He Wore a Special Bra

The Buddha: An Alternative Narrative of his Life and Teaching by Mukunda Rao.  Harper Element.  192 pp. $14.99  ***?

I agree with the basic premise of this book.  The Buddha’s life is exemplary, not strictly factual, and we can fill it in any way we want.  (Thich Nhat Hanh, to mention one more “biographer,” created a much larger story.)  Mukunda Rao is knowledgeable about religion and spiritual practice, and has some interesting things to say about both.  He focuses on the body, a bias which I share.  But by the time we finish this book we have the feeling that he was really writing a biography of U.G. Krishnamurti, the subject of three other books that he has published.  He just dropped the details into the story of the Buddha.

U.G. is the man I think of as the “other” Krishnamurti; it’s as if he’s J. Krishnamurti’s evil cousin (the two men met, but were not related).  But while J. Krishnamurti sometimes got a little grouchy as he got older, perhaps because he kept saying the same thing again and again and nobody got it—as if he were talking to an overgrown moron called The Human Race and the guy just kept looking at him with a dull expression on his face, drooling a little—U. G. Krishnamurti seemed to become grouchy at the moment of enlightenment.  He had a spiritually transformative experience and came out of it saying, Get away from me, I have nothing to talk about, there’s no message, it’s all a lot of horseshit.  In a way other spiritual teachers had similar reactions.  But no one with as much vehemence as U.G.[1]

I was glad that Rao did away with a number of the details of the early years.  Apparently the Buddha came from a well-off family, was sheltered from many of the exigencies of life, had some extreme experience of impermanence right after his first son was born and decided he had to leave his family, wandered among spiritual practitioners for a number of years, trying one thing and another.  All of that makes perfect sense, including the story that he learned to go into very deep states of meditation but believed they weren’t what he was looking for.  It was after he went too far in an ascetic direction that he decided to do something more moderate, and then made the discovery that would answer his questions and lead to his teaching.

Rao has a theory that everyone who becomes enlightened has some kind of near death experience.  He cites Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo’s the Mother, and U.G. himself; he could have mentioned various other people, including Eckhart Tolle, whose awakening was preceded by a dark night.  Weirdly enough, though, instead of mentioning that the Buddha nearly died from his ascetic practices, Ray regard his near-death experience as the meditative experience that came before that, when he was young and sat under a tree in a field and experienced a feeling of peace.  That was an important moment, but it hardly sounds near death.  Rao then says—rightly, I think—that we don’t really know what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.  There are teachings, but they don’t describe an actual experience.

Rao believes that enlightenment involves a physical change.  It’s not something that happens just to the mind; it happens to the body.  Again, he cites the Mother, Ramana Maharshi, U.G. Krishnamurti (he could just as easily have mentioned J. Krishnamurti, who went through something that he called The Process for much of his life, also involving severe physical pain).  He gives the most space to U.G., perhaps because he knows his teaching the best.  Here is how he describes that physical transformation.

“His skin turned soft, and when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm, it produced a sort of ash.  His eyes stopped blinking and his senses started functioning at the peak of their sensitivity.  He developed a female breast on his left side.  And the hitherto dormant ductless glands such as the thymus, pituitary and pineal, referred to as chakras in kundalini yoga, were reactivated.  On the eighth day, he ‘died.’”

Rao goes into much more detail about this “death,” which lasted for “about” 48 minutes (?).  Supposedly his heartbeat slowed down and his hands and feet grew cold.  “All thoughts, all experiences undergone by humanity from primordial times, whether good or bad, blissful or miserable, mystical or commonplace—the whole ‘collective consciousness’—were flushed out of his system.  He . . . was reborn in the state of ‘undivided consciousness’, untouched by thought.  It was a most profound journey and a sudden great leap into the state of primordial awareness without primitivism[2]’.”  U.G. preferred to call this the natural state, rather than enlightenment.

I make it a practice not to contradict someone who says something or other happened to them.  If someone tells me they had an enlightenment experience, or they saw the truth of all things, or they had an experience of God, I don’t sell all I have and give the guy the proceeds, but I don’t say No that didn’t happen to you.  In this case, however, I’m biting my tongue to keep from contradicting the man or bursting into laughter.  Especially that part about the left breast.  What was that all about?

I can see how that might have made him grouchy.  Though it would make auto-eroticism a lot more interesting.

What Rao seems to be saying about all these people is that a physical transformation takes place that wipes away the process of thinking.  They don’t sit around having thoughts the way you and I do.  They can think if they want but otherwise their minds are blank.  That’s what he says happened to the Buddha, and to various other great beings throughout history, including Jesus.  They become a different kind of being.  Their slate is wiped clean.

That is Mukanda Rao’s central thesis, which contradicts my experience (hardly a reason not to believe it) but also contradicts a number of teachers—including the great Kosho Uchiyama—who say that no such thing ever happens, and that hoping for such a thing, or waiting for it, ruins the act of meditation and makes it just like any other human activity.  You’re sitting there wanting things to be other than they are.  You’ve turned spiritual practice into suffering.

Rao continues with a number of other chapters with such titles as “Is there a Middle Path?”  “Where is the Mind Located?”  “Is there a Soul?” but his answers to those questions, though interesting, all seem speculative.  By the end of the book he’s completely reductive, seeming to say that there’s no validity in religion or any spiritual path whatsoever; his final chapter, entitled “The Way,” takes incoherence to a new level.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to re-interpret the life of the Buddha.  But you don’t need to turn it into a life of U.G. Krishnamurti.

[1] If I may refer to him thus informally.  I have no idea what these letters stand for.

[2] This final phrase, though it sounds deep, is also rather vague.  What the hell is primordial awareness with primitivism?