Week 4 Storytelling: Luck and Misfortune

("The Victory of Buddha", via Wikipedia)

Once, there was a man who walked in the world and saw only the things he could not see.

There are three main kinds of things not seen, of course. Firstly, there is the kind which are washed out by previous assumptions. This is the easiest kind to learn to see, because you only need to learn to open your eyes again after you've opened them the first time, and these things start to appear. Secondly, there is the kind of things that don’t exist, even if they are suspected to. This is the least dangerous kind, except for when it isn’t. And thirdly, lastly, there is the kind of things that you don’t even try to see, because you're ignorant of their very existence. These are the things that hide in plain sight; the things that bleed and kill and cry out for attention.

The man—we’ll call him Anand, which means "happiness" in his language, though that is not his real name—saw all three of these kinds of things. But it was the last kind that drove him mad bit by bit, because it is the hardest kind to see: to begin to grasp these things with your eyes, you must first grasp them with your mind. You must find your ignorance, and grasp that too, and put the unseen things where your ignorance was--and anyone who is aware of anything knows that ignorance is one of the hardest things to grasp: it is vast and intangible and constantly moving, so that it is partly one of all three kinds of things, and yet none of them simultaneously.

It hadn’t always been this way for Anand. Once, he had been a shining beacon of a man, splendid in his virtue and bliss. He was not aware of his own ignorance, and so he could not be bothered by things he could not see. The things he did see, he took at face value and did not judge them, for the blissful are not prone to judging.

I find this funny, or I wouldn’t be telling you this story. Anand's ignorance isn’t funny, of course, but what's funny is this: Anand became aware of all three of these kinds of things simultaneously, and it was all my fault. But who can blame me? I was only doing my job...

It all started on the road. This could seem a symbolic statement, like I meant for all of this to start on the road, but really the road is just a dangerous place to be. All kinds of people are on the road traveling to and from all sorts of places, for all sorts of different reasons, carrying all sorts of stories on their backs like so many baskets of worn river stones. It's entirely possible, there, for you to meet a person you've never met before, and for that meeting to cast a light on one of the Unseen Things. Cast a light on anything and it casts a shadow as well: thus you begin to see an Unseen Thing. Cast many lights, and the shape of the thing may begin to take form. But Anand didn’t know this at the time, and so the road was especially dangerous for him.

I've told you a bit about Anand already, but now I'll tell you about the way he grew up. His story goes like this: he was a prince, and born to a king of middling fame, in a kingdom that was generally prosperous and well-known—thus why I didn’t use his real name. There is a very real chance you might know who he was, because even if neither his father nor his kingdom were particularly famous in the wider world, Anand was the darling of his own kingdom, and everyone there knew him. You might recognize his real name if I used it, and thus know that he eventually outgrew his humble background.

But I digress. Anand never known about the ugly parts of life, because everyone who loved him only ever wanted to give him the beautiful parts, and so he grew up surrounded by things like elegance and love and cleanliness. He knew nothing of old age, because old age was not elegant, and little to nothing of sickness, because everyone was well-fed, well-rested, and very clean. And he knew nothing of me.

You can call me Isha, by the way, which means "lord," although that is not my real name either.

Anand first grasped the Unseen Things when, one day, he went out onto the road to make a visit to the next kingdom over, from which he was destined to take a bride. Not two hours into the forest, where everything was as lush and beautiful as a palace (and also as deadly, but that remained Unseen), an old man stepped across the path of Anand's charioteer. He was wizened and half-deaf and suffered from a bit of dementia, but I suppose he was doing well for an old man because I didn’t know who he was.

Anand asked his charioteer how such a man could exist. The charioteer told him about old age.

A few steps down the path, a man with rot in his lungs and boils on his skin leaped out of the trees, his eyes feral with fever. He babbled with a swollen tongue: nonsense words, pleading words, desperation in every line of his body.

So Anand once again asked how such a wretched person could exist. And the charioteer told him about sickness.

A few more steps down the path, I knew it was time. I stepped out of the trees, and gazed directly into his face. It is not easy, gazing into the eyes of Death, Lord of All, but Anand held mine, his gaze as surprised as an open door.

I stepped back into the trees.

Anand returned to his palace the next day and discussed what he had seen with his father, and his mother, and his newly-wedded wife, who had returned with him from the next kingdom. He drove himself half-mad with what he could not see, until one day he decided to leave, and go out on the road by himself.

But that, my children, is another story.

Author's Note:

This isn't one of my best, but I managed to I cobble this story together using 1) the scenes in The Life of Buddha where Siddhartha discovers the misfortunes of the world, along with 2) my own recent experiences in studying anthropology (yesterday I had one of those moments where your eyes are opened to a whole world of Unseen Things, which is why this story didn't get written earlier--I must have opened up this document at least 10 times and just stared at the page, thinking that I really didn't have anything meaningful or useful to say about anything in life), and a random prompt from the storytelling generator about Death being the narrator of the story. In The Life of Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who when he was born was prophesied to bring Enlightenment to the world, and who grows up extremely sheltered in his father's palace, to  goes out one day to make a visit to a neighboring kingdom in his chariot and comes across an old man. Having never seen old age before, the prince is obviously very shocked and intrigued. On the next two consecutive days, he goes out and sees a man dying of sickness and a dead man. He is so completely overwhelmed by the notion of death that he becomes consumed by his preoccupation with it. He goes back to his palace completely and utterly amazed by what he'd never seen before. This was really applicable to my experiences this week, so I tried to write a story about the experience of having your ignorance shown to you all at once.

Also, I still really like this picture--there's a kind of peaceful beatitude to it that really calmed me down when I wasn't sure what I was going to write for this week's story. The self-possessed posture of the Buddha is what finally inspired me to start writing this story the way I wrote it.

Source: Andre Ferdinand Herold (1922) The Life of Buddha.