Boleh Tahan ~ MY BROTHER & THE
YETI
ONCE A WEEK, when
I was a child, my parents used to take my younger
brother and I to the Movies (we called it “The
Pictures” in those days), usually on Friday
evening. After five dreary days of school, it was
really something to look forward to.
The nearest town to our village had four
cinemas, the names of which—if I remember correctly—were
Odeon, Gaumont, Regal and Tatler. Near each of them
was the inevitable sweet-shop, into which we were
taken before going into the cinema, and given free
choice. Supplied then, with a bag of sweets and chocolate,
we would enter the dark womb of the cinema and join
the hushed and expectant crowd waiting for the movie
to begin; it was another world, and we were about
to embark upon adventures.
Many people would say, “Yes, but a
fantasy world, not real”. Not real? What do
you mean—not real? What is real? You mean this
world is real, but that is not? Now, hold on a minute!
Life is like a dream—and sometimes a nightmare.
It is real only in context, only at the moment, but
because of the element of constant change, which we
cannot do anything about, ultimately, it is not real;
it comes and goes, whether we like it or not, and
we cannot catch, hold or possess it. Can we really
say that this life is any more real than a movie?
When we watch a movie and are interested in it, it
is as real to us as the life passing endlessly by;
what is the difference? When a thing has passed, it
has the same substance as a movie, as a dream; we
cannot be certain that it ever really happened, or
if we just dreamed it.
Everything is empty, void of lasting substance.
What we think of as ours is not ours at all. Our houses
are not ours, our cars are not ours, all our possessions,
our money, our food and clothes are not ours—not
just because we didn’t make them and that they
came to us from others, but because even our lives
are not ours. Our lives are not ours because we have
no control over them; they come and go, without our
permission. And if our lives are not ours, how can
anything else be ours? Quite a sobering thought, is
it not? So, is nothing ours—nothing at all?
No, I didn’t say that. There is one thing—just
one thing—that we may consider ours: the present
moment, which is where we live, and where we have
some choice and control. But it is not something to
talk about, for no sooner have we opened our mouth
to speak about it than it has gone; it is not a word
and cannot be caught with words; it can only be lived.
We can choose how we are going to live, what we are
going to do in the present moment. Only this is ours;
only the present moment is real, not the past, for
it has gone, and not the future, for it never comes.
And both that which we take for real, and that which
we say is not-real (like the movies), exist, to us—each
one of us—only in the mind, and nowhere else.
We experience things—whether it be eating ice-cream,
reading, brushing our teeth, surfing the net, or sitting
through a movie, and so on—essentially only
by the mind, via the senses. We call it perception.
How do we decide what is ‘real’ and what
is ‘not-real’? Life is like a movie, too;
it moves, and never remains the same. Movie making
has come so far and reached such a stage that the
special effects are so realistic they almost jump
out at us, and we are absorbed by, engrossed in them!
But it is all ‘unreal’, we say. What can
we catch and hold and call ‘real’ that
won’t change and slip from our grasp?
The Buddha rejected the common belief in
a soul—something immortal, personal and separate
from others—and showed, by analysis of the component
parts of a person, that no such thing exists. This
is the most shocking thing that many of us can hear,
as it undermines our whole belief in, or conception
of ourselves, and removes—or so we think—our
reason for continued living. But He did not say or
imply that life was therefore worthless, and in fact,
placed the greatest value and importance on being
born human, as it provides us with the opportunity
for spiritual growth and realization up to and including
enlightenment. He said: “Here in this body of
ours, but a fathom in length, is to be found the World,
the Origin of the World, the End of the World, and
the Way to the End of the World”. His was not
a doctrine of pessimism or annihilation, but one of
Liberation and Light.
Anyway, back to my childhood and our movie-going.
One of the movies we saw involved the Yeti (otherwise
called The Abominable Snowman)—a gigantic, hairy
anthropoid which legend holds lives in the snowbound
fastnesses of the Himalayas. Now, yetis are supposed
to be shy and elusive, so none have ever been filmed
or captured, except in this particular movie, which
was only fiction and not true, of course. A British
expedition went in search of this legendary creature,
and—because it was a movie—it was not
long before their Sherpa guides succeeded in tracking
down not just one, but a family of yetis, and cornered
them in a cave, where they turned and tried to defend
themselves. Well, because the expedition was determined
to capture at least one yeti at all costs, the mother
yeti and child were shot, and the father yeti trussed
up and shipped off to London, to be exhibited as “The
Missing Link”.
Infuriated to the point where it could no
longer bear abuse, the Yeti managed to escape from
its cage and took refuge in the London Underground,
where it went on the rampage, venting its fury on
unfortunate commuters. Attempts to recapture it only
resulted in more deaths, until finally, it was shot
dead.
End of movie. But not end of the effects
of the movie on me. I was so terrified by this creature,
and could not get it out of my mind. My other brother—ten
years my senior—knowing this, took delight in
scaring me further, by telling me, just as I was about
to go upstairs to bed: “The Yeti is up there
waiting for you!” This fear lasted for a long
time, and I do not remember when I outgrew it.
Two years ago, I saw this old movie on Australian
TV, and could not believe how I had ever been scared
of such a silly thing; it was ridiculous; but at the
time, so many years before, the Yeti of the movie,
and the irrational fear of it, were as real to me
as the brother who got his kicks by scaring a child
in this way! Children do not know the difference between
fear of real things—fear that can protect us
from danger and harm—and fear with no foundation
in fact; to the child, it is simply fear. To purposely
frighten kids with horrors stories and tales of ghosts
is therefore not just stupid and wrong, but bad, and
has a negative and sometimes long lasting effect on
their impressionable minds. We should be concerned
with the cultivation of the mind, not with its destruction.
But fear is part of the deluded mind, and
it is heartening to learn that even Prince Siddhartha
himself, before his Enlightenment as the Buddha—that
is, while still a Bodhisattva—experienced fear;
he knew what fear was like. It was fear that lay behind
his questions when he went out of the palace one day
and was confronted and shocked by the sights of the
old person, the sick person and the corpse: “How
do people become like this? Can it happen to me? Can
my wife become like that?” These questions are
very strange—coming from a Bodhisattva—and
make no sense unless we realize that, while he was
a Bodhisattva, he wasn’t aware that he was;
it was only after his Enlightenment as a Buddha that,
looking back, he realized He had been a Bodhisattva
before.
Many years later, He related that after he
had left the palace and gone into the forest in search
of truth, at times, sitting alone at night, he would
be scared by his imaginings and the noises all around
him. Fear arose in him, he said, and his hair stood
on end. What did he do? What could he do? He didn’t
jump up and flee from the forest back to the palace,
but sat there and faced his fear, and slowly brought
it under control. He faced the fear, instead of being
afraid of it, and by facing it, found courage. It
sounds strange, but it’s true: Courage does
not mean the absence of fear, but the presence of
it; without fear, courage cannot arise; there is no
question of courage apart from fear. Just as a large
deposit of iron-ore may be turned into a lot of steel,
so fear may be transmuted into courage; without iron-ore
in its natural state, there can be no steel.
Sometimes, I’m not very
happy with myself, and think I’m getting nowhere,
or even slipping back. It is encouraging, therefore,
to look back and see that I have made progress in
this life, and am not finished yet. I mean, I might
have remained scared of yetis all my life, mightn’t
I?
“It is curious that our own
offences should seem so much less heinous than the
offences of others. I suppose the reason is that we
know all the circumstances that have attended them
and so manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot
excuse in others.”
(Somerset Maugham)
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