Preface To Enlightenment: A Cautionary Tale

There was once a terrible man who had sores everywhere, even on his tongue. He lived alone in a perfectly square house that was painted the color of scabs. His undergrown yard refused to even support dirt or stones. Broken cast-off mechanical parts littered poisoned ground like fossils of an extinct robot species. He was also a hateful fuck, with never a kind word to anyone & more grousing & grumbling than small talk. Scary, nasty, disgusting, foul, smelly, ill-tempered, disease-ridden, shunned, loathed, as sinned against as sinning.

& he was the neighborhood's Bodhisattva.

What the hell? It's true! No one could possibly be enlightened because this motherfucker was too unpleasant to be around. But what about compassion? What about charity? This was obviously some kind of loophole. Something about his presence cast a pall over everyone else's attempts to escape the cycle of suffering & rebirth. For someone who was supposed to be helping out, he turned out to be a real douchebag.

This happened, of course, a very long time ago in a place not unlike our own but very different. The rules were more or less the same & the path then, as now, had eight folds, like a complicated record album for stoners in the sixties. Still, the lesson is more or less unclear - the questions were, as always, never entirely answered to anyone's satisfaction.

& oh yes, that hairy, pot-bellied Bodhisattva died & attained Nirvana. The rest of the townsfolk, though, died of the same plague he was doubtless carrying around with him, & they had to do it all the fuck over again.