THE WOUNDED BUDDHA

On reading Luc Venet’s last considerations, I was reminded of a Zen koan: “If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him”.
Luc Venet has had the luck of meeting Satprem, a figure of strong and great spiritual valour, an extraordinary travelling companion.
Each one must settle accounts with his own ‘evil double’, his shadow: Venet’s is the one of ambition (to have a seat amongst the chosen, and perhaps, why not, why not him the successor of Satprem).
Incapable of demolishing his Buddha-Satprem while alive, Venet has attempted, with his delirious writing titled The end of Illusion, to kill him when dead.
Yet, more than the end of Illusion, this text seems the beginning, or rather, the perpetration of a vast Ignorance. Such an uproar of muddy accusations grafted on his Buddha-Satprem, only prove how enlightened has been Satprem’s choice of keeping his distance from collaborators of this sort.
Unluckily for Luc Venet, by his defamatory libel he could but wound his Buddha, moreover just lightly.
And a wounded Buddha is more invulnerable and pernicious than a Buddha dead or alive, for he succeeds in exposing all your mediocrity; showing you your incapacity to make a progress, out of weakness, pride, ambition, cowardice and meanness.
To the ambitious, the sterile vainglories, bestow a place among the mediocrities. Yet, it’s always better to be a mediocrity than to earn for oneself the fame of a coward and of a pusillanimous.

Simonetta Invernizzi
10 July 2007