Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

a j a h n s u c i t t o
7
The Kingdom of the Law
Homage to the Buddha. “Homage to all the Buddhas, the great sages
who have arisen in the world.” Thus ran one of my much-repeated
mantras: the recitation of the names and virtues of the twenty-eight
Buddhas of whom Gotama was the most recent. This chant was supposed
to have a protective influence. At least reciting it while fingering
the twenty-eight-bead mala did cast a benevolent mood around the
mixed bag of mental states and sensory impingement coming my way.
We were leaving Uttar Pradesh and entering Bihar. At the time of the
Buddha the Gandak River was also a boundary—to the west lay the
republic of the Mallas, a vassal state of the powerful kingdom of Kosala;
to the east were the federation of republics known as the Vajjian confederacy.
Shortly after the Buddha’s death, the whole region was
conquered by Ajatasattu, who subsumed it into his kingdom of Magadha,
the heart of what under Ashoka in the third century b.c.e. came to
be the first and greatest Indian empire.
I had woken up cold in the dark with my legs aching from the hard
ground. Orion had gone and my mind was full of mud. In that fuddle
and gloom we lost something most every morning—candles, items of
clothing, whatever. India took them all in exchange for the mud and grit
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