#17 MAYA AND LAO TZU
Tradition tells us that Buddha and Lao Tzu lived as contemporaries; together they made an outstanding contribution to the world and to Asia in particular. The lives of Buddha’s mother, Maya, and his father were aspects of Mary and St Germain while the life of the gentle philosopher Lao Tzu was one of St Germain’s outstanding lives.
According to legend, Maya, the mother of Gautama Buddha, died of joy after giving birth to him in 563BC. It was a time of the showering of stars, of great bursts of enlightenment when prophets and sages were born. Mahavira and Buddha (Lord Sananda), the founders of Jainism and Buddhism respectively, were born in India. Whereas Lao-Tze (St Germain) and Confucius (El Moyra), the founders of Daoism and Confucianism, were born in China. But the prophets of Judaism: Jeremiah and Zachariah were born in the Middle East. All these prophets of religion were born within fifty years of each other. While in Greece, Socrates (Kuthumi) and Plato (St Germain), the fathers of western philosophy and Aeschylus,(St Germain) a philosophical playwright, were also born (525BC). Aeschylus’ form of tragedy was a new kind of ritual performed at a religious festival which questioned the Greek religious beliefs.
There are legends which bring some of these great ones together. Confucius’ meeting with Lao Tzu is quite well detailed, while Lao Tzu’s meeting with the Buddha is commemorated in drawings and paintings which seem more ethereal and ultimately more divine. These lives have true mythic proportions, important in the founding of two great religions and complex systems of thought. Mary, in agony, will birth the Buddha while St Germain will gently birth a philosophy.
Maya and Shuddhodana
According to tradition, Maya or Queen Mahamaya was the perfect woman to conceive a Buddha; she was devout, calm but not passionate and she did not drink alcohol. Shuddhodana, his father, was the king of a province called Kapilavstu at the foot of the Himalayas. Shuddhodana is described in legends as a man of the world and a member of the proud Shakya or Lion tribe. We can assume he was everything Maya was not. The stories around their son’s birth, the Buddha, are fantastical; miracles abound and two familiar events of other great births occur: a great light appears in the sky and foreign kings come to adore their son.
His mother, Maya, had dreamt that her soon-to-be-born child appeared to her as a white elephant carrying a white lotus in his trunk. Both these symbols signified to her that he too would be an enlightened one. In her dream, the white elephant approaches her, touches her right side with his trunk and in this way the Buddha enters her to be born from her right side. Maya had carried the Buddha during a ten month pregnancy and sensing his imminent birth travelled to her mother’s place to confine there. Passing through a beautiful grove of flowers and fruit trees, she decided to camp there. When birth pangs started she grasped one of the branches of a flowering tree and delivered her son, whom she named Siddhartha, meaning from “her side where he had entered her”. Maya gave birth with no pain. After birth, her son immediately stood up and took seven steps. Present during his birth were the Hindu Gods of Indra and Brahma. Seven days later, tradition says, Maya died leaving her sister to raise her son while she joined the gods. The legend of Maya, according to the Gatekeeper, could not be further from the truth.
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“Maya is often shown as a beautiful woman. What does Maya look like, Gatekeeper?”
“She’s a small woman, barely five foot … no … only four foot ten who is almost perfectly formed. Maya has a very round face and skull, just like a Nepalese which she was, of course. She is slightly almond-eyed, with a small nose and a rosebud of a mouth. Maya, when she walked, moved like a cat without a sound and with a cat’s fluidity. She had a very soft voice, so much so you had to strain your ears to hear her. Maya was very independent and made her views known within the bounds of royal protocol. She held herself very erect as person of great dignity would; she was pious and most meticulous in dispatching her royal duties. She came from a long line of Brahmin tribes who practiced a form of animalistic Hinduism. Maya was very much a genetic throw-back to her Nepalese Ghurkha ancestors with the innate bravery of that race and their impish humour.”
“Maya is venerated as the perfect mother. Was she?”
“She was very quick tempered, sometimes unjust, a bit neglectful. She was human, not a god.”
“As a mother, how did she influence her son?”
“Maya would never lose her temper in her interactions with her son which was a great influence on the young Buddha. Her calmness, her measured tones, her controlled emotion co-existed with an absence of anger. Like Mary, she was not submissive to the Buddha’s father and while she lived, she was the dominant parent.”
