Nagarjuna and his begging bowl

A beautiful story is told about a great mystic, Nagarjuna:

Guru Nagarjuna (Tibetan), who lived around the middle of the seventh century A.D. (not be confused with the founder of the ‘Madhyamika’ philosophy, who bore the same name but lived 500 years earlier.) It was said of him that he had changed an iron mountain into copper, and it was thought that he would have transformed it into gold, if the Bodhisattva Manjusri had not warned him that gold would only cause greed and quarrel among men, instead of helping them, as the Siddha had intended. During Guru’s experiments, it happened that even his iron begging bowl turned into gold.

He was a fakir, but all real seekers loved him. A queen asked him one day to come to the palace, to be a guest in the palace. Nagarjuna went. The queen asked him a favour.

Nagarjuna said, “What do you want?”

The queen said, “I want your begging bowl.”

Nagarjuna gave it — that was the only thing he had — his begging bowl. And the queen brought a golden begging bowl, studded with diamonds, and gave it to Nagarjuna. She said, “Now you keep this. I will worship the begging bowl that you have carried for years — it has some of your feel. It will become my temple. And a man like you should not carry an ordinary iron begging bowl — keep this golden one. I have had it made especially for you.”

It was precious. If Nagarjuna had been an ordinary mystic he would have said, “I cannot touch it. I have renounced the world.” But for him, it was all the same, so he took the bowl.

When he left the palace, a thief saw him. He could not believe his eyes: “A naked man with such a precious thing! How long can he protect it?” So, the thief followed….

Nagarjuna was staying outside the town in a ruined ancient temple — no doors, no windows. It was just a ruin. The thief was very happy: “Soon Nagarjuna will have to go to sleep and there will be no difficulty — I will get the bowl.”

The thief was hiding behind a wall just outside the door — But Nagarjuna, reading the mind of the thief threw the bowl outside the door. The thief could not believe what had happened. Nagarjuna threw it because he had watched the thief coming behind him, and he knew perfectly well that he was not coming for him — he was coming for the bowl, “So why unnecessarily let him wait? Be finished with it so he can go, and I can also rest.”

“Such a precious thing! And Nagarjuna has thrown it so easily.” The thief was so perplexed and ashamed that he entered the Guru’s hut, bowed at his feet, and said, “Respected sir, why did you do this? I came here as a thief. Now that you have thrown away what I desired and made a gift of what I intended to steal, my desire has vanished, and stealing has become senseless and stupid. But you are a rare being — I cannot believe my eyes. Now a great desire has arisen in me. I am wasting my life by being a thief — and there are people like you too? Can I come in and touch your feet?”

Nagarjuna laughed and he said, “Yes, that’s why I threw the bowl outside — so that you could come inside. Whatever I have should be shared with others. Eat and drink and take whatever you like.”

The thief was trapped. The thief came in, touched the feet… and at that moment the thief was very open because he had seen that this man was no ordinary man. He was exposed, open, receptive, grateful, mystified, and stunned. When he touched the feet, for the first time in his life he felt the presence of the divine.

He asked Nagarjuna, “How many lives will it take for me to become like you?”

Nagarjuna said, “How many lives? — it can happen today, it can happen now!”

The thief said, “You must be joking. How can it happen now? I am a thief, a well-known thief The whole town knows me, although they have not yet been able to catch hold of me. Even the king is afraid of me because I have entered and stolen from the treasury. They know it, but they have no proof. I am a master thief — you may not know about me because you are a stranger in these parts. How can I be transformed right now?”

And Nagarjuna said, “If in an old house for centuries there has been darkness and you bring a candle, can the darkness stay, Can the darkness give resistance? Will it make any difference whether the darkness is one day old or millions of years old?”

The thief could see the point: darkness cannot resist light; when light comes, darkness disappears.

Nagarjuna said, “You may have been in darkness for many years — that doesn’t matter — but I can give you a secret, it is better to light a candle than to curse darkness.”

And the thief said, “What about my profession? Have I to leave it?”

Nagarjuna said, “That is for you to decide. I am not concerned with you and your profession I can only give you the secret of how to spark a light within your being, and then it is up to you.”

The thief said, “But whenever I have gone to any saints, they always say, ‘First stop stealing — then only can you be guided.”

The Guru Nagarjuna, however, replied: ‘Whatever I possess should be shared with others. Eat and drink and take whatever you like, so that you need never more steal.’

The thief was so deeply impressed by the generosity and kindness of the Guru, that he asked for his teachings. But Nagarjuna knew that, though the other’s mind was not yet ripe to understand his teachings, his devotion was genuine. He therefore told him:

‘Imagine all things you desire as horns growing on your head (i.e., as unreal, and useless’). [Ref. This phrase has its origin in the well-known Sanskrit metaphor of ‘the horn of a hare’, which is used to indicate unreality.] If you meditate in this way, you will see a light like that of an emerald.’

