A Bowl of Milk

OWPC Chapter 5

– December 16, 2025, 10:03 to 10:51 pm

The frame widens, breathes, and resets in this quietly revelatory chapter. Svasti falls into a daily rhythm of visiting Siddhartha in the forest, frequently encountering Sujata there as well, who becomes a close friend. Sujata tells Svasti how she first met Siddhartha a few months before he did, “and how she had since brought him food every day around noon” (35). She met him on a full moon day, carrying an offering to the forest gods: cakes, milk, congee honey. Full moon day, noon sun blazing. Peak heat. 

She sees a man (Siddhartha, as it turns out) “lying unconscious on the road…Without hesitating, she poured a cup of milk and eased it against the man’s lips, spilling a few drops on them… his lips quivered and parted slightly” (37). He drinks the full cup, regains consciousness, then asks her to pour him more milk, which she happily does. The milk, as it turns out, provides the necessary nourishment to restore Siddhartha not only to his famished body, but to reignite his mind enough for him to translate the insights gleaned from his most recent meditation sessions. 

Just moments after finishing the two cups of milk, briefly introducing himself, Siddhartha rejoins with: “I have seen that abusing the body cannot help one to find peace or understanding. The body is not just an instrument” (38). The insight he returns with, on the path of Enlightenment, isn’t some grandiose cosmic truth—no, it is a luminous shard of self-directed insight, reflective awareness. He derives a broader insight from his own failure to nourish his body: that finding peace or understanding must necessitates, first and foremost, creating the psychosomatic conditions under which a meditative practice can be sustained, and insights derived from it can be taught/translated/disseminated. Without the milk, his body would have given out. Here the myth of the wounded healer, or another variant, that of the tortured artist/musician/poet comes to mind. Or philosopher… ooooh, hiss, that one hits closer to home. Don’t I remember the tortured philosopher vibe from my early 20s. Black lipstick, late nights, black and gold cigarettes, tiny mugs of espresso, and almost ZERO real sustenance. Deprivation as lifestyle to produce… insight? I’m not sure how I rationalized that, honestly. Anything I produced during that time was intense and ephemeral. Fragments in notebooks, for the most part. Alive but lost in dispersion, to return to that earlier phrase I was turning over. I wanted to be a floating head, a mind without a body, then I grew up a lot and tried to take care of my body again starting in my 30s. Yikes! So this piece of Siddhartha’s story resonates. 

He continues: “the body is the temple of the spirit, the raft by which we cross to the other shore. I will no longer practice self-mortification” (38). Now viewing the body as a constitutive and sacred container, as well as a transitional vessel, Siddhartha vows to stop voluntarily inflicting suffering on the body– no more “self-mortification.” That totally makes sense, and this is something I’ve internalized and integrated, though I don’t always act on: life is hard enough, so I try to be gentle with myself and not go out of my way to perform suffering as some warped idea of penance. That road has led me only to spinning my wheels in the desert of the Real. 

The giving of the milk, that too needs to be examined: Sujata’s story, which I already have a nagging suspicion/dread will be on the shorter side. She gives the milk, and keeps returning to give Siddhartha daily food and milk (or other beverages, I don’t know for sure), because she “only understood that the monk was important and that offering food to him was more beneficial than offering food to a dozen forest gods,” because “if [his] meditation deepened, she felt, his love and understanding could help relieve much suffering in the world” (38). More humility, more devotion here: Sujata offers what she can to make it possible for the Buddha to reach Enlightenment; she nourishes his body so it can continue supporting the blossoming and unfolding of his mind/psyche/interiority, his communion with the divine. She becomes not just “sweet little girl,” but a caretaker, a steward of the sacred, in this moment, and every moment she returns with a plate of food. She participates in an essential way by showing up consistently with nourishment: simple, but, again, absolutely essential. Without her simple yet lifesaving intervention, Siddhartha would have never become the Buddha. Here’s to Sujata. 

The chapter ends with a new beginning: a group of children, including Sujata and Svasti, gather around Siddhartha after an indelible outdoor picnic, and he begins to tell them the story of his life. I will pick up from there tomorrow, as the work and the walk both march onward. 

-- Dianna