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Pasenadi's dreams

Buddha's interpretations coming true

Buddhist mirror by A.G.S.Kariyawasam

Pasenadi was the king of the Kosala country as a contemporary of the Buddha. Converted to Buddhism early in his kingship, he became a devoted follower of the Buddha and remained so throughout.

Books record sixteen dreams he once saw along with their interpretations given by the Buddha. These dreams and their interpretations are quite valuable as they possess a perennial value as prognostications of the future, which fact is one of the aspects of the dreams we see. Here, these dreams and their interpretations bear the moral theme, which is one of the dimensions from which problems are viewed in Buddhist ethics. For instance, a meteorologist would explain the presence or the absence of rains according to his speciality, which is a physical science.

However, in Buddhism, the moral dimension is always an inherent aspect of any problem which means that the quality of the moral behaviour of people of any country, comprising very broadly the rulers and the ruled, is also a contributory factor towards the making of rains and droughts. If they are morally depraved droughts and floods will penalize them by causing human misery through them. If they are morally sound, rains will come only in time as wished by the off-quoted pali) line devo vassatu kaalena.

This moral dimension is applicable to all human problems as succinctly expressed by the celebrated statement is Buddhist ethics that Dhammo have rakkhati Dhammacaarim - "Dhamma indeed protects its practises. Accordingly, the sixteen dreams seen by Pasenadi were all prognostications regarding the moral depravity that was in store for the future. Let us enumerate them one by one along with the Buddha's interpretations and see how far they have been coming true since the Buddha's time.

In the first dream Pasenadi saw bulls entering the royal courtyard to fight but retiring after roaring and bellowing. This meant that there will come a time when unrighteous and wicked rulers govern a country rains clouds will only gather and threaten to rain but rain never results. People get ready to receive the rain but every time they become utterly disappointed.

In the second dream trees and shrubs after sprouting from the earth, flowered and bore fruit when they were just six inches in height. This foretold that there will come a time when both men and women become degenerately lustful when girls begin to bear children even before their coming of age and as a result people become very short-lived. In the third dream cows were sucking from the calves which were hardly a day old. This indicated that as a result of general moral decay the young would refuse either to respect or listen or to look after the elders in their old age. The old will become helpless and subordinates of their own children. The meritorious action of 'respect to elders' disappears totally.

The fourth dream showed sturdy draught oxen just standing and waiting while young steeds attempted to draw the loadfuls. This signified a period when a country's administration pass on to the hands of the inexperienced young men and women while the mellowed elderly wise men are not accepted for fear that their corrupt ways would be debunked by them.

The fifth dream was of a horse that ate from two mouths, one on either side of the body. This foretold a time when the judges of the law-courts would take bribes from the contending parties thereby stooping to low corruption.

As the sixth dream he saw people holding a priceless golden bowl and asking a jackal to urinate into it. This was an indication that a time will come when the rulers of a country exalt the low-born owing to their own lowliness, resulting in the nobel maidens being forced into matrimony with the upstarts.

The seventh dream was that of a man holding a rope trailing at his feet which was being eaten by a she-jackal. This foretold a time when women would lose their sense of modesty and would begin paying attention only to external physical beauty and make-up. They would live more with their paramours and that too with the earnings of their legal husbands.

The eighth dream was that of a big pitcher at the palace gates filled with water but surrounded by empty ones. This indicated a period when the rulers of a country would become poor owing to their corrupt ways and set about exploiting the whole country making the people pauperized and insecure.

In the ninth dream a deep pool with sloping banks was overgrown with lotus plants. Both men and animals were entering the pond of which the water had become muddy and turbid while the edges had crystal-clear water. This was a sign that in the near future immoral and unrighteous rulers going astray through the four-fold wrong ways of acting through favouritism, hatred, fear and delusion begin oppressing and exploiting the people who would therefore leave the capital cities and go to live in remote regions, away from the oppressive rulers, whose main aims is to fleece the people to enrich themselves.

The tenth dreams was a case of rice being cooked in a pot, which rice, instead of getting cooked evenly, remained in three separate parts as some sodden, some raw and the other well-cooked. This was an indication that a time will come when men of all classes, both lay and clerical, will become wicked and as a result the very forces of nature will operate against them.

The eleventh dream was of men bartering butter milk for much-priced sandalwood, which presaged a time when the Dhamma would decay and its votaries begin clamouring for material gains like money and gifts. The malady affects the clergy as well.

