Dear Taimyo Practitioners:
Happy New Year to you!
At the end of the last year, I had a chance to read “The Vision” written by Tom Brown, Jr……
I would like to share a part of this book with you and ask you to think about it when you practice Taimyo next time!!
Looking forward to our next encounter!!!
-Fugaku Ito
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from: Chapter III Trail p-65~66
The Vision, by Tom Brown, Jr. ISBN: 0-425-10703-5
Not many days after the deer hunt I was sitting quietly in the bushes watching some men in a pickup truck dumping garbage along one of the larger sand trails. Tears filled my eyes, and I found I hated them to the core, wishing that I were bigger so I could beat them senseless. Grandfather’s silent approach went unnoticed until he sat down beside me and gazed toward the two men and the truck. Without looking at me he said, “Thinking and emotions take pathways too and can become ruts just as deadly as physical ruts.” Just as silently as he had come, he slipped away, leaving me with my thoughts, my anger, and my mental ruts. As I watched the men unloading the truck, I thought for a long time, desperately trying to work throught the anger and find a different way of seeing and understanding things.
The anger was so entrenched that it was hard to let it go, but slowly the anger faded. I was no longer angry to these men but rather pitied them for their ignorance. So many times I heard Grandfather say, “There is always some other answer rather than anger,” and for the first time I knew what he meant. The pity led to an action that I had never thought I would make. I walked silently up to the truck and begged the men to stop throwing their garbage in one of my favorite areas. Money was hard to come by in those days, but I had a quarter and I offered it to them for gas to drive to the dump, which was free, and asked if they would want me to unload the truck for them there. They were so surprised by my offer and intensity that they stood as if shocked. I guess that they were not only shocked by my silent appearance but also by they pleading of a small boy.
They began to apologize profusely and sincerely as they packed up the truck. They promised to take the load the few extra miles to the dump. I helped them pack the truck and explained to them that there had been a lot of the same type of dumping farther up the sand road. Without hesitation they asked me where and I let them to a pile of rubble larger than the one they had intended to leave. As I left them, I glanced back and watched them loading the other pile of garbage on their truck, collecting even the scraps of paper that had blown into the trees.
Grandfather had been watching me all the time, and as I got back to my sitting area, he sat beside me. “Anger would not have solved this problem,” said. “Pity and teaching were the only answers. These men would have learned nothing if you had approached them with anger in your heart. Instead you thought of a different way and found the answers. Now your thinking and emotions of sorrow are transformed into growth, all because you strayed from the trail and thought and felt in a new way.” I carry the lesssons of the men in the truck to this day. I now know, because of what happened so many years ago, that ignorance is one of the primary causes of the destruction of the earth. Re-education and getting man’s feet back in the soil are some of the answers to the saving of the earth.