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The relevance of Zen thoughts

by Prof. Sunanda Mahendra

I was not aware of the fact that the late scholar monk Professor Walpola Rahula, was interested in Zen and the elements that go into the understanding of Buddhist thought, until I came to read a second impression of a book titled 'Zen and the taming of the Bull', Published by Godage International Publishers - Sri Lanka.

This is a collection of essays on Buddhist (topics) written to a number of learned journals at home and abroad. Perhaps a limited number of copies had been published as far back as 1978, and the second edition had come up in 2003, with a number of revisions and additions.

The key essay on Zen and the taming of the Bull presents to the reader the significance of Buddhist symbolism, where the taming of the bull may mean, the self awareness, and understanding one's innerness as against the outer disturbances.

According to scholar Rahula, the simile of the taming of the bull, goes back to very ancient times. As stated in Visuddhimagga, the text of Buddhagosha on Buddhist ideology, the simile is further elaborated as follows:

'Just as a man tied to a post a calf that should be tamed, even so here should one tie one's own mind tight to the object of mindfulness.'

According to Ven. Rahula, in this commentarial simile the herdsman fixes a post and ties the calf to it, whereas the bull in the Zen ideology as depicted in pictures is tethered to a tree.

The significant point is that Zen readers may not be the readers of accepted Buddhist classics like Buddhagosha's Visuddhimagga, but the followers of a particular Theravada tradition as laid down creatively by Bodhidharma, a sage who is said to have been the propagator of Zen in China and Japan.

His teachings led to a creative thinking which is formulated in Zen poems, stories and pictures and he had a group of followers who were known as Zen teachers or Zen masters. A very significant point always emphasized as characteristic in Zen discipline is that one should live in the act, live in the moment itself, without worrying and disturbing oneself with thoughts of the past and the future.

In certain ways this ideology is an existential imagination. As Dr. D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) the Japanese philosopher and interpreter of Zen, points out, 'Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.

By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world, can say that Zen liberates all the energies properly and naturally stored in each of us, which are in ordinary circumstances cramped and distorted so that they find no adequate channel for activity'.

The attempt on the part of the scholar Rahula, is to present to the legend of the taming of the Bull as a method of self discipline. The tamer is in a constant flux of self discipline where he has to undergo agonies and disaster in order to tame the bull. He wants to dispel the belief that Zen is different from all other systems of Buddhism.

This erroneous impression according to the monk scholar has been created by later developments in China and Japan. Going deeper into the etymological roots he points out that Japanese Zen comes from the Chinese 'Ch'an' which is derived from the Sanskrit 'dhyana' (Pali Jhana) meaning 'meditation'.

As mentioned above this was introduced from India to China about the sixth century A.C. probably by Bodhidharma. But he states that its practice went through such tremendous transformations, almost beyond recognition, on account of the character and culture of those countries.

Nevertheless, the spirit of the original Buddhism from India still remains as the life of Zen, for its fundamental tenets are all based on the teachings and ideas found in the original canonical texts. A reader of Dhammapada and other Buddhist text show us that there are occasions where certain monks who were in 'meditation' had attained the highest supreme bliss.

This according to Zen teachings, is treated in a similar manner as 'mind awakening' or inner awakening denoted by the term 'Satori'. This awakening can be treated as an exercise in 'sudden recognition'.

In order to illustrate this factor Zen teachers have a series of parable like mini stories some of which have been drawn from actual life experiences.

Scholar Ven. Rahula presents a few Zen stories which are retold as follows:

The Zen master, after 30 years of hard discipline and training, experienced his Satori, when he saw a common peach flower in bloom. Another master after a long and arduous search, had his Satori when he heard the sound of the stone hitting a bamboo.

A Zen master named Mumon spent six years of hard discipline and meditation with the famous Koan Mu (Nothingness) without any result. One day he heard the beating of the drum announcing meal time, and all of a sudden he had 'satori' (the sudden awakening).