“In our legend she died at Buddha’s birth and, therefore, didn’t influence him at all. That is, however, at odds with the special veneration with which she is held in Buddhist countries and it implies she lived after his birth.”
“Buddha’s father’s senior wife died as Buddha was being born and his mother immediately became the senior wife. She will die eight years later. This confusion gave rise to the stories that Maya died at his birth.”
“Was Buddha’s birth unusual like Jeshua’s?”
“But of course. There was the same star, there were plenty of astrological portents to be read if you were able to read them and there was the same massing of the three planets which occurred over his birthplace.
Astrologers journeyed to witness his birth from Babylon, from China, and one from Sri Lanka. They had been told to follow a particular constellation in the night sky to a set location which they would know when they got there. And they took gifts as one should to the birth of a great king.”
“Buddha is said to have been born from Maya’s side, which suggests to me that he was born by caesarean. How could a woman live through a caesarean in 500BC? Was it possible?”
“Of course. Maya was cut open, her son was removed then her uterus was sown up and they branded the outside of her flesh with a red hot iron, thereby sealing her flesh to destroy any bacteria.”
“So much for the legend he was born without pain! I hope they gave Maya a form of anaesthetic!”
“Yes, she was given a distillation of opium, a poppy juice … you call it laudanum.”
“What role did his father play?”
“Saint Germain, as Prince Shuddhodana, was not present for the birth. He assumed that all the visitors had merely come to give him homage so he was away feasting with his cronies. He was a hopeless father being nothing more than a sperm donor and certainly not the loving father as he could be and as we will see as Joseph. Buddha did not have a happy relationship with him but having an ineffective father can teach you more than a loving and effective one. You learn to forgive the carelessness of their parenting and to conquer your resentment and subsequent hurt for loving someone who ignores you. Hence you learn a great deal and so it was with Buddha.”
“Did he live to see his son’s greatness?”
“He lived to see him venerated, but was not interested in what he was doing. It would not be so different now. Buddha, however, had a magnificent tutor who played a significant role in his life. He was a Pandit called Rajmukar, an aspect of Kuthumi who taught the prince to decide things on the evidential nature of the problem presented.”
“Should Maya be remembered merely as a mother or did she make any other contribution?”
“As a mother, Maya had little opportunity to make any contribution. She bore, with her son, all the maltreatment from his father. Hers was a pious life”
“Was this maltreatment physical?”
“Yes, he bashed her but it was also the maltreatment of neglect. It was cutting her off from having a say in the rearing of her son or from being involved in anything of importance. Maya was far more intelligent than the king, but she was condemned to be an intellectual prisoner, almost in solitary confinement. Buddha’s father was an autocrat, a misogynist, which made him impervious to any contribution Maya might want to make. She was, in effect, in purdah.”
“Why did Mary incarnate as Maya? Was that her spiritual challenge?”
“No, but close. It was the bearing of her spiritual disappointment and frustration with equanimity. And this was significant because although she was better intellectually qualified than most at Court, she was not allowed to bear any responsibility for her son. Maya was the silent witness to her masterdom and to that of her son’s.”
“What was her life purpose?”
“To go through the initial gateway and forget about justice and her rights. Which leads to a yet unanswered question? Why are women more spiritually sensitive? Because they have physically and emotionally tougher and harder lives and continually have to compromise their sense of justice allowing them to advance spiritually.”
“Did Mary have any regrets about her life?”
“Maya says she could have been more understanding of her son’s wisdom. She regretted not finding a better way of dealing with her husband’s brutality and she regretted her selfishness and vanity.”
“What qualities of Mary did she bring into this incarnation?”
“Mary’s endurance, intelligence, passive strength, beauty and her love of flowers … her garden was a paradise.”
“What was her cause of death?”
“Maya died of tuberculosis but her broken heart contributed greatly to her death. She was sterile after Buddha’s difficult birth and everyone knew that she was and this increased her sidelining. When Maya died it was the passing of a sad life.”
“How did her son remember her?”
“The Buddha venerated her memory and it became enshrined in the imperfect memory of a young child. He had weightier matters on his mind and to his regret, she faded. But he retained a veneration for what she taught him.” [Litchfield, 2005]
