Thursday, January 14, 2010

Are We Blind Followers ?

If you see a mob of sheep running in a field, try this challenge, but be careful, do not hurt yourself. Take a hurdle and keep it in their runway. The forerunners will make a clever jump and continue their journey, the followers also will do the same clever thing and happily follow their forerunners. Till the hurdle is there every follower is a clever chap. Now, here comes the play. If you remove the hurdle on their way, and notice, you can still see the follower doing a clever jump at the same place where their forerunners did once upon a time. The followers do continue that clever thing even when there is no hurdle in place anymore.

It doesn't mean that only the forerunners were clever chaps. Now somehow you make the forerunners to join the end of the mob. If you notice, the ones, which started all these practice for some reason, will do the same thing now, for no reason. Now guess who a blind follower is.

Many of the rules we obey nowadays have no real foundation. But society continues to follow them. The society created some systems in the past for some reason, but in the fullness of time, they lost their reason for existence, but even today we still continue to follow them for no reason. Let me illustrate this with a simple story. Being a fan of short stories, how could I miss a short story in my blogs?

A great Buddhist master had a cat, which was his true passion in life. So, during meditation classes, he kept the cat by his side in order to make the most of his company. One morning, the master who was already quite old – passed away. His most adept disciple took his place. As a tribute to the memory of their old instructor, the new master decided to allow the cat to continue attending the meditation classes.

Days passed, some disciples from the neighboring monasteries, traveling through those parts, discovered that, in one of the region’s most renowned temples, a cat took part in the meditation sessions. The story began to spread.

Some years passed. The cat died, but the students at the monastery were so used to its presence, they soon found another cat and trained it and made it sit with them during the meditation practices. Meanwhile, other temples began introducing cat in their meditation sessions. All started doing cat meditation, they believed the cat was truly responsible for the fame and excellence of their old teacher, and in doing so forgot that the old master was a fine instructor.

A generation passed, thesis was developed, which were even accepted by the academic community – that, cats have the ability to increase human concentration, and eliminate negative energy. And so, for a whole century, the cat was considered an essential part of Buddhist studies in that region.

Until a master appeared who was allergic to animal hair, and decided to remove the cat from his daily exercises with the students. There was a fierce negative reaction – but the master insisted. Since he was an excellent instructor, the students continued to make the same scholarly progress, in spite of the absence of the cat. Little by little, the monasteries, which were already tired of having to feed so many cats, began eliminating the cat from the classes. In twenty years time, new revolutionary theories began to appear, with very convincing titles such as “The Importance of Meditation without a Cat”. Another century passed, and the cat withdrew completely from the meditation rituals in that region.


But two hundred years were necessary for everything to return to normal – because during all this time, no one asked why the cat was there. Even today, we do have so many cats and other animals sitting beside us in our daily life. We don't know why they are sitting with us, but we just let them sit over there and feed them. Maybe, because we are one of the B' followers. It is not easy to remove those animals from our daily life because today we do not know whether it is a cat or cow. Who has seen the cows these days; we do see only the milk packets from Aavin or Nandini. So it is not an easy job. Well, I am not out of the topic here; I am just preparing you to realize some truths of the Universe.

4 comments:

  1. Hey I have heard this story somewhere!!!hehehe....
    Waiting for more....

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  2. hehe! Some time back I told this story to you and Ashwini. This is not the first time I am hearing something like this from my friends. It is just that people didn't realize that i have already put the seeds.

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