The Buddha’s Birth:
Ajahn Jayasāro Reads Grevel Lindop
by Grevel Lindop and Ajahn Jayasāro | June 7, 2020
‘Great sage, as the planets bring
In the circle of time what is old again to light,
It seems we live in days of legend. Tonight
My son sleeps in a room across this court,
Yet into our mere human house was brought,
It seems, in the hands of gods. Ten months ago,
Maya, our queen, as often, went to bestow
Gifts and alms on the poor and the Brahmin priests
And other ascetics—for no banquet feasts
Her heart so much as giving of good gifts,
Above all when the moon’s energy lifts
Such acts in power. It was a full-moon day,
As now. Returned in the noon heat, she lay
To rest, silk-shaded in an upper room
But cooled more richly by those webs the loom
Of dreams throws round the sleep of innocent minds:
For with that sudden heart-leap that unbinds
The playful spirit from the heaped body’s trance,
She found herself pillowed, lifted at once
Dizzyingly high over a diamond-range
Of our cragged, needled Himalaya…
