MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER FIVE
The Fool
That which made Socrates the wisest man in all of Athens was that he, alone, was conscious of his own ignorance. He knew the limits of his wisdom. Likewise, the first step of the Magnum Opus is the admission of one’s ignorance in the face of the transcendent. In order to reconstitute the rotundum into the philosopher’s stone, one was first dissolve it into its base elements by applying the alkahest—that is, one must first allow his preconceptions to dissolve in the mercurial abyss of the Nigredo, a deep melancholia which characterizes the ego’s plunging into its shadow.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the Buddhist tradition acknowledges wisdom in one’s awareness of his own limitations—and a lack of wisdom in one’s arrogance. The Dhammapada says:
A fool conscious of her foolishness
Is to that extent wise.
But a fool who considers himself wise
Is the one to be called a fool. (Buddha 17)
But the teachings of the Buddha do not stop there. Beyond acknowledging the first steps toward wisdom, and further beyond acknowledging wisdom’s first obstacle, The Dhammapada warns about the faculties of reason itself:
Reasoning is harmful
To fools;
It ruins their good fortune
And splits open their heads (19)
One might be mistaken for thinking this passage a hyper-judgmental parody penned by Nietzsche in the vein of Thus Spake Zarathustra; but it is neither parody nor excessive. The truth is that when a person is willfully blinded by his own pride and arrogance, he will employ his higher human faculties to rationalize his motivations, his decisions, and eventually the ill-consequences resultant from those choices. This is because such a fool mistakes good fortune as belonging to himself and bad fortune as being imposed upon him.
A fool suffers, thinking,
“I have children! I have wealth!”
One’s self is not even one’s own.
How then are children! How then is wealth? (17)
One mistake made is in believing that any fortune is not a finite and transient gift, separate from one’s control and willpower. Another mistake lies in assuming that suffering is the consequence of external powers. Suffering is in fact misplaced desire or aversion. One does not control life’s good fortunes, but one does decide to affirm or deny painful experiences, thereby producing either peace or agony. The fool inverts this dynamic between human beings and reality—and always to delayed, decadence effect:
As long as evil has not borne fruit,
The fool thinks it is like honey.
But when evil does bear fruit,
Then the fool suffers. . . .Like fresh milk,
Evil deeds do not immediately curdle;
Rather, like fire covered with ash,
They follow the fool, smoldering. (18-19)
The morality of the fool is the inverted morality of slaves. The slaves turn against life and toward narcotic pleasures, which at first serve to numb their pains but inevitably come to exacerbate them like taking morphine for a toothache. Numbing the pain does not make the rot go away, nor does it help bring cessation to the immoral behaviors which generated the rot in the first place. Thus in the seeking of pleasure, fame, wealth, status, and all else which one seeks merely to distract himself from the question of his own significance, the fool cultivates a festering wound in his breast. He harbors smoldering resentment and the taste of bitterness with every breath.
For those who catch a whiff of such putrefaction in the presence of another, the Buddha advices one keeps his distance:
If, while on your way,
You meet no one your equal or better,
Steadily continue on your way alone.
There is no fellowship with fools. . . .A fool associating with a sage,
Even if for a lifetime,
Will no more perceive the Dharma
Than a spoon will perceive the taste of soup. (17)
The message here is clear. One ought to surround himself with people who want the best for him and avoid those who will only hold him back or corrupt his character. This can be very difficult, for often the master can have great love for the slave, but rare is it that the slave comes to love his own position in life—for if he did, he would soon discover that his affirmation made him something more than merely a slave; he would become master of his own life before too long.
That is why it is best to continue on. The festering man is doomed to remain infected just as he is doomed to infect anyone he is close to for too long. This is because he sees the world upside down. He sees good fortune as belonging to him, as if he is entitled to it, and therefore gratitude is impossible. he sees misfortune as always being another’s responsibility instead of his own, and so he blames others always and everywhere for his own wrong-doings, making learning and self-correction impossible. Such a one cannot be helped. Better that one already on the path serve himself until he meets another who is willing and able to meet his potential. After all, the path is difficult enough:
Night is long for one lying awake.
Seven miles is long for one exhausted
Samsara is long for fools
Ignorant of true Dharma.
Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.
