Nation-building and the lessons of the kula sutra
The most enchanting thing about Buddhism for me is that even the
simplest sutra is made for multiple application in multiple situations,
for untying straightforward knot or unravelling the complexities of
being to reveal (at least those who have slain appropriate volumes of
the kleshas) the pathway out of sorrow.
I was introduced to the Kula Sutta (on families) a short while ago.
‘Can you see if the Kula Sutra is on the internet?’ was the question. I
googled it. Found it. A simple observation. Here is the first part.
“In every case where a family cannot hold onto its great wealth for
long, it is for one or another of these four reasons. Which four? They
don’t look for things that are lost. They don’t repair things that have
gotten old.
They are immoderate in consuming food and drink. They place a woman
or man of no virtue or principles in the position of authority. In every
case where a family cannot hold onto its great wealth for long, it is
for one or another of these four reasons.” All kinds of applications of
the above observation are possible, all kinds of extrapolations too.
I was thinking ‘nation’. I took ‘nation’ as family, or to put it
another way, Sri Lanka as household and Sri Lankans as family.
We are currently classed as a middle-income nation but have often
been thrust into the low-income bracket, described as ‘poor’ or
condescendingly called ‘developing’ instead of the more apt
‘underdeveloping’ (S.B. de Silva’s doctoral work is essential reading on
the subject: ‘The political economy of underdevelopment’). We were not
always like that though. We must have been a wealthy nation to earn a
name such as ‘Granary of the East’.
We could not, it is clear, hold on to our wealth and if one went back
to personality and event the reasons for debacle could easily be slotted
into one of the four mentioned in the Sutra. Our ancestors were not
exactly wasteful. Thrift is something they knew. Sustainability, long
before it became a development buzz word, was second nature to them.
They were never in a hurry, and that’s not because they were lazy,
but just that their unit-time reference was not lifetime, but lifetimes
or of sansaric proportions. Still, they were industrious. They looked
for lost things, found them, and reverted back to life as it always was:
the seasons, seasonality, doing the right thing at the right time in the
proper manner and treating the vicissitudes of life with as much
equanimity as they could muster.
Today people are urged to reuse, recycle and reduce. Back then there
were no I/NGOs or state agencies running media campaigns on such themes.
Our ancestors did not subscribe to a use-and-throw ethic; they may have
not heard the term value-addition, but they both recognized value and
added to it. They knew how to repair. They repaired. And when things
wore out beyond the point of resurrection, they transformed them into
other things that had other uses.
And yet, we squandered it all, not so much to forces of superior
strength but on account of immoderation in consumption on the part of
leaders and also their scant regard for virtue and principle.
Greed is a strange thing. I believe that societies are tinder boxes
and people matchsticks and consequently am constantly thankful that
bonfires are a rarity. Greed is a flame and all it takes is for one
madman or madwoman with the power to decree flaming to sink a
civilization for decades and even centuries. Yes, we are that fragile!
The Sutra has a second part, one that pertains to recovery,
resurrection and preservation. It is the reverse, naturally, of the
first part.
“In every case where a family can hold onto its great wealth for
long, it is for one or another of these four reasons. Which four? They
look for things that are lost. They repair things that have gotten old.
They are moderate in consuming food and drink. They place a virtuous,
principled woman or man in the position of authority. In every case
where a family can hold onto its great wealth for long, it is for one or
another of these four reasons.”
In the year 2010, as we ponder the long and arduous journey to
recover that which was best in our past and embrace that which is best
in the world while divesting ourselves from the nonsensical baggage that
history often burdens us with and as such we ourselves acquire out of
ignorance and arrogance, we won’t lose anything by reflecting on these
wise words of arguably the greatest intellectual that walked this earth,
Siddhartha Gauthama.
We have to look for things that we lost, we have to recover that
which was robbed from us by way of the colonial project and this refers
also to the vandalism of land, labour and cultural artifact and the
humiliation of our people and their belief systems.
We have to un-learn the largely Western ethic of use-and-throw and
re-learn how to re-make the things we break or things that break or are
broken by others. This includes all our traditions, all customs, all
technologies and belief systems that were denigrated by a project that
was violent, arrogant and in the final instance self-destructive.
We have to re-learn moderation. In all things. We have to understand
that the middle-path is not just something between ‘left’ and ‘right’
(‘straight’ is not a bad idea compared with ‘straying’) but one that
chooses ‘caress’ over ‘tight grip’ and ‘callous rejection’. We have to
strive to deal better with the upadanas (attachments) that we as
pruthagjanas (unenlightened beings) tend to fall prey to. And finally,
have to learn to be virtuous and principled before we demand virtue and
principle from our leaders.
And our leaders? They could refer to the dasa raja dharma, but that’s
another article. For now, I suggest that we, as citizens, reflect on the
kula sutra.
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