As laid down by the scholar Ven Rahula, the origin of Zen is related in a delightful little story of apocryphal tradition. I wish to reproduce that story here:

One day, while preaching to the assembly on the Vulture peak, the Buddha held up a golden lotus flower. None in the assembly understood the meaning of his act except Maha Kasyapa, the great elder, who looked at the Buddha and smiled. Then the Buddha said, 'I have the true Dharma eye, marvellous mind of Nirvana. This now I transmit to you, Maha Kasyapa.'

Thus Maha Kasyapa was considered to be the first in the line of the Indian patriarchs of Zen'

(The reader is referred to Zen Dust by Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki) But Ven. Rahula while presenting that story doubts as to a genuine origin.

All in all this essay is one of the most stimulating researches on the subject of Zen. students who offer Buddhist Culture as a subject at the Advanced Level examination are requested to know some aspects of Zen thought and its bearing on Buddhist culture.

As such if this essay is to be translated into Sinhala it would be a resourceful exercise.

Translation as an exercise in comparative creativity

If a translation opens up a window into a culture, the translator must decide whether the window thus opened offers a valid or valuable insight into the culture, said Dr. Carmen Wickramagamage, Department of English, University of Peradeniya delivering the keynote address on the occasion of awarding the H. A. I. Goonetileke Prize for Translations 2003 at the Barefoot Gallery on May 8. Excerpts:

There is a phrase that is often repeated in Translation Studies like a mantra: and, that is, that "translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes" (Roman Jakobson). "Equivalence" I would say is the operative word here and how to maintain this "equivalence in difference" is the cardinal problem for all translators.

In other words, there cannot be a perfect translation if by a perfect translation we mean one that matches word for word, phrase to phrase, and sentence to sentence, the original. One can only aim at approximation because translators must work with two different languages or two different sign systems.

So, we as the panel of judges was most interested in gauging the extent to which the translators had understood and adhered to this cardinal principle in translation practice.

That is, we wanted to know whether they realized that a perfect translation was not possible, if by a perfect translation we mean a "literal" translation. May be an example or two would suffice to explain my point.

Now for those of you who know Sinhala, how does one translate "upaaseka Balalaa" into English? Should it be translated as "pious/devout cat"? Now I am sure you will agree with me that what is sacrificed here is sense in order to offer a literal translation.

On the other hand, if it was equivalence in difference we were looking for it should be translated as "he is only acting the saint" or he is pretending. Or take a phrase like "eyaa hari pandithai" or "eyaa hari panditheyek." Should this be translated as "s/he is a great pundit"? Those who know their Sinhala would know that a "punditheyaa" in Sinhala is anything but a pundit! A more accurate translation therefore would substitute "know-all" for "pundit."

Readership

In other words, the three judges looked at translation as an exercise in comparative creativity. And that was particularly so because we were considering translations of creative writing written for an educated adult readership. And I highlight the special status and challenges of translating creative writing because translations can be, and are, undertaken for different reasons.

The translation of a religious text or scientific text, for instance, would entail problems and requirements that are different to those confronting the translator of creative writing.

In a translation of a religious text that contains divine decrees and dictates, the translator has very little freedom to deviate from or interpret what is supposedly God's word. And the translation of a foreign literary text for children, say, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, for instance, would entail a different set of problems.

On the other hand, in the translation of creative works for an educated adult readership, the translator is freer to experiment because he is not catering to the needs of a special audience. So, first of all, we felt that the translator should have a good idea about the extent to which the writer of the original work deployed the resources of the source language and culture.

Then we wanted the translator to demonstrate his competence in locating equivalent resources in the target language. In other words, we wanted to see if the translator had created the best possible home for the source text in the target language and culture.

In this context, we would in fact like to commend many of the translators for having selected texts in the original that deserved to be translated. But, of course, as we all know, the richer the text is in its original setting, the more difficult it is to translate.

In fact, the beauty of one text in particular lay in its dialectal richness. So, the question then was, how does one recreate such linguistic regionalisms in English? If the translator wishes to share with the target readership this colourful dialect, she or he must experiment with prose styles in order to create a distinct prose style that is unique without being artificial or archaic. One thinks here of the distinctive style of prose that Chinua Achebe created in Things Fall Apart in order to capture and carry the idiom and ethos of the Igbo peoples of Nigeria.

Degree

At a more basic level, we were also interested in the degree to which the translators were able to balance the demands and requirements of the source text and target language. Now we all know that adherence to source language requirements will produce a faithful translation. But will this necessarily produce a readable text in the target langauge? So we wanted to know if the translators knew when to remain faithful or adequate to the source text and when to let go of source language forms in order to produce a dynamic text in the target langauge.

In fact, a good test of translator competence we felt was the way the translators tackled fixed expressions, idioms and proverbs. That is, whether they always tried to translate them literally or knew when to locate dynamic equivalents.

So, just as one cannot "kick the bucket" in Sinhala, one cannot "eat parippu/dhal" in English. A meaningful English equivalent for the popular Sinhala expression "maara parippuakne kaeve" therefore cannot be "what a fine lot of dhall I ate." In English, it should be something like "I got into a right royal mess!" To translate the "parippu eating exercise" as "eating dhal" is a good example of the scenario that the classic Sinhala expression describes/captures in "'yanne koheda?' 'malle pol'," which by the way should not be translated into English as "'where are you going?' 'I have coconuts in my bag.'"

A translator's feel for the texture of the language must include an understanding of the way the language works - where an expression, as in the above "dhal" scenario, has lost its purely reverential function and has taken on figurative dimensions. In such instances, the translator must resist the temptation for literal translation and look for an equivalent idiom in the Target Language.

Or he must sacrifice the attempt at idiomatic richness for the sake of pure sense as in "I got into a right royal mess." Similarly, a conversation characterized as "yanne koheda, malle pol," should be translated as a "conversation going nowhere" or an exercise in miscommunication.

Creative transposition

In translation studies, this is called creative transposition. So, of course, as the above examples illustrate, translation may therefore involve an inevitable loss, whether of sense, linguistic texture or cultural content.

Richness

That is, if a dynamic equivalent cannot be found for "yanne koheda, malle pol" in English, some of the textured richness of the phrase, sentence or text would be lost in the English translation. So the linguistic pun that carries the punch in the Sinhala rhyme, "Kolombeta Kiri, Apeta Kakiri," would have to be lost in a translation.

The question before the translator therefore is how to minimize this loss. Of course, we the judges, as practising translators ourselves, were only too aware that this is easier said than done. But we felt that the translators should have the confidence to decide when to overlook source language demands. Similarly, they also had to know when to bend the target language to accommodate source language requirements.

May be an example or two will help. Now, for the Sinhala word "puskola potha", is "book" in English an adequate substitute? So, if a translator selects "book," then it shows a certain unthinking laziness, in my opinion. In the same way, is "Full Moon Day" adequate for the Sinhala word "Poya"? I would say that "Full Moon Day" dilutes the unique cultural content behind the word Poya. (The Sinhala word "Poya" after all can be used to connote all four stages of the lunar cycle).

On the other hand, if "upaasaka balalaa" becomes "pious cat" in English, the target readership would be hard put to understand what this phrase might mean. So, the translators' challenge, we felt, was, not to produce a text that reads like any other text written originally in English. Because if that was the case, then there was no point in translations.

Perhaps the point could be illustrated further through reference to the metaphor of the (suitable) home used earlier. The home that the translator creates for the source text in the host language should not be identical to the other homes of the host culture but, instead, stand out to some extent.

But, on the other hand, it should not be so faithful to the original or source text, that it could only be understood through reference to the original. That is, we should not have to do a back-translation, into the source langauge, in order to know what the writer means as in "pious cat." Because, if the readers could understand the source langauge or read the source text, then, most probably they would not need to read it in translation.

