“It is not iron that imprisons you

Nor rope nor wood,

But the pleasure you take in gold and jewels,

In sons and wives.

Soft fetters,

Yet they hold you down.

Can you snap them?” -Dhammapada

Whenever I read about someone, I always look for that little anecdote that may seem inconsequential or even silly to others but for me illuminates the whole of their character in a sudden flash of incandescent insight. Standard biographies of Roman general Lucullus may duly note his military conquests in the East, for instance, or the fact that he turned to a life of excessive consumption after jealous rivals back home blocked his triumph and forced him into an early retirement. Plutarch, though, tells us that when Lucullus’ servant heard one day that he would be having no guests and thus only served him a simple meal, the general immediately complained, “But Lucullus is dining with Lucullus today!” There, in just a single line, you have the decadent solipsism of not only Lucullus but the whole governing class of Rome in the dying days of the Republic.

I recently had a similar insight into Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the man who is better known to the world as the Buddha or Awakened One, the founder of Buddhism. Of course, I have read about Buddhism and heard various stories about his life for many years, but it wasn’t until I discovered that he named his son Rahula that I felt the mask of historical personage that enveloped him fall away, revealing the frail nakedness of the man beneath. For Rahula, in the dialect of Sanskrit Siddhartha would have spoken, means “fetter.” Some have interpreted the name otherwise, claiming it to be a reference to the mythological snake Rahu who is said to cause eclipses of the moon, however this is a spurious conclusion suggested not by the facts but a desire to portray the Buddha as charitably as possible. The reality is that the Buddha most likely regarded his newborn son not with wonder and affection but fear and resentment. The helpless boy, grasping at his mother’s breast in the first few days after his birth, was a ball and chain.

In a greater sense, this name is in keeping with samsara, the idea within Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other Asian religions that the universe is an endless circle of rebirth in which we are all trapped. The birth of a child not only bound Siddhartha more tightly to his wife and family but was an inescapable demonstration that he was an active participant within this cycle, that he was now part of the flow of flesh and blood that animated the world. Just as a child seals the parents together for the rest of their lives, so the birth of Rahula connected Siddhartha more tightly to the world he had come to regard with a weary eye. Thus the boy was the latest and perhaps greatest impediment yet to what Siddhartha increasingly hoped to achieve, liberation from samsara. Indeed, the birth of his son may have finally convinced Siddhartha that the only way he could ever succeed was to abandon his family and throne, as otherwise his growing responsibilities would ensnare him for the rest of his life. So, he fled the palace on horseback one day, destined not to return for many years.

Of course, the notion that having a family is an impediment to greater spiritual understanding is not in any way confined to Buddhism. Roman Catholicism tacitly acknowledges this when it demands that its priests forgo marriage and children; the time and attention that would otherwise be spent in caring for wives and children is instead invested in the greater glory of God. This has perfect support within the Bible itself, where Jesus Christ explicitly states that following Him will necessarily break people away from their families and, by extension, the very institution of the family itself:

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.” -Matthew 10:34-38

Of course, Jesus himself is depicted as having no wife or children of his own, and the very suggestion that he imagined the possibility was enough to bring a hailstorm of criticism and even death threats down upon the filmmakers of The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Sentiments similar to those in the Gospel of Matthew are made later on by Paul in his epistles, who frequently describes marriage and children as little more than a necessary evil, to be indulged in by those who lacked the spiritual fortitude to solely dedicate themselves to God.

There is an even a secular version of this idea in our own time, perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. Here Woolf is addressing the question of why there are so few women among the world’s greatest writers. The answer is simple: Women are trapped in the cult of domesticity, their lives defined by the roles of wife and mother, and they are never given the literal and metaphysical space (the room of one’s own of the title) to contemplate the deeper spiritual truths about themselves and the world that lead to great art. Even more recently, the popularity of the book Eat, Pray, Love, about a woman who decides she must abandon married life to embark on a journey of self-discovery, demonstrates that this idea is still alive and well. One can imagine the Buddha regarding them with equanimity before rising to say that such is the condition of not just women but all humanity–men’s cages may be gilded, but they are cages nevertheless. After all, did he not have to surrender an entire kingdom to achieve enlightenment?

I do wonder, though, if we too often ignore the human costs of these transcendental achievements. What does the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment look like from Rahula’s perspective? What is it like to not only be regarded as a ball and chain by your father, but to actually have been named and identified to the world as such? Did the thought that your father was out among the ascetics trying to learn more about the nature of the universe comfort Rahula when he was sick? Did it wrap him with blankets when he was cold at night? Pick him up when he fell? If you are the Buddha, was the Enlightenment worth missing your son’s first steps or hearing his first words? The loss of your wife’s embrace? And if you were one of Siddhartha’s subjects, who saw their little kingdom invaded and annexed by hostile neighbors before the end of his life, was the Enlightenment worth the loss of such a promising leader who could have saved them from oppression and exile?

It may very well have been. But you cannot understand the value of that which you have gained without understanding the value of that which you lost. Nor can you allow the sight of God, Nirvana, or simply the Universe to blind you to the pain and suffering that we can inflict–or chose not to inflict–on those we love. Few of us will ever achieve enlightenment, become a saint, or even fully understand ourselves. But all of us can improve the lives of those who are already in ours, most of all through our children–those fetters that bind us to the world and thereby give us our best opportunity to change it for generations to come.