[Buddha-l] Buddha's Meditation

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 6, 2011, at 05:37 , S. A. Feite wrote:

> All the footnotes in the world probably will not hide that a Hindu form of basic manasika-japa  
> is not Buddhist meditation by any means.

This morning I was listening to a two-hour Canadian radio program entitled something like Being Muslim in the West. It was excellent. Toward the end of the second hour, a Muslim who was being interviewed quoted something that was attributed to the Buddha. The quotation was: "If you dig a six-foot hole, you'll find water. If you dig six one-foot holes, you'll find nothing." The quoter went on to say that it really doesn't matter which deep hole one digs, but he had personally chosen to go deeply into Islām.

I have never encountered anything like that in any Buddhist text, but then I've probably read only about 0.00000001% of the corpus of Buddhist texts. Does it ring a bell, or at least clunk a wooden fish? Mind you, I have heard the quotation dozens of times, but I've always heard it attributed to Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa or Svāmīvivekānanda, both of whom were, of course, quite capable of quoting Buddhist texts. The pluralistic sorts that they were, the meaning they extracted from the well analogy was exactly what the Muslim extracted from it.

My guess is that if the saying does turn out to have a Buddhist provenience, it is not used to promote religious pluralism of the sort that Rāmakṛṣṇa and Vivekānanda advocated. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, as used by Buddhists, I'd guess the well analogy would have a triumphalist purport. The point of the story of the blind men and the elephant as cited by the Buddha in the Udāna was that all other religious teachers are blind and therefore offer distorted narratives about reality, but he alone can see and give a true and accurate narrative, so if you don't want to be led around by blind men, you'd better follow the Buddha. I'd guess a similar meaning would attend to the well analogy. Other religious teachers dig shallow wells, but the Buddha alone dug deep enough to find water.

> But you apparently can fool a lot of people, a lot of the time --for  
> fun and profit.

If you couldn't fool most of the people most of the time, organized religion wouldn't last a minute. Besides, the economy would wither up a blow away. Unfortunately, both the economy and organized religion remain healthy by most question-beggingly conventional measures of health, which means that the planet as a whole is facing a sickness unto death. But so what? Planets are impermanent anyway, right?

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM