Buddha

Poetry/ Prose

Image from Wikipedia commons: An illustration of the Buddha sitting below the Bodhi Tree, day and night by an unknown artist. Either from India or Nepal, Date unknown, approx. 1000 years ago. Illustration, used later on the cover of the book, “Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks.”

The image makes me feel like a small black planet. Wet, almost silken, resonating with a rhythm carefully written on seeds, before they were buried in the darker soils of the sky. Floating in an enormous sea of something that resembles time. But, is in fact a lot thinner and is faintly inscribed with words poets left out of their tales. The universe where this planet wanders has leaves for stars and figs are moons, aging and bursting. The planet moves in extraordinary orbits, which if we could trace would resemble songs mothers sing at their daughter’s weddings or ones they sing when they dye earthen pots in midnight blue ink.

I can’t be that planet, I am too oddly centred for that. This image though, it seems to have found that small black planet in me — going about its daily planetary routine in the sky, or a portion of the sky that resembles a poem or a painting crafted by hands that have touched nothing but water. Water falling incessantly from a dancing nimbus cloud.

On Buddha Purnima