Hooves laced with steel seemed to come at me from all directions as a coal-black stallion named Midnight Merlin ripped the lead rope out of my hands, bucked, whirled around, and lunged at me, rearing, striking, raging at a ghost. All I could do was hold my ground and pray that I was fierce enough to win his trust.
“I don’t want to be this strong person,” I kept saying over and over to myself, fighting the urge to run screaming out of the arena as the previously-abused horse attacked me once again for no apparent reason. To contain this violence, I would need to tap a form of power I wasn’t even sure existed. But first I had to get over my resistance to the by-then-blatant fact that gentleness, sympathy, and understanding couldn’t begin to heal this savage, wounded force.
Not only did I survive the ordeal, I was deeply transformed by it. And in doing research for my fourth book over a decade later, I realized that gaining the trust of an angry stallion was an ancient power story, one that predicted greatness. But what did it mean? What skills and intrinsic personal qualities did this archetype promote?
Alexander and Siddhartha
At age ten, Alexander the Great proved to be the only person in his father’s entourage capable of riding an unruly horse named Bucephalus. No one could mount the black stallion, and even the grooms were afraid to lead him. The young Macedonian prince gently yet confidently approached the horse, speaking softly, stroking his shiny black coat. Then, at the right moment, Alexander leaped onto the stallion’s sturdy back and took off at a gallop, reveling in the horse’s phenomenal vitality rather than trying to rein it in. The team went on to conquer the known world together.
Similar horse taming tales are told about a young prince who lived in northeast India over two-hundred years earlier, though his brand of power turned out to be much different than Alexander’s. Gautama Siddhartha was also raised to become an emperor-warrior. Shortly before his birth in 563 BCE, oracles told his father, King Suddhodana, that Siddhartha would become a great leader. But a sage named Asita sensed a crossroad in the prince’s path, one that shook Suddhodana to the core. If the young prince contemplated the nature of suffering, Asita predicted, Siddhartha would renounce his kingdom and instead become a saint.
Suddhodana tried to avert the latter possibility by shielding his son from witnessing death, disease, and old age, insisting that Siddhartha be educated and entertained within the carefully controlled setting of palace grounds. There the prince developed exceptional archery, music-making, and riding skills enhanced by his patient, empathetic nature. Yet luckily for posterity, Suddhodana didn’t realize that the equestrian arts, which most royals employed for pageantry and war, were also capable of exercising an expansive, nonpredatory power, one that would transform Siddhartha’s sensitivity into mindfulness, courage, and poise in the midst of chaos, giving him the tools he would need to leave his comfortable life and seek enlightenment.
During one classic coming-of-age story, Siddhartha tamed a wild stallion to impress Yasodhara, daughter of a neighboring king. Siddhartha was competing with other young noblemen to win her hand in marriage. One by one, suitors tried to mount the horse as terrified grooms restrained the enraged animal with ropes. The Indian prince took a more thoughtful, compassionate approach, calmly walking to the agitated animal, speaking softly, eventually stroking his face and sides. When the stallion began to lick Siddhartha’s hand, a tentative sign of trust, the young man quietly eased onto the animal’s back, winning the contest. And Yasodhara became a royal horse whisperer’s wife.
The invisible
Throughout history, these remarkably similar stallion-taming tales have been interpreted as evidence that Siddhartha and Alexander possessed miraculous talents. When faced with the task of rehabilitating an enraged stallion over two thousand years later, however, I realized that these men had developed a host of somatic emotional and social intelligence skills that great equestrians acquire progressively—yet find exceedingly difficult to translate into words. In the nineteenth century, such men were referred to as “horse whisperers,” a term still implying secret abilities that set gifted trainers apart from mere mortals. Yet as I discovered in working with Merlin, the seemingly more mysterious abilities involved are nonverbal and unphotographable, not supernatural.
In acquiring the most basic skills necessary to work with a violent, unruly horse, I began to understand how exceptional horsemen were also able to harness the talents and loyalty of large groups of potentially violent, unruly people. I realized it was no accident that a surprisingly high number of history’s most influential leader-innovators were accomplished riders, including Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, George Washington, Katherine the Great, Andrew Jackson, Elizabeth I, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan, among many others. Regardless of policy and agenda, these people exhibited significant poise under pressure, clarity of intention, courage, conviction, and charisma, motivating horses and people alike to transcend basic survival instincts and endure significant discomfort or uncertainty, sometimes inspiring entire populations to face incredible odds in service to ambitious (though not always altruistic) goals.
Alexander capitalized on these skills to expand his kingdom beyond all sense of decency. Siddhartha, on the other hand, stepped off his high horse, further developing his equine-inspired talents to pursue peace and enlightenment. Buddhist histories specify that it was another powerful horse, Kanthaka, who carried Siddhartha away from his father’s palace under cover of darkness, through the countryside and across the Anonma River where the adventurous prince embarked on the ultimate journey of freedom — from suffering, craving, hate, and delusion.
Some ancient texts insist Kanthaka died of grief when Siddhartha struck out on his own that night. But the horse was subsequently reincarnated as a brahmin (a member of India’s priestly caste) who, after attending talks by a then much older Buddha, easily took the teachings to heart, becoming enlightened himself—in his first human incarnation, no less!
This evocative tale struck a chord in me. During the decade I worked with Merlin, the stallion had worked his own brand of magic on me, helping me gain a profound combination of mindfulness, fierceness, compassion, and self-control I can’t imagine accessing under any other circumstance. In the process, he became gentler, more thoughtful and increasingly trustworthy. Our experiences changed both of our lives for the better.
In Part 2 of this article, Linda Kohanov will share how horses embody many of the attitudes people access through more formal mediation training. She also shows how her relationship with Merlin brought to light the principle of what the Buddha described as “dependent co-arising,” and Thich Nhat Hahn called “Interbeing.”
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