16.7 — Becoming Someone Worth Being

Two stories end this volume, and they are the two endings of the two longest books ever written, and they say the same thing.

The dog

Yudhishthira has walked north with his brothers and his wife, and they have fallen one by one, and he has not looked back (3.20).

A dog joined them on the road. Nobody invited it.

He reaches the top alone with the dog, and a chariot comes to take him into heaven in his own body, which is an honour almost nobody receives.

And he says he will not go without the dog.

He is told it is absurd — his brothers are dead, his wife is dead, and he is refusing paradise over an animal that attached itself to him.

And he says: this creature came with me and has been faithful, and I will not abandon somebody who is devoted to me and looking to me for protection.

After a hundred thousand verses about duty, war, kingship and dharma, that is the final examination.

The hunter

Krishna is sitting under a tree in a forest (4.12).

His clan has destroyed itself in an afternoon. His son is dead. His brother is dead. His city is about to go under the sea. Everything he arranged has come apart in front of him.

A poor hunter sees the sole of his foot through the leaves, takes it for a deer, and shoots.

And the man comes forward, sees what he has done, and is destroyed by it.

And Krishna's last act — with every possible reason to be occupied with himself — is to comfort him and tell him it was not his fault.

What the two endings have in common

Neither man is asked about doctrine.

Neither is graded on achievement.

Neither is asked whether he was right.

Both are tested on whether they attended to somebody with no claim on them at all — and one of them is a dog and the other is the man who just killed him.

That is where the two greatest works in the language put the ending, and they were written centuries apart by different hands with different theologies.

What this volume has actually been about

Sixteen Parts, and it comes down to a small number of things.

That the disasters are not caused by evil people. Every catastrophe traced here — Ravana, Duryodhana, Bhishma, Karna, Dhritarashtra, Drona, Vali, Daksha, the hall in 3.9 — was produced by somebody decent who declined a moderate personal cost, repeatedly, over years, with good reasons.

That the vices are one mechanism at six stages, each of which feels like clarity while it is running (8.5).

That the exit is always available and always priced at a humiliation (8.10).

That an absolute rule will meet a case it cannot handle, and that the response is a procedure rather than a solution (4.11).

That what changes a person is behaviour repeated over months, and that insight alone changes nothing (5.4, 8.1, 10.4, 13.4).

That the traditions agree almost completely on how to treat each other and almost not at all on what is ultimately real (12.9) — which means the practical half is the well-tested half.

That the metaphysical questions are open, in both directions, and nobody is entitled to certainty (15.2, 15.6).

And that the test at the end is not about any of it.

What you can actually do

And the volume should close on something you can do rather than something you now know.

This week: write the code (13.8). One page. Three lines, three tests, an exception procedure, two standing commitments, and a review. It will be wrong and you will revise it, and having a wrong code you revise is a completely different condition from having none.

And start two of the practices (16.6). The five-minute audit and one weekly contact.

This month: name the thing you are avoiding, and the exit price, and whether it has gone up (8.10).

And take one small humiliation deliberately (8.9, 16.4).

This year: write the eulogy (14.8). Have the conversation with your parents while it is possible (4.7). And go and ask the person who has been trying to tell you something (3.3).

And for the rest of it: reduce what you are defending (16.3). It is the root of the lightness, the calm, the guilelessness and the ability to take the humiliation, and it is the only item on any list in this volume that changes the others.

The thing to aspire to, stated once

Because the question was asked directly and deserves an answer that is not a mood.

Not a person who feels nothing.

A person who feels everything at full strength, has nothing to defend, has already accepted the worst case, does not require the outcome, keeps their word at a cost, says the true thing in a room where nobody else will, and is entirely present with whoever is in front of them.

Every one of those is trainable.

None of them requires you to believe anything.

And all of them are slow, and nearly invisible from inside, and obvious from outside after about ten years.

The last thing

The Buddha's last words, and they are the best closing available (6.13).

Vayadhamma sankhara, appamadena sampadetha.

Everything that is put together falls apart. Work on it, and do not be careless.

Two clauses.

The first is the whole diagnosis: nothing you are holding will stay — this body, this work, these people, this arrangement. Not one thing.

And the second is the whole instruction, and the word is appamada, which means the opposite of drifting.

Not urgency. Not anxiety. Attention, sustained, to the thing in front of you, for as long as you have.

A dog at a gate. A frightened hunter in a forest.

That is the test, and it is available today, and nothing in the preceding sixteen Parts is more important than it.

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Next: Volume VIII takes the same instinct outward — the planet, the peoples, and every event that produced the world you woke up in this morning.