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Sky Full of Elephants

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Cebo Campbell

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“Later Siddhartha was to recount how the most crucial incident of his childhood occurred when he was nine. In the spring he was taken to the ploughing festival. This was a very important day for the Shakya people who were agriculturalists. On this day, the ploughing season began. The king, Siddhartha's father, would ceremonially cut the first furrow with a special plough. It was the occasion for a great spring festival and everybody was celebrating. Siddhartha was taken along by his nurse maids to watch his father perform the all important symbolic act of making the first cut in the ground. As Siddhartha watched, what this sensitive child saw was the beautiful earth being cut open: cut open in order that the people might grow crops and so live; cut open just as, perhaps, he knew that his mother had been cut open to give him life. He saw insects turned up by the plough, ejected from their homes. He saw worms cut into pieces. He saw the birds descend and eat the little creatures squirming on the broken soil. He saw that in this cutting there was much suffering. He felt the suffering himself. He felt a great urge to remove himself from this painful spectacle. He slipped away from his nurse maids and went to sit under a tree. Later they came looking for him and found that he had gone into a deep state of concentration. As he reflected upon what he had witnessed he was unaware of their approach or of them observing him. This was the first time, he entered into the kind of intense rapture we call samadhi. So Siddhartha grew up with a deep concern about the meaning of suffering in his heart. He knew that he was alive because his mother had died. He knew that people were only able to feed at the expense of the cutting of the earth. He felt the unavoidability of much suffering acutely. He went out from the palace and he saw people who were sick and he learned how nobody is immune to sickness. He saw how people grow old and how nobody is able to avert doing so if they live long. And if they do not live, then they die and this too is an affliction, both for the person who dies and for those who grieve. Siddhartha was certainly sensitive enough to grieve. The great mass of suffering in the world seemed to weigh upon him.”

SufferingBuddhismAnimalsDukkha
Book:The Feeling Buddha by David Brazier (24-May-2001) Paperback
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“What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration: but one still has one's eyes, he thought, one's ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil or else an absolute ignorance. Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn't known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”

PainSufferingPerceptionIllusion
Book:The Heart of The Matter
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