on loneliness and gifts....
We use to have these very healthy Thursday discussions back at home, where we read out books, spoke about what we did during the week and much more. In one of these, Kolhatkar ajooba (scientist and counselor) once shared a story of Buddha. In the Vedic times, India was opulent with independent thoughts and philosophers, who many a times contradicted the Vedic ideas. Buddha, one of these was once walking along some path with his disciple, encountered a Brahmin. Gaining tremendous popularity, those times saw numerous people following the Buddha rather than Vedas and so on. This Brahmin, extremely upset, cursed Buddha with all the harsh words he could while Buddha listened patiently, not letting even his disciple utter back a single sound. Tired with his own outburst, the Brahmin left. Baffled with the calm Buddha, his disciple asked him why didn't he not answer back. Buddha questioned him back,
‘What would you do if
someone got you a gift and you did not want it?’
‘I will not take it.’
‘Then where does it go?’
‘It remains with that
person.’
‘Hmm. So I did not take
his bad words.’
And the message was so
obvious and simple that the story never left me; if you don’t want it, don’t
take it and it will never bother you. But if life was that simple. Today the
story came back to me firstly after listening to Devdutta Patnaik’s lecture
where he spoke about ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ and secondly after a student
called saying he wanted to meet because he felt lost and lonely and hated
holidays because he didn't know what to do with his time. Somehow this
loneliness is a concept, some are lonely immediately after they reach home,
some are lonely because not with family, some are lonely in crowds too. It’s a
state of mind, with such a strong perception that we seldom withdraw from it. Loneliness
could be physical or metaphysical. It’s like truth, it can be different for
everybody and yet in the end never ceases to be universal. But are we not
becoming secluded more and more today? Don’t we talk more of individual space
and when left for ourselves feel alone and unwanted? There seems to be no
satisfaction. Being lonely has become an idea, and we have succumbed to it, to
an extent where we all are together and yet alone, we simply don’t relate to each
other.
Wondrous thing to
happen to a society which was so tolerant that could easily sustain different
sects, ideologies, gods, philosophies in harmony. There could be people who
believed in Vedas, Upanishads who questioned the nuances in the same. Charvakas who believed in good life for
themselves/materialism and nothing else, Mimamsakas
working on perception/inference/comparison finding reason to everything, samkhyas who believe in dualism of purusa and prakriti, and their cannot be a single truth/view or a single centre/objective,
vaisesikas who prefer the invalid knowledge
based on doubt/illusion/dream, naiyayikas
who believe in perception and the error/illusion and the fallacies arising out
of it and yoga who believed in
empowering your energies, rather theistic samkhya; all not accepting the
authority of Vedas/gods. Buddhism and Jainism too emerged as powerful
philosophies or ways of life, which tried to simplify the living of man.
We never seemed to have
a single truth, not meaning that we weren't stable but more so that we accepted
that nothing is constant. Devdutta Patniak speaks about the TRUTH coming from
west, where they believe only one truth and way and all that’s obtuse to it to
be false. My student being lonely is much more a vested ‘truth’ of globalization, because he perceived it based on a parameter created. Lonely
because not alone, but nothing to have in hand as practical world today expects
you to.
We’re accepting too
many gifts I felt, from everybody and everywhere, our house is so full of them
that we hardly have space to keep ourselves......and then we search for this
space outside. Buddha was without this baggage of gifts
.......and was
enlightened.
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