Walking on Water

Walking on water is at times used as an example of an impossible task. The phrase is widely used to refer to the performance of extraordinary tasks, as in the titles of books that aim to show individuals how to break through their personal limitations and achieve dramatic success.

According to scholars, the Visuddhimagga is one of the extremely rare texts within the enormous literatures of various forms of Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to give explicit details about how spiritual masters were thought to actually manifest supernormal abilities. Abilities such as flying through the air, walking through solid obstructions, diving into the ground, walking on water and so forth are performed by changing one element, such as earth, into another element, such as air. The individual must master kasina meditation before this is possible.Dipa Ma, who trained via the Visuddhimagga, was said to demonstrate these abilities.

Leonardo da Vinci, in the Codex Atlanticus manuscripts, sketched designs for floats to allow a man to walk on water.

From a scientific perspective, an act of walking on water would be anomalous because it doesn’t fit with what we know to be possible. It defies basic laws of hydrodynamics. Even though the burden of proof is with the believers, scientists have looked to the 1,200 different species that are actually able to walk on water in order to understand and explain the underlying processes that come into play with the notion of humans and walking on water.

Smaller animals are able to walk on water because they do not break the surface tension that water holds. Insects have hydrophobic oils that force the water molecules to move out of the way when they walk on water. However, humans are clearly able to break the surface tension, so scientists look to larger animals and find that they have the ability to create a force that allows them to walk across water by slapping their feet on the water, which creates cavities in the water surface supporting them for less than 1/10th of a second allowing them to hydroplane. Examples are the basilisk lizard and the western grebe. According to Thomas McMahon, professor of biology at Harvard University, walking on water would “require a power output at least 15 times greater than ever achieved by humans”. Going on to support da Vinci’s design above and suggest that humans could design machines to do it better for us. Today, you can buy the newest water-walking device online.

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Wikipedia