The essence of Buddhism made its way into the Island during the lifetime of Buddha himself on his own ‘solitary-warrior’ journeys to numerous lands in his exploration and quests for tranquility, stillness & peace. According to oral fables of his adventures to Mihintale Mountain near Anuradhapura & other destinations to find sufficient tranquility & calmness to explore into the deep recesses of his mind, he found quiet places to unlock the Emptiness & Nothingness of reality, on these excursions, he had not talked to anyone in particular but had been entirely Silent, Still & Present in the ‘Now’ rather than being chattering with his ego, mind, intellect, person, thoughts, in the past or the future.

It was only about 300 to 500 years after his expiry from his bodily existence that Buddhism was first introduced as an intriguing & respectable practice of existence in Sri Lanka by the Buddhist King Ashoka of India through his grand daughter Sangamitta, who brought with her a sapling of the Holy Bo (Fig) Tree of Bodhgaya, India & planted it herself at Anuradhapura which has become the world renowned Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi Tree of Anuradhapura. This not only paved the way for Buddhist teachings of the numerous sutras – texts of the principles & best practices of Buddhism to be translated from the Pali language to be translated to Sinhalese, so that the people can understand as to what it is all about, but also served well to begin our rudimentary ‘international’ efforts to conserve & protect the ecology and the protection of the environment by inspiring the people in the planting of trees to replenish the entropy & logging of the mature trees & foster new vegetation to take root, which enabled concentric waves of energy of Consciousness to spread out in order to trigger compassionate efforts to care for all creatures including vegetation equitably in the greater consciousness.

Throughout our lives we have been attached to our family, work, food, entertainment, lifestyle, stature, health, wealth, transport & are tempted to visit places that appeal to our interests, which enables us to digest our curiosity, have fun and be happy. However, we find that too much attachment to even what we really need eventually leads to misery through craving, decay & entropy. So Buddha looked beyond what was known at the time such as belief, habit & social conditioning, for the ultimate truths, this led him to unfurl what was beneath the deep recesses of the mind, intellect, memory, thoughts & perceptions in order to perhaps discover what our Consciousness could be ? He questioned whether he could possibly pack the cosmos into a mustard seed and stretch out to the vast expanse of infinity ? He reckoned that he could perhaps disengage ‘himself’ from the environment around him, that is to be isolated from his physical existence by creating a distance between himself, his thoughts and his body-mind to see whether the illusion of space still exists in time or whether the ‘movement of the moon & the sun’ kept everything in place enabling life to go on and on. So he reckoned that detaching from his thoughts had to be the priority, and he practiced being aloof from everything, being still, silent & being in the ‘know’ of nothing whatsoever, just being in the presence .

Through detachment from everything else he discovered that each of our individual consciousness is : that in which all experience appears, ; that in which all experience is known and ; out of which all experience is made ! – he found the empty space in his consciousness where all the processing takes place as ‘Chitta / Thuriya’. This enabled him to unleash ‘our’ hidden, obscure, entangled & essential self as he shattered his ego, constructs of the mind, intellect, stature, person, name, identity, race, religion, nationality and all the social, cultural & ecological conditioning that ‘we’ as individuals are influenced as individual physical bodies, body-mind & the cycles of our breath, movement & life spanning over time as life goes on.

Modern Scientists from Harvard, Yale, UCLA & other Ivy League institutions have discovered this peak of human potential & performance whenever any patient is injected with Anesthesia, when all characteristics of human physical existence can be ‘frozen’ for awhile until the necessary medical interventions are conducted on the body while the ‘consciousness’ is held ‘on the wall’ where there is ‘no time & space’ for the patient and that the total mind-body can be revived later with the potassium based ketamine drug.

Buddha discovered that we are essentially ‘awareness’, immeasurable, timeless & infinite. This he found out by stepping aside of the ego, being in the presence for a long period of time & finally by stepping from his calm self to that of the ‘Non Self’ ! This is interpreted as Nirvana !

Amongst numerous generalizations, that he conceptualized was, ; the ‘Lankavatara Sutra’ where he clearly shows by the illustration of throwing two pebbles into a ‘still’ pond, he observed an anomaly. This is when the waves that move away on the surface of the water, from where the pebbles fell, begin to spread out in concentric circles from the two reference points where the pebbles fall on the water. Observing these waves bouncing at each other, he found that an interference pattern forms in the middle, a moderate set of a concentric circle of waves ‘appears’ to form at the center, when the two sets of original waves meet emerging from the ‘interference’ pattern. This is interpreted as the production of a new entity out of the play of two, through the interaction of the two or more entities which indicates the proliferation of ideas formed by the synergy of the meeting of two or more people, plants or other creatures for a common interest, such as the pursuit of happiness, love, peace and joy.

However, he found that happiness lingers with unhappiness swinging like a pendulum between each other, as we search beyond for an alternative, when Buddha somehow stumbles upon contentment and bliss. He arrives here deciphering out of the box from swinging between fun & suffering, by transcending on the one hand to being content which is pretty mediocre, and on the other hand to perhaps feel joy, exuberance & bliss, which opens the doors of absolute peace & harmony within one and with what is in this existence.

However, one couldn’t quite find peace while being too busy with schedules, people, meetings, work, things, conditioning, family commitments and other engagements & attachments, which could even lead to stress while one mitigates existence and find that peace is somehow in the distance, amused at how we struggle to reach for it into a positive vibe or rendezvous in our lives.

“Life is a roller coaster ride, thrilling, exciting & terrifying

but it’s worth taking another spin” – Carl Sagan

So being detached from his belongings, aloof from all the clutter of thought, ideas, sensations, concepts & imagination of his mind & ego, Buddha just wanted to be in the presence, in the now, in the stillness & silence. When he distanced his – ‘self’ from his body-mind, overlooking the past which is only history, the glorious but the past and not delving on the future as it has to unfold anyway. He looked at what could perhaps be beyond time, matter and space. He uncovered what could lie behind the scenes through the emptiness, that being & doing was far better than ‘having’. It was when he stepped aside of the ego, mind, person, belongings, personality, name, identity, intellect, race, religion, nationality, other constructs etc. that he found his ‘self’ or spirit of awareness in the Universal Consciousness. Then finally when he stepped aside of his – ‘self’ to perhaps be in ‘non-self’, was when he found timelessness, love, peace, freedom & got himself liberated into Nirvana where he claims that being something as a body-mind is the illusion created in our atomic physical world of existence and that the nature of reality is either nothing or everything not anywhere in between. In order to discern these and other truths he needed to be still, quiet and find calm locations, which he found aplenty in this land of tranquility, peace, landscapes of emptiness, spacetime and ‘time & gravity warps’ – Willkommen (Bienvenue) Sri Lanka !