Choice of texts

We, as the panel of judges, were also interested in the extent to which the translators had critically reflected upon the task before them. That is, we wished to know first of all about the decisions that they had made and the reasons for their decisions. Next, we considered the extent to which those decisions had led to a good translations.

Among the most important pre-translation decisions that a translator has to make is the choice of texts. A translation, especially into a language like English, puts the text into circulation among a culturally diverse community of readers dispersed globally and united only on the basis of their competence in English.

Therefore, the translator must work out for himself why a particular text is chosen for circulation and consumption among this globally scattered and culturally diverse community. Even where the target language is not English but may be Tamil, the translator must have his translation objectives clearly in mind in selecting a text for translation.

Is the purpose information, entertainment or persuasion or some combination of the above three basic objectives? Why select this particular text for translation? What effect or response from the target readership does the translator hope to elicit? Will it offend the target readership, arouse outrage or move them towards socially harmful emotions or actions? Will it offer a skewed view/portrait of the source langauge community? If a translation opens up a window into a culture, the translator must decide if the window thus opened offers a valid or valuable insight into the culture.

In other words, what insight or angle into the culture does a text afford? Does it illuminate the socio-cultural ethos of that culture in some significant manner and capture its mind-set and texture? In other words, does the text deserve to be translated? So the translator's role entails a responsibility.

In choosing a text for translation, he must be aware of the wider repercussions or resonances of such a translation.

The killing of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses reminds us that the repercussions can sometimes be quite deadly.

The decision-making role of the translator was not limited to the choice of text. She or he also has to decide to what extent one must retain the "foreignness of the foreign" (Andre Berman) when it comes to translation and to what extent one must let go of the alien and the foreign in the interest of producing a readable text.

For example, must one retain words like "Buuru Enda, Ela and Kaettha" when perfectly acceptable equivalents exist for those words in English? (Of course, let's keep in mind that the equivalent English term for "buuru enda" is "camp cot," not "Donkey bed"!) What was to be gained then by cluttering the text with such exotic-sounding terms? On the other hand, should one translate everything, including proper names and kinship terminology, into English? So, a Sinhala name like Ran Menika, for instance.

Should this be translated as "Golden Gem"? Or how about a term of endearment in Sinhala such as "mage sudhu" or "mage sudhaa?" Does it make sense to translate this word as "my white"? This would be the same as translating the American English term of endearment "Honey" into Sinhala as "paeni"! On a more serious note, take kinship terms in Sinhala and Tamil. We know that conventional English cannot accommodate the linguistic and cultural differences that these terms connote.

Kinship terms

If so, is this difference effectively captured by translating Piyadasa Aiya as Elder Brother Piyadaasa or Seetha Nangi as Younger Sister Seetha or Podi Aiya as Younger Older Brother? Wouldn't it be better then to retain the "foreign-sounding" kinship terms (that is, Piyadasa Aiya, Seetha Nangi and Podi Aiya, for instance) with a glossary, at the back of the book, to denote the difference? Such literal translations can produce quaint terms as "older mother" for 'Loku Amma" and "younger mother" for "Punchi Amma," which in English can be quite confusing, to say the least! Our position, in other words, was that translators should not erase all traces of the foreign to produce a readable text.

But we felt that these translation decisions needed to be shared with the reader in a critical introduction that outlines and rationalizes such decisions.

And, finally, we also insisted on an expert grasp of the workings of the target langauge.

That is, the translator had to be conversant with the idiom, the modalities of creation and the socio-cultural content of the receptor langauge. For instance, a translator had to know that the archaic word "alas" in English is not the equivalent for the colloquial "aiyo" and "aney" in Sinhala.

Usage

He should also know that in more conventional usage, it is more common to say "why don't you join me for a drink?" than "why don't you join me for a booze?" Similarly, elementary level errors, at the level of spelling, punctuation and grammar, we felt, were unacceptable in the case of professional translators.

