The Buddha was not Aware of Simple Harmonic Motion

I have read a number of books about the Buddha and on Buddhism. I have also listened to hours of descriptions and explanations of what the Buddha said, on YouTube. The net result? I am no better off than when I started out more than 20 years earlier, longer than what the Buddha took to achieve the so-called Nirvana.

The lectures, particularly on YouTube, tie themselves up in knots trying to answer, “In the absence of soul (anatta, permanent self or essence), what exactly gets reborn in Buddhist philosophy?”

Well, I am not a Buddhist in most of the general senses in which followers of Buddhism slot themselves, but still I am one in a distinctly particular sense – empiricism. There are, to be sure, who are also dyed-in-the-wool empiricists and I am proud to be associated with them, even if only by myself.

One late evening I was working in the office trying to tackle a tricky design effort with multiple pathways to design, and also for checking the design (these are not to be done by the same person, but in my desire to submit as flawless document as I can, I ignored that prohibition). These two did not match and I was at my wits’ end. Then, out of the blue it struck me who is it who is working on the problem, the designer or the design-checker? Which Raghu am I? It is at that moment, before I had read anything about the Buddha or being aware of it in any meaningful sense, it dawned on me that “Raghu” is a dog-tag hung around the neck. That is all it is.

 It helps to identify you after your death (or, when you are on the cusp of dying) in the armed forces. Then, I had this light-bulb moment – “Raghu” comes alive only when the identity refers to something/someone which/who is not there anymore–the identity is real but what it identifies is not. Go figure.

"I" had a brief discussion on this with a colleague who was also slaving away in another cubicle. "I" think "I" confused him because “I” was on the same boat (from this point on, "I" will be discarding the “...” and its declensions in identifying the individual to make the reading visually smoother). The light-bulb was of a low wattage.

The idea came to me out of the blue when I was least aware that I was even thinking.

No, I am not claiming that I am a Buddha; only that I could be one billionth of him.

Now I claim that the Buddha, even at his supreme enhanced level of self-awareness, was not able to bring the idea in its wholesomeness to his disciples. This is why there are so many interpretations, but none making anyone the wiser than the next one.

The question about being “reborn” still stayed unanswered within me.

I am used to asking my students to do a thought experiment when I began to tech Simple Harmonic Motion (SHM).

In this thought experiment, we would assume that the earth is a perfect, homogenous (no variation in the material distribution within it) sphere, and there is no air resistance in the hole. A hole has been dug straight through the center of the earth from a point on it to the point precisely antipodal to it. Imagine a stone being dropped (zero velocity) at one. The questions are whether the stone would reach the antipodal point, and if it did reach, what would be its velocity and acceleration as it emerged “out” at the diametrically opposite point.

The answers? Yes, the stone would reach the antipodal point and, its acceleration is ‘g’, the acceleration due to gravity (by definition) and the velocity is zero (directed towards the centre). The stone would keep accelerating under ‘g’ as per its position within the earth, reducing as the distance between the stone and the centre of the earth reduces, (refer to the sketch of variation of ‘g’ within the earth) overshooting the centre, and coming to zero velocity at the antipodal opening.

 

This behaviour of the stone is repeated numerous times, but the stone remains the same; it is just as a goldfish sees outside from the bowl and by the time it returns to its starting point, it cannot remember that it has seen the scene earlier! This is SHM!

Now, include friction.

To gain traction with Buddhism, I suggest that each location has a memory associated with it, but symmetrical about the centre, and there is friction–we slow down, perhaps millions of times, and finally we come to the centre and rest. Friction is the desire/craving. The seeker sheds it layer by layer till she becomes the thus gone–Tathagata. For the Buddha, it took six or seven years. For ordinary mortals, a lifetime would not be sufficient.

This is Nirvana!  

Raghuram Ekambaram