Beveridge seemed to share the belief that there is such a thing as enlightenment and that Siddhārtha found it, which gave those earlier poems an almost aristocratic clarity and certainty. Being the son of a king and born to rule, Siddhārtha was calm and sure of his power throughout ‘Bodhi Tree’, even when that power was renounced.

For lesser mortals, life is altogether more complicated, and Siddhārtha’s cousin Devadatta is, in this book, marvellously and emphatically lesser. He joins the new Buddhist order, but is in every way unsuited to it. Like a disgruntled infantryman, he revels in and yet complains about the discomfort, the lack of food, the peasants: ‘I want to tell these miserable, skinflint, pinch-fisted folk / to stop tossing us husks, rinds, cores, thorns, rats’ tails …’ He is, it seems, only a monk in the first place because he is jealous and power hungry: ‘… what I’ll never do, is stop planning / how to run Buddha out of his tidy squat, how to get / the townsfolk and monks to curse him from his top-knot / down. Ah, I can almost smell it in the air now – / that scent when something sweet moulders and rots.’

At times Devadatta approaches the heightened awareness and humility of Siddhārtha’s ruminations, but for the most part his gloriously truculent verses reveal a man hopelessly trying, for all the wrong reasons, to be something he is not. Ascetic he certainly is not: he spends an inordinate amount of time engrossed in lubricious daydreams about Siddhārtha’s wife, Yasodharā. He even exhausts himself: ‘I sigh, look away. / I’m weary of trying to turn everything into a fantasy; // weary of trying to set down my load and staring into / the abyss.’

The Buddha, of course, was utterly singular, and Beveridge, in writing about his quest, had to imagine what that experience might be like and somehow convey that singularity. The experience for the reader in ‘Bodhi Tree’ is of being taken outside and beyond oneself; it is slightly icy, even at its most limpid and beautiful.

Devadatta is an everyman, and so the poems are more rambunctious and discursive. It is actually all rather good fun. He is recognisable and unchanging – there must have been Devadattas in every monastery in medieval Europe, in every 1960s commune. Judas Iscariot. Salieri. It is an old story, possibly the oldest. And universal: Devadatta even has a Wile E. Coyote moment as he attempts to drop a huge boulder on the Buddha, and fails yet again.

Interestingly, though, the cause of Devadatta’s angst is not really power or inadequacy, but a woman. He and Siddhārtha, in this version of events, competed in a test of arms for Yasodharā’s hand. Not only did Siddhārtha win, but infuriatingly, he won effortlessly, as a sort of add-on to being Ghandian and nobly Christ-like (the template fits anywhere you place it).

Yasodharā, perhaps surprisingly, has the traditional role in both sequences, that of absent desire object. For Siddhārtha it is loss, as his abiding love for his wife pulls at his resolve, is acknowledged, and, with sadness, placed to one side again. ‘Yasodharā, when your image appears, / I vow with all beings / to shatter the mirror / and bury the pieces with care.’

Judith Beveridge

For Devadatta there is endless defeat, mostly self-inflicted, and frustration. His hopeless position is portrayed in ‘Tailspin’, as the lines turn over and around on themselves, the changes hardly perceptible: ‘I sit and muse on Yasodharā, / I smell her hair, her scent of jasmine. I want / to hear the Buddha’s doctrines. I want to say my prayers / and mantras, but I smell her hair, her scent of jasmine. I sway / about like a flute-charmed cobra, but my head aches, my legs and / my back again.’

It is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for Devadatta. He is like that famous Athenian citizen who, Plutarch says, asked Aristides the Just to write ‘Aristides’ on his ostrakon so that he could vote to banish him, simply because he was sick of hearing about how great and just he was. Beveridge herself is quite like one of those classical historians: ‘I have used a great deal of poetic licence, inventing characters and scenarios, and at times being deliberately historic-ally inaccurate. I have interpreted the character of Devadatta through my own lens. This sequence has been highly fictionalised and dramatized.’

This sensual, supercharged book crackles and teems with all the licence, sensation, and desire, that we, the unenlightened, enjoy, and with Judith Beveridge’s delight in Devadatta. ‘All they’ll think about / will be that Devadatta has come back and about how / their lives, at last, feel as precious as silk / pulled through a ring.’

Indeed.