25. TITTHA-JĀTAKA - The Horse That Refused Used Water

 

  

The Horse That Refused Used Water. An Ancient Lesson on Invisible Contamination.

 

From a 2,500-year-old Buddhist Jātaka to our present: the environment, the company we keep, the traces we don’t see but feel.

 

 

There is an image I cannot shake from my mind. It lasts 28 seconds, but it could last millennia.

 Misty dawn, ancient India. A sacred pond shrouded in golden haze. On the bank, a motionless white horse. Forehooves dug into the mud, parallel grooves like refusal written into the earth. He does not tremble, does not retreat: he recoils. The difference is subtle and total.

Beside him, a sage in ochre robes. He does not speak, does not touch the bridle. He observes. He waits.

Beneath the water's surface – smooth as obsidian – a shadow dissolves. An equine ghost, stocky, drooping mane. A nag. Washed here moments before. The water is not dirty. It is used. And for the horse, this is the only impurity that matters.

Above the pond, a giant lotus suspended in air. Petals fall one by one, impossibly slow, like spent gold coins. Each petal touches the water and generates a concentric ripple that expands until it reaches the horse's reflection.

The camera moves closer. Slowly, inexorably. Toward the eye. Hyperdetail of wet eyelashes, dark iris like soaked bark. And within the iris, reflected: the entire scene. The fading ghost. The sage who knows. The dying lotus. And his own face becoming, imperceptibly, the face of the nag.

 The blink. One frame. Then stillness.

 28 seconds. Then the first petal falls. Then the horse might enter. Or perhaps not.

 This is Level 1 – Contamination by Osmosis. From the Tittha-Jātaka (No. 25), one of the tales of the Buddha's former births. The story is deceptively simple: a warhorse refuses to bathe where a nag has been washed. The sage (the Bodhisatta) understands it is not illness, not stubbornness: it is wounded pride. And he prescribes a strange cure: not purer water, but another place. Because the water is the same. What changes is the absence of the trace.

The mechanism of contamination by osmosis is this: no physical contact, no material damage, nothing measurable. And yet everything. The water has become a sign. It carries inscribed within it the memory of a body. The horse reads this inscription with the precision of a philologist.

We do the same, every day.

 Used water in contemporary culture

Luxury. A haute couture dress cannot have been worn. A luxury car cannot have mileage. A Hermès bag loses value the moment someone else has opened it. It is not the damage: it is the trace of use. It is the nag that bathed before.

Social distinction. Pierre Bourdieu taught us that tastes are never neutral: they are acts of classification. The horse refuses the water because it classifies the nag as inferior, and fears being reclassified by contact. It is the child taught not to speak "like those people." It is the gentrified neighborhood where the artisanal café erases the corner bar. Same water, different name.

Cancel culture. The public figure "cancelled" because someone used the water before them. A tweet from ten years ago, an association, a connection. No poisoning: impregnation. The nag made the water common. And in the economy of the sacred – religious, moral, aesthetic – the common is the impure.

Digital privacy. Every navigation leaves traces. We are not the nag bathing; we are the nag leaving its ghost in the water. Cookies, data, digital footprints. The web's water is all used water. The paradox is that virgin water no longer exists. Today, the horse would have nowhere to drink.

Sustainability. Ecological ethics asks us to love used water: recycle, reuse, produce nothing new. But our imaginary of value is still feudal: new is noble, used is plebeian. The horse is our cultural unconscious. He knows he should drink. But he does not want to drink after.

 What happens, then, when the lotus falls?

In the Buddhist tale, the Buddha does not prescribe to the former goldsmith – five hundred lives handling pure gold – the meditation on impurity. It would be sterile. He shows him an aging lotus. He shows him that even gold is water used by time.

 The horse learns, perhaps, that purity is a form of attachment. And that attachment is the true contamination.

He does not learn to find pure water. He learns that pure water does not exist.

Liberation is not finding the uncontaminated place. It is losing the disgust for the trace.

In the moment the petal touches the surface and the ripple reaches the reflection, the horse might finally enter. Not because the water has become pure. But because he has stopped asking *who* bathed there before.

 28 seconds. Then the first petal falls.

He did not refuse the water. He refused to be made equal.

Then he understood: water belongs to no one.

And the first petal fell.