98. The Jar That Can Never Be Filled
A Tamil woman student passing under a tree hears a voice in her head: "Will you accept seven jars of gold?" The student looks around and sees no one, but the offer of gold arouses her avarice and suppresses her caution. She exclaims, "Yes, I accept!" At once the voice replies, "Then go home, for I have carried the jars to your house."
The student hastens home to verify this declaration and finds the seven jars in her study. She opens them one by one. Each of the first six is filled to the brim with gold, but the last jar is only half-full. A strong desire arises in her mind to fill the last jar, for without it, her happiness is incomplete. She melts down her bangles and earrings and nose ring and converts her savings to gold and adds it all to the jar, but the mysterious vessel remains only half-full. Exasperated, she spends less and less, to the point of starving herself, adding all of her income to the jar, but the vessel remains as before. So one day, she humbly asks her guru for an increase to her stipend, and as she is a favorite student, as soon as her request is made, it is granted. She saves her pay and dumps into the jar, but still the jar shows no signs of filling.
Dejected and obsessed, the student's condition worsens every day. Seeing her plight, her guru asks her, "Sishya! When your pay was half of what you make now, you were happier and well fed! What is the matter with you? Have you got the seven jars?"
Astonished, the student asks, "Guru, who has informed you of this?"
Her guru replies, "Ah, don't you know that these are the signs of the Yaksha's seven jars? He offered these jars to me also, but no sooner did I ask if these wages were to be spent or hoarded than he vanished with no reply. Don't you know you cannot spend this money? It only brings with it the desire for more. Go at once and return the jars."
This advice brings the student to her senses. She returns to the tree and says, "O Yaksha, take back your gold." The same voice as before replies: "It is done." When the student returns home, she finds the seven jars have disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived, and with it, her lifelong savings.
I offer you two readings. In the first reading, so it is with the dimensions of settler colonialism. The gold in the jars is the valuable social status of white-affiliation deriving from the woman's classification as a quasi-assimilable South Asian model minority, a subordinate settler who benefits as long as she performs whiteness (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 18). The wealth she pours into the seventh jar is the Tamil cultural praxis she abandons in her greed for a whiter role to improve the odds of being believed in the clinic, for a whiter style of writing to improve her chances of completing her doctoral degree. She may be invited to be a white American settler, but as she will never be one, she is always in danger of reverting to foreign contagion. Pour as she might, she will never fill the seventh jar, and when the Yaksha takes them back, her ethnic identity and cultural praxis go too.
In the second reading, so it is with energy rationing in the chronically painervated patient. The jars are the alluring misconception that the more one hoards energy, the more energy one has to spend. But the truth is that energy is expended in the act of hoarding energy. Six of these jars present themselves as alluring energy reserves, while the seventh is an insurmountable energy sink: the dissertation, the 4/4 teaching load, service obligations, meetings, commutes, bodywork, intergenerational trauma, that prevent the woman from ever accessing the other six. Greedy for perpetual reserves of boundless energy if she can only fill the seventh jar, she forgets that hoarded energy rots in the pocket, and she spends the energy she has on a delusion. Thus, "those who do not understand the difference between what is real expenditure and what is real income lose all they have" (Sri Ramakrishna, 1947, p. 19).
(–85. Notes to Self)
In the third reading,