Some Favourite Pictures

 

The Blind Men And The Elephant

The parable of the blind men and the elephant is probably the most widely known and the most loved of all the world's parables. By far the earliest version of  it is to be found in the Udana, one of the books of the Buddhist scriptures where it is attributed to the Buddha (Ud.67-9). There seems no good reason to doubt this attribution, for while the blind men and the elephant is a most memorable one, it is by no means the only cleaver parable attributed to the Buddha. The parable’s  appeal is due to how well it makes its point, its striking juxtaposing of man and beast and its gentle humor. 

The background to the Buddha telling this parable goes like this. Some monks in Savatthi noticed a group of non-Buddhist monks quarrelling with each other about some philosophical or theological issues. Later, they mentioned what they had seen to the Buddha and he said:  “Wanderers of other sects are blind and unseeing. They don’t know the good and the bad and they don’t know the true and the false. Consequently they are always quarrelling, arguing and fighting, wounding each other with the weapon of the tongue.”  Then the Buddha related his famous parable.  “Once here in Savatthi, the king called a certain man and said   ‘Assemble together in one place all the men in Savatthi who were born blind.’  Having done as the king commanded, the king then said to the man ‘Now show the blind men an elephant.’ Again the man did as the king commanded, saying to each as he did   ‘Oh blind man, this is an elephant and this is its head. This is its ear. This is its tusk. This is its trunk. This is its body. This is its leg. This is its back. This is its tail. This is the end of its tail.’ This having been done the king addresses the blind men saying ‘Have you seen an elephant?’  and they replied  ‘We have sire.’ ‘And what is an elephant like?’  he asked. And the one who had touched the head said ‘An elephant is like a pot.’  while the one who had touched the ear said ‘An elephant is like a winnowing basket.’  The one who had touched the tusk said ‘An elephant is like a plough pole’  while the one who had touched the trunk said  ‘It is like a plough.’   The one who had touched the body said ‘It is like a granary’  and the one who had touched the leg said ‘It is like a pillar.’ The one who had touched the back said ‘It is like a mortar’,   the one who had touched the tail said ‘It is like a pestle’  while the one who had touched the end of the tail said ‘An elephant is like a broom.’  Then they began to quarrel saying ‘Yes it is!’  No it isn’t! An elephant is like this!’  ‘An elephant is like that!’,  until eventually they began fighting with each other.” Having told this story the Buddha summed up its meaning in a terse little verse -“Some monks and priests are attached to their views
And having seized hold of them they wrangle, like those who see only one side of a thing.” The key to understanding the meaning of the parable is in the last line of this verse; seeing only one side of a thing (ekanga dassino). This is but one example of where the Buddha gives advice about how to form a more complete, a more accurate view of reality. Here he is suggesting one important point - that we should not mistake the part for the whole. In other places he advises keeping personal biases out of the way when assessing views, taking time to form opinions and even when having done so, keeping an open mind so as to be able to consider fresh evidence to the contrary.  I notice that the Wikipedia article on this famous parable says that the blind men touch eight pachyderm parts while K. N. Jayatilleke (usually a very careful scholar) says there are ten. In fact, there are nine. I really  delight in the Buddha’s  comparisons. You can see women using winnowing baskets (sup or supli in Hindi, suppa in Pali) is any Bihari village even today and they  are shaped  just like an elephant's ear. The elephant’s tail and the broom is a good comparison too. The back with the pestle is less obvious. Could it be referring to the long ridge of the backbone which can so easily be seen under the elephant’s skin? After the Udana, the earliest mention of the parable of the blind men and the elephant is to be found in the Syadvadamanjari, a Jain work where it is used to illustrate the Jain doctrine of relativity of truth (anekantavada). This doctrine states that  “every view is true from some standpoint (naya) or other and in general no view can be categorically false.” Boy! Wouldn’t New Agers love this one if they knew of it! After this the blind men and their elephant  wandered all over the place. They appear in Brahmanical and Hindu works, in some Persian collections of stories and even in one of the works of the Persian  Sufi mystic Rumi. Today there are numerous children’s  books about it or which include it. If you would like to see a careful and accurate word by word translation of the whole sutta in which the parable of the blind men and the elephant appears have a look at Venerable Anandajoti’s www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Texts-and-Translations/Udana/6-Jaccandhavaggo-04.htm

A Non-practicing Buddhist !!

Just yesterday someone described themselves to me as a non-practicing Buddhist. I cannot say that I have heard this term used before and I found it a rather strange one. Strange because it implied that being  Buddhist is an identity apart from practicing and trying to live by the Dhamma. It makes sense to call yourself a non-practicing  Jew because Judaism is to a large sense a culture and an ethnicity as much as a religion, so you can have one without the other. I have heard people describe themselves or someone else as a non-practicing or lapsed Catholic. This makes sense too given that Catholicism is so all-embracing that it imparts an identity beyond one’s specific culture, race and so on. But a non-practicing Buddhist? 

To me this makes no more sense than it would be to describe oneself as a non-practicing athlete. “I have never competed in any athletics, I do not have an athlete’s build and I have no interest in or knowledge of athletes, so I’m a non-practicing athlete.” An athlete is legitimately and properly called such by his or her doing of athletics. And equally it makes no sense to  describe oneself as a non-practicing Buddhist. You either practice or genuinely try to practice the Dhamma and accept its main philosophical propositions or you do not. If you do you are a Buddhist, and if you do not you are not. You can be a former Buddhist, you can be a bad Buddhist (a far from endangered species)  but you cannot be a non-practicing Buddhist. 

