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Petama Counsellor April Circumambulating the Life of Buddha - 2 from: Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Unity of Religious Ideals' |
This soul, who was not allowed to see much of the world and who had not known pain and distress and trouble, was quite unaware of the experience that the life in the world shows to a human being. Then he went out for the first time; he looked at a person who was aged and only with difficulty could walk. And he said, ‘What is it?’ They said, ‘It is age.’ And he sympathized. And then he saw another person, worn out and tired and downhearted. And he said, ‘What is the matter?’ And they said, ‘It is illness.’ And he sympathized, and said, ‘There is such a thing as illness.’ There was another person who had lost his money and was in a great despair, and was in poverty. Buddha asked, ‘What is it?’ They said, ‘It is poverty.’ And he sympathized, and he felt his condition. In short, this soul, whose heart was open to sympathize with everyone, felt that life has many limitations and every limitation has its despair. And the number of limitations that he saw was so great that he thought what must be the remedy for all these limitations. In the first place he saw that human nature seeks for happiness. lt is not because happiness is outside of us human beings; it is because happiness belongs to us. Then he saw that all these limitations make a barrier for a human being, thereby depriving him of the consciousness of this happiness which is his own. He also saw that all the manner of distress, and all the causes of distress, if they were removed, still a human being would not be free from distress, because the nature of us human beings is to find happiness; we are not looking for distress. For no one in the world is seeking for distress, and almost everyone in the world finds distress without seeking for it. He saw that the removing of these apparent limitations was not sufficient, but it is the study of life, observation, analysis, that is the most necessary. He found in the end that it is the analysis of life, a thorough analysis, which clears our reasonings from all darkness, and produces in it its own original light. A human being is distressed by looking at the distress without having studied it. That is generally the case. Every distress that comes to a human being he is afraid of, and he partakes of it without first having faced it and studied it analytically. But at the same time Buddha saw that if there was a key to happiness, it came by throwing analytical light upon all the different situations of life. This Buddha taught in the form of religion more than two thousand years ago. And today the reasoning that is looking for a solution in the modern world is now finding the same solution which Buddha found over two thousand years ago; and they call it psychoanalysis. It is the beginning of that something which had reached to its highest top, and this analysis in itself had reached to the highest idealism.
(Maheboob Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan‘s brother, has composed music to a row of aphorisms of Hazrat Inayat Khan in the middle of last century, as this ‚How Shall I Thank Thee‘. Mohammed Ali Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s cousin, has sung this song around the year 1956 in a concert in Zürich – here you can listen to it) (these E-book are free of all charge - use their treasures well!) |
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