Peace as far as the eye can see
View(s):I was wrong. Last week, lulled by the tranquillity of Vesak, I waxed eloquent (like a growing gibbous moon, you may say) on the serenity of religion in our land. In the cool moment between sunset and moonrise, I wrote that our country is home to people of a spectrum of faiths, philosophies, and ways of life. And carried away by the false peace of the full moon, I penned these lines:
“Hardly a day goes by in Sri Lanka when a temple or a church bell, or a muezzin’s cry from the myriad minarets that adorn the skyline, or the colourful sights and sounds of pooja, don’t serve to remind us of this fact. Worship, religious rituals, and miscellaneous acts of piety are an everyday part of the panoply of many people’s lives. And the plethora of holidays (or holy days in this case) assigned to the populace is a blessing to the adherents of their respective faiths.”
Then that monk went and immolated himself in the name of a cause, a vision, a passion. And nirvana came crashing down over the heads of so many sensitive souls island-wide. On the whole, though, it cast a small insignificant pall over the peaceful poya weekend.
But it got me thinking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of ideals in Sri Lanka today. Is it true (as I pondered over poya) a sense of unutterable peace has descended on many if not most of our neighbourhoods and also around the parts of our nation open to sight, sound, and scent? Is it truly the fact that worship, religious rituals, and miscellaneous acts of piety are an everyday part of the panoply of many people’s lives so as to be only a blessing and never a curse? Or is the reality that the darkness in our society continues to engulf us all – like the flames did with that burning bhikkhu – and that we have only enough faith or philosophy to make us dislike, despise, denigrate, desecrate, and eventually destroy?
By this time, are you mopping your damp brow and reaching for a cooling potion to slake your thirst? And a good thing, dear reader! Well I would do, too, to follow your compassionate and humane example…
I – lacking a burning passion, vision, or cause – simply followed a whim of mine (a hobby, a pastime) and took a slow train down from our urban centre to a southern hamlet just past Kalutara South. From Katukurunda Railway Station it is exactly one kilometre’s walk to the estuary of the Kalu Ganga. It is a sanctuary for people burdened by the oppressiveness of the world, samsara, life. And from the spit of land separating lagoon from sea, I beheld a beatific scene. Not a soul in sight, not even a heena-yaana boatman on the river (it was poya, so my thoughts strayed to the so-called lesser vehicle). Just wisp after wisp of salty slightly stinging ocean breeze; wave after wave of gentle rollers lapping at my feet while commingling briny and brackish waters; waft after waft of fragrant frangipani. (It being Vesak, my purple prose assumed monstrous dimensions!)
I, alone, a Crusoe on a deserted spit of land between sea and sky and sand, was monarch of all I surveyed. Here nature was glorious, only humanity vile. But that thought was tempered by the three towers of faith that thrust into the heavens. There were on the far horizon across the living waters, a temple and church and mosque – each dazzlingly white in the postmeridian sun: all seemingly equally serene; noise nowhere to fracture the soft golden tranquil sense of being one with the universe.
In that unutterable moment, the wisdom of Carl Sagan pierced my consciousness. It might seem strange that the words of the presenter of Cosmos – rather than, say, a Carpenter from Nazareth or a Charioteer at Kurukshetra or a Caliph-maker from Mecca – should assail me. But they did. And they spoke volumes.
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our self-imagined importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
“The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
The midnight memory of that flash of inspiration makes me well up with tears whenever it returns to haunt me. It has given me a cause, a vision, and a passion; no mere hobby or pastime. Here is me hoping that it will give fiery crusaders, nihilistic self-immolators, and apathetic bystanders alike a new flame of hope and resolution.
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