streaming consciousness…

Buddhism: Meeting of East and West, Aryans and Dravidians, Nobles and…

Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka

…us, of R1 genome, y-DNA, that is, not mitochrondial, we the barbarians from the north, land of ice and snow, with broken hearts and bad manners, satisfying ourselves with whomever whenever wherever, animal instincts and animal appetites, with an inclination toward wheels, and gears, and wine, and dark beers, anything to make the boring food go down easier, trail food, and whatever gets you through the night…

But it must have something incredible to watch, erstwhile Aryans, light-skinned and beefy, from creamy milk, rolling in over the high plains, toward India, literally rolling, in chariots and carts pulled by horses and oxen, herding cows and goats and wayward children, lording it over the local slim swarthy dark-skinned Dravidians, so-called, for lack of a better name, in what must have been the world’s first great culture clash, the likes of which wouldn’t be seen again until the American genocide, this just the preamble to that constitution…

And whether we destroyed what was there, or not, since the facts are not clear, we certainly picked up the pieces, of something great, and heretofore largely uncredited, like so:

Although some houses were larger than others, Indus Civilisation cities were remarkable for their apparent, if relative, egalitarianism. All the houses had access to water and drainage facilities. This gives the impression of a society with relatively low wealth concentration, though clear social levelling is seen in personal adornments. Toilets that used water were used in the Indus Valley Civilisation. The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro had a flush toilet in almost every house, attached to a sophisticated sewage system–Wikipedia

But we had the wheels, cars, I believe they were called in that ancient dialect of Celtic, relative of Sanskrit, or proto-Sanskrit, c. 1500 BCE, while cousin Greece was barely a-borning, they of similar DNA, and almost equidistant from the source. But these ancient dark proto-Indians had cities and villages enough for five million souls, one-third of the world’s population, more or less, more then than now, even, as a percentage of the total world population…

And they had more than that, too, apparently, including meditation, which came to be something more than just what to do when your spouse is bugging you, and yoga, and wholistic medicine, at least to some extent, that is to say, everything that we now associate with classic Vedic India, and handed down to the present through Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, and tens of thousands of wannabes and almost-rans with not much more than a hearty ‘namaste’, which means something like ‘hi’, roughly translated…

And so it began, the mixing and mingling of body fluids and ideas, and beliefs and practices, skin colors moving toward some vanishing point in the middle, UNTIL—a curious thing happened. Instead of celebrating this diversity, and ultimate blending toward the middle, those hereditary descendants of the original Aryans apparently were feeling more like “VIVA LA DIFFERENCE!”, and so decided they needed something to maintain their privileged status, skin color being finicky, after all, with nothing guaranteed…

And the rest is history, caste system established to basically confirm what had already happened, that the fix was in from the start, when the native dark people became ‘slaves’ and Johnny-come-lately white folks became ‘nobles’, as enshrined in nearly every nearby language to this day. But why, you ask? Racism, my dear, simple racism, since some sort of knee-jerk ‘instinct’ seems to imply that lighter is better and darker is badder, especially when you’ve got the arms to back you…

And there’s the rub. Might and white make right. To their credit Buddhists eschewed the caste system, but kept all the rap about ‘noble this’ and ‘noble that’, even though much, if not most, of Buddhism, indeed came from the ‘slaves’, apparently, especially meditation (everything translated as ‘noble’ in Buddhist texts comes from the original Sanskrit word ‘Arya’ or some derivation, i.e. white people). And they kept past lives and rebirth, too, if halfheartedly, which is basically a back-door to the caste system…

If it’s any consolation—not much—the status of women is not much better. But whites had the technology, and the high philosophy, and the language skills. And so it stands to this day, the sins and glories of the fathers passed on to the children, proving at least that something passes on from one generation to the next, and perhaps many, on down the line, and it may even be more than just DNA, and language, and culture, and natural selection, and genetic drift, and God-only-knows what else…

There may indeed be something like karma rippling through the time-lines like a blast from the past. But it won’t be a personal karma, because that person is long gone, if he/she/it ever existed in the first place, and not if you’re a Buddhist, he/she/it didn’t. So the slaves may indeed be the noble ones and the noble ones may indeed be racist…

But that’s just half the story, the half that y-DNA tells, i.e. the story of men. We haven’t even started telling the story of women, i.e. mt-DNA, the mitochondrial stuff. So did ‘Science’ just inadvertently ‘prove Buddhism wrong’? Ha! I wouldn’t go that far, wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole, in fact. Let some other hack writer have at that; I’ve got a planet to save, and no time to lose…

This is no time to be proud, this is no time to be haughty, this is no time to exalt ourselves as better than all the rest, no matter how light or how dark our skins, we the latest fashion models from recombinant DNA, hopefully stirred but not shaken, result of millions of possible recipes and combinations since time immemorial, constantly re-shuffling the deck and comparing trade tips…