I couldn’t do a thing, nobody could. This woman and her husband, boy friend, friend whatever he was – were completely alone and together in this sea of pitying, curious, horrified faces all staring intently at them. I couldn’t see her face but I know she was feeling a level of fear that can only come from loving him. She was probably knowledgeable about his condition as she had the poise of somebody who had dealt with this before but I know she was still fearful for him, for her, for their distance from the safe harbor of their home.

The man’s convulsions eased and a staff member brought a wheel chair. The woman helped the man into it and they left. Their sense of dignity was deeply affecting. My sense of helplessness was overwhelming, is overwhelming. I felt a tight pain in my chest twisting its way around my neck that spoke to my shame, in-equanimity and lack of understanding of my feelings.

I want to know that the man is alright, that they are used to this happening as a couple and this was just a rare recurrence of his condition, that he had perhaps forgotten to take his pills and that the woman was now laughingly scolding him for forgetting. I needed to know they were now kissing and this only made his love for this woman who obviously loved him stronger. I wanted to know the woman wasn’t feeling despair with having to deal with this and she would be there for him forever.

I desperately want her to be saying to him – this is our world, my dear and I would give anything up for this.

I am reading Phra Farang, an English monk’s autobiographical account of his journey into Dhamma (Buddhism) and experiences as a monk in Thailand. In the initial couple of chapters he talks about how he discovered Dhamma and how deeply he identified with it. When he talks about why he so strongly felt the pull, I found I was completing his sentences.

I am not starting as an outsider to Buddhism or Dhamma like Phra Peter. Born in India as a Hindu, the concept of Dhamma (or Dharma in Sanskrit) is something sewn into the fabric of my soul. I am going off on a tangent here but I cringe from labeling myself a Buddhist or a Hindu because before the concept of ‘religion’ was brought to India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or the hundreds of strains of Hinduism were all just paths to the same thing – living a life of Dhamma and ultimately attaining Nibbana/Nirvana as Buddhists termed it or Moksha as Hindus termed it – release from the cycle of life and death by gradually attaining higher levels of understanding and enlightenment by living the right life.

In ancient India and to a relatively lesser extent in modern India, thousands of ascetics and monks still endeavor to find their own paths to Nibbana. Some grow long hair, cover their skin in ashes and practice extreme yoga, some meditate in dense forests or in the icy Himalayas, some starve themselves, some believe that experiencing and accepting extreme physical pain (like the very stereotypical yogi sitting on a bed of nails) will help take the mind to a higher plane…it goes on. They are all trying to find their path to the same thing. There is no Hinduism or Buddhism in India – just a million paths to Dhamma – and you are free to discover your own.

The Buddha through intense experimentation, meditation and introspection discovered one such path – The Eight fold path that we call Buddhism today. But before he did, he tried almost all the methods prevalent at the time for many years but reached the conclusion (the hard way) that self mutilation, starving oneself or other such extreme measures did little to elevate the mind. He experimented, he tried and failed repeatedly and he did not hesitate to change his mind if he felt his previous conclusions were wrong. in fact, his most devoted followers repeatedly left his side because they felt he wasn’t consistent. He was the consummate scientist and did not arrive at his conclusions lightly.

As far back as I can remember, whenever I have brushed against the Buddha’s teachings or the man himself in my history lessons or in books or during those beautiful anecdotes from the Buddha’s life that my grandma, my parents or relatives would tell  us kids,  I was struck by the simplicity of the teachings and the humanity of the stories. While Hindu mythology is full of stories gods and goddesses each meant to symbolize and represent a value, a moral or a flaw – and are also magical and beautiful, it’s difficult to relate to them as intimately precisely because of that reason.  The Buddha never claimed to be anything more than human and the stories and anecdotes do not require a high level of suspension of belief.

Now, as I delve into the teachings and try to discover the path for myself, it evokes a very deep instinct in me – it is as if I have always known this is what I have always wanted but I just didn’t know it.
 
A reading of the Dhammapada or the biography of a monk or the teachings of an Ajahn (teacher) move me in a way that I have never experienced. I feel a tightness in my chest, a knot in my throat, a pull so intense that I might have termed it desire if that word wasn’t directly polar to the path of the Dhamma .

Lest I get fanatical about following the Dhamma as is, the Buddha immediately forewarns against taking his or any other teacher’s words at face value and stresses the importance of questioning and discovering for oneself if any of the teachings or rules are indeed true and worthy of following. It is stressed by most Ajahns and the Buddha himself that one should only rely on a teacher for guidance and  better illumination of the path but discovering one’s path is left to oneself.

This post has meandered miles away from what I intended to write about – I know I want to ordain as a monk but I fear I don’t have the fortitude or mental strength to go through with it.  I want to ordain at least for a few months or years though my instinct is towards monkhood for the rest of my life.

