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| Source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cricket_insect_on_flower.jpg |
Who cares about an insect and who wants to keep it
as a pet? And, how does it matter if an insect lives or dies? You will change
your views about an insect drastically after reading this short story. Also, it’s
interesting to learn that some cultures in Japan and China keep these insects
as pets for their musical abilities.
I came
across this beautiful and sad story about a cricket, while I was reading a book
about mind mapping by Tony Buzan. The book introduces this story Kusa-Hibari,
which the author uses for an exercise in learning how to read and memorize
efficiently. For sometime, I forgot about the book and started reflecting on
this story. It is truly a touching story and showed me various spiritual
dimensions which I will highlight, as you go through the story. This story is
about a pet insect Cricket (Possibly called Oecanthus rufescens)
The Story begins below...
(The actual story Font in Georgia and my thoughts in Italics).
His cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and
one inch and a half wide: its tiny wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will
scarcely admit the tip of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that
cage - room to walk, and jump, and fly, for he is so small that you must look
very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse
of him. I have always to turn the cage round and round, several times, in a
good light, before I can discover his whereabouts, and then I usually find him
resting in one of the upper corners - clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of
gauze.
(We are all spiritual beings caged in this material body, entrapped in
material existence and then, depending on what we are – we have our field of
activity, which is different to different people. For, example a field of
activity for a small child may be his home or back yard with some toys and
field of activity for the President of a country could be much bigger extending
whole of the nation or other nations. In Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna defines
this as Kestra (the field or Body) and Kestra-jna (Knower of the field or body)
Chapter Thirteen of Bhagavad-Gita: Nature, the Enjoyer and Consciousness).
Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary
mosquito - with a pair of antennae much longer than his own body, and so fine
that you can distinguish them only against the light. Kusa-Hibari, or
'Grass-Lark' is the Japanese name of him; and he is worth in the market exactly
twelve cents: that is to say, very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve
cents for such a gnat-like thing!… By day he sleeps or meditates, except while
occupied with the slice of fresh egg plant or cucumber which must be poked into
his cage every morning… to keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome:
could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of
a creature so ridiculously small.
But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him
awakens: then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of
indescribable sweetness - a thin, silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest
electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes sweeter - sometimes
swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate with the elfish resonance -
sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice. But
loud or low, it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird… All night the atomy
thus sings: he ceases only when the temple bell proclaims the hour of dawn.
Now this tiny song is a song of love - vague love
of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen
or known, in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors, for many
generations back, could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or
the amorous value of song.
(There is a small insect called Indra-gopa and there is King Indra – the
demigod in charge of Heaven. Both of them are bound by Karma, enjoying or suffering
the deeds, labour of their previous births. Further clearly explained in this
Verse 5.54 of Brahma Samhita as below, (http://vedabase.com/en/bs/5/54)
Translation: I adore the primeval Lord Govinda, who burns up to their roots all
fruitive activities of those who are imbued with devotion and impartially
ordains for each the due enjoyment of the fruits of one's activities, of all
those who walk in the path of work, in accordance with the chain of their
previously performed works, no less in the case of the tiny insect that bears
the name of indragopa than in that of Indra, king of the devas.
Purport: God impartially induces the
fallen souls to act in the way that is consequent on the deeds of their
previous births and to enjoy the fruition of their labors but, out of His great
mercy to His devotees, He purges out, by the fire of ordeal, the root of all
karma, viz., nescience and evil desires. Karma, though without beginning, is
still perishable. The karma of those, who work with the hope of enjoying the
fruits of their labors, becomes everlasting and endless and is never destroyed.
The function of sannyāsa is also a sort of karma befitting a āśrama and is not
pleasant to Krishna when it aims at liberation, i.e., desire for emancipation.
They also receive fruition of their karma and, even if it be disinterested,
their karma ends in ātma-mamatā, i.e., self-pleasure; but those who are pure
devotees always serve Krishna by gratifying His senses forsaking all attempts
of karma and jñāna, and being free from all desires save that of serving Krishna.
Krishna has fully destroyed the karma, its desires and nescience of those
devotees. It is a great wonder that Krishna, being impartial, is fully partial
to His devotees. )
They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in
the shop of some insect-merchant: and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But
he sings the song of his race as it was sung myriad years ago and as
faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course
he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory - deep, dim memory of
other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the
dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love - and death. He has
forgotten all about death: but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings
now - for the bride that will never come.
