The Nomadic Alternative – Page 189

eating any fort of filth makes the mind capable of any and every meditation." As usual 'thinking the unthinkable' involved a complete suspension of the critical faculty.

The strenuous exercise, the mortifications, the self-imposed withdrawal from palatable food crammed the horrors and privations of a lifetime into a short span. The ecstatic was so intent on ripping his body to bits that finally the glands which secreted adrenalin and histamine, designed to protect him for a lifetime, gave up the unequal struggle in the face of so many toxics. 'Reborn' the ecstatic passed, or was supposed to pass, through an infernal jewelled paradise into a final liberated condition of radiant calm.

The Buddha infuriated these nihilistic queue-bargers by showing them up for what they were worth. Nirvana was not to be found up a tree or on a nail-bed. He had tried ascetic penances and found them wanting. Automatism without sense was a vehicle leading to a dead-end. Yet he never rejected the concept of wandering or 'going forth' through the Earth's Field to reach Nirvana. Wandering itself was the very antithesis of those 'attachments' he sought to dissolve.

"The man who always hankers after possessions", says the Kama Sutta, a treatise attributed to him, "... will be overwhelmed by troubles and weighted down like a battered ship into which water is pouring. By throwing desire overboard and bailing out the ship, he crosses to the safety of the opposite shore." The Buddha ordered moderation.

To arrive before time was worthless. The Middle Way led between optimism and pessimism and was a catalogue of moderate instructions for the road.*

"He travels the fastest who travels alone." Rudyard Kipling's dictum perhaps paraphrases another saying of the Buddha. "Let him wander alone for that is the worthy life." Going forth to 'homeless- ness' signified the traveller's transition from a worse to a better life. He must forsake the company of worldly men as a tree sheds its leaves, for arguments invariably divide travelling companions.

The silence of the road is golden. "In company there is no peace G.T. Allen, The Buddha's Philosophy, 1955, pp.