Reflecting on Muda (Japanese for waste, futility, purposelessness)

I was reading "Natural Capitalism, and I stopped on the word, "Muda", part of the title of Natural Capitalism, Chapter 7 ("Muda, Service and Flow") which also connects its meaning with the content of Chapter 3 ("Waste Not").

"Muda" was not the first word I pondered and mused. This book "Natural Capitalism" is so engagingly well-written that, paradoxically, I have difficulty through-putting it through my mind. There's hardly a sentence which doesn't ring bells of associatve resonances and I am diverted into listening and savoring those sounds. That is how successful the authors have been in writing this book.

So as I pondered and mused over the word , I wondered if it had been accurately rendered in the Roman script. Do the Japanese really pronounce it to rhyme with "coulda" as in the colloquial "I coulda dunnit"? Then it came to me--an "echo":

There's a word in Sanskrit (and several Indian languages) "Moodha." It connotes stupid, uninformed, irresponsible, slow, unintelligent, wilful, proud, deaf, lacking consciousness / conscience / sympathy, being unresponsive or insensitive etc. etc.

Ghamachchhanna drishti ghamachchhannamarkam,
yathaa nishprabham chaati moodha

For an Indian like me, every time I come across something said with considerable brilliance and apparent originality, my unfortunate focus is to first make a connection with something said in the past--to cock my ear up for a time-skip echo--and then to communicate it in a manner which, at best, is only tangentially relevant and at worst, is tiresome even to me. Still the addiction is so hardwired, few can kick the habit. I only hope some catalyzing good can come out of these imposition.

For instance, a shloka-shubhaashitam in Sanskrit could be of interest to the advocates of resource-productivity and the opponents of Muda / moodha-behaviour, or biomimicry. It goes :

Amantram aksharonaasti, naastimoolam anaushadham
Ayogyah purushonaasti, yojakastatra durlabha

"There's no sound / alphabetical letter which can't become a mantra,
there is no rooted plant which can't become a medicine
and there is no human who is incompetent.
All one needs is appropriate design and organization"

In my frequent moments of quiet frustration with the current situation here (which, in Bucky Fuller's words, "Teach us to assume, as closely as possible, the view point, the patience and competence of God"} I have commented elsewhere,

"Instead of inventing and producing what we need, we get into the habit of inventorying and debating what our ancients left behind them. Since our culture prides itself in being hoary, the inventorying never gets done. Someone, somewhere, appears to always leave something out and count goes back again and always to the Vedas."


-- From a letter Vyom Akhil sent to the authors of Natural Capitalism, Sunday April 9, 2000