Of Mindsets and Monkeypots

Petr Karel Ontl, "Of Mindsets and Monkeypots" (BPS/ATI); Dhr. Seven (ed.) Wisdom Quarterly

I'm going ape over your dancing, baby. Dance, baby, dance! (rawstory.com)

  

Monkey King

In rural India, I am told, there are people who earn extra money by trapping and taming monkeys to be sold into slavery as pets.

 

Over the years, through trial and error, several ways have been devised to capture these clever but greedy/grasping primates. But the simplest method is said to be THE MONKEYPOT. 

Hey, monkey, it's a trap. Just let go! (redxb9)

In a clearing, the trapper fastens a short piece of cord or chain to a stake or tree-stump. To the other end is attached a small pot with a narrow neck. Into this pot are dropped several nuts, fruit, or a clump of precious salt, and a few more are scattered on the ground. The trapper then hides out of sight.

 

Soon a band of monkeys arrives and descends to feed. Before long, one of them discovers the contents of the pot. It puts its hand in the pot easily enough. But having grasped the enticing treat, it cannot pull its clenched fist out through the narrow opening no matter how hard it struggles. 

[Why? Its narrowed hand can go in the neck, but its full hand is too big to pull out -- and, due to its grasping nature, it never thinks to let go.]

Lust is the strongest manifestation of SENSUAL CRAVING, tanha and lobha or thirst and greed, just as VIEWS are the mind's obsession (Williams/laluzdejesus.com).

 

It panics in fear and the trapped monkey creates a ruckus, which brings the trapper running with net and cage or skewer. The monkey's fate, for all its cleverness, is sealed.

 

At first glance it would appear that the villager is the trapper, the baited pot his trap, and the poor monkey his victim. No doubt the villager sees things this way. The hapless simian, were it able to speak, would probably agree. 

However, a closer look shows a different perspective. The villager is NOT the trapper, nor the pot the trap, because there is nothing holding the monkey:

It could very easily remove its hand from the pot and rejoin the free monkey in the treetops if only it would let go of the nuts, the fruit, the salt. If it would only let go!

  

Monkeys only? 

I just want more and more love and...

The monkey in this anecdote does not suspect that it is being held prisoner solely by its mind. It has found some treat. 

Greed -- unreasonable and unreasoning desire -- has arisen. Though the jungle abounds with nuts and fruits and salt and all kinds of foods, the monkey's conditioned reaction dictates that it must have these as well.
 

Its narrow mindset is the only thing that imprisons it, that prevents it from letting go, from seeing the absurdity of this predicament, this enslavement, this "trap" -- or the obvious way out of it.

 

Now, before anyone makes any smug comments about the monkey and its intelligence, or the apparent lack thereof, and before we congratulate ourselves on our vastly superior reasoning powers, let us see where we ourselves stand.

 

This business of letting go is so easy, yet so hard, for monkey and for human alike. We are both caught up in the same predicament. The details may differ, played out on higher levels of sophistication or complexity [and higher ones where celestial beings are caught up in more alluring space worlds], but the end result is the same: enslavement by concepts and conditioning. 

While the monkey is done in by its greed for a few nuts, we humans are done in by our greed for wealth, fame, power, status, pleasure, and shiny trinkets and toys which we believe we absolutely must have and cannot live without. 

You're still not getting it! I want what I want when I want it, and I expect you to know what that is without me having to explain it every single time. I don't think that's too hard!

 

Even more fundamentally, we become enslaved by our attitudes and feelings toward them.

 

We endlessly seek gratification for the senses: pleasant things to look at, to listen to, to touch, to taste, to smell. Moreover, we are spurred on by thoughts or concepts created by our ego-driven minds. 

These last can be the hardest to satisfy since we cannot just please our senses and be content. Rather, we strive to fulfill fantasies of outdoing our peers, of turning them green with envy by having the biggest, the costliest, the latest, the shiniest. We are caught up in competition, in a game of one-up-manship. 

 

It cannot even be said that we are materialistic: We don't know how to be! We do not genuinely enjoy and appreciate the material things we have, much less life itself. We don't even know how to relax. More

• Petr Karel Ontl was born into a Bohemian-American family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1942 and emigrated to the USA in 1949. He has been a Theravada Buddhist for the past 20 years affiliated with Bhavana Society, West Virginia, USA.

The Monkey King literature (video)

Stephan David, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; A.C. Yu, "Journey to the West" (Hsi Yu Chi)

 

The story of Monkey was written hundreds of years ago, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, by a Chinese author and satirist, based on an ancient Chinese legend called "The Monkey King." 

 

Its original name was Hsi Yu Chi ("Record of the Journey to the West," Saiyuki or Suy Yuw Gey in Japanese). The full story is enormous, comparable in size to the Bible. There are various English translations, both full-length and abridged. Full-length versions are usually translated as "Journey to the West," while abridged versions usually have "Monkey King" or at least "Monkey" in the title.

(Col. Angus) Episode 1: The Monkey King, Zhang Jizhong

Monkey King

The novel is a fictionalized account of the legendary pilgrimage to the "holy land," India, by the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. It is loosely based on source material from the historic text Great Tang Records on the Western Regions and traditional folk tales. The monk traveled to the "Western Regions" during the Tang Dynasty, to obtain sacred texts (sūtras). Guanyin (Kwan Yin Bodhisattva), on instruction from the Buddha Amitabha, gives this task to the monk and his three protectors in the form of disciples -- namely Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing -- together with a dragon (naga) prince who acts as Xuanzang's steed, a white horse. These four characters have agreed to help Xuanzang as atonement for past unskillful karma. More

 

What is the Monkey King literature?

Amazon.com

The Monkey (abridged version)

Anthony C. Yu’s translation of The Journey to the West, initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time.

Written in the sixteenth century, The Journey to the West tells the story of the14-year pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, one of China’s most famous spiritual heroes, and his three supernatural disciples, in search of Buddhist scriptures.

 

Throughout his journey, Xuanzang fights "demons" (yakkhas, asuras) who wish to eat him, communes with spirits (devas, pretas), and traverses a land riddled with a multitude of obstacles, both real and fantastical. An adventure rich with danger and excitement, this seminal work of the Chinese literary canon is by turns allegory, satire, and fantasy.

 

With over a 100 chapters written in both prose and poetry, The Journey to the West has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. 

 

But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. 

Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible. One of the great works of Chinese literature, The Journey to the West is not only invaluable to scholars of Eastern religion and literature, but in Yu’s elegant rendering, it is also a delight for any reader.

• "Journey To The West" (Univ. of Chicago Press), Anthony C. Yu [4 volumes].
• [new] Revised Edition (2013) [new]
• On 21 December 2012, a revised edition of the four volumes of "Journey To The West" was published by Univ. of Chicago Press.
• On February 15, 2013 they were published in the UK, and on April 5, 2013, the Kindle editions were released.