To become the Path itself ...

When I was young teenager, which I was once upon a time, a couple of cousins referred to me--appreciatively and not mockingly--as Buddha, all because I offered highfalutin thoughts that were perhaps a tad out of the normal for that age.  I refer to the "mockingly" because it was also true that we used to mock people who came across like they had suddenly realized their mistakes--as if they became enlightened like the Buddha. (புத்தருக்கு ஞானம் வந்திருந்து)

Perhaps because of all these kinds of influences, or otherwise--who knows!--I have always had a fascination for the Buddha, as any number of posts in this blog reveal.

Buddhism has largely vanished from the India.  Once, I had a spirited argument with a friend, which went nowhere and ended with a agree-to-disagree, on how Adi Sankara led the charge to wipe out the rapidly growing Buddhist influence.  In the marketplace of religious truths, Buddhism lost!

My folks, like many devout Hindus, have visited Bodh Gaya and the tree (well, its descendant) where Siddhartha became the enlightened one.  Some day, I will visit those parts of India too.

For now, it is all vicarious.  Like by reading this fantastic piece in The New Yorker, in which Paul Salopek writes about waking the Buddha trail, in his Out of Eden project.

Caption at the source:
The Out of Eden Walk is an experiment in slow journalism, retracing the pathways blazed by the first Homo Sapiens

The author writes:

In the Buddha’s day, northern India’s religious landscape was in a time of spiritual crisis and social upheaval. Disillusioned, rudderless, Siddhartha renounced his gilded life—a childhood with thirty-two nursemaids, a kingdom with seasonal palaces and private gardens, and his princess wife and their child—to join other ascetics meditating in forests along the Neranjara River.
Today, plastic trash spangles the river’s sandy banks.

Such is life.  When even the Buddha has become irrelevant in this pale blue dot, how utterly foolishly arrogant of us to think that our egos and desires matter the most!

Fair goes the dancing when the Sitar is tuned.

Tune us the Sitar neither high nor low,
And we will dance away the hearts of men.

But the string too tight breaks, and the music dies. 
The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies.

There is a middle way.

Tune us the Sitar neither low nor high.
And we will dance away the hearts of men.

More here