15Mar14
Hi All –
While dining at a local restaurant, I received the following
fortune cookie:
Well . . . great!
This message could be the springboard for conversations in many
directions but today I want to focus on the question of want. What do you want? Most of us might rattle off a long list
of wishes such as new cars, houses, and technological gizmos cascading out of a
horn of plenty.
Christopher Isherwood, writing on Vedanta, the ancient
Indian philosopy, explores the
issue of want in his book “The Wishing Tree.” Below is the short story from his book.
Have a great week!
Kevin
The Wishing
Tree
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
ONE AFTERNOON, when the children are tired of running around the garden and have gathered for
a moment on the lawn, their uncle
tells them the story of the Kalpataru Tree.
The Kalpataru, he explains, is a magic tree. If you speak to it and tell it a wish; or if you lie
down under it and think, or even
dream, a wish; then that wish will be granted. The children are half skeptical, half impressed. Truly-it'll give
you anything you ask for?
Anything? Yes, the uncle assures them
solemnly: anything in the world. The audience grins and whistles with amazement. Then someone wants to know: what does it look like?
The uncle, pleased at the success of his storytelling, casts
his eye around the garden and
points, almost at random: "That's
one of them, over there.”
But this is too much of a good thing. The children are mistrustful,
now. They look quickly around at their uncle's face, and see in it that all-too-familiar expression which children
learn to detect in the faces of grown-ups. "He's just fooling us!" they exclaim, indignantly. And
they scatter again to their play.
However, children do not forget so easily. Each single one of them, down to the youngest, has
privately resolved to talk to the
Kalpataru Tree at the first opportunity. They have been trained by their parents to believe in wishing. They wish when they see the new moon; or when
they get the wishbone of a
chicken. They wish at Christmas, and just before their birthdays. They know, by experience, that some of these wishes come true. Maybe the
tree is a magic tree, maybe it isn’t
but, anyhow, what can you lose?
The tree which the uncle pointed out to his nephews and nieces is tall and beautiful, with big
feathery branches like the
wings of huge birds. It looks somehow queer and exotic among the sturdy familiar trees of that
northern climate. There is a vague
family tradition that it was planted years ago by a grandfather who had travelled in the Orient. What nobody, including the uncle, suspects is
that this tree really is a Kalpataru
Tree one of the very few in the whole country.
The Kalpataru listens attentively to the children's wishes- its leaves can catch even the faintest
whisper and, in due time, it
grants them all. Most of the wishes are very unwise- many of them end in indigestion or tears but the wishing tree
fulfills them, just the same: it is not interested in giving good advice.
Years pass. The children are all men and women, now. They have long since forgotten the
Kalpataru Tree, and the wishes
they told it indeed, it is part of the tree's magic to make them forget. Only and this is the
terrible thing about the Kalpataru
magic the gifts which it gave the children were not really gifts, but only like the links of a chain
each wish was linked to another
wish, and so on, and on. The older
the children grow, the more they wish: it seems as if they could never wish enough. At first,
the aim of their lives was to get
their wishes granted: but, later on, it is just the opposite their whole effort is to find wishes which will be very hard, or even impossible, to fulfill.
Of course, the Kalpataru Tree can grant any wish in the world but they have forgotten it, and the garden where it
stands. All that remains is the
fever it has kindled in them by the granting of that first, childish wish.
You might suppose that these unlucky children, as they became
adults, would be regarded as lunatics, with horror or pity, by their fellow human beings. But more
people have, in their childhood,
wished at the Kalpataru Tree than is generally supposed. The kind of madness
from which the children are suffering is so common that nearly everybody has a streak of it in his or her nature so it
is regarded as perfectly right and
proper. "You want to watch those kids," older people say of them,
approvingly: "They've got plenty of ambition. Yes, sir they're going
places." And these elders, in their friendly desire to see this ambition rewarded, are always
suggesting to the children new things to wish for. The children listen to them attentively and
respectfully, believing that here
must be the best guides to the right conduct of one's life.
Thanks to these helpful elders, they know exactly what are the things one must wish for in this
world. They no longer have to ask
themselves such childish questions as: "Do I honestly want this?" "Do I really desire
that?" For the wisdom of past
generations has forever decided what is, and what is not, desirable, and enjoyable, and worthwhile. Just obey the rules of the world's
wishing-game, and you need never
bother about your feelings. As long as you wish for the right things, you may be quite sure you
really want them, no matter what
disturbing doubts may trouble you from time to time. Above all, you must wish continually for money and power more and more money, and more and
more power because, without these
two basic wishes, the whole game of wishing becomes impossible not only for yourself, but for others as well. By not wishing, you are
actually spoiling their game and
that, everybody agrees, is not merely selfish, but dangerous and criminal too.
And so the men and women who were shown the Kalpataru Tree
in the garden of their childhood, grow old and sick, and come near to their end. Then, perhaps, at last,
very dimly, they begin to remember
something about the Kalpataru, and the garden, and how all this madness of
wishing began. But this
remembering is very confused. The furthest that most of them go is to say to themselves: "Perhaps I
ought to have asked it for
something different." Then they rack their poor old brains to think what that wish, which would have solved every problem and
satisfied every innermost need, could possibly have been. And there are many who imagine they have found the answer
when they exclaim: "All my
other wishes were mistaken. Now I wish the wish to end all wishes, I wish for death."
But, in that garden, long ago, there was one child whose experience was different from that of
all the others. For, when he had
crept out of the house at night, and stood alone, looking up into the .branches of the tree, the real nature of
the Kalpataru was suddenly
revealed to him. For him, the Kalpataru
was not the pretty magic tree of his uncle's story- it did not exist to grant the stupid wishes of children it
was unspeakably terrible and
grand. It was his father and his mother.
Its roots held the world together, and its branches reached behind the stars. Before the beginning, it had been and it would be, always.
Wherever that child went, as a boy, as a youth, and as a man, he never forgot the Kalpataru Tree.
He carried the secret knowledge of
it in his heart. He was wise in its wisdom and strong in its strength: its magic never harmed him. Nobody
ever heard him say, "I wish," or "I want" and, for this reason, he was not very highly thought
of in the world. As for his
brothers and sisters, they sometimes referred to him, rather apologetically, as "a bit of
a saint," by which they meant
that he was a trifle crazy.
But the boy himself did not feel that he had to apologize, or explain anything. He knew the secret
of the Kalpataru, and that was all
he needed to know. For, even as an old man, his heart was still the heart of that little child who stood breathless in the moonlight beneath the
great tree, and thrilled with such
wonder and awe and love that he utterly forgot to speak his wish.
