The Pebbles and the Ghee – Teaching from the Heart

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Every year during the rainy season, when roads became difficult to travel, the Buddha and his disciples used to take a break from travelling the country and stay in one place for a retreat.
So one year they stayed in a lush, green garden with a little pond, provided by one of the Buddha´s wealthy followers.

One day a young man ran up to the Buddha, threw himself on the earth in front of the Buddha, grasped his feet and cried out in utter distress, “Oh Lord, oh Lord, please help me!“
The Buddha helped him back on his feet and asked compassionately, “What´s wrong, young man, what´s wrong? Tell me!“

So the young man answered.
“My father passed away while I was on business abroad, so I, the eldest son, was not able to light his funeral pyre and perform the rituals according to our customs. So I am worried that his dear soul might not find its way to the upper realms. And since you are the mightiest of all brahmins, the most scholarly of all pundits, the wisest of the wise, I want you to perform a ritual for my father, so that his soul may find eternal peace. Please, oh Lord, I beg you!“

Normally the Buddha would have answered something really wise, showing the young man the absurdity of his request and we would all be able to read his wonderful, insightful answer in some Pali canon or something, but here the Buddha immediately saw that this young man was so caught up in his beliefs, his tradition, the customs of his people, all of this causing him so much distress, that he could not be reasoned with.

So the Buddha said: “Go to the market, buy two earthen jars, fill one with pebbles, one with ghee, seal them both tightly and bring them back to me, here to this place.“

A ray of hope lightened up the young man´s face, he thanked the Buddha and hurried away, feeling all sorrows vanish from him. For sure the Buddha would perform a wonderful ritual and his father´s soul would be saved.

When he came back with the two jars, the Buddha told him to place them inside the little pond. The pond was so shallow that the jars were barely covered with water and still clearly visible from the surface. “Now“ the Buddha said “smash those jars with this iron bar.“, putting the iron bar inside the young man´s hands. The young man smiled, understanding immediately and raised the iron bar over his head, ready to strike.

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Cut!
Allow yourself to be beamed to the year 1992 in Varanasi, India.
Benares, as the British called it, or Kashi, its old name, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world and a place of pilgrimage and worship for the Hindus. They believe to die here means instant moksha, liberation from this dreadful cycle of birth, death and rebirth. So families bring their dying loved ones to Kashi to enjoy an auspicious death.

I don´t know if Kashi (The Shining) lent its name to the Kubrick movie, but for a Westerner there is some real danger of losing it there. The constant assault on all senses, the colors, the sounds, the noise, the smells, the stench, the touts, the hassle, the scams, the crowds in the narrow streets, the dirt, the pollution, the permanent presence of death, the heat, the pandemonium of all of the before mentioned must have seduced the authors of the Lonely Planet India to write this most epic sentence of all travel guide books ever:
Varanasi takes no prisoners.

In Varanasi there are those places called “Burning Ghats“.
A ghat is basically a fortified river bank usually in the form of terraces or bigger steps with stairs inbetween leading down to the river, which in the case of Varanasi is the Ganga, the Mother of India, holiest of the holy rivers, bringer of death and fertility, sustaining millions. I have seen her pure virginity in Gangotri, the source, high up in the Himalayas, I have spent many hours at her banks in Rishikesh, my guru Swami Sivananda´s home, I joined thousands of devotees in the great Arati (a light ceremony) in Haridwar, one of the places for the Khumba Mela, the biggest religious festival on earth, but it is in Kashi where I saw her in all her glory, the intermediary between life and death, washing away the ashes of this world of ours, of namarupa, name and form.
So the "Burning Ghats" are cremation grounds right by the Ganga. Each corpse will get its own funeral pyre, the size and the kind of wood directly proportional to the family purse, with the poor sometimes only half burned to be released into Ganga´s care.
The atmosphere is very solemn, touching, holy, with big signs warning the tourists not to take pictures. That´s why the vultures rent boats for a tour on Mother Ganga along the ghats and try their luck with big telephoto lenses.

