The begging bowl has come to symbolise monks, especially in the Buddhist tradition. Perhaps the association finds its origin in the bowl of milk and rice that the kind Sujata offered to an emaciated Gautama, shortly before he achieved enlightenment. In the early days, monks exclusively ate the food that they begged from villages or towns around their monasteries.
It does offer a rather interesting metaphor, one that affords us a rather dispassionate lens in the way we approach material trappings. The marketing machine preys on our desire for aesthetics and luxury, be it food or clothing, with the packaging enamouring us more than the contents! In the last couple of weeks, fashionistas would have been horrified to learn how little it cost to make the designer handbags that they splashed out hundreds of thousands on. Effectively, more than 90% of the cost went towards the brand, which creates the apparent hierarchy in the market.
Which goes to show, that even for something as frivolous as handbags, if we were able to strip out the labels, we would be able to approach a more egalitarian society. Food, of course, is a basic necessity, and with trendy restaurants and extravagant menus, one can spend anything from a few hundred to literally hundreds of thousands. The price one pays isn’t just to cover the cost of the ingredients and the chef, but also the whole experience.
Enter the humble bowl, where food from a 5-star restaurant mingles with leftovers from a humble middle-class home. Suddenly, all the glitz, glamour and the allure of flavours disappear, just like a flash in the pan. We’re all holding a metaphorical bowl, in which we collect new experiences everyday.
Today it may be full of praise and the glow of success, and yet tomorrow we will also collect failure and dejection; The bowl remains the same, only the ephemeral contents change. It is when life experience can bring this perspective, that a sense of detachment and dispassion dawns on us, helping us appreciate how temporary and fleeting our experiences and emotions are. When a famished Gautama had had enough of the rice-milk, he stopped, that little food providing the nourishment and energy that he needed to take that final step to enlightenment, becoming the Buddha.
Our earthly lives are episodes in a much longer spiritual journey, each one helping us to learn vital lessons needed for our evolution. We access these learnings through the experiences we gather in our bowls, and like food they nourish us, but if we over indulge in them, they can become toxic. Spirituality is the fire of digestion that helps us extract the nutrition for our souls and discard the rest.
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