(The scorpion lays its eggs in piles of rice, and sometimes it
is said that the scorpion is born out of rice. But the rice is not the cause of
the scorpion. Actually, the eggs were laid by the mother. Similarly, material
nature is not the cause of the birth of the living entities. The seed is given
by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and they only seem to come out as
products of material nature.
http://vedabase.com/en/bg/14/3
The total material substance, called
Brahman, is the source of birth, and it is that Brahman that I impregnate,
making possible the births of all living beings, O son of Bharata.)
So that his longing is unconsciously retrospective:
he cries to the dust of the past - he calls to the silence and the gods for the
return of time… Human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing it.
They call their illusion an Ideal: and their phantom of organic memory. The
living present has very little to do with it… Perhaps this atom also has an
ideal or at least the rudiment of an ideal; but, in any event, the tiny desire
must utter its plaint in vain.
The fault is not altogether mine. I had been warned
that if the creature were mated, he would cease to sing and would speedily die.
But night after night, the plaintive, sweet, unanswered trilling touched me
like a reproach - became at last an obsession, an affliction, a torment of
conscience; and I tried to buy a female. It was too late in the season; there
were no more kusa-hibari for sale, - either males or females. The
insect-merchant laughed and said, 'He ought to have died about the twentieth
day of the ninth month.' (It was already the second day of the tenth month.)
But the insect-merchant did not know that I have a good stove in my study, and
keep the temperature at above 75 degrees F. Wherefore my grass-lark still sings
at the close of the eleventh month, and I hope to keep him alive until the
Period of Greatest Cold. However, the rest of his generation are probably dead:
neither for love nor money could I now find him a mate. And were I to set him
free in order that he might make the search for himself, he could not possibly
live through a single night, even if fortunate enough to escape by day the
multitude of his natural enemies in the garden - ants, centipedes, and ghastly
earth-spiders.
Last evening - the twenty-ninth of the eleventh
month - an odd feeling came to me as I sat at my desk: a sense of emptiness in
the room. Then I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his
wont. I went to the silent cage, and found him lying dead beside a dried-up
lump of egg-plant as gray and hard as a stone. Evidently he had not been fed
for three or four days; but only the night before his death he had been singing
wonderfully - so that I foolishly imagined him to be more than usually
contented. My student, Aki, who loves insects, used to feed him; but Aki had
gone into the country for a week's holiday, and the duty of caring for the
grass-lark had devolved upon Hana, the housemaid. She is not sympathetic, Hana
the housemaid. She says that she did not forget the mite - but there was no
more eggplant, and she dutifully expressed contrition. But the fairy-music had
stopped: and the stillness reproaches; and the room is cold, in spite of the
stove.
(What is the difference between a dead and living? The body is still
there but, something is missing. The consciousness and the life symptoms which
are displayed because of the presence of Soul which is said to the size of the
one- 10,000th part of the tip of a hair. Smaller than a molecule
but, just like Sunlight which can illuminate the whole universe, the Soul
illuminates the whole body with consciousness. So, do crickets have Souls? Yes,
from a small ant, a Whale, Elephant anything and everything that shows the
symptoms of consciousness.)
Absurd!… I have made a good girl unhappy because of
an insect half the size of a barley-grain! The quenching of that infinitesimal
life troubled me more than I could have believed possible… Of course, the mere
habit of thinking about a creature's wants - even the wants of a cricket - may
create, by insensible degrees, an imaginative interest, an attachment of which
one becomes conscious only when the relation is broken. Besides, I had felt so
much, in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice - telling of
one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the
favour of a god - telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and
the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps
of the Vast of being… And then to think of the little creature hungering and
thirsting, night after night and day after day, while the thoughts of his
guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams! How bravely, nevertheless,
he sang on to the very end - an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!…
May the gods forgive us all - especially Hana the housemaid!
(“the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within
myself, were forever but one” – Bhagavad Gita – 2.17. That which pervades the
entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy
that imperishable soul.
This verse more clearly explains the real nature of the soul, which is
spread all over the body. Anyone can understand what is spread all over the
body: it is consciousness. Everyone is conscious of the pains and pleasures of
the body in part or as a whole. This spreading of consciousness is limited
within one's own body. The pains and pleasures of one body are unknown to
another. Therefore, each and every body is the embodiment of an individual
soul, and the symptom of the soul's presence is perceived as individual
consciousness. This soul is described as one ten-thousandth part of the upper
portion of the hair point in size.)
Yet, after all, to devour one's
own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the
gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order
to sing.
