The Buddha and the Ant

The Buddha and the Ant
Glenn Wallis

A black ant brings him to his senses. It’s just a haze of various shades of green and brown, at first. Slowly, something—a speck of moving blackness no larger than a peppercorn—comes in to focus. It is an ant. And a moving leaf. No, the ant is carrying the leaf. The leaf is perpendicular to the ant’s body, rising vertically like the head sail on a reed boat. The ant is struggling to surmount a cluster of dried leaves with its leaf intact. As he observes the ant, he is vaguely aware that his left cheek is pressed hard against the forest floor. The sour stench of stale vomit fills his nose. He tastes blood on his lips. He squeezes his pulsating head. But he keeps his right eye trained on the ant, captivated by its furious determination. The ant thrusts forward; the leaf falls; the ant whips around, grabs the leaf; charges another fraction of an inch; darts, and dodges an onslaught of branches and leaves. The ant looses the leaf in the melee, clinches it, like a buccaneer, in its barbed mandibles, and charges again. This is the moment when he passes from the mental fog into self awareness. A simple but invigorating thought bolts through his mind—just drop the leaf, fool.

The ground is cool on his cheek. He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply. What happened? What the hell happened? He remembers sitting, as usual, crossed-legged, back straight, head centered on his shoulders, leaning against the tree trunk. This memory quickens him. He pushes himself back up until he is sitting on his buttocks again. The tree trunk is right there to support him. Leaning against it with his bare legs straight out in front of him, he stares into the woods. What happened? He remembers hunching over like a withered reed, and gazing at the ground. His head suddenly felt as if a strongman were tightening a leather strap around it as a headband. Instinctively, he grabbed it with both hands fully extended, and began massaging it, hoping, in vain, to ease the pain. He gasped with fright when he felt his scalp. It was shriveled and withered. When he rubbed his head, the hair, rotten at the roots, fell to the ground. He remembers heaving in waves. The vomit shot in a stream onto the ground and splattered on his face. He couldn’t hold out. In pain and exhaustion, he finally fell over on to his face.

He just stares into space now. The woods are dark. He wraps his arms tightly around himself, presses his knees against his chest, and pulls his robe over his shivering body. Overcome by loneliness, shame and, most devastating of all, a sense of catastrophic failure, he begins to weep. After half a minute he stops. He wipes his face with his sleeve. He sits still. He punches the ground. He sharpens his gaze, looks around, and mutters to himself, where’s that damned ant?

Sadness was his element. Anger was his tonic. Together, they were elixir, flushing delusion from his mind, paralysis from his body. As a child already, he had discovered the futility of struggling against anger and sadness. It was like trying to prevent rain from soaking the ground. He had tried that once. The rains were coming. With the help of a servant, he constructed elaborate hemp roofing and dug a complex drainage system to protect his herb garden. The result was the ruin of his herb garden. The plants were smothered by the collapsed roof, beat by the rain mercilessly into the ground, and finally drowned in his ditches. He observed this disaster from his window and drew the logical conclusion. And all is nature. Nature is supreme power. Nature is element: water, fire, earth, and air. I, too, am this. I am nature. I have a stark choice: I can either let nature take its natural course or learn how to benefit from its majestic force. But doing so will take precise knowledge and great skill. In the meantime, I will just let the rain permeate the ground, pervade and infuse it, saturate it with its very nature, wetness.

Like the rains, anger and sadness were for him inevitable and all-consuming forces. When sad, he felt drawn down to the ground, helpless and disoriented. He lost all sense of who he was, what he was doing, and for what reason. Anger braced him, lifted him up, turned his face squarely toward the world. When properly mixed these two emotions were like the gods’ nectar: they simultaneously clarified and impelled. Sadness was a mirror for his self-delusion. It lay open to view his fantasies about the world. Anger narrowed his view, sharpened his focus. It provoked ideas and impelled him to action.

Now, here he is, sad and angry. With patience and care he will absorb their force and harvest their seed, as he has done so many times before. That is what he determines. On elbows and knees, he crawls over to where the ant had been struggling with its leaf. That leaf was both its food and burden, he thinks. Both its sustenance and ruin. He sees no sign of either.

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