The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [55]
If you hit the mark on the wrong target, you have missed.
Humanity is like a blind man who does not know where he is heading. He gropes around with the cane of scientific knowledge, depending on yin and yang to set his course.
What I want to say is, don't eat food with your head, and that is to say get rid of the discriminating mind. I hoped that the food mandala I drew earlier would serve as a guide to show at a glance the relationship of various foods to each other and to human beings. But you can throw that away too after you have seen it once.
The prime consideration is for a person to develop the sensitivity to allow the body to choose food by itself. Thinking only about the foods themselves and leaving the spirit aside, is like making visits to the temple, reading the sutras, and leaving Buddha on the outside. Rather than studying philosophical theory to reach an understanding of food, it is better to arrive at a theory from within one's daily diet.
Doctors take care of sick people; healthy people are cared for by nature. Instead of getting sick and then becoming absorbed in a natural diet to get well, one should live in a natural environment so that sickness does not appear.
The young people who come to stay in the huts on the mountain and live a primitive life, eating natural foods and practicing natural farming, are aware of man's ultimate purpose, and they have set out to live in accordance with it in the most direct way.
* A definite code or system by which one can consciously decide these questions is impossible. Nature, or the body itself, serves as a capable guide. But this subtle guidance goes unheard by most people because of the clamor caused by desire and by the activity of the discriminating mind.
Food and Farming
This book on natural farming necessarily includes a consideration of natural food. This is because food and farming are the front and back of one body. It is clearer than firelight that if natural farming is not practiced natural food will not be available to the public. But if natural diet is not established the farmer will remain confused about what to grow.
Unless people become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food. In one of the huts on the mountain I left the words, "Right Food, Right Action, Right Awareness"* inscribed on a pinewood plaque above the fireplace. The three cannot be separated from one another. If one is missing, none can be realized. If one is realized, all are realized.
People complacently view the world as a place where "progress" grows out of turmoil and confusion. But purposeless and destructive development invites confusion of thought, invites nothing less than the degeneration and collapse of humankind. If it is not clearly understood what the non-moving source of all this activity is—what nature is—it will be impossible to recover our health.
* This motto is phrased after the Buddhist Eightfold Path of spiritual realization.
Part V
Foolishness Comes Out Looking Smart
The autumn nights are long and chilly. The time would be well spent gazing into glowing coals, hands pressed around a warm cup of tea. It is said that anything is fine to talk about while sitting around the fire, and so, thinking that the grudges of my fellow farmers would be an interesting topic, I have casually brought up the subject. But it seems there are going to be some problems.
Here I have been, talking all the time about how everything is of no account, saying that humanity is ignorant, that there is nothing to strive for, and that whatever is done is wasted effort. How can I say that and then go on chattering like this? If I push myself to write something, the only thing to write is that writing is useless. It is very perplexing.
I do not care to dwell on my own past long enough to write about it, and I am not wise