Gautama Buddha said that each person has four wives or husbands in their lives. To understand what he meant, we should first read the short story of ‘A Man and His Four Wives.’
“Once there was a man who had four wives. He loved the fourth wife and adorned her with rich robes and treated her with delicacies. He took great care of her and gave her nothing but the best.
Over the years, the man had become ill and was about to die. At the end of his life, he felt very lonely and so asked the fourth wife to accompany him to the other world.
‘My dear wife,’ he said, ‘I loved you day and night, I took care of you throughout my whole life. Now I am about to die, will you please go with me wherever I go after my death?’
He expected her to say yes. But she answered, ‘My dear husband, I know you always loved me. And you are going to die. Now it is time to separate from you. Goodbye, my dear.’
He called his third wife to his sickbed and begged her to follow him in death. He said, ‘My dear second wife, you know how I loved you. Sometimes I was afraid you might leave me, but I held on to you strongly. My dear, please come with me.’
The third wife expressed herself rather coldly. ‘Dear husband, your fourth wife refused to accompany you after your death. How can I follow you? You loved me only for your own selfish sake.’
Lying in his deathbed, he called his second wife, and asked her to follow him. The second wife replied, with tears in her eyes, ‘My dear, I pity you and I feel sad for myself. Therefore, I shall accompany you to the graveyard. This is my last duty to you.’ The second wife thus also refused to follow him to death.
Three wives had refused to follow him after his death. Now he recalled that there was another wife, his first wife, for whom he didn’t care very much.
He had treated her like a slave and always showed much displeasure with her. He now thought that if he asked her to follow him to death, she certainly would say no.
But his loneliness and fear were so severe that he made the effort to ask her to accompany him to the other world. The first wife gladly accepted her husband’s request.
‘My dear husband,’ she said, ‘I will go with you. Whatever happens, I am determined to be with you forever. I cannot be separated from you.”
The meaning of the story is what only the wisest of people can see. Once you understand its meaning, you’ll see the integrated wisdom inside.
This is how Buddha concluded the story: ‘Every man and woman has four wives or husbands. What do these wives signify?’
The fourth wife
The fourth ‘wife’ is our body. We love our body day and night. In the morning, we wash our face, put on clothing and shoes. We give food to our body. We take care of our body, like the fourth wife in this story. But unfortunately, at the end of our life, the body, the fourth ‘wife,’ cannot follow us to the next world.
The third wife
The third ‘wife’ stands for our fortune, our material things, money, property, fame, position, and the job that we worked hard to attain. We are attached to these material possessions. We are afraid to lose these material things and wish to possess much more. There is no limit. At the end of our life, these things cannot follow us to death. We can’t hold our fortune after our death, just as the third wife told her husband: ‘You hold me with your ego-centred selfishness. Now it is time to say goodbye.’
The second wife
Everyone has a second ‘wife.’ She is the relationships, with their family, parents, sisters and brothers, all relatives, friends and society. They will go as far as the graveyard, with tears in their eyes. They are sympathetic and saddened…
The first wife
The first ‘wife’ is our karma. When we deeply observe and recognise that our minds are filled with anger, greed and dissatisfaction, we are having a good look at our lives with our soul. The anger, greed and dissatisfaction are karma, the law of causation. We cannot be separated from our own karma. As the first wife told her dying husband, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’
Gautama Buddha was born in present-day Nepal. His original name was Siddhārtha. Gautama was the originator of the religion of Buddhism. He lived from about 563 BC to about 483 BC.
Buddhism is today the world’s fourth-largest religion with over 520 million followers, or over 7% of the global population, known as Buddhists. An Indian religion, Buddhism encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices largely based on original teachings attributed to the Buddha and resulting interpreted philosophies. Buddhism originated in ancient India as a Sramana tradition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, spreading through much of Asia.
Pic courtesy: Rainbow stamp club blogspot. Vesak, or Buddha Jayanti, the day Buddha was born, is being celebrated formally on the full moon day of the month of Vaishak (typically in May) since 1950.