OPWC Ch. 2: Tending Water Buffaloes (Part I)

– December 15, 2025 6:36 pm to 7:26 pm

The second chapter begins by layering, expanding, and deepening the closing insight of the preceding chapter. In a direct counter to the causal relationship often established between age and wisdom, Svasti, although he is Rahula’s senior by several years, views him as a teacher because of his greater experience with and exposure to the Buddha’s path. Similarly, although Drew is my younger brother by just over a year, in the last several years of his life, he went from being my immediate peer and intellectual comrade to being a monastic teacher, a spiritual elder with a deeper and more catastrophic wisdom than I had ever accessed, all grandiose aspirations aside. The more he experienced suffering outside of his control and beyond the scope of conscious understanding or the possibility of meaningful medical intervention, the more out of time he became, the closer he came to the Buddha’s path. Enlightenment as learning how to die? But I digress again. 

The insight is not just about decoupling age and wisdom in itself; it is part of a broader lesson about the importance of “nurturing humility and virtue” within oneself. Svasti’s reverence for and engagement with Rahula as a teacher reveals a growing practice of nurturing humility, in looking past conventional hierarchies of age to recognize virtue. The relationship between humility and virtue—and the cultivation of humility as a spiritual practice—deepens in this chapter’s key scene: the Buddha introduces Svasti, the newest bhikkhu at the monastery, to the assembled group. 

Instead of introducing Svasti through more socially legible (and superficial) frames and identities, the Buddha foregrounds and celebrates the rigorous dimensions of the work that has hitherto dominated his life: tending water buffaloes. The Buddha has come prepared; he offers not just a series of vague platitudes about hard work and dedication, but rather a philosophically and spiritually coherent ethical system: a praxis, if you will, that has already put him on the path of the Buddha. This feels like a loving, meticulous, and affirmative framing of Svasti (who comes from the “Untouchable” caste, largely defined by their work of tending water buffaloes). So not only does the Buddha highlight the pre-existing sacredness and meditative dimensions of Svasti’s prior work, he also restores dignity and meaning to a devalued form of labor. 

This is where the Buddha delivers the Eleven Points, which are highlighted again at the end of the chapter, and so seem important to analyze in some detail in terms of their content as well as their form/structure. The structure is comparative: just as the buffalo boy does x for the buffaloes, the bhikkhu (Buddhist novice/disciple/initiate) translates it into spiritual labor, for eleven points. Let’s get into it: 

1. Just as a buffalo boy recognizes each of his own buffaloes, a bhikkhu recognizes each of the essential elements of his own body. 

2. Just as a buffalo boy knows the characteristics and tendencies of each buffalo, a bhikkhu knows which actions of body, speech, and mind are worthy and which are not. 

Ah, yes, this is terrain I can play on. 1– Ontology, on the most basic level: the question of essence, what is essential to my body for its composition, differentiation, and basic survival– as distinct from the question of worthy action and character in point 2, where we start veering into epistemology and its sometimes violent merger with ontology (“worthy” in what frame? According to whom, or what criteria? Perhaps we’ll get more into that later in the text– it’s only been 14 pages…). Alternatively, it’s possible that the sense of the “rightness” of a given action is felt or intuited in a register between and beyond symbolic language. Closer to the sacred-sublime? A more generous reading. 

3. Just as a buffalo boy scrubs his animals clean, a bhikkhu must cleanse his mind and body of desires, attachments, anger, and aversions.

4. Just as a buffalo boy cares for his buffaloes’ wounds, a bhikkhu watches over his six sense organs—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—so that they do not become lost in dispersion. 

In all honesty, upon a superficial read, I RECOIL after reading Point 3. My immediate thought: Sorry, I’m not becoming a monk, I’m a greedy little gremlin. No fucking way! Pause… reread, a little slower, and a more generous reading emerges through the comparative frame: “just as a buffalo boy scrubs his animals clean, a bhikkhu must cleanse”--okay. That sounds closer to cleansing as regular, necessary maintenance rather than obsessive purification. Cleansing as routine care, not sanitizing, not compulsively scrubbing. Also as a process, partial and provisional (also not a destination, as established in the previous chapter). In Point 4, things take a fascinating turn as the “sense organs” are directly analogized to “wounds” that require caretaking, continual stewardship. Tending to the sense organs as wounds, that is, foregrounding the ways in which “sense organs” open us up to suffering– not as a catastrophic accident or a horrifically unfair situation requiring immediate rectification, but as a portal for connection, recognition, showing up with renewed or altered presence. “Lost in dispersion” is another intricate turn of phrase that I’m still turning over in my mind. It seems like the directive is to avoid too much loosening or scattering of sensation, perception, discernment, attunement: that these sensory organs need to be gathered, oriented, present, disciplined, trained. This might be another anchoring image of discipline across spiritual, intellectual, physical, and creative planes? 

Points 5-11 to follow. Slow and steady seems to be the rhythm so far.  More soon.

-- Dianna