Fukuoka Sensei

Fukuoka Sensei

I hear Fukuoka died on August 16. He was 95. I am sure he was glad to move out of an old body to go into a brand new one. His striving in this last body was so deep and vast that one can be sure it continues in more new ones.

The world knows him as the man who gave us the idea of Natural Farming. But he gave far, far more. Natural Farming was just an illustration of his vision that ‘man knows nothing.’

Indeed man doesn’t. Otherwise why would we be in such deep trouble? Most of our inventions are proving to be harmful to us and to all creation. They look to be clever on the surface but they clash with whatever they come to touch. 

Fukuoka was hit by a divine vision so powerful it turned him insane for months. Then when it settled down a bit his gut told him to go back to his village and on his land grow rice without doing all that ‘the clever scientists’ had told the farmers to do. He did virtually nothing except to sprinkle the seed on the land. Nature did the rest and his crops grew same or better than the others.

His insight was to blend with nature all our actions. Obviously therefore much more still remains to be done. Fukuoka only pointed a finger. Forget the finger and focus on where it pointed. We must learn to watch and learn Nature’s ways of doing things. It needs to be done with the food we eat, the clothes we wear, houses we live in, size of communities we create, ways in which we dispose of our waste including what comes out of our bodies everyday.

The way meaningfully to remember Fukuoka will be to start from Natural Farming and to move right on out to change everything we do. For this we will need, just a bit, to turn our back to our minds and come in touch with the animator in all of us which links with Life and the Truth of the universe. Only then can we shed the discriminations and number that our minds dwells in and see the truth of ALL being one undivided whole.

Brother and teacher Fukuoka, our Namaskar.

Partap
August 27, 2008