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OLD AGE

 

 

The world is on fire!

Are you laughing?

You are in the dark of mind’s chronic sleep.

Will you not ask to awaken?

 

For behold your body,

It’s a painted puppet, filled with culture’s desire,

Jointed and sick and full of false imaginings,

Abstractions of events once held dearly, now gone.

An unconscious shadow that moves, shifts and fades in time.

 

How frail we truly are!

Weak and diseased.

Like every living thing

In the end all sicken and die.

 

Behold these white bones,

They are like hollow shells and husks of a dying summer.

Ashes!

Are you still laughing?

 

You are a house of bones,

Flesh and blood for plaster.

Like an uninvited guest, pride and arrogance lives in you,

The result is hypocrisy, decay and death.

Your self-importance is an illusion, for only in you does it exist.

Can you not see the truth in your deception?

 

The glorious chariots of kings break and shatter.

So also does your body and your creations turn to dust.

But the spirit of purity and love is changeless and timeless, void of physical form.

So the pure instruct the pure.

The awakened call to those asleep.

 

The ignorant person is a beast of burden.

They grows in size,

Not in understanding,

Nor in wisdom.

 

Vainly I sought the builder of my house

Through countless lives,

I could not find him…

How hard it is to walk, life after life, with nowhere to rest!

 

But I see you now, O builder!

And never again shall you erect my house.

I have severed the rafters, cracked the ridgepole,

And trampled ambition and desire as if mud under my shoe.

Now my mind is awake and free.

 

There are no more fish in the lake of the unconscious.

The abstractions of intellect have fallen away.

The long-legged crane stands quietly in the water.

And the mind suffers no more.

 

Sad is the youth

Lived loosely and squandered their fortune of a precious human life

Sad as a broken bow, sadly sighing, and suffering…

After all that has arisen and passed away

They have nothing to show for,

Except for a broken body and broken dreams.

 

Are you still laughing?

 

____________________________________

Words of Siddhartha, 563 – 483, B.C.

Transcribed by John Worman 6-24-2002, A.D.

 

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© Copyright June 2002