But that’s such a big step no? Can I be actually thinking of it?  Why do I do about my lust? What about my parents or my sister or my niece? What about my irrational burning love for that one person who probably doesn’t deserve it? My passion for food? How do I give up my job? Can I give it all up? Can I go through with this?

Do I actually want to? Can I live without these wants and desires? One one hand, the need to give it all up and go head first into understand the path is so attractive and exciting that it makes me unreasonably excited just thinking about it. But am I romanticizing it? The life of a monk is not easy but in a way, it is easy because it is what I feel is right for me.

I have been wondering what happened to the passion I had for my job or the fire that technology lit in my mind or the love of travel? It’s all gone. And I am just 30! My friends speak with such passion and live their lives with a determination that reminds me of myself just a couple of years ago. But I am no longer passionate about the same things. I still love the good things in life, I buy the latest gadgets, travel extensively and am trying to look after my body. I am not even going to mention my err…passion for the opposite sex. But I honestly feel that I could just as easily live without them though it will be difficult to overcome I am sure. Their loss won’t burn me as it once would have. But perhaps most pointedly, I feel any depth of emotion or passion only when I think about the Dhamma and the possibility of devoting my life or atleast a few months or years of my life to understanding it.  And to think that the whole point of Dhamma is to get rid of this attachment to needs or wants or emotions .

I have some thinking to do.

Tags: Dhamma, Monk, Dharma, Phra Farang, Buddhism, Hinduism

Nobel winner blames cultural decline on “blogging and blugging”

Almost everybody has ripped into her. I am torn between laying into her myself and well, holding it inside. Hmm, that last sentence pretty much encapsulates my views I guess .

Is it fair to expect Nobel prize winners to not be idiots who feel the urge to shoot their mouths off about something they are not remotely familiar with? Look lady, you just won a Nobel for your ability to write. Stick with it – you won a prize and a neat bundle – you did not suddenly become the all-knowing goddess of all things. Pick up the cheque, go home, switch to premiere Darjeeling tea – you can afford it now and write some more books that will probably find their way onto Scribd or Google books and catch the eyes of millions more than the couple of thousand people who have probably read your books now.

And congratulations. To be fair, the rest of the speech was beautiful and inspiring.

A country where a rape victim is jailed for 6 months and given 200 lashes because she was alone with a man (man?) who then gang raped her with six of his buddies has given up all pretensions to morality – it has soaked up inhumanity to the extent that justice is no longer a recognizable noun.

What is wrong with these people? Generations have lived under an interpretation of a religion that has been passed through dark prisms repeatedly till all color is gone from any light that this religion once perhaps contained – but GBud, they still call it light!

They didn’t stop there though. They called the wretched soul an adulteress…for getting raped!

The pain this woman must be going through…how will she ever gain peace again, GBud? Will she ever know it’s not her fault, will she ever know that she has to live through this but it *will* end, that her suffering is impermanent, that this is but a moment? If she doesn’t, if nobody speaks this into her ears – her world will kill her and then decry her to death for the crime of murder.

When a frog is put
on the center of a plate,
she will jump out of the plate
after just a few seconds.

If you put the frog back again
on the center of the plate,
she will again jump out.

You have so many plans.
There is something you want to become.
Therefore you always want to make a leap,
a leap forward.

It is difficult to keep the frog still
on the center of the plate.
You and I both have Buddha Nature in us.
This is encouraging, but you and I
both have Frog Nature in us.

That is why
the first attainment of the practice–
froglessness is its name.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk (Zen) and poet.

This coral’s shape echoes the hand
It hollowed. Its
Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,
As your breast in my cupped palm.

Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,
Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,
And your smooth body, like none other,

Creates an exact absence like this stoneSet on a table with a whitening rack

Of souvenirs. It dares my hand
To claim what lovers’ hands have never known:

The nature of the body of another.

Sometimes you read something that you would never be able to write but is exactly what you wish the talent to be able to articulate.

A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the riverbank.

They sit in a nook of the ground and talk.

Each morning, the second they see each other, they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets, empty of any fear or suspicious holding back.

To watch, and listen to those two is to understand how, as it’s written, sometimes when two beings come together, Christ becomes visible.

The mouse starts laughing out a story he hasn’t thought of in five years, and the telling might take five years!

There’s no blocking the speech flow-river-running-all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is. Bitterness doesn’t have a chance with those two.

The God-messenger, Khidr, touches a roasted fish. It leaps off the grill back into the water.

Friend sits by Friend, and the tablets appear. They read the mysteries off each others foreheads.

But one day the mouse complains,

“There are times when I want conversation and you’re out in the water, jumping around where you can’t hear me.

We meet at this appointed time, but the text says, Lovers pray constantly. Once a day, once a week, five times an hour, is not enough. Fish like we need the ocean around us!”

Do camel bells say, “Let’s meet back here Thursday night?” Ridiculous! They jingle together continuously, talking while the camel walks.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself? Don’t argue or answer rationally.

Let us die, and dying, reply.

~ Rumi

(From The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks)