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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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these things cannot be understood, these things cannot be reduced to knowledge -- and that's where Tennyson misses, misses the whole point. He says: LITTLE FLOWER -- IF I COULD BUT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE, ROOT AND ALL, AND ALL IN ALL, I SHOULD KNOW WHAT GOD AND MAN IS. But it is all 'but' and 'if'.
Basho KNOWS what God is and what man is in that exclamation mark, KANA: "I am amazed, I am surprised... NAZUNIA BLOOMING BY THE HEDGE!" Maybe it is a full-moon night, or maybe it is early morning -- I can actually see Basho standing by the side of the road, not moving, as if his breath has stopped. A nazunia... and so beautiful. All past is gone, all future has disappeared. There are no more questions in his mind but just sheer amazement.
Basho has become a child: again those innocent eyes of a child looking at a nazunia, carefully, lovingly. And in that love, in that care, is a totally different kind of understanding -- not intellectual, not analytical.
Tennyson intellectualizes the whole phenomenon, and destroys its beauty. Tennyson represents the West, Basho represents the East. Tennyson represents the male mind, Basho represents the feminine mind. Tennyson represents the mind, Basho represents the no-mind.
Let this become your basic understanding, then we can go into the sutras of Gautama the Buddha.
WANT NOTHING.
WHERE THERE IS DESIRE,
SAY NOTHING.
A simple statement, but the import is great: WANT NOTHING... because this is how all the awakened ones have come to know -- that the misery is created by desiring. Misery is not a reality, it is a by-product of desire. Nobody wants to be miserable; everybody wants to destroy misery, but everybody goes on desiring, and by desiring one goes on creating more and more misery.
You cannot destroy misery directly, you have to cut the very roots. You have to see from where it arises, from where comes this smoke. You have to go down deep into the soil, to the roots. Buddha has called it TANHA -- desiring.
The mind is constantly desiring. The mind never stops even for a single moment desiring; all day it desires, all night it desires, in thoughts it desires,
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