The twelfth dream was that of empty and hence weightless pumpkins getting sunk in the water, much against the theory of density. This meant that the world would become topsy-turvy with the low-born nitwits assuming high positions while the noble wise men would sink into poverty.

The thirteenth dream showed solid blocks of rock floating in the water, another violation of the density law. This meant that truly respectable wise men would be scorned while low-quality upstarts would be having their own way.

In the fourteenth dream tiny frogs were chewing and eating large snakes indicating that a time would come when, owing to excessively lustful lifestyles, the males would become the slaves of ill-behaved wives and be ruled by them.

According to the fifteenth dream wicked village crows were attended by golden swans which foretold that rulers would appear in the future who, in their ignorance and cowardice, would start raising to power not their peers but their footmen and all lower grades of men resulting in the blue-blooded nobles being forced and reduced to waiting on the upstarts.

In the sixteenth and the last dream it was an unusual case of goats chasing panthers and devouring them.

This meant that the low-born would be raised to lordship while the nobles could be forced to sink into oblivion, obscurity and distress. If the latter were to plead for their lives then the underworld tactics will be used by cudgelling and bastinadoing - which even today has its exact parallel when the underworld gangs are in action.

The Buddha's explanations as given here show clearly that all human problems have an ethical dimension which, if ignored and not properly regulated, can generate grave problems in consequence as was explained at the outset regarding droughts and floods.

In reality, ethical manoeuvrings can effect changes in nature. This can mean that bad times in any society can be traced to a very great extent to the low ethical quality of the lives of the people in that society, specially the rulers and the politicians, who are the leaders that set the trail in the norms of public life. This shows how, supreme is their responsibility as per the quality of a society's pubic life in any country.

As a concluding observation it can be maintained that the nature of man being what it is, an unbridled open economy undoubtedly leads to the practice of sensual indulgence or the Kaamasukhallikaanuyoga in general, which the Buddha has stigmatized as "low and degrading". Here lies the key to most of the social problems harassing us in the contemporary society.

The degeneration of the ethical aspect of family life is a result of that evil lifestyle.

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Compassionate meditation to improve health

by Giles Hewitt

For Americans seeking to improve their health, the US surgeon general advises putting aside one hour, several times a week, for "compassionate" meditation and the elimination of destructive emotions. Actually, he doesn't. He prescribes 60 minutes of physical exercise. But noted molecular biologist Eric Lander, a leader of the Human Genome Project, believes the change is coming.

"It is certainly not inconceivable that 20 years from now, the US surgeon general might recommend 60 minutes of mental exercise five times a week," Lander told a conference of renowned scientists and Buddhist scholars at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this weekend.

Such a prediction from a man of Lander's stature at a venue like MIT is an indication of mainstream science's growing fascination with Buddhism, and especially with the preliminary but extraordinary results of state-of-the-art research into the Olympian mental athleticism of trained Buddhist monks.

Some of the data presented at the conference - attended by Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama - pointed not only to attention spans that would make an air-traffic controller weep with envy, but also meditation techniques that could actually "re-wire" the brain's neural pathways.

In the age of Prozac, the possible applications could leave mood-altering pills on the shelf. Harvard-trained neuroscientist Richard Davidson showed brain-scan images of a monk who was able to push levels of activity in his left, prefrontal cortex - a part of the brain associated with positive emotions - "off the chart" by using a technique known as compassion meditation. In a different meditative state, the same monk could do what, until then, had been thought to be impossible and suppress the "startle reflex" - the involuntary response to a loud, sudden noise like a gunshot. Paul Ekman, one of the world's most eminent experts on the science of emotion, described the monk's level of control as a "spectacular accomplishment."

"We've never found anyone who can do that," Ekman said. "We don't have any idea of the anatomy that would allow him to suppress the startle reflex."

Another test showed advanced meditators to be capable of startlingly high speeds of cognition, correctly identifying the moods behind a series of facial expressions flashed onto a screen for just one-thirtieth of a second. They scored far higher than groups previously identified as the best performers, such as psychiatrists, customs officials and Secret Service agents.

Alan Wallace, a former monk and president of the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Consciousness in Santa Barbara, believes Buddhist practices aimed at improving emotional and cognitive balance could be powerful tools, and not just in treating depression and mental illness. (AFP)

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