So the texts submitted for the prize we felt had to be clean of such surface-level errors. But this was not always the case, may be, because of the short notice given of the Award. So, to recap, we had to consider the extent to which the translator maintained a fine balance between faithfulness to the original and acceptability in the Target Language, in this case, English.

We also gave consideration to Translation Decisions-that is, the extent to which the translators critically opted for certain format and conceptual choices, including choice of text.

But most of all we had to consider the expert grasp and command of the Target Langauge because a readable text depended on that command.

We would like to commend the translators who came forward at such short notice to submit manuscripts for the competition. We would have been only too happy to award the prize considering that this is the first-ever HAI Goonetileke Prize for Translation. We are sorry to have to announce that we are unable to award the prize for translation this year because the terms of reference sent to the panel by the Gratiaen Trust clearly states that we should select a winner "should the entry be up to standard." The judges felt there was no such entry this year.

We sincerely hope that the translators will not be too discouraged by this decision and will continue to contribute to this very important field of literary production.

Punyakante Wijenaike : 

The underestimated writer

by Tissa Abeysekera

It is always unsafe to quote from a work of fiction, out of its narrative context, as it is unfair to believe that the views expressed by a character in a novel or a play are those of the author. But that is precisely the risk I am taking now.

J.M Coatzee is a South African writer who won the Nobel last year. His latest novel is titled Elizabeth Costello, and is woven round a fictitious Australian woman novelist.

She has become a celebrity, and leads a sterile existence, moving through a monotonous routine of lecture tours, writer-in-residence assignments on luxury cruise ships, and of course the inevitable seminars.

Her books are on the best-seller lists, and the cash flow is voluminous and continuous.

Coatzee has structured his novel in a series of polemical discussions situated within those frighteningly cold and sunless interiors where everything begins and ends at a single point, never proceeding beyond, and going nowhere. Each movement or chapter is a polemic, and the second polemic is titled: The Novel in Africa.

Here the setting is on a luxury liner, the SS Northern Lights sailing on a fifteen-day cruise to the ice shelf in the South Pole carrying a precious cargo of ageing millionaires. There is also an African writer on board, whom our woman novelist had met long years ago, when they were both young, and struggling.

Now both have become icons and frozen in the ice cold of celebrity status, displayed like precious mummies, and in the case of the African writer, almost like an exotic animal from the Dark Continent, caged in a zoo. They argue and they quarrel. Emmanuel Ugudu, the African novelist and our lady, Elizabeth Costello, are plagued by the memory of a brief encounter and its fleeting consummation in a cheap hotel in Kuala Lumpur, during a literary seminar, long years ago.

Quarrel

Both are over the hill, but the African is still attractive to the blonde Russian girls serving as stewardesses, and he still has the virility to bed them regularly. Elizabeth is beyond such activity, and feels lonely and unloved.

This is an attempt to lay bare the context within which the statement by Elizabeth Costello, which I shall quote now, is made, even though such an explanation may not be relevant here.

"The English novel" she says, is written in the first place by English people for English people.

That is what makes it the English novel. The Russian novel is written by Russians for Russians. But the African novel is not written by Africans for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to me to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers.

Yet how can you explore a world in all its depth if at the same time you are having to explain it to outsiders? It is like a scientist trying to give full, creative attention to his investigations while at the same time explaining what he is doing to a class of ignorant students. It is too much for one person, it can't be done, not at the deepest level.

Problem

That, it seems to me, is the root of your problem. Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write."

These comments are valid even when taken out of the dramatic context within which they occur.

They lay bare a problem at the heart of ethnicity, indigenousness, and cultural identity in art.

It is a problem with which perhaps film-makers of the calibre of Lester James Peries, Satyajit Ray and Yazujiro Ozu, in their commitment to making a true and convincing portrait of their countries, had to contend. It is also a problem central to all those in this part of the world, trying to express themselves creatively in English.

