The Wisdom of the Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha after attaining enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree.  What we skip over is the fact that the tree symbolizes a perfect system that is deeply rooted in the soil of knowledge, its branches holding out the various aspects of wisdom, all brightened and enriched by the sun that falls on its heart shaped leaves.  We tend to equate wisdom with knowledge. The Buddha never claimed he was the only wise person in the world and that he had a monopoly on dispersing understanding among the witless masses. What the Buddha had attained was gained after years of meditation, deep thought and discussion with sages whom he closely questioned. He had to torture both his mind and body to attain that wisdom.

His enlightenment or what we call ‘wisdom’ or ‘teachings’ came from the analyses he made of the collective knowledge then prevalent in the Indian subcontinent.  He never assigned any extra spiritual source to his knowledge or interpretation of the answers to the woes of humankind. That was the real kernel of his wisdom, which he tried to communicate to other human beings.

The Eight fold path he suggested to his followers was the righteous way to a better life, or Nirvana, the end of all worries that harassed humankind. He was perhaps the master who taught the real art of living, sans dependence on gods and spirits, freeing the human mind using Sankhya philosophy. Yet, within his lifetime, the collected wisdom broke down and became the subject of debates and vociferous fission leading to the very frictions that Buddha wanted humankind to overcome. Humankind has neither, then nor now attained or acquired the Wisdom the Buddha had. It has remained an esoteric philosophy to be discussed in Universities and monasteries amid chants, incense and tantra rituals.

It must be remembered that the economic conditions that prevailed during the life time of Gautama were very harsh and trying for the ordinary people of the Indian subcontinent.  Agriculture and herding depended on the whims of the elusive monsoons. Floods, draughts, landslides, petty wars and robbers made life a hell for the peasant. Human empathy had dried up when there came upon the land two sages, the Buddha and Mahavira, preaching a philosophy of understanding and deep compassion.  To some extent they stopped the mad race for material wealth and power then prevalent and turned the efforts of powerful rulers towards real welfare measures for their subjects. 

Their teachings were  the last straw held out to the depressed citizens of the subcontinent, drowning in self created sorrow of thinking that they have been caught in a never ending cycle of rebirths, called Karma.  They liberated the minds of most people and led them towards a more positive understanding of the whims of Nature. This was the wisdom of the two Sages who tried in their own way to reform the then known civilization of its myriad ills and superstitions.

But has the wisdom of the Buddha permeated to our minds? Sadly, this wisdom resides perhaps in the minds of few followers of the Buddhist philosophy left on Earth like the Dalai Lama.  The economic conditions now prevailing has given an unprecedented advantage to humankind. Most people have a better chance for a better life, better food, better job conditions, purchasing power and fast growing technical equipment to ease the burden of living on this whimsical planet.  Science it is claimed has enabled creation of vast knowledge databases for technical exploitation by humankind. Yet this is not “wisdom” as mere knowledge is being bandied about to create more and more chimeras of conquering Nature, mistakes that will ultimately lead this intelligent creature called Homo Sapien   being declared extinct, sometime in the near future. Humankind, in its own arrogance had never shown a willingness to accept the Wisdom of the Buddha.

Eating our friends

Humankind has an enormous appetite. Imagine the number of cattle that get eaten all over the world. A lot of poor chickens, ducks and turkeys besides other birds are being daily sacrificed on the altar of the Goddess of Hunger. Many cows, goats, camels and sheep bleat helplessly as they are mowed down by the relentless scythe of remorseless humankind, all for their delicious flesh.

 But if this huge appetite continues, we will finish off eating all the animals on Earth, elephants, whales, snakes and hippos included. Humans trawl the high seas with ‘high techno gizmos’ pulling in great white sharks, swordfish, tuna, dolphins and manta.  Many relish them raw. Poor octopi hide in the forests of coral to escape the greedy eyes of humans.  We can understand the poor Jorawa tribals on the Andaman spearing fish for dinner. But what about this extended, organized massacre of our sea life?  Whaling ships pull in huge carcasses which end up as sushi.  Others go about scraping up the sea floor for fish to feed the guts of hungry folk all the way from Florida to Fukushima. The excuse to eating fish is to escape from the plaque that clogs up our veins and cholesterol piled up from eating too many chickens and goats! Humans need proteins, you know! Remember how the American bison was almost wiped out by a hungry horde of Europeans ?

The World appears obsessed with food and drink and more food and drink.  Humans are slaves to their stomachs. Warning: Masterchef shows are injurious to your eating habits.  And calculate the piles of shit that humankind   flushes out in to rivers that all end up in the Seven Seas, polluting it for millennia. Of course we add plastics bags and toxic chemicals to add flavor to the sea water. And we happily consume the fish that consumes our shit.

