Skip to main content

Imprisonment


Parable

Manav was arrested and thrown into a dark dungeon.  No one told him what his crime was.  When they hurled him into the dark cell whose door shut with a bang, all that he could see was a beam of light passing through a slit-like ventilator at the top of one of the walls.  Silence and darkness enveloped him.

He stretched his body and touched the narrow sill of the ventilator.  He pulled himself up and looked out through the ventilator.  The light outside helped dispel some of his gloom. 

He spent most of his time and energy doing the same thing day after day, without once caring to explore the darkness in the cell. 

If only he had explored the darkness, he would have discovered that the door was not locked.

What stood between him and his freedom was his obstinate clinging to the narrow slit.


Acknowledgement: This parable is adapted from Sheldon B. Kopp’s book, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Wow ! Such a nice parable. I haven't read the book.. would you recommend.. what is it about ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The subtitle of the book is: "The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients". the author takes examples from classical literary works such as Shakespeare's Othello, Kafka's K, and Don Quixote to analyse certain psychological problems of people in quest of meaning in life. The author's basic premise is that an adult cannot be a disciple: hence kill the Buddha (that's Zen koan). Neither a spiritual guru nor a psychotherapist can reveal your truth; you have to discover it for yourself, the guru and the therapist can be lamp posts on the way...

      the book is fairly good. On a scale of 5, I'd give it 3.5 rating. The problem is that there's a tendency for the author to seek popularity at times... Secondly, the book was published in 1972 and psychology has undergone much change after that.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Exactly, Anita. That's just the point. Now, please transfer the metaphor to our life!

      Delete
  3. And this is how we miss out.on life... We cling to one thing and forget that there's a whole different world ... a different aspect of life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let me quote Kopp: "... we are defeated not only by the narrowness of our perspectives, and our fear of the darkness..."

      Delete
  4. Nice parable..

    How we miss things in life..sigh..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A whole big world remains unexplored because of our clinging to something...

      Delete
  5. I so agree with the author's disdain to cling to the last leaf . But that makes me wonder what pushes us into this myopia. Is it our upbringing, the society and environment or the collective acceptance of grandness of life while on the contrary it is simple.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People have the herd mentality, Bushra. They follow the majority. And the majority view today is that wealth is the only value, external beauty is what matters, and so on. If we stand out of that, as you say, life becomes much easier - much simpler at least.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...