Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [154]
The maidens did as ordered. They played, danced, and sang. They “served him at table and made him company all day.” And still the son refused to be moved to “any act of self-indulgence” and continued to lead a virtuous life and retain his singular innocence. “I tell you,” Marco says, “that he was so delicate a young man that he had never gone out of the palace of his father in his youth nor had ever seen a dead man nor any other who was not sound in his limbs, for the father let no old and no decrepit man go before him.” That state of innocence could not endure.
“Now it happened that this young man, having leave of his father to go out with a very fine company, was riding one day along the road through the city and then he saw a dead man whom they were carrying to bury, and he had many people following. He became all dismayed at it. So he asked immediately of those who were with him what thing it was, and they told him it was a dead man.
“‘What?’ said the son of the king. ‘Do all men die?’
“‘Yes, truly,’ they said.
“Then the young man said nothing and rode on very thoughtful. After this, he had not ridden far before he found a very old man bent down with age who could not walk and had no teeth in [his] mouth, but had lost them all through great old age…. The youth said, ‘How from youths do they become old and bent like this?’ To whom the servants answered, ‘Sir, all those who live long in this world must become old like this man and then die.’ And then, when the son of the king had well understood about the dead and about the old, he went back to his palace frightened and all astonished.”
Marco recounts this story with more conviction and precision than he brought to other spiritual episodes. Of all the legends he heard during his travels, the story of the young son’s response to the death and decay of the world around him had the greatest resonance. He continues: “He went off to the mountains very great and out of the way seeking still the rough and wildest places and stayed there all the days of his life very uprightly and chastely, and led a hard life, living on roots and herbs and wild fruits and made very great abstinence, just as if he had been a Christian.”
For Marco, this account of the privileged young son’s life marked the point of contact between East and West, between the Christian faith and the Buddhist worldview. More than that, it prompted him to dare to elevate the central Buddhist system to the same level as Christianity, as heretical as that idea would seem in Venice. Nevertheless, he hammers the point home: “For truly, if he had been Christian he would have been a great saint with our Lord Jesus Christ for the good life and pure that he led.”
Marco pauses, and then brings the story to its conclusion: “When this son of the king died, he was carried to the king, his father. When he saw him dead, whom he loved more than himself, there was no need to ask if he has vexation and grief; he almost went out of his senses. He made great mourning, with bitter lamentation of all the people. Then he had an image made in his likeness all of gold and precious stones and made it honored by those of the land with the greatest reverence and worshipped as their god.”
A change in the narrative’s pitch signals that although Marco was willing to embrace the Buddha, he remained skeptical concerning the doctrine of reincarnation: “They said that he was God, and they say it still, and also that he was dead for eighty-four times; for they say that when he died the first time that he became a man, and then he revived and became an ox, and revived and became a horse, and thence an ass, and so they