Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Losing One's Head | Seeking Non-Self In Sri Lanka
Transcript
- Losing One's Head | Seeking Non-Self In Sri Lanka “To be or not to be,” is the refrain of several Sri Lankan government departments – but how can they – or that - free you from suffering? From cravings? From any need to cling to things? I was besottedly watching a gluttonous troupe of toque macaque monkeys lay waste to the mangos when a passing guest, a very down-to-earth birdwatcher from West Hampstead, told me he had lost his head. As he went on to enumerate the names of several species he had been able to photograph just that morning from beyond the pool, I realised he was rather pleased with this loss of his head. For him, it was a good thing, a very good thing indeed - an expression of extreme happiness. I was relieved. This is, after all, a hotel I am running here, and happy guests are much to be preferred to decapitated ones. Would, however, that his expression of happiness was one I could so easily have adopted just then, for at the time my head had also been lost, but in no good way at all, and all thanks to the byzantine dealings with one of the country’s main governmental financial institutions. This particular state department lives to its utmost, Hamlet’s frustrating refrain: To be or not to be. Famous throughout the island for its ability to befuddle, confuse and delay the simplest of transactions, the institution’s mastery of procrastination would have given even the great Leonardo da Vinci a run for his money as he laboured for 15 years over the Mona Lisa. I can see this modest debate running for years and years until death or some great act of meritorious goodness moves the players on. But waking up as I did this morning to my jungle valley teaming with early-start birds and monkeys and an unexpected pair of Grey Hornbills, and watching the light slowly shift across the hills turning them from dark green to yellow green, I felt every bit the equal of this wearisome struggle. Inspired by the casual observations of my Hamstead guest, I’m more positively distracted by the unexpected positives involved in head loss. As a form of death, it is, of course, spectacularly graphic and final. More than a mere killing, it is a ritual or even a passage – for by removing a head, with all its attendant and deeply personal indicators of identity, it marks the destruction of an individual’s personality and distinctiveness. It is – almost - an (albeit shocking) physical embodiment of anatta. On the long and challenging road to purification, as embodied by the Theravada Buddhists who dominate the island, anatta is one of seven stages in the spiritual journey, the last of which, the purification by knowledge and vision, leads immediately (and with no little sense of relief) to Nirvana or enlightenment itself, and a final breaking of the endless painful cycle of rebirth. Or in my case, no more vacillating emails from the directors of this state institution. The anatta stage comes more or less bang in the middle of the seven stages. To get to it, you have to get through sila – the purification of virtue by bringing moral discipline into your life; and citta, which purifies the mind through meditation. As a lapsed Anglian Methodist, moral discipline is something I have been struggling to get the better of all my life long. Mediation, however, is much easier, and I sink into it happily most days, surrounded by my five meditating schnauzers. It’s the next stage – stage three - that is proving most difficult. For in stage three – ditti - you have to disaggregate the five things – known collectively as the skandhas - that make you who you are – your body, feelings, perceptions, consciousness and thoughts. Assuming you have done all this correctly, you achieve anatta, or non-self. You have eliminated the fixed, illusory, and permanent features of your personhood. You are free from suffering. From cravings. From any need to cling to things. What bliss that will be. Nagasena, a Buddhist sage who lived in nearby India around 150 BCE, equated the process to taking a chariot apart. Or, in the case of me and this bothersome government institution, taking it apart again and again and again. The chariot, Nagasena explained to an enquiring Greek king, Menander, has no independent nature of its own. Once you have removed its axles, wheels, and reins, the chariot vanishes. So too does the soul – once you have removed those five things that make you who you are. You might – if pressed - say that removing your head achieves much the same sort of thing. I am not sure whether it is the eminent officers of the financial institution who are busy sending me contradictory emails or if I am very far along the journey to anatta. We still have quite a way to go. Every time we seem to reach closure, another bit of the symbolic chariot is discovered or rediscovered, and the process reverts to Stage One. Yet decapitation has form in Sri Lankan history, and almost every Sri Lankan, officers of the state or not, will know of the story of an early king who ruled Anuradhapura from 247 to 249 CE - Siri Sangha Bodhi. Sri Lanka’s famous Mahavaṃsa Chronicle, an epic poem written in the 5th or 6th centuries CE and covering its history since 543 BCE, took this particular king to heart, despite his criminal role in a conspiracy to murder an earlier king. He was, the ancient chronicler noted, “a righteous hero” whose heart was “much shaken with pity”. Not just pity, it seems, but extraordinary self-sacrifice too. For this king, in an act of anatomical wonder, severed his own head from his body to allow a beggar to collect the reward offered for his death. Legend though it might be, this extreme expression of self-effacement underlines the humility that so marks out much of any study of Sri Lankan kings. Though probably no better or worse than their royal counterparts anywhere else in the world, Sri Lanka’s kings were, by virtue of being Buddhist, unusually preoccupied with the importance of doing, however late in the day, acts of meretricious goodness. A good record in this department did not of itself lead to Niviana - but it was said to help ensure a favourable rebirth in the next cycle. It might help you avoid reappearing in the realm of animals, the realm of Hungry Ghosts or worst of all, the Realm of Naraka –hell itself. Siri Sangha Bodhi’s death, and that of his wife, who died of shock on discovering the body, so tormented Gothabhaya, the king who had placed the bounty on his head, that the repentant monarch fastened a skull made of gold to his dead predecessor before an extravagant cremation ceremony. No archaeological evidence has yet been uncovered to validate the story. Still, numerous temples across Sri Lanka tell the tale in wall frescoes and statues, most notably at the temple in Attanagalla, some 45 miles from me here at The Flame Tree Estate, where a stunning set of paintings by H. Medis Silva decorates every inch of the inner temple. Collectively, the frescoes are a wonderful depiction of a story that, despite its dreadful beginnings, has the happiest of endings: Siri Sangha Bodhi was destined to move immediately to Nirvana and Buddhahood following his self-decapitation. Non-self has got him to where he most wanted to be. Non-self is a personal goal I chase and cherish when dealing with most government departments, not just the one that has come to mind today – and with the Bank of Ceylon – and even, come to think of it, the kamikaze drivers of Sri Lanka’s big red buses. “Practice humility and patience,” advised Vincent de Paul, a catholic saint who had escaped slavery. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, put the process more directly: "Humility,” she advised, “is attentive patience." Taking in how measured and beautiful the wild parts of this island are, spaces that stretch about me here in every direction like an enormous green cushion that moderates and softens your every moment, I know that I have the wherewithal to prevail, to overcome the skandhas that crowd in on me every time I open another bothersome email. Anatta is within sight - and with it the prospect of losing my head in the nicest possible way. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.