Just as a storm cannot prevail against a rocky mountain, so Mara can never overpower the man who lives meditating on the impurities, who is controlled in his senses, moderate in eating, and filled with faith and earnest effort.
Trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita
I was 25 years old when I first travelled on an airplane. That’s pretty old, particularly as I was brought up in the UK which is an island. At that time there was no channel tunnel so realistically leaving the island meant a boat or a plane, and a boat wouldn’t have got you very far. So as a 25 year old I hadn’t gone very far. I wasn’t very well travelled.
When I first when on a plane it was to fly to Ghana to volunteer as a teacher in a remote community with Voluntary Services Overseas. It was a two year posting. I wouldn’t go on a plane again until I was 27 when they flew me back to the UK.
There was a lot going in the 25 year old mind. I’ve a vivid memory of looking of the window and being amazed what the earth looked like from so far up; the roads, the fields, the villages, the rivers, the entire patchwork planet. After a time, a range of mountains just grew up out of the landscape. The granite just seem to emerge out of the farmers’ fields. The grays, whites and greens of the rock shone under the sun. The mountains stood as they must have stood hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, a million years ago. The human world must have grown up around these mountains and the mountains would be there a long time after us humans had gone.
But even the mountains are impermeant. They would come a time when they too would be worn down by the passage of time. Eroded, changed, gone from this earth with no-one to remember them. Just boulders in the ground. Just pebbles in the dirt. Just sand in the wind. Just a grain of dust in the air. Just a part of our effervescent world.