buddhist sutras and videos for anglers

There is another image in the early Buddhist scriptures, which - while not strictly about fishing - seems relevant here. It recurs in a number of places and the instance I'm looking at now is in the Maha-Assapura Sutta, the Great Discourse at Assapura, in which the Buddha explains the practices that are necessary for contemplatives. Towards the end of the discourse, he describes the results of training oneself to watch one's own mental states from a more detached position. And, in doing this, he evokes the image of a clear mountain tarn:

Just as if there were a pool of water in a mountain glen - clear, limpid, and unsullied - where a man with good eyesight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting, and it would occur to him, 'This pool of water is clear, limpid, and unsullied. Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.' In the same way - with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability - the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations.

Through the practice of meditation, contemplatives learn to observe their own thoughts and emotions without attachment as if looking down at shoals of fish swimming in transparent water. There is no fisherman in this image because, of course, the Buddhist technique is not to intervene in the pool that is the mind - only to observe its operations from a distance until it becomes natural to see those operations not as the experiences of some coherent individual 'self' but as events in the world that come and go without any great consequence for the observer.

But this leads me on to think about the opacity of much of the water around us. The canals, ponds and rivers of South Yorkshire would not have worked so well to illustrate the process of watching one's own mental operations. And a point that emerged in the meeting in Rotherham was that visualising what is happening under the surface - an imaginative act that arises from the very murkiness of the water - is, for some, a part of the pleasure of fishing. Martin talked about films that are made by dropping a camera into the water with bait attached so that the fish gather round and their behaviour can be recorded. 'They don't do what you'd think,' he said. The world below the surface is not quite identical to the one that you imagine. To say that, though, you have to have spent time trying to visualise what might be going on. The interest of the film arises from the time expended previously on wondering.

Contrasting the Buddha's image of the transparent mind with Martin's enthusiasm for the underwater films has led me to think about how the hiddenness of the fishy otherworld contributes to the experience of angling. Lowering a hook into a place that you cannot see or enter. Inferring what is happening from tell-tale signs on the surface. Visualising how it might be. Imagining what might be going on at the other end of the line. Transparency and opacity. Seeing and inferring. Knowing through direct observation and knowing through logical inferences. In the end, it is all about how muddy the water is (and, in a way, a lot of life is the same, I think).

Fish in the clear water of the Plitvice Lakes, Croatia. Image by Aphex82 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.