The problem is more so when one's instrument of communication happens to be language. It is within this context that Punyakanthe Wijenaike's solid body of work has to be examined and evaluated. She has kept working bravely and stubbornly through the long dark night when English was the focus of political hatred in this country. The class struggle in this country also had a linguistic divide. We are long past that stage when we located responsibility for his in personalities and movements.

When we look beyond to the broader movement of history we could plainly see the rejection of English as an inevitable phase in our growing up from the medieval to the modern, or even perhaps to the post-modern period.

In a paper read out at the SAARC Writers Conference in Lahore, last March, I made the following observations, which I feel is relevant here.

I was referring to the period before the Rushdie syndrome, when South Asian writers of English still did not quite own the language from within.

Brave souls

"Between R. K. Narayan and the post Salman Rushdie phenomenon, I can think of a few writers who wrote beautifully in English, Kamala Markandaya, Ved Mehta, Dom Moraes, Nayanatara Sahgal and Anita Desai. In my own country, this was a period of crisis where, in a moment of political insanity, we threw the English Baby with the bath water of Colonial residue. It is a warp from which we are yet to emerge fully; but here I must pay tribute to a handful of brave souls who kept writing poetry and English through a long dark night.

Anne Ranasinghe - a German-Jew from Essen who escaped the holocaust as a thirteen-year-old kid to England, married a Sri Lankan and domiciled here; James Goonewardene - who, though he didn't quite make it kept writing even through penury, Jeanne Arasanayagam - once again of Jewish ancestry and married to a Tamil who wrote poetry of consistent seriousness because they seem to come from the gut of felt experience, and the most prolific of them all, Punyakanthe Wijenaike, who within four decades wrote thirteen novels.

Then came Carl Muller, who, like his predecessor in sub-continent, GV Desani, creatively applied for the first time in Sri Lanka, a native English idiom."

The Commonwealth Journal has remarked once that "In Punyakanthie Wijenaike Sri Lanka possess one of the most under-estimated writers at work in the English language."

Affection

It would be interesting to probe why she was under-estimated. Over here, I could locate responsibility in an under-developed critical establishment, and to misreading by academics labouring under literary orthodoxy.

But the indifference of the offshore establishment could be due to more complex reasons.

They may be found in those prejudices, which I touched upon at the beginning of this talk. Whatever they may be, they have to be identified and come to terms with.

Meanwhile there is the question, central to the life and work of any artist, writer, film-maker, painter, musician; what keeps them working as Punyakanthie has, in the last four decades? There are many clues in her autobiographical sketch, The Sunset Years. A beautiful title I thought. Written in that sincere unaffected almost non-literary manner but with a subtext of warm affection for everything seen, observed, and felt, which is the hallmark of her writing, Punyakanthie, provides us with the portrait of a gentle soul, who in spite of everything is still in love with life.

"I am trying to forget myself, by thinking of others', she says somewhere at the beginning. In all her books, even though in some, there are elements, which are unmistakably first person, she mostly writes of others. It is said, that all good art has to be personal. But as Tolstoy once said, art helps you to fly out of the birdcage of yourself. It is a freedom, which all serious artists seek, but seldom achieve.

Referring to her so-called 'arranged-marriage' Punyakanthe refers to her homecoming with a most charming anecdote, and it is heavy with implication. "We got married on the 17th January 1952. The first year of marriage passed quietly under my mother-in-law's roof. Her words of greeting to me were:' I want my son to depend on you for his cup of tea.'

I did not know how to read that. I had never made tea back in my own palatial home. It had been always brought to me on a silver tray" Like in Tagore's beautiful story Samapti, where a tomboyish girl-child comes of age gracefully, Punyakanthe's life may have been the narrative of a girl who had her tea brought to her on a silver tray becoming a mature person who observed with great understanding the pain of others.

ABBA

But sometimes I have wondered whether some of that pain, covered discreetly though, is also Her own. There is a hint towards the end when she quotes from the song by ABBA:

"I have a dream
A song to sing,
A book to write -
To help me cope -
With reality."

Has she also been attempting to flap flap herself out of that cage of whatever she was born to?