With these words Nagarjuna poured a heap of jewels into a corner of the room, made the pupil sit down before it, and left him to his meditation.

The former thief threw himself constantly into the practice of meditation, and as his faith was as great as his simplicity, he followed the words of the Guru Nagarjuna literally and lo! - horns began to grow on his head!

At first, he was excited at his success and filled with pride and satisfaction. With time, however, he discovered with horror that the horns continued to grow and finally became so cumbersome that he could not move without knocking against the walls and the things around him. The more he worried the worse it became. Thus, his former pride and ecstasy turned into dejection, and when the Guru Nagarjuna returned after twelve years and asked the pupil how he was fearing, he told Master Nagarjuna that he was very unhappy.

But, Nagarjuna laughed and said, “Just as you have become unhappy through the mere imagination of horns upon your head, in the same way, all living beings destroy their happiness by clinging to their false imaginations and thinking them to be real. All forms of life and all objects of desire are like clouds. But even birth, life and death can have no power over those whose hearts are pure and free from illusions. If you can look on all the possessions of the world as no less unreal, undesirable, and cumbersome than the imagined horns on your head, then you will be free from the cycle of death and rebirth.”

Now the dust from Chela’s (thief’s) eyes, and as he saw the emptiness of all things, his desires and false imaginations vanished- and with them the horns on his head. He attained ‘siddhi’, the perfection of a saint, and later became known as Guru Naga Bodhi, successor of Nagarjuna.

To obtain miraculous powers -according to the Buddhist scriptures has been called siddhi, a power that is equally effective in the spiritual as in the material world. Tibetan tradition has preserved for us the life stories, legends, and teachings of a great number of mystics, who obtained those miraculous powers and who were therefore called ‘Siddhas’ (Tibetan: grub-throb). In the symbolic language of the Siddhas experiences of meditation are transformed into external events, inner attainments into visible miracles and similes into factual, quasi-historical events. If, for instance, it is said of certain Siddhas that they stopped the sun and the moon in their course, or that they crossed the Ganges by holding up its flow, then this has nothing to do with the heavenly bodies or the sacred river of India, but with the ‘solar’ and ‘lunar’ currents of psychic energy, and their unification and sublimation in the body of the Yogin, etc. In a similar way alchemistic terminology of the Siddhas and their search for the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ and the ‘Elixir of Life’.

Another Siddha, whose name is associated with Nagarjuna, is the Brahmin Vyali. Like Nagarjuna, he was an ardent alchemist who tried to find the Elixir of Life (amrita). He spent his entire fortune in unsuccessful experiments with all sorts of expensive chemicals and finally became so disgusted that he threw his formula book into the Ganges and left the place of his fruitless work as a beggar.

But it happened that when he came to another city farther down the Ganges, a courtesan, who was taking a bath in the river, picked up the book and brought it to him. This revived his old passion, and he took up his work again, while the courtesan supplied him with the means of livelihood.  But his experiments were as unsuccessful as before, until one day the courtesan, while preparing his food, by chance dropped the juice of some spice into the alchemist’s mixture- and lo! - what the learned Brahmin had not been able to achieve in fourteen years of hard work, had been accomplished by the hands of an ignorant low-caste woman!

The symbolic character of the story is plain. The essence of life and nature, the secret of immortality, cannot be found by dry intellectual work and selfish desire, but only by the touch of undiluted life: in the spontaneity of intuition.

The story then goes on to tell, not without humour, how the Brahmin, who spiritually was not prepared for this unexpected gift of luck, fled with his treasure into solitude, because he did not like to share it with anyone or to let others know about the secret. He settled on the top of an inaccessible rock which rose during a terrible swamp or marsh.

There he sat with his Elixir of Life, a prisoner of his selfishness – not unlike Fafner, the giant of Nordic mythology, who became a dragon to guard the treasure, for which he had slain his brother after they had won it from the gods!

But Nagarjuna, who was filled with the ideals of Bodhisattva, wanted to acquire the knowledge of his precious elixir for the benefit of all who were ripe for it. Through the excretion of his magic power, he succeeded in finding the hermit and in persuading him to part with the secret.

The details of this story can be found in the Tibetan manuscript, in which the story is preserved, mentioning mercury as one of the most important substances used in the experiments of the Brahmin. This proves the connection with the ancient alchemist tradition of Egypt and Greece, which held that mercury was closely related to the ‘prima materia’. But what was meant in this case was not the metal but ‘the mercury of the philosophers’, which was the essence or soul of mercury, freed from the four Aristotelian elements, earth, water, fire and air. To the Buddhist these four elements are mahabhuta, and are well known as the solid, the liquid and the gaseous, and the radiating principle; in other words, the qualities of inertia, cohesion, radiation, and vibration, as the characteristics of the four aggregation in which the material world appears to us.A