IN THE CENTER OF THE CITY

IN THE CENTER OF THE CITY

©Lalita Arya

In the center of the noisy city is a tree, a big, spreading tree. Around the tree is a fence, an iron grill fence. It is triangular, isosceles in shape, the bottom half in concrete and the top iron, measuring about five feet high. The tree has heart shaped leaves and is considered sacred, it is actually a peepul tree. This beautiful tree is revered especially by unmarried women, because it is believed that the Lord himself had taken marriage vows with his Beloved, holding her hand while walking around this tree. The belief is that a tri-ambulation around it will grant anyone a partner for life.

Encircling its thick trunk, and at the base of the tree, someone had built a concrete seat about two feet high. Facing the street and near the bottom of the triangle fence, on this structure is seated a three-foot high statue of the Buddha. He is sitting in the classic lotus meditative posture. I have no idea what this statue is made of. It could be either cement, stone or even some kind of resin, but it has the usual pacific look of a Buddha statue.

I have to pass by there to drop off to, or pick up my kids from school. Every time I pass by there I look out of the car window and try to get a glimpse of the meditating Buddha under that tree. At times there is someone sprawled asleep on the clean, green grass lawn that is enclosed and guarded by the two sides of a gate tied together with a piece of string.

There is usually only one ugly sight and that is of an advertisement painted on a piece of wood, nailed to the tree, a commercial selling silk saris. Maybe, I consoled myself they are responsible for this oasis of peace in the midst of urban chaos, so they have a right to advertise. Surely they did not go to all this trouble simply to sell their delicate fineries. That is until recently. The sign was removed and replaced with another in favor of the Lions International, similarly nailed to the tree. The name of this mini park this commercial also announced is Himalaya Giri Buddha Park, the Park of the Mountain Buddha.

As I sit to do my meditative prayers at my own convenient time, the mundane worldly thoughts assail my peace and stillness. I think of that statue under the tree, I think of the stillness of the hands, the erectness of its back, the calmed externalization of inner feelings expressed in that half smile. My thoughts float on to other times and spaces to a living image under another tree. The form of the renounciate Prince Siddhartha comes in view.

He who sat in another time, in another age but with the usual clattering thought of karmas, thoughts of guilt, of temptations, of thoughts running into other thoughts, chain reaction of seeds of thoughts of all vrittis. His mind must have floated back to thoughts of his glorious regal past, of his uncertain present, what he was about to surrender, about the future and what it might be like, all mind stuff.

My mind struggles with the inner fights he must have had at first, fights we all go through. Sitting alone and still for forty-nine days and forty-nine nights, arguing, debating, analyzing, struggling day after day and night after night with the humdrum, ordinary problems of life and death. Slowly, if only slowly abandoning such confusions, moving on to more abstract ones above all physical and mental temptations, removing blocks, I see him not as a Prince, but as a struggling human being, somewhat like me.

In the end he decided to abandon the possessions of a beautiful wife and a dear son, to give up the pleasures and responsibilities of the luxury of a princely life. That tremendously impacting decision resonated through time to thousands of years after that sitting under the bodhi tree.

For forty nine days & nights he sat

In the unmeasured time that it takes to speed through thought and space, my agile mind races to that still form under the peepul tree, that is here and now. I am still, my spine straightens and peace envelopes …a peace absorbed from the aura of the image under the tree, the tree in the center of the noisy city.

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