The apology of Burmakin V

Burmakin: Thunder and lightning are striking you, your majesty. You might be worn out by imprisonment, defeat of war and tragedy of love. However, even a guinea rodent in a merciless laboratory might find some way of escape from his running tracks. How do you manage to counteract Paharada’s thought experiment?

King of Angels: Well, my son. Thunder and lightning are striking me. Not for inflicting pain and humiliation but for dazzling my eyes! There is the beauty in our new war of critical reasoning if you have mercy neither upon yourself nor your prejudices. The critical arguments are enlivened under the sunshine if you hold that you might be wrong and your opponent’s thoughts might be fine.

Burmakin: This is not our Burmese taste, your majesty. Our Burmese tradition mandates that the seniors and honorable are always right. Buddhism is always right. Buddha’s Dharma is the complete resolution and the end to all human sufferings. We Burmese don’t need to do any thought experiment as we are the most nobly rewarded privileged people to know and practice Buddha’s Dharma. We Burmese don’t need to argue as we have no reason for progressing humanity as we are already in the end for this purpose.

King of Angels: Hey, my son. When you Burmese Taung Phi La abbot was reciting “the cause and effect doctrine” during his exploration for Buddha’s feet imprint in your Ava’s age, he asked a question to my Minbu guardian spirit. “Is the Dharma I am reciting the same as that original text of Buddha?” Did you remember what did the spirit feed him back?

Burmakin: His Dharma is looking like the smell of foul fish paste if the fish paste is packed with numerous layers of leaf packs. But the abbot insisted that his Dharma is perfectly the same as the origin of Buddha’s words. He even swore that a thunder should hit him and break his head into eight pieces if it was not so. Neither thunder nor lightning befell upon him; so thus, his argument seems to be right.

King of Angels: Hey my son. Every hour, every day and every where in your country, the pauperized, the starved, the disease-plagued, the imprisoned, the tortured, the enslaved, the outcast, the neglected, the treated unfair, all those beleaguered Burmese utter the same and iterative curse that my life-destroying weapon should shatter your demon king Than Shwe and his evil Queen Kyaing Kyaing’s heads into eight pieces. Nobody cares and I don’t care. Neither have I ever listened to this kind of your abbot’s arrogant swear.

Burmakin: Nonetheless, the abbot was venerable, your majesty. Even the guardian spirit appeared to approach him, bow him and listen to his sermon preach. The guardian spirit was one of the moral citizens of your illustrious deva kingdom, your majesty.

King of Angels: This is the abbot’s illusion, my son. My moral citizen approached him for admonishing that he was at a very immature level to understand the Dharma he was reciting. He was like the radio without life and any thought, that is exactly how your Burmese Buddhist monks nowadays, and throughout are practicing Buddha’s teachings. How unfair foul is this arrogant monk to compare himself with our unrivalled Teacher!

My moral citizen, the guardian spirit, was bewildered by this kind of an overbearing response, even if he sincerely told your Burmese monk to be aware of the nature in his human flaws, and the limits of himself as a human being. Since that time, my moral deva citizens have shut up their mouths in your Burmese land and turned their backs against you Burmese, my son. So have been our backs turned against the Sinhalese people who extravagantly thought and claimed that they are the only entitled defenders of Buddhism.

Burmakin: I now understand your majesty. The Buddhism knowledge of our human world is still immature and as young as it is. The irony lies in our vanity and arrogance: our Buddhist human races insistently imagine that we have abruptly got the enlightenment or enlightenment is just a one hand distant to our hands. If enlightenment had been that easy, the Bodhisattva Sumedha would not have needed to struggle that hard for a multiple of four for 10^140 years plus one hundred thousand eons in balancing his compassion and reason. The Teacher himself might not be so sure about his perspective for ultimate attainment of his Buddhahood, had he ever broken his pledge of his son Jali and daughter Kanhajina to Jujaka by killing this old bhramin that he couldn’t help conceiving it.

King of Angels: Right, what you Burmese Buddhists badly need is the humbleness for awareness of your limits as human beings, and forsaking of your obsessive indulgence in your schizophrenic historicism. In this scientific age of so competitive knowledge struggles, and the natural selection as the fittest to survive, the never tested strength for your Burmese is to fight utmost against those haughty illusions of your Burmese ego. Once your ego sways to the side of humbleness, the parasitic military dictatorship inflicted on your land created by your own Burmese heroic arrogance, yourselves, will no longer find any further place to stay.

The only enemy is your most intimate one that is yourself, my son, and nobody else. That is what Vesanntra had understood in doing his incredible act for the choice of renouncing his own children, that most people simply interpret is for the sake of others. As a matter of fact, the line of his rational reasoning has nothing to do with compassionate love upon Jujaka or others, but it is for his awareness and his combat with his intrinsic human flaw, that is the one-over-everything, love.

Intimacy vs. equanimity

The teacher told this story on the occasion of a lotus leaf shower…

Jujaka got up quickly, and spitting like the fire at the end of an aeon, the stick and creeper in his hand, he caught up with the two children, and shouting,

“You are too clever at getting away!’ he bound their hands and led them off again.

Holding a rope and stick, the bhramin led them away, beating them, while the Sivi prince (the Teacher) looked on.

As they were led away like this Kanhajina turned round to look at her father and cried out to him.

‘O daddy, this Brahmin beats me like a switch, as though I were a slave who had been born in his house. This is not a real bhramin, daddy, for bhramins are good men. This is a ghoul, disguised as a bhramin, who is leading us away to eat us. How can you just watch as we are driven away by an ogre?’

At the sight of his little daughter going off sobbing and trembling, overpowering grief rose up in the Teacher, and his heart grew hot. His breath came from his mouth in gasps, for he could not breathe through his nose, and tears that were drops of blood poured from his eyes. Realizing that such pain overcame him because of a flaw in him, his affection, and for no other reason, and certain that that affection must be banished and equanimity developed, he plucked out that dart of grief by power of his knowledge, and sat down in his usual position.

(Translation from the oldest Pali Text of Vesanntra Jataka surviving today, the work of Margaret Cone and Richard F.Gombrich)

To be cont. The struggle of ego, why Buddha could call out to the evidence of Vasundre (Earth Goddess) for his entitlement of the Bodhi enlightenment by inferring his perfect generosity in the Vesanntra Jataka? Because the charitable prince had defeated his human flaw of agent-relative reasons.