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| Sunday, 6 February 2005 |
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The island of the carpenters Sunday parable by Sunanda Mahendra In the distant past when king Brahmadatta was reigning in the city of Baranas, there lived a thousand carpenters. These carpenters were not fair by their clients. They got the material and money from the clients but never made any furniture as promised. Most of the time they abandoned their work and lived a good for nothing life.
The carpenters sailed in the ship with their family members and they, thought, they now had, the chance to live without much trouble, as the island they saw was full of various trees like jak, mango and paddy fields with the best harvest. To test the validity of these facts they sent a group of seven carpenters whom they thought were well versed in living matters. One man in the group, having landed in the island consumed a bellyfull of the ripe jak fruit and drank sugar cane juice. He was so happy that he rested his head on the sands of the shore and slept soundly. Oh, this is the finest place to live and I have not got any happiness of this sort anywhere else thought the man. To this place where the man was sleeping came the seven men, who appointed him. But the seven men could not make him out as the man who was the first to land. In the first instance they thought that the man sleeping on the sea shore was a devil, who had come to occupy the island. So they were about to shoot the man with an arrow, when he got up and said that he was one of them and felt so relaxed that he ate, drank and slept to his hearts content... So they pardoned the man for his behaviour and searched around the island. They found that the gods liked the island for its glory and natural splendour, with a never-failing harvest and life-giving energy through plants. So one of the leaders of the group told the others that they should not pollute the surroundings with their dirt and preferred to dig a pit and put all the dirt into it. He told the others, that if this was done, this place would be the best place to live. So to live with their families consisting of children and wives they had to make the place as clean as possible. For these thousand carpenters who came to the island there were two main leaders. Each one of them had a retinue of five hundred on their side. One group engaged themselves in making intoxicants out of the honey. The other group disliked this behaviour as they thought that the intoxicants would enable them to be lazy and inactive and make their lives dull and weary, and make way for erotic feelings. The group who used the intoxicants for their merriment, polluted the land and began misbehaving. There were also two guardian gods who lived in the island. One god happened to be a god full of good qualities [satpurusha devatava] who constantly warned that the impending disaster depended on the gravity of pollution of the place where one lived. The other god, was not so good [papishta devatava] because he advised in the negative. See how the gods too are divided into two groups? So what happened was beyond the control of the group of carpenters who took the side of the good god. The group, who listened to the negative advise of the bad god polluted the land. The bad god would advise the carpenters not to listen to the good god as this was a blessed island, where one had the liberty to pollute in any manner they desired. Things gradually aggravated, to the extent that the group of carpenters on the side of the good god wanted to find a better place to live. Finally the good god told the carpenters that the sea would erode on a full moon day and the entire island would undergo agony and suffer a devastating disaster, unimaginable to the human mind. But even this advice was not heeded by the stubborn and foolish group of carpenters on the side of the bad god. The wise carpenter or the good hearted carpenter who listened to the advice of the good god wanted to act quickly before the impending disaster. But they found it difficult to understand what the god was saying. One of them said that they should leave the island, as it was getting putrid and was stinking, while the other said it was preferable to stay on with the pollution. Those who were on the side of the wise carpenter: made arrangements to leave the island before full moon day. The group of carpenters on the wise carpenters side made a huge ship and sailed away from the polluted island. With the appearance of the full moon, the sea water gradually surged into a tidal wave that swept up to the knee in the first instance, then to the shoulders and finally to the level of the head drowning and burying them. In this manner five hundred carpenters who listened to the bad god died with their family members. The Buddha, who told this story in Samudda Vanija Jataka [Jataka no. 459] declared that the five hundred foolish and boisterous carpenters were none other than the retinue of the bad monk Kokalika, the pupil of Devadatta, who was the arch enemy of the Buddha. The carpenters, who were rescued from the disaster were the pious monks of the order of the Buddha. The wise carpenter was none other than the Buddha himself. |
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The people who gave them the money agitated and said that they should
work or return the money. But the carpenters failed to fulfil their
request. But the carpenter could not live like this. They went into the
forest by the side of a river and made a great big ship and got into it
sailing right into the sea. Then while they were sailing in the sea they
saw an island, which they considered as the best spot to anchor and settle
down.
