Only A Blank Canvas Provides A Plethora Of Possibilities
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
28 June
2023
"Books make you a scholar. Awareness makes
you an evolved individual."
A Zen saying
Kitabon Aur Pothiyon Se Aage Nikal
Apni Hasti Ko Samajh Aur Badhta Chal
Dayashankar ' Naseem '
(Go beyond books and tomes/ Realize your
existence and march ahead)
Every day
in the corner of a library in Japan, an old monk was to be found sitting in
peaceful meditation. " I never see you read the sutras, " said the
librarian. " I never learnt to read," replied the monk. " That's
a disgrace. A monk like you ought to be able to read. Shall I teach you? "
" Yes. Tell me," said the monk pointing to himself, "what's the
meaning of this character?"
Why light a
torch when the sun shines in the heavens? Why water the ground when the rain
pours down in torrents?
Socrates,
Kabir, Saint Kanakadas, among others never learnt how to read and write but
that didn't prove to be their Achilles' heel. Kashmir-born Indo-American poet
Aga Shahid Ali succinctly described Kabir in his quatrain, "He never
wielded a pen/ Because, it was a pain/ Rather, he travelled all over/ That was
his gain." By the way, 'elite' Indians going ga-ga over Shashi Tharoor,
Vikram Seth, A K Ramanujan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's English, must read Aga
Shahid Ali's chiselled English poetry. Coming back to the core issue, we all
have a conventional way of thinking. Our definitions and perceptions of
knowledge and enlightenment are still so backward.
The great
polymath and modern Marco Polo, Rahul Sankrityayan (Kedarnath Pandey), was not
even a matriculate. No university offered him the professorship as he didn't
have enough degrees. Let alone varsities, he was not even considered for the
job of a primary teacher until Jawaharlal Nehru, a visionary, intervened and
appointed him as a professor of Buddhism and Eastern Religions. It was an irony
that though varsities didn't care for him, all the 'learned' professors of
Philosophy across the globe were studying and teaching his treatises!
To be
enlightened, one doesn't have to be 'educated' in a conventional sense of the
word. Akbar Allahabadi wrote, "Zehan Khulta Nahin Do Kitabein Padh Lene
Se/ Aati Hai Aql Aankhein Khuli Rakhne Se" (The mind doesn't open by
reading a few books/ Wisdom comes when eyes are wide open; here, the phrase,
'eyes wide open' means 'to have uninterrupted awareness'). In Buddhism, it is
not whether you can read or write, but how you can use your native intelligence
and wisdom to transform and control your thoughts, speech, and actions and
return them to their original state of pristine purity and quietude.
Enlightenment means that one has attained the necessary wisdom to achieve the
absence of desire and suffering and to be release from samsara or the cycle of
repeated births and deaths. Enlightenment means also to understand and to be
awakened.
In The
Walled Garden of Truth or The Hadiqat al Haqiqa (حدیقه
الحقیقه و شریعه الطریقه),
Persian mystic Hakim Sanai writes about one of his disciples whose name I can't
recall at the moment. He was unlettered, but extremely intelligent. Sanai never
tried to teach him how to read and write because he (Sanai) believed that by
learning artificial means, the disciple would lose his natural intelligence and
awareness. He used Muhammad as a metaphor for ramming home his point: 'Not for
nothing, did Allah choose Muhammad as his medium, because Muhammad was Ummi
(totally unlettered in Arabic).' Wisdom descends on those who're simple, but
aware and whose consciousness is ever-evolving. Only a blank canvas provides a
plethora of possibilities.
----
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/blank-canvas-plethora-possibilities/d/130094