Punyakanthe comes from that class in Sri Lankan society, where English was and continues to be, almost a surrogate mothertongue. Perhaps she could express her most intimate feelings only in that langauge.

The langauge of her ancestors has been debased. It is no longer the langauge of Gurulugomi, or Rahula, or that of the Kelani boatman. This is put much better in Anne Ranasingha's beautiful translation of Rose Auslander's holocaust poem:

"My Fatherland is dead
They have buried it in fire.
I live,
In my Motherland
Of words.

It does not matter from where those words come. All that matters is that they should be sincerely spoken, written or sung. Punyakanthie, you are a brave woman, and I salute you for that bravery, and your unaffected consistency.

You have come through, and from now on, may the road be kind to you. From the speech made at the launch of Punyakante Wijenaike's new books, Missing in Action and Sunset Years.

The writer is a former Chairman, National Film Corporation

Tips from a marketing guru

Alevi Jayamaga
Author: Nimal Sedera
Rathna Book Publishers, Colombo 10
138 pp Price Rs. 175

Nimal Sedera is known to be a committed salesman trainer in the insurance field. A senior insurance executive once told me that Sedera can even sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo!

In Alevi Jayamaga Sedera comes out with all the secrets of his success as a salesman and a trainer. He begins the book by telling the reader that salesmanship is his favourite subject. He is someone who enjoys what he does.

Turning the pages of Alevi Jayamaga I found that a lot of his personal experiences has gone into it. In addition, he claims, he has included what he had gathered vicariously or what he has read in a book, newspaper or magazine.

What do companies look for? Once a leading company inserted an advertisement in a newspaper calling for a Sales Executive. The company wanted someone who is ambitious with good customer relations, communication skills and fluency in English.

If the company advertised for a salesperson or a salesman only a few would have applied for the post. However, the "Sales Executive" is a modern term - attractive and highly respectable. Similar advertisements appear in the press regularly calling for sales representatives, sales executives or marketing executives. But all of them have to do one big job. They must sell a product or service to a customer.

Customer

Nobody can sell a product or service to an unwilling customer. Numerous salesmen visit our houses but we politely turn them away. However, once a well-dressed young man walked into my office and wished me a happy birthday.

I was pleasantly surprised but after sometime the young man walked away after selling me an insurance policy! By reading this exciting book I gather that a good salesman should be a pleasant person to work in an organisation. A person who never smiles cannot fit into this slot. He should also be patient and methodical in his work.

Most businesses prosper because of the personnel they recruit. They are good communicators, fluent in English with a fairly good educational background. Even if you have no wall full of diploma and degree certificates, if you have all the other qualifications you are the person for the job.

Unlike monthly paid employees, a successful salesman is entitled to generous sales commissions, annual bonuses, medical facilities and what not. What is more, he will enjoy that rare privilege of recognition in his own company and in society. That means, we always welcome an honest and helpful salesman who comes to our doorstep. Such a person sooner or later becomes indispensable to any organisation.

King

There are moving items, moderately moving items, slow moving items and non-moving items in business. An enterprising salesman can make a non-moving item a moving item by following the wealth of advice imparted in the book.

One such advice is to consider the customer as the king. If you have no customers, there will be no sales. If the goods are not moving, you and the company will go bankrupt. The author gives an important advice to prospective salesman: Be a positive thinker. If you think you can do it, you will succeed. Likewise, a good salesman meets his targets whether there is rain or drought.

In essence, Alevi Jayamaga tells all those involved in selling products and services to be mindful of little negatives that clutter up their progress. As Norman Vincent Peale in The Power of Positive Thinking says, "The negative attitude is a friction approach. The positive approach is the 'smooth handle' technique. It is in harmony with the flow of the universe."

Nimal Sedera's Alevi Jayamaga is a dependable manual for sales persons because the author is not an armchair critic but somebody who practises what he preaches.

- R. S. Karunaratne

 **** Back ****

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