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| Sunday, 27 April 2003 |
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Musings of a ghost from the past by Prof. Suwanda H. J. Sugunasiri Part 8 The crab principle A Sinhalese monk in Toronto recently complained to me that it was this interpretation - no drinks beyond a point, that a renowned white professor, a Pali scholar, had given addressing, horror horror, a group of young Sinhalese Buddhists! Our monk understands the Precept somewhat differently. It is to abstain, repeat ABSTAIN, totally, from 'liquor (sura) and spirits (mayraya) that leads to drunkenness (majja) and the point of non-deligence (pamadatthaana)'. In this understanding, the fifth precept is straightforward. No liquor, period. No if's and but's. Interestingly, this is also the understanding of many a practising Buddhist of other traditions as well, as I found in a random sampling in Toronto. What, then, has led the Sinhalese to opt for the interpretation of allowing themselves an opening? This is where the Sarachchandra soirees enter the picture. The drinking partners here are the English-speaking middle-class, my own class, I remind myself, fellow culture-vultures, if you allow me some levity. Now, should the drinking soirees be seen as symptomatic behaviour of a class who has learned their Buddhism, if it has at all, from English texts, and never from the temple, or Sinhalese books? Have such values been internalized through a western, or westernized, education, the kind I myself got at Nalanda, Ananda? We all know the popular baila line, Purtugeesi kaarayaa rataval allanna sooraya. 'Oh that Portuguese man, so clever at capturing lands'. ... And then the lines, Wine bowtalay apagay parama winnowday, Wediyen gattot yaa heki dewlowa paaray. 'The bottle of wine our extreme bliss - taken a bit more, the road to heaven we kiss'! So is it that my colleagues and friends have taken a cue from the Portuguese, not to mention the Dutch and the British? Oh no, are we on to that favourite past-time again, brow-beating the colonizer for yet another post-colonial ill? But before letting the colonizer off the hook for this one, let's pause to think. Heard the phrase, 'social drinking'? Drinking for the sake of company. I know what it means not to. As I said, I've experienced the social ostracizing, and so I understand perfectly why someone at a party, not wanting to ruin the spirit of the evening, wanting to go with the flow. But what about the resulting overflow? Including the 'one for the road'? A reader will, no doubt, immediately point to a harsh truth - that drinking among the Sinhalese has a venerable history. Remember Suranimala and Gothaimbara, Dutugemunu's Division leaders? Were they not known to go bellyful on toddy? How about Dutugemunu's own elephant, Kandol Etaa? Fast-forwarding now, what about the village dad coming home kata gonnak raa beegena 'full to the brim with toddy'? Or the kasippu and the hora raa in the city slums? So then, it is not only the westernized and/or the middle-class lot that indulge, eh (to go Canadian here)? The village folks do no better (worse), it looks. Now, this may sound hypocritical. But is there any validity in pointing out that drinking in the village was a discrete activity, done out of sight, away from wife and children and community? The odd drunk village dad was known to hide out the whole night. But a city cousin of mine was known to come home from work dead drunk, and drink more into the night, as wife and children would play mouse and cat - scared, just barely not wetting their pants! Pity that's not my only city example. Mind you, I'm an old man, talking on the basis of the sixties. And estranged from the culture. So how about today? Am I given to understand that drinking has gone publicly public - in hotels, for sure, but in homes as well? The answer in Canada to the issue of drinking privately vs publicly, is well-known. Come straight out and do your thing in public! Out with the hypocrisy. That, strangely, sounds like the Buddha speaking. "I do as I say and say as I do." No gulf between thought and behaviour. If you think drinking is good, then do it right out, front and center. So, yes, the crab principle, a.k.a. hypocrisy, may be morally reprehensible. At the individual level. But letting the outside world into your booze-room may also be. That is, reprehensible, at another level. Does it, I'm just asking, give a licence to be immoral with impunity? Casting away any sense of self-discipline with an "I don't care a damn about the world" attitude? But, if I may be allowed a humble and perhaps naive question, would it not be equally hypocritical to claim a moral superiority for non-hypocrisy over a damn-the-world licence? But morality aside, are there other reasons for containing drinking to your private quarters? Let us, e.g., take the impact on the younger generation. Does knowing that your dad drank have a stronger impact on a young mind and youthful behaviour than seeing dad drink? Let us turn to psychology, western or Buddhist. In each of them, we know that the eye-sense comes to be listed first. Why? Because that is the primary, and the most powerful, 'door', to use Buddhist vocabulary, through which we access the outside world. The ear comes a distant second. If so, would it be reasonable to allow that seeing dad drink could have more of an, a more direct, impact upon the junior than hearing about it? Let me in this connection quote from myself, from a column I wrote in the Toronto Star (as a columnist on Buddhism) of Feb 1, 1997. The issue was a Canadian judge ruling in favour of the right of a woman to go bare-breasted, on the basis of equality. Here are my words: "......taking your eyes off the bare breasts you've just seen on the street wouldn't make one bit of a difference to the person - psychologically. You may be able to show your respect for the woman's right to bare herself, but by the time you take your eyes off, it is already a part of your consciousness. ....... "The mental image now acts as stimulus, and so the bare-breast consciousness continues to linger, in memory." Would 'drinking-dad consciousness', then, be different? What seeing dad drink, or the memory of it, does is make drinking an oh-so-ordinary behaviour. The act of drinking ceases to have any moral implications. Drinking in hiding, by contrast, can be said to highlight the issue of morality. It is done away from others because it is something wrong. Seeing dad drunk, you also come to be (even more) de-sensitized. It takes little imagination to see how, over time, the injunction against drinking gradually disappears from the young mind. Allowed an open sesame, now drinking becomes just another behaviour, no longer even defiant behaviour, much less deviant behaviour. Public drinking outside of the home is also fodder for the media - a public event to be reported on, to be read by the old and the young alike. Add the media's penchant, in the experience of the writer in the Canadian context at least, for laughing off morality as a grandma virtue smacking of Victorian values. Any sense of social reprehendsibility is lost on the young. Next step? Try it out. Soon public drinking, accompanied with smoking, among the young, becomes fashionable. Everyone does it. Not even the way my friends did in smoking. Hiding under a culvert. So, would we be far off the mark if we were to borrow a page from the Dhammapada and declare boldly - public drinking begets public drinking! Just like in the verse, Hatred begets hatred. But let's, one more time, think of hypocrisy. Are we not all walking and breathing hypocrisies? Whatever our religion, we vow not to lie. But don't we tell white lies at least? What about stealing? Don't we, e.g., steal time - at work when we take long lunches, or take a pencil home? And killing. Have we set up a mousetrap recently? Do Buddhists worship gods at the temple? Well... At the risk of being called a prude, then, let me assert that, while hypocrisy may be bad, having no values at all - call it Victorian, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim, is, if you allow me to 'murder the queen' here, badder! I paraphrase. Values are good! We may not be able to live by values all the time. But that should not surely mean that no attempt should be made, or that there should be no guidelines at all to fall back on. Indeed the crab principle, do as I say and not as I do, might I venture to say, may be better than the no values at all principle, when it comes to the social good. (To be continued) |
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