From Bryan White
The other day I was telling Vincent that I almost wish the Buddha story ended with him just literally sitting under a tree, and that was it. The more I think about it, the more I kind of like it. That might be the one sort of religion I could get behind. Someone comes in, bearing all the burdens of their life. They’re looking for answers. And you just take them over to a tree (a nice tree, of course) and you tell them:
“Just sit here.”
“Just sit under the tree? Am I supposed to meditate or anything.”
“You can if you want. I don’t really do that.”
“Is there, like, a certain amount of time that I’m supposed to …. like?”
“Nah. You should probably give it at least fifteen minutes. But it’s up to you.”
“So I just sit here?”
“Yeah”
“Under this tree?”
“Yup”
“And after that? Am I’m going to be better? With everything? Am I’m going to feel better?”
“I don’t know. Probably a little bit. It’s nice. It’s quiet. I like it.”
And that would be about it. What more are we really expecting?
PS: Although the above is meant as a joke (obviously), the seemingly rhetorical question at the end is asked in earnest. Assuming that this was the bare minimum that could be provided in the way of solace or answers or spiritual comfort, where COULD you take it from here? How could you build on it, laying simple stone on simple stone, without the whole thing falling apart?
It seems to me that most all religions begin as an effort to say the truest things possible, and they either get lost right at the outset, or they get left behind in the advance of human knowledge until the true things they tried to say end up devolving into myth and fable and folklore. And the people who try to stick it out and defend these religions end up looking like fools, end up having to be DIS-honest, end up having to twist themselves into pretzels of cognitive dissonance in a desperate effort to stay afloat on their beliefs. But I think they usually start from an honest place. I think the creation account in Genesis, for instance, began in a place as simple as sitting under that tree. I think they wanted to start clean. They wanted to work with what they felt sure that they knew. They wanted to keep it grounded. They wanted to take each step in careful measure, sure that the heel of one foot was firm against the toes of the other before taking the next one.
a wayfarer’s notes 
I like the way it is bare.Makes me want to add to it, from my knowledge and personal experience. Perhaps also hunger & need, past & present.
In your bare scenario there is an inviter, a tree and an invitee.
The inviter is charismatic. Or perhaps the tree looks beautiful, and has a magical feel to it. There has to be some kind of USP—unique selling proposition!
A selling proposition is a form of promise, either explicitly stated by the inviter, or seized upon by the hopeful invitee.
Then the act of sitting under the tree has (sooner or later?) to yield benefit corresponding to the promise.
Then the inviter dies, the generations pass, but the excitement of something lives on. Some fabled thing, about which so much had been said, and passed into legend.
It makes the focus of a community, and then an institution, that makes demands on its members and offers them something in return.
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Thanks for your comment Bryan. I took the liberty of deleting it, on the grounds that it might discourage others from adding their two cents’ worth.
Hope you don’t mind—the editor’s decision is never final here.
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I remember such a tree – only I wasn’t sitting, I was lying down, not alone but with Larry (it was the summer we first met). It was an old beech tree and we were not meditating but looking up. We saw a multitude of leaves beyond counting. Many leaves but one tree, many lives but one Life.
ellie
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Lying down is permitted. 😉
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By the way, for the sake of clarity I suppose I should point out that it’s the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment that ends with him sitting under a tree.
The story of the Buddha ends, as all such stories must, with the Buddha dying — from eating some spoiled food, if I remember correctly.
To quote what an old co-worker of mine once told me after I inexplicably said of someone, “The last I’d heard, he had died.”:
“Well, that’s usually the last you hear of someone.”
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I enjoy sitting. The problem is motivating myself to get back up.
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Getting-back-upism is a rival school of thought. They espouse the “this is boring”, “I have stuff to do”, and “Seriously, what’s the point of this?” doctrines.
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When you talk of “getting-back-upism” it rings a bell for me, that what you call sittism is what I’ve called “not-doing” in Wayfarer’s Notes. For several months its epigraph was “Practise not-doing, and everything will fall into place”, and I assigned a category for not-doing.
“Get-upism” in this context would be the opposite, and the paradigm of Western civilization, the American dream, and so forth. Founded on Protestant work-ethic?
And I once characterized the contrast between the two in a post called “Me and the Kenyan Mau-Mau“, based on musings in the bath and what my grandmother told me about her time in Kenya:
—arousing the ire of the Mau-Mau “terrorists” or “freedom-fighters” who declared not unreasonably that the white men stole their land.
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This is one of my favourite images of Africa, despite being almost certainly staged by a canny photographer. Little boy under shade of tree.
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By the way, Vincent, started a poetry blog that you may be interested in:
http://www.theinktrees.wordpress.com
I’ve been wanting to start one for a while, but haven’t been able to get up the nerve to do it. The closest I got was that Dyscography site on Blogger. But that was more of a dumping grounds for stuff I did occasionally. This I’m actually going to try to focus on. It’s generally all going to be very short, free form poems.
Anyway, don’t mean to plug on your platform here. If that’s out of line, feel free to delete this.
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I like your inktrees site, the poems layout & name. Do you mind if I also mention https://encyclopediaofcountedsheep.wordpress.com ?
No, it’s not out of line, & anyway I’m always linking to Wayfarer’s Notes. And it’s our platform. I shall just continue to curate, in the verbal sense. We don’t want any curates here, in the preaching noun sense. And that’s about it for what’s out of line!
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No problem. Thank you!
You know, I saw earlier on Twitter someone was promoting a book called “Wayfarer” something or other. I associate the word itself so closely with you now, that it’s impossible not to hear it and think that you’re somewhere afoot nearby, recording your thoughts into a handheld tape recorder.
Apropos of our discussions here, do you think it’s possible, genuinely possible, to exorcize enough of ourselves, or to create something far enough beyond ourselves, in this effort of words, so that in the end we feel like the better part of ourselves or maybe something better than ourselves will endure after we’re gone? And we can really make peace with that? Is that possible?
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Also relevant to this post (and also since we’re talking links here), there’s this old post:
I don’t believe I was even familiar with the story of the Buddha when I wrote that.
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Yes, to both of your questions above. And they bring to mind a snippet from Colin Wilson’s Outsider which I jotted down yesterday, lifting it out of a specific context, seeing how it stands on its own:
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And that puts me in mind of this:
“This is not the greatest song in the world.
No, this is just a tribute.
Couldn’t remember the greatest song in the world.
This is just a tribute.”
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