Unlike our ape ancestors who chewed on branches and grass and seasonal fruits, we are gorging ourselves on everything under the sun. We domesticated grass seeds calling it rice, wheat, barley and oats.  The ancient civilizations of Southern America were good farmers for they domesticated the potato, tomato, cassava, capsicum and what not along with corn and the Soya bean.  Humans now slash down prime forests to plant bananas, sugar cane, oil palm and rubber. 

Ultimately, tropical and temperate forests will disappear and all the soil will be washed down the Amazon or the Mississippi or the Ganges or the  Nile. Deserts will sneak in and cover every corner with sand and dust. Or the ice in glaciers and the Antarctic will melt; seas will rise and drown the coastlands and islands. So goes the warnings from Climate change and global warming.  Polar bears and Grizzlies will wander in front of the White House seeking Presidential intervention to save them from extreme poverty. And we will find Gorilla meat on the menus of New York restaurants! That is till we eat them all up and go onto our chimpanzee cousins. Giraffes and zebras and wildebeests and kookaburras, cats and dogs and capybaras, will go onto the limited menus from Paris to Beijing.  You can hear the gnawing and crunching of bones as humankind gnaws steadily through the population of fellow beings on this beautiful planet.

Luckily the Dodo and the dinosaurs died out long back. Wonder whether the great lizards were all eaten up by some early unknown humanoid ancestors.  All this talk of meteoroids from outer space causing species extinction appears a cover up by smart scientists to save the dignity of their voracious ancestors. At least Noah had the good sense to build a boat to save a selected population of wild life when global warming upset things.  Humankind will cruelly crucify any Messiah of Climate change who advocates vegetarianism and restraint on energy usage.  However, World carbon emission levels will drastically go down, if our over smart politicians and administrators shut up their mouths and eat less food during their world conferences in Doha and Rio. Like Nero they are fiddling while the fires of hunger burn up the stomachs of hungry folk in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania.

  Food is the basic need for a hungry world.  All our efforts, production of energy and agriculture all go towards filling the cooking pot.  In the Mahabharata, there is a character called ‘Began’ who had an enormous craving for animal and human flesh.  He was ultimately eliminated by the legendary Bhim, who himself is known as ‘Vrigodhara’ or ‘One who has an insatiable Wolf like craving for food!  Kumbakarna, brother of Ravana, is also depicted as having an enormous hunger whenever he wakes up after a six month sleep. Don’t we see the significance of these depictions of hungry demons?

The warning is to stop gobbling up limited global resources!

Ultimately, when we run out of grass seeds, trees, pumpkins, elephants and potatoes we will turn to eating each other. Bon appetite, Mon Amis.  But the disturbing thought is what will we eat up after nations consume other nations, tribes chew up other tribes and a handful of hungry animals like hyenas will hunt each other in Central Park, New York and under the Eiffel Tower, Paris?

Dreams and Humankind

The caveman must have dreamt of saber tooth tigers chasing him through the savanna like grasslands of Africa, running for his life.  He must have screamed and woken up to see the frightened eyes of other tribesmen looking at him with wondering eyes. In his primitive speech he must have explained that he was having a nightmare. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein after a dream.  It is said that Beatle Paul McCartney heard a beautiful melody in a dream and on waking he played it out on his piano. Otto Loewi (1873-1961), the  German born physiologist, who had  won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses,  obtained the spark of intuition during a dream and  had written it down on a piece of paper.  On waking, he was unable to read what he had written.  Luckily he again dreamt of the same idea and waking up, he went to his laboratory, did an experiment that conclusively proved that nerve impulses were basically chemical. Abraham Lincoln's     dream that someone had assassinated the President, later turned out to be  tragically true. 

 Chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the tetravalent nature of carbon, explained the formation of chemical- organic "Structure Theory" and the structure of the Benzene molecule, all because he dreamt of dancing molecules. In 1845, Elias Howe who  was working on an idea of a  sewing machine, was unable to figure out  a practical  method to enable the thread to go through  the needle. Then he had a dream.  He was taken prisoner by a group of natives who began to dance with spears which had holes near their tips. On waking up, he applied this technique and made a practical sewing machine.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,  after he saw the story in a dream. He was upset when his wife prematurely  woke him up  as he had been screaming in terror. Stevenson realized  that he could turn the dream into a superb  horror story. One of India's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.  He always attributed that he got his inspiration   from goddess Namakkal who appeared in his dreams.  Louis Agassiz (1807-1883), the Swiss naturalist, zoologist, geologist, and teacher who had emigrated to the US in 1846, saw in a number of dreams the actual fish he had seen as a fossil.  On partially waking up from his third dream, Agassiz made a drawing of the fish as it would have been when alive and later he was astonished as it exactly matched the fossil specimen. There are other cases of authors who had written short stories and novels based on their dream sequences. I had a friend who once dreamt that he escaped being run down by a car just in front of the flyover near the office. The very next day, he had an actual experience of nearly being hit by a speeding car, exactly in the same place he had seen in his dream.