant included chapters that muse on the narrative. He admits that two fundamental attitudes toward meditation conflict: one of “disbelief in the products of the mind, of throwing thoughts, feelings, views, overboard” versus one that believes stories can be gateways that take us deeper into the mystery. These attitudes reflect a fundamental disagreement: One side says that no stories are fundamentally true, that no story can duplicate even a moment of reality, and the other realizes that human beings are storytelling animals; get two humans together and they start telling stories. 

But Tarrant thinks that various moments in the Buddha’s story, any number of moments, function as koans, stories we can ponder and meditate on, also that different moments in the Buddha’s life will come up at different moments in ours, and that we might react in various ways. The fact that the Buddha left home right after his son was born, for instance, bothered Tarrant, and kept him from Buddhist practice for years, though personal experiences brought him back. Eventually, he reacted to a similar moment in his own life in a completely different way: When he began to lead retreats, he took his young daughter along (though that had its problems, too, and once, she wailed in the bulkhead bassinet across the Pacific).

Moments in the Buddha’s story, any number of moments, function as koans, stories we can ponder.

The Buddha’s home-leaving was a key moment for me as well. I never believed he had gone through his whole young manhood without seeing an old or sick person. But I could understand why, just after his son was born, he could have a sudden feeling of impermanence. I vividly remember the feeling of holding my newborn son and knowing two things simultaneously: that I would do anything I could to prevent him from harm and that, ultimately, there was no way I could do that. I had an overwhelming feeling of how fragile life is, the kind of feeling that leads to spiritual questioning. Most of us make some adjustments and deal with the situation (I put up with panic attacks for a while). The Buddha somehow couldn’t do that. He had to go out and face those questions (and, of course, he was leaving his son in a situation where he had a vast extended family and many servants).

Tarrant’s final chapter takes storytelling one step further, into the koan tradition he has been writing about for years, and teaching in the Pacific Zen Institute he helped found. He includes some koans from the Gateless Gate, newly translated by him and his colleague Joan Sutherland (who has also written insightfully about the koan tradition). He also includes the moment when the Buddha saw the morning star and realized that all beings had attained the way in that moment. There’s a koan for you.

The book is filled with exquisite artwork from a variety of traditions. It reads like the wisdom of a longtime practitioner summing up all he has learned. I’m not saying it’s a final testament, but it is wisdom born of age (I can say that because Tarrant is a year younger than I). You may think you’ve read the story of the Buddha’s life and know how it informs your practice. You may think you know what koan practice is and how it fits into the history of Buddhism. You nevertheless need to read this book. It shows you the story in a whole new way. It’s a stunner.