I have started tryingto write a kind of semi-dystopian clifi sort of story based on a version of the life of the buddha and the few generation immediatly following him premised around the conceit that the religion actually started as a hunger strike.
I would love suggestions about how to expand on the idea, things that could be worked in that either highlighted Buddhist stile teachings, explored connections between Buddhist ideas and Marxist ones, gave more feeling for ancient India in the era immediately prior to and during the Chandraguptas, and also anything that might make it genuinely weird, like space age technology, or other moons, or really anything to make it clear that we are we are reading a fiction in an imaginary world where climate change, political change and other changes might influence peoples thinking and actions.
Here is the draft and outline:
- Gotoma led the hunger strike.
Within a year dozens had joined.
They would say:
All beings are sustained by food, this one gives up killing, gives up seeking food, taking only food that is given freely, not hungering for anything in the world not freely given.
They would leave the village and live in the wilds.
Some starved and died before finding peace but many, aloof from village life, hidden from the sensual, taking care with the senses and taking care with the mind, thinking joyous thoughts not connected with sensuality, their minds become joyous and their flesh become pleasant.
This they called the first insight.
With the ceasing of thoughts their minds remained joyous and their flesh remained pleasant, this they called the second insight.
With the calming of joy, their minds having become tranquil, this they called the third insight.
Observing the ceasing of pleasure in the flesh, observing tranquility of the flesh, the mind remaining tranquil, this they called their fourth insight.
The tranquil mind thus liberated from village life, thus liberated from hunger, thus liberated from the flesh, from pleasure and pain, from joy and sorrow, from thinking and sensing, that mind the whole truth can see.
For that mind, liberated from the flesh, for such a one, the starvation and death of the flesh is of no consequence.
Thus has this one heard.
- A hundred years later many, saying they understood, took the knife, but the old ones taught them the breath mediation.
This ones grandmothers grandmother told her that those who had taken the knife did so sunken in confusion. This ones grandmothers grandmother saw the buddha when she was a girl. This ones grandmother told this one.
Grandmother said that the true teaching was already lost when the strikers began to take the knife, and the old ones who taught the breath where simply trying to help the ones falling to the knife.
- Grandmother said that in the early days many died and willingly, not being fed.
Grandmother said that the Brahmins would refuse them saying “Black scum.”
Those first ones, some of them remained in seclusion and did not return to this world.
Sometimes the ones remaining in the village would embower those remains and venerate those places, saying they were holy, and would make offering there.
- Within a few seasons Gotoma was meeting with the ruler Ajatasattu.
Then Brahmins fed those gone forth.
The Brahmins would ask those gone forth questions and venerate them.
Those gone forth wandered far and wide, giving the instruction, living in the wilds.
Years passed.
- Gotoma liberated from the flesh left the flesh behind.
Grandmothers Grandmother remembered.
- Grandmother said they would teach the rules in the dormitory but that one could not find seclusion in the dormitory.
Grandfather would laugh aloud when Grandmother would say that.
- Now they are carving a stone.
Ashoka venerates the strikers and the strike and the one who led the way.
- This one lives high in the deep valley secluded from the village.
Grandmother and Grandfather left the village long ago.
When it was mostly the families of the first strikers, the supporters.
Grandfather could not find seclusion in the dormitory.
So they lived outside the village, in the lower valley, diverting the water, growing rice.
Father met mother in the lower valley.
Mother and Father came here when I was small.
Father carried Grandmother on his back.
Grandfather had passed.
Grandmother said he understood, much more than the dormitory ones in the village.
‘We need not make a bower.’
- Grandmother said her grandmother understood completely, was one gone thus.
Father died in mothers arms and mother died in this ones arms.
Years ago now.
Now this one walks down through the lower valley to the village four times a year.
This one walks back through the lower valley to the high cleft and the thatched roofs by the stone caves four times a year.
9.(something about how this is being carved in brahmi in the caves to tell the true story of the strike, contrasting with the ashoka carving that does not tell what really happened.)
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The story Grandmother told me (her grandmothers story)
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Grandmothers sory (this one tells the story of Grandmother and Grandfather meeting in the monastery and running away to live on a farm outside the village.
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This ones story, of having to flee the farm, moving up to the high cleft of the valley, discovering the caves, The passing of Mother and Father.
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This ones story now. Old age, the village these days, the farmlands these days, living on the mountainside, keeping goats, deciding to carve the stories in the caves.
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Last words.
Feedback much appreciated! remember I am trying to write a cli-fi fiction based on a version of the second indian urbanization where the sakyans started a hunger strike in a period of food-insecurity caused by Bimbisara and Ajatsutta’s military expansion, so keep it on topic, i.e no "rewrite your whole story because that’s not what the real buddha said/did etc. it fiction!
Metta.