Jain Spirit 2002 03 No 10

SR No.: 528990
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains
Publication Year: 2002
Total Pages: 62
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, UK_Jain Spirit, & UK
File Size: 15 MB

Page 38

Shadows of The Heart
than we, who dwell amid the latest CD-Roms and suvs might possibly imagine - but we can imagine, and we do, because these monks, and all these Jain traditions, these millions strong who feel the truth of their compassion, give us loft, courage to be optimistic, however pregnant the cliché - they leave a world more hope than not because, in the most practical terms, have learned to live in peace. And at a time when that is the key to everything.
poor Afghanistan, whose long pain begins again and sceptics piled their wrath upon the innocent,
illiteracy, disrespect, and violence sweeping the multitudes, in callous biting hideous days
noxious never-ending tortuous nights
no place for turtles to breed
no hope for victims of greed north, south, east, west, a multiplicity of signs
that this world was dying out
800 species each day. the seas, the forests, the air, the blessed airAnd sounding presidential, a strange, oddly-logical cry for war, in order to make peace, said Tony Blair, the same logic, one might add, that hastened the demise
of millions of lambs, and cows and steers
and pigs and played upon our fears as such "logic" has done for many, many years.
These thoughts, bouquets and icons revolve around themselves, like butterflies in primeval delirium anecdotes become a theory, theory a vow, the vows eventually a science, the science a self, the self a telling totality, 1-and-thou, togetherness, feeling and prayer, for every splendour, mountain, desert lair, each nook inhabited and uninhabited, for all those jungles in need, sea beds and gardens green, for all our daughters and their mothers no niche forgotten or ignored, no has been, where every day is all forgiven, lightly and anew, and peace promulgated like a handshake that never tires a heart without limitation, the big-bang of compassion, illimitable, expanding outlives all other regrets, fears, and question marks.
Yet there, and without fanfare, a wandering monk, bare comes faintly across historical back roads,
scarcely a mark, no track at all, stopping for a day or so to whisper among the kindness of strangers,
and help a toad across the road
of what does such humility bode? or offer assistance to the overburdened mule could there be a more important school?
save a lamb from the skillet
and a piglet from the fire -
oh, every culture might so aspire, and take some porridge in his palms of millet
whilst his friends assure him this food is pure, what we are saying is true, a refrain from century to century, household to household,
For this let me offer eternally my sutra of gratitude blank verse that has no rule of thumb no other reason for being but that those many friends with whom my heart has silently traversed might know, and others yet to come. Where tragedy has argued for patriotic gore and bombs and rage and the end of time this lesson from the annals of the Jains whose whispers and quiet days have, just possibly, found another way to heal the pain.
Michael Tobias has written over twenty-five books and made over one hundred films on art, environment and spirituality. He lives in Los Angeles, USA.
until this day and time, a world gone certainly mad
or might well, save for this insistence on our sanity this calming truth of truths whose mother origins started
long before the painful onrush of antipathy outsived every darkness, gave unblushing the patient study
to minutiae, dew drops and nigoda,
masks to protect insects from getting in the mouth, months of quiet time
during the rains, to shield the worms, or frogs from being stepped upon, the period during which
once, long ago, was written a book, the Kalpasutra, eighth chapter of the Dasasrutaskandha by Bhadrabahu recited fifty nights after the monks have begun their rain-rest, the very words, kalpa, connoting right behaviour, moral duty and sutra, a paragraph, in this case, a collection of them,
like a rainforest, or coral reef, and at the centre, an adult human without the slightest possession
in greater happiness, that much is clear,
March - May 2002. Jain Spirit
37