Father's Day: Buddha as Father and Husband

Dhr. Seven and Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly, PasaDharma Zen Group

Burmese depiction of royal Shakyan scene: Rahula asks for his inheritance (wikipedia.org)

   

How can a parent best help her or his child? This question came up for the Buddha, who returned to his native Kapilavastu seven years after gaining enlightenment and establishing a Sangha.

His former wife, Yasodhara, who had been left with all the palace riches and their son, Rahula, bid that boy to ask his father for his inheritance.

The boy was being well taken care of financially, surrounded by family and being groomed by the Buddha's father, Suddhodana, to become king, just as Siddhartha was meant to.

   

Rahula, the Buddha, and fellow Shakyan Ananda

The Buddha considered his son's request and realized that the only real and lasting inheritance worthy of being given to his son -- or any family member as so many of the Sakyan women later found -- was the immeasurable inheritance of the Dharma. The Buddha instructed Sariputra to ordain the 7 year old Rahula. So the son went with his father.

Yasodhara was not forgotten; she eventually became a nun and got her inheritance. King Suddhodana was deeply aggrieved and requested that from then on no child be ordained without the parent's permission -- an odd request since, technically, the Buddha was his father. [But a rule was established that no one under seven can be made a novice, and no one under 20 can receive full ordination, without parental permission.]

  

Rahula, Siddhartha and Yasodhara's son

His father the king is said to have been guided by the Buddha to a noble attainment before his passing. The Buddha's foster mother, Maha Pajapati, became the world's first Buddhist nun.

   

The Shakyan Kingdom, with its capital at Kapilavastu, was not so lucky. (Did the Buddha foresee that long in advance?) Like the world we live in, which is for crossing over not building on, it was destroyed and many of those who did not join the Sangha met with karmic catastrophe as a rival neighboring clan invaded to avenge a dishonor meted out by the Shakyas.

  

Shakyamuni and those who renounced were spared that tragic part of the vicious cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, war for territory and loss through war for territory. The tragedy was rooted, it is said, in a mysterious case of group karma stemming from an act many lives before (the poisoning of fish in a river). On account of that former deed, no one was "fated" to experience the result, as those who joined the Sangha demonstrate.

   

But actions (karma) play themselves out when and if they can, which is often so long after that we cannot connect and learn from them in any obvious way. Groups who share karma have a strong tendency and affinity for being reborn together again and again, not as a necessity. It is just karma working itself out in mysterious ways.

  

Given these facts, what more could the Buddha have done for his son -- and his wife, his father, his mother, his childhood friends and relatives -- than give them the immeasurable gift of the Dharma? What more can any parent or child do for family?

(Kim Jung-hyo and Lee Jung-a/Yonhap News/Zen Mirror)

    

But is it fair to introduce kids to the Dharma, to ask them to take robes even temporarily, to shave their heads? Just look at the misery on these Zen children's faces.
   
They were ordained and still got to play. What a loving parent would do for an only child, that the Buddha advised us to do for all living beings -- if we would be happy now and in the future.