The last night
A question, before any of this
What would you want to have said?
Ten weeks ago this course opened with a young man riding out of a city, seeing three things by the road, and walking out of his entire life. This week he is eighty years old, lying on his right side between two trees, and there are perhaps six hours left.
What he does with them is the last thing this course has to show you, and it is not what you would guess. He does not gather his closest disciples for a final secret. He does not settle accounts or name a successor. He gives an instruction about sweeping a floor, he loses an argument with a crowd of grieving townspeople, and he spends a meaningful part of his last night on a stranger from a rival school who has turned up wanting to ask a question.
The storyTwo chapters — read both, in order
Nirvāṇa (II)
A last meal, two rivers, a final bath, and a couch set out between the twin trees.
Read it →The Great Final Nirvāṇa (I)
An old man from another school arrives at the worst possible moment and will not be turned away.
Read it →Come back when you have finished both.
Three momentsPlaces worth stopping
1 · He arranges it himself
"He instructed Ānanda: 'Between those twin trees over there, sweep and cleanse the ground thoroughly, and set out a rope-strung couch for me. This very night, at its middle watch, I shall enter final nirvāṇa.'"
"The Tathāgata went to the rope-strung couch and lay down upon it, his head to the north, on his right side, resting his head upon his own hand with his feet placed one upon the other, just as a lion-king reclines — his very last body, having now finished with suffering, lying down there this once, never to rise again."
Read the instruction again and notice how domestic it is. Sweep the ground. Set out a couch. He is arranging a room. A man who knows he will die tonight spends some of his remaining attention on whether the floor is clean.
And then the details of how he lies down, which the poem records with the care of someone who was there: head to the north. On his right side. One hand under his head. Feet one on top of the other. East Asian Buddhism has depicted this exact posture for fifteen centuries — in every reclining Buddha you have ever seen in a photograph, you are looking at these four clauses.
There is no drama in it and nothing supernatural. An extremely old man bathes in a river, has somebody tidy a patch of ground, and lies down carefully on his side.
2 · He makes the argument, and it does not work
"…men and women rushed out at once, weeping and crying aloud as they made their way to the Buddha, their clothes disheveled, their hair unbound, their bodies covered in dust and streaming with sweat… and, weeping, bowed at the Buddha's feet, their bodies wasted with grief and sorrow."
"The Tathāgata comforted them, saying: 'Do not let yourselves waste away in grief — this is a moment that calls, rather, for shared rejoicing; it is not fitting to give way to sorrow now. What I have planned across such long ages, I am only now, at last, about to attain… why, then, should you grieve on my account?'"
See this passage in the full chapter →It is a real argument, and from where he is lying it is a sound one. He is about to get the thing he set out for on the night he left his father's house sixty years earlier. Grief, from that angle, is a category error.
And then the poem tells you exactly what his argument achieved:
"The Mallas, hearing the Buddha speak of entering this great and final stillness, felt their own minds thrown into confusion, their eyes darkened as though beholding a vast and impenetrable darkness."
See this passage in the full chapter →It fails. He tells a crowd of people not to grieve, and they are plunged into darkness.
You have seen this poem do this once already. In Session 2 it printed the objections of a whole city and refused to answer them. Here it lets the Buddha give the best consolation available to him and then records, in the very next sentence, that it did not land — and it does not criticise anybody on either side. Not him, for saying it. Not them, for being unable to hear it.
That is an unusual thing for a religious poem to do, and it is one of the reasons this one has survived. It knows that being right is not the same as being of use to a crying person, and it does not pretend otherwise even about its own founder.
3 · Somebody knocks
"Ānanda, his own feelings still raw with grief, and suspecting besides that this might be some attempt at mere philosophical debate, or perhaps even someone secretly pleased at the World-Honored One's coming death, felt it was not fitting to let him see the Buddha."
"The Buddha, knowing that this man's own hope was sincere, and that he was a fit vessel for the true Dharma, said to Ānanda: 'Let this follower of another path come forward — I remain here for the sake of delivering the living; do not create any obstacle for him.'"
See this passage in the full chapter →An old man — a wandering ascetic of a rival school, who has spent his life on a philosophy he is beginning to doubt — hears that the Buddha is dying tonight and comes to the grove. He wants to ask one question. He knows exactly what he is asking for: "an encounter such as this can hardly be met with again… the sun of the Buddha is about to set its own light — I beg you to let me see him, if only for a moment."
And Ānanda says no — for three reasons, every one of which is entirely reasonable. He is grieving. He suspects the man wants an argument. He suspects the man may be enjoying this. Anyone who has ever stood at a door protecting someone they love from one more visitor has had all three thoughts in the same five seconds.
The Buddha overrules him in a single sentence, and the sentence is the last thing this course has to give you: I remain here for the sake of delivering the living; do not create any obstacle for him.
Subhadra's own opening line is worth noticing too, after nine weeks of stories about people who could not stop competing: "I ask this not for the sake of mere debate, nor with any wish to win or lose an argument." The craftsman and the painter could not have said that. The husband with his cake could not have said it. The lion with the woodpecker in his mouth could not have said it. This is an old man, on somebody else's last night, arriving with nothing to win.
He gets his answer, takes it, and dies before the Buddha does.
One thing to tryThis week · one sentence · out loud
The question this session opened with is not rhetorical, and it has an unfussy answer.
Then say it this week. Out loud, or written and sent. Not arranged into a conversation, not saved for the right moment, not prefaced. The right moment is a device for postponement and everyone knows it.
It does not have to be large. The last hours in this story were spent on a floor being swept, a failed attempt to comfort some neighbours, and a stranger's question. None of that is momentous. All of it got done.
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
You have read ten stories. Which one is still in the room?
Not the one you thought was best, and not the one with the most obvious lesson — the one that has kept turning up when you were doing something else. That is the only measurement that has ever mattered for a story, and it is entirely outside anyone's control, including yours. Whichever one it is, it chose you rather than the reverse, and it is worth asking what it wants.
- A young man rides out of a city and sees three things everyone has already seen.
- A father cannot think what to call his own son, and a city says out loud that the son abandoned his wife.
- A craftsman and a painter deceive each other beautifully, and both walk out of their lives at dawn.
- A husband wins a bet about a cake, cleanly, by rules both parties agreed.
- A mother weeps for one son and can say exactly why.
- A man pays a fortune for fourteen paces and finds out that night what they were worth.
- A turtle, a woman, an enemy and some moths are pulled out of a flood, and only one of them matters.
- A lion floats out of a well, and another lion loses an eye.
- A bell on a door rings for years and then, once, in the wrong place entirely.
- An old man lies down between two trees, loses an argument, and lets one more stranger in.
The door is the first room, not the house.
Everything in this course has been story. If you want to know what the man in them actually taught, the Academy's next course is built for exactly the person who has just finished this one — Read a Whole Sūtra hands you eight short scriptures and asks you to read each one from the first line to the last. Its fifth session is this same night, told by a different text, in the Buddha's own words rather than a poet's. And the whole five-layer path is laid out if you want to see what comes after that.