So what makes Varanasi such a special place is its eternal love affair with death. The City of Light, the one city Shiva agreed to spare when he would go out to destroy the world, makes no secret of it. While us Westerners tend to hide our dead from sight, it is an all out, in yer face, public viewing event in Varanasi. Dead bodies, wrapped in colorful sheets, waiting for their turn on stretchers, lining the paths to the Burning Ghats, tourists hastily jumping aside to avoid contact with those stretchers and their cargo in the narrow streets while the porters of the dead push through the crowds in a hurry, because, let´s not forget, where there is religion there is also business.
Then, just after making it through the narrow streets uncompromised, you step out into the open, enjoy your first view of the river, see the burning pyres, take in the scenery in its whole grandeur, it is then when Varanasi hits you with this all out attack on your most primal sense, the sense of smell. This indescribable amalgamation of sandalwood, incense, flowers, smoke, cow shit and burning human flesh, Varanasi takes no prisoners.

I carefully approached one of the funeral pyres, the people gathered there did not seem to mind, so I stayed and watched the cremation.
The flames started to devour the cloth around the dead body, freeing the body and covering it in black at the same time, as if to protect it against some indecent stares, the fat started to drip into the flames, feeding them even more, letting them leap ever higher, soaring, roaring, the body started to move inside the fire, Shiva dancing, a hand came up, as if waving a last goodbye, everybody looking on in solemn silence.

The atmosphere was very holy, very uplifting, otherwordly, I felt being part of some incredible transition process and very alive. Maybe I was just happy that it wasn´t me on the pyre. After some time, when only parts of the skeleton were left, the flames had retreated a bit and the heat close to the pyre got less intense, one Indian man approached the pyre with an iron bar in his hands and started to beat the shit out of the skeleton.

I was shocked!
My first reflex was to rush him, rip the bar out of his hands and whack him with it.
What he just did there is called desecration of corpses in my country, punishable by law with a prison sentence of up to three years.
But I had learned already that it is better to check first how the locals are responding to a given situation, nobody moved a finger.
Another blow hit the skull, cracking it open, still nobody moved.
So I booked that incident under “different countries, different customs“ and got the hell outta there.

Later I learned that the Hindus, or at least some of them, since Hinduism is such a vast field it is always difficult to say the Hindus, believe that you have to open the skull, in order for the soul being able to leave the body. So this is what I saw, giving the soul the means to escape the body, and the man doing it was probably the eldest son.

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Cut!
Back to the Buddha!
Remember? We were in a garden with two earthen jars placed in a pond with an iron bar high up in the air, about to crack open the jars.
Do you see the connection? The ingenuity of Buddha´s plan?
Cracking the skull, cracking the jars?

The bar came down on the first jar cracking it wide open, nothing happened.
The bar came down on the second jar cracking it wide open. What happened? The ghee, clarified butter, inside the jar, being lighter than water, started to float to the top, while the pebbles from the other jar just remained down there.

The young man looked at the Buddha, wondering what all of this could mean.
The Buddha said: “Now young man, go gather all your Brahmins, your priests, your pundits, your scholars, your wise men, bring them all here and let them pray: `Oh pebbles, oh pebbles come up, oh ghee, oh ghee sink down!´, let me see how it happens!“
The young man looked at the Buddha in utter bewilderment and stammered:
“But my Lord, this is not possible, it is against the laws of nature! How would this be possible?“
The Buddha smiled and answered:
„Ah, young man, so wise. It is not possible, it is indeed against all laws of nature.
Same with your father. If all his deeds in life were hard and heavy as the pebbles, no amount of prayer, no pious ritual will make his soul ascend to the higher realms. But if his deeds were soft and light like the ghee, nothing can prevent his soul from its glorious ascent!“

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All images from wikimedia commons labeled for reuse

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