Dec 14, 2024
Dec 14, 2024
Yesterday I read a text message sent by an unknown friend in a group. Obviously it was a thought from Lord Buddha’s teachings. The thought was to the effect that when you are born you have no name but breathing and when you die you have name but no breathing. So the space between breathing and name is called life. Really this definition of life is far appealing.
There may be as many definitions as human beings are under the sun, because experience of life is different and varied to each individual, therefore, he / she won’t accept facts respecting life which are told by others and this is the beautify of life , mystery of life. It offers novelty to each living being. If every individual has one and the same pattern of life, it would have been such boring business. There might not have been enthusiasm in living. Just as we find no interest in the movie of which story has already been told by a friend. Another shed of this reality is that life demands change and novelty ever and ever.
When I was in seventh grade I had got to read a sentence in a grammar book – life is an onion, if you layer and layer out you would find nothing in it. What a witty definition! But it is pregnant with meaning. Yes, the onion is solid and hard if you press it in your fist. But finally you find nothing in it like a stone in a mango or a bean in some fruit. Indeed sometimes we feel very sorry for our life. However important we may be, we can’t remain back in a solid material form. We are either buried or burned and then everything is gone. We remain only in someone’s memory if he loved to remember us, otherwise not. You see even the stones survive in solid form for hundreds of thousand years but man for merely 60 or so years.
There is a very beautiful quote in Yavati – a Marathi novel by V. S. Khandekar. ‘After going through such long tragedies, if life must end with death, why is man born anyway? The sharper senses the more enjoyable life. Birds and animals also enjoy life but not the way man can. Why? For, they didn’t devise multiple sources of delight as human beings did. This is what made human death more horrible or unbearable. Extreme attachment towards life has aggravated death in human society. You will see that in animal kingdom death is not so intensively bereaved.
As life many have also defined death. And also for millions of years man tries to be immortal through several uncanny experiments, for that he does what not. However, he did not succeed to find the elixir of life so far. In fact, our birth itself carries a sealed packet of death. Life consummates with death, if you don’t accept death, you are not given life as well.Death is prerequisite of life. Shakespeare said … death is necessary end when it will come, will come. He also says that cowards die many times before their death. Actually, not only the cowards but the brave also fears death. Death is both sense of loss and loss of sense. So one fears. Psychologists tell us that all humans fear two things: death and darkness. True, but death is a pre-planned program of life, we can’t streamline it.
I'd like to conclude this small write-up with Socrates’ words. When he was sentenced to death, someone asked him,” Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end. Socrates says: “To him I may fairly answer, there you are mistaken, a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong- acting the part of good man or mad man”
05-Mar-2016
More by : Prof. Madhav Sarkunde