Can the Mind Be Quiet? by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Author:Jiddu Krishnamurti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

32

TO LEARN COOPERATION IS PART OF EDUCATION

To an old Mughal garden with ancient tombs a man on a bicycle came every day at the same hour. He would lean his bicycle against a tree and with his back against the same tree, facing one of the tombs, he would sit on the dusty grass, cross-legged with a straight back and closed eyes. He would be very quiet, his body motionless, and would repeat some chant. The green parrots had their homes in the little crevices in the dome over the tombs. There must have been thousands of them and they were noisy in the evening coming back home. There were crows and mynah birds, all of them making much noise in that quiet garden, and the man with the bicycle would sit there. When one had walked for half an hour or more around the tombs, among the trees and in the walled rose garden, the lights would come on in the streets and he would still be there. He was probably a clerk; he was a poor man and wore a dirty coat. He would say that he was meditating or saying his prayers. He didn’t expect anything from this world except perhaps a few rupees, but he came there every evening after office hours. He must have been looking forward to it through the day. Children played around him and neighbouring servants would sit further away on the lawn, playing cards. He never seemed to pay attention to all this. He was used to the beauty of the dome, its blue tiles, the arch and the smell of the jasmine. During that hour or more he never opened his eyes; he was completely withdrawn, motionless. Only his lips moved and presently they too would be still. He would call himself a religious man. He kept his bicycle very clean and polished.

Is meditation an escape from daily life, from the monotony and boredom of it? Is it a further form of pleasure, an expansion of one’s craving? Is it a projection of one’s own desires contrary to one’s own despair? Is it self-hypnosis, a vision of one’s own conclusion, a longing symbolised in an image of the mind or of the hand? Is it an enchanting vision that one has conjured up from the past? Is it a conflict to hold wandering thought? Or is it an effortless deep quietness where thought has no place, though thought can function from it? Is it a silence which has no measure, neither height nor depth, a silence in which there is no centre as the thinker, the experiencer? It is a silence that can never be a result of control, of imitation, of effort.

Would the man with the bicycle understand all this? He had a very simple mind; he didn’t want any of the complexities and subtleties of meditation. He had found a way of sitting quietly and repeating words that gave him tremendous satisfaction, a comfort he couldn’t find in life.

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