The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

This last quiet phrase is deadly. Our everyday life, the Buddha is suggesting, is lived within an eggshell. We have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. For a moment the Buddha draws aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into another dimension. When I read these words I remember listening to the far-off voice of Neil Armstrong that evening in 1969, telling us what it felt like to stand on the moon and look up at the earth floating in a sea of stars. The Buddha’s voice reaches us from no distance at all, yet from a place much more remote. He is at the center of consciousness, beyond the thinking apparatus itself. As in some science fiction story, he has slipped through a kind of black hole into a parallel universe and returned to tell the rest of us what lies outside the boundaries of the mind.