Metta World Peace

The other day I put metta into a  Google  Image search hoping to find a picture illustrating the concept or perhaps a beautiful picture with some words   from the  Metta  Sutta on it. All the pictures that came up were of a black American basketball player. Intrigued and a little confused I did a bit more searching and discovered that this high-profile sportsman recently changed his name to Metta World Peace, Metta being his first name and World Peace being his surname. The Wikipedia entry on MWP quotes him as saying: “Changing my name was meant to inspire and bring youth together all around the world” and his publicist  explained  that he chose Metta as his first name because it is a traditional Buddhist word  that means loving kindness and friendliness towards all”. It is a laudable sentiment and it’s nice to know that something of Buddhism is getting wider coverage with the general public.  The letdown was not long in coming.

It seems that MWP was arrested for domestic violence four years into his marriage and his wife filed for divorce two years later. He has been involved in violence on an off the court several times as well and in a recent interview he stated that he regretted changing his name.

High profile sports stars behaving badly is nothing new but this sportsman’s  name change thing raises an interesting point, to me at least. The word  love, whether used in a romantic or a religious sense, is thrown around often and very liberally. The quality itself is quickly and ardently professed, everyone gets all warm and when they use it or hear it being used, it is lauded and put forward as the solution to many, sometimes to all, human problems. But let’s face it, love of any type, especially metta,   is a rather rare quality. Getting all tearful and chocked up while saying “May all beings be well and happy” is one thing. Genuinely trying to be forgiving, patient, kindly and generous, especially when it is hardest to do so, is another.  This is not to say that we can’t have metta but just that it takes more than talking about it or giving yourself that name.   

The Lotus Posture

The lotus posture, padmasana, is the name traditionally given to a way of sitting in many Indian spiritual practices, particularly in meditation. The practitioner sits placing each foot on the thigh of the opposite leg. Thus the legs are interlocked and symmetrical aligned. The hands can be placed on the knees or in the lap or on the knees.

Although this posture imparts a degree of postural stability many people take time to get used to it and often report that it becomes uncomfortable to maintain for extended periods. Indian tradition ascribes a great deal of benefits to the  padmasana, that it harmonized “energy”, that it massages the nerves enhancing relaxation, etc, even that it is essential for meditational progress. Most of these claims would seem to be fanciful.

In traditional Buddhist art the Buddha is often depicted sitting in the padmasana. However, in the suttas the Buddha himself says nothing about posture in sitting meditation other than that one should sit “with the  body  straight” (ujum kayam) and the legs  “pallankam abhujitva”. This term  could mean legs crossed (i.e. lotus posture) or simply folded and the term padmasana occurs nowhere in the Tipitaka. In this second posture the legs are folded and placed against the other rather than being interlocked. Many people report that this posture is more comfortable and is less likely to cause cramps and painful stiffness. Although the placement of the body may have some influence on the mind it is probably very slight. Ultimately, the more physically comfortable one is the easier one’s meditation will be. Meditation is, or should be, a simple and natural process.  Requiring numerous technical necessities and details only robs it of these qualities.

The Last Traces

Northern Pakistan, Gilgit, Swat, Chitral, etc, in ancient times was a major route for Indian missionary monks and nuns going to China and Central Asia and for pilgrims from those areas going to India. The region is covered with traces of their passing, graffiti, inscriptions, petroglyphs, images, etc.  Now the government of Pakistan is considering damming the Indus River, a project of immense  environmental consequence but also one that would destroy the thousands of archaeological sites in the region. Here are images of but some of them.

 

Buddha’s Words In Taliban Territory

The Swat Valley in northern Pakistan is definitely not the sort of place you would want to be visiting nowadays. Malala Yousafzai, the girl who   was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for attending school is from Swat. But it wasn’t always the case. Going back 1500 years ago the valley was known as Udyyana, the Buddha’s Garden.  The monks have long vanished, their sonorous chants silenced forever and their monasteries and stupas now nameless neglected ruins. But even here the Buddha’s words, though no longer understood by the locals, can still encountered. If you take the main Malamjaba road some 5 k north of Manglaur you will eventually see two huge rocks on the side of the hill, one known locally as Oba Ghat and the other as Khazana Ghat. There are two inscriptions on the first of these rocks and one on the second. The first inscription reads: Sarvva pāpasyākarana, kusalasy opasampada, svacitta vyavadānam, caetad budanu sasanam, which is of course the Buddha’s famous summery of his teachings from Dhammapada verse 183.  

The second inscription is on the upper portion of the rock far beyond reach and reads: Vācānurakst samvrtahk kāyana caiva kusalan na kurvan tāstrāyin karma pathānu isokya āraghyen mārgam rpippraveditam. This verse can be found  at Dhammapada 281.

Moving on to the second rock one will  find a third inscription which reads:  Anityā vava (sic! for vata) samskārā utpāda vyaya  dharmina hutpadyahinirud (dh)yantetepā (read tesām) vyupasamas sukham.

This passage can be found in the Mahasudassana Sutta (D.II,1990 and is repeated in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta where it is recited by Indra.   Each of these inscriptions is in Sanskrit, although in the case of the last one with rather poor spelling. The first two are in Gupta period Brahmi characters from about the 2^nd or 3^rd century CE, and  the third   was written in the 6^th century CE judging by the characters.

Who wrote these verses we do not know. Clearly they were literate, they knew the Dhammapada and the Digha Nikaya and they thought the verses important enough to make them known, so chances they were monks or perhaps nuns. What would they think of Swat, one of the loveliest valleys  in the Himalayas, if  they came back today?