An ogress becomes a goddess

Hariti with another ogress - Ajanta Cave 2

A woman runs through the streets of Rajagriha in the dead of the night. She is frantic. She is in search of something. She has opened every cradle in the city. She has looked under beds, in granaries, behind the water pots, inside caves. Her hands, which have killed countless little babies, are trembling now like any ordinary mother’s hands.

She is looking for her youngest son. Pingala. Her baby. Her little darling.

After much search and panic, she finds herself standing in front of the Buddha, the Enlightened One.

Buddha smiles at her. “Hariti, the child-eater, what brings you to me, an aging man?”

“I lost my son Pingala.” Hariti sobs.

“How many women in this city have lost their little darlings because of you?” Buddha asks.

Hariti was an ogress. Children were her food. She had hundreds of children of her own and she needed a lot of food to feed them all. Her children ate the flesh of other little children. They drank the other children’s blood.

“Have you understood the pain of losing a child?” Buddha asks.

Hariti nods. The Buddha’s very proximity has made her feel some sort of tenderness within her.  A touch of the Buddha transforms you, she has heard.

“Touch me, the Enlightened One, and heal me,” she prays with folded hands and shut eyes.

The Buddha hugs her gently. “Your Pingala is here with me,” he tells her. “Take him and live happily.”

Buddha asks her to collect pomegranates from the orchard and feed her children with them.

Soon, Hariti becomes a protector of all children in Rajagriha.

Later, she became a Buddhist goddess of children and fertility.

***

I read about Hariti in a Malayalam weekly this morning. The first thought that struck me is that the Buddha didn’t go and preach morality or ethics to Hariti. Instead, he took away her infant and gave her an experience of what it means to lose your beloved child.

Who could do something similar to Donald Trump, Valdimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Mojtaba Khamenei of Iran? Their decisions and actions have killed thousands of children. Children, real children, are feeding the blood lust of these men. That’s the Hariti Act: keep our own table full while the arithmetic of other people’s grief is drowned in grandiloquence.

Is a Buddha possible today with his healing touch?

We are building ostentatious temples for our gods. If only any of those gods could touch our hearts!

A temple was built for Hariti too some time in the interval between the Buddha and our memories of him.

A temple for an ogress, a yakshini. Scandalous? No, perhaps, that’s the whole point of the story. The transformation of an ogress into a goddess.

Why don’t such miracles occur anymore?