Dibyendu's WallScript

Buddha once declared: I teach but one thing, and one thing alone—the nature of suffering, and the way that leads to its cessation.   The true Buddhist response to suffering is to walk along the path of the Noble Eightfold Way, freeing oneself first, and then extending that freedom to others still caught in the net of pain. It is a discipline of the human spirit, a moral courage that enables us to remain unshackled from sorrow.   But before we see how wisdom ushers liberation from suffering, we must first examine what this suffering is, and how it arises. For unless we penetrate its causes, its grip cannot be broken. Suffering may come in two forms: one physical, the other mental. Deliverance from either can be realized only when we enter into its very roots. In the language of an auditor, it is cure from the origin of risk. Here, the “risk” is none other than the primal source of suffering.   The Reality of Suffering   Buddha taught that human existence is inextri...

I first read about her in Aruna’s Story , a book by Pinki Virani. A book that wrung tears out of me, leaving me shaken. Perhaps only Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot had ever made me weep more. In recent years, I have grown weary of books that indulge in tears; they often feel like staged melodrama. Yet, Aruna’s tale stood apart, carved out of a reality too raw to dismiss as theatre. Whenever I imagine her hospital bed, my eyes brim over.   For thirty-eight unbroken years the girl has lain in a hospital ward. From the age of twenty-five. Aruna Shanbaug—ambitious, brimming with dreams of a larger life. She longed to study abroad. She had chosen nursing as her vocation, a profession of care, a full commitment to serve. Life had barely begun to reveal itself to her. She could not know that what awaited her was so unimaginable, so monstrous, that no imagination could have foreseen it. She did not know that soon she would lose her sight, lose the use of her ...