Have you heard of the Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House? Here is the brief version. A great man had a big house. The house being old was in a state of collapse and was filled with all sorts of filth and thus was a haunt of poisonous insects and malignant birds and beasts.

One day, a fire broke out in the house. The householder watching the house in flames heard someone say that his children were inside. The great man shouted at his children inside the burning house, asking them to flee. But, the children were absorbed in their games and did not heed his warning, though the house was being consumed by raging fire. Then, the great man devised a stratagem to lure away the children from the burning house. Knowing that the children were fond of interesting playthings, he called out to them, “Listen! Outside the gate are the carts that you have always wanted: carts pulled by goats, carts pulled by deer, and carts pulled by oxen. Why don’t you come out and play with them?” The great man knew that these things would be irresistible to his children. The children, eager to play with these new toys rushed out of the house.

Can the parable help us grasp the reality of our contemporary social life? Let us try. To put it simply, the house is the society, filthy and in a state of collapse, the children in the house are the people and the father evokes the image of a leader or saviour that is supposedly destined to save the people from the impending disaster. The cart is the promise that the leader holds out in order to lead the slobs to a much desired but hitherto unknown world of collective Nirvana. Why people continue to live in the house that is infested with sickening muck and is likely to crumble over their head? Why are they oblivious to the danger it poses? The house is rotten simply because it has not been taken care of by the leader of the household. He has moved to safer environs, away from the reach of infectious air though without relinquishing his rights over its old property. What worries him is not the way the people slither and slobber in his old property. The prospect of their death is the nightmare that haunts him. With their annihilation he stands to lose everything; the property already being in shambles will come to have zero value as it will be impossible to house the new ones. So his ostensible effort to save the people from the flames is in fact to save the world he owns.

But why the people though miserable are resigned to be what they have been reduced to? Why do they while away their time on this earth trapped in a socially created dungeon? The answer is not simple. Ours is one of the most ancient societies evolved along the class and caste lines. Class and caste are generally interlinked. Class status initially created caste status. There is ample evidence that after the Aryan conquest the upper crust of Dravidian (Harappa people) were accepted into Aryan fold after meeting certain conditions which were not difficult to fulfill. At the opposite end, the poorest sections of Aryans were gradually reduced to the status of Shudra. That’s why you can come across certain individuals among the aboriginal/nomadic tribes with blond hair and bluish eyes, the unmistakable sign of their Aryan origins. The overwhelming number of the people having low status in terms of class and caste in their false consciousness has consented, no doubt through relentless and subtly coercive ideological and socio-political persuasion, to be treated as children and being led by the nose. That is the reason why the Lord Buddha used children as a metaphor in his parable. Even today you can hear the poor people addressing the high and mighty as ‘Mai Baap’(parents) implying unqualified submission before the perceived parental authority.