I had escaped to the Ganges, as myriads of transitory pilgrims have escaped before. From the distractions of politics and the dust of practical reforms I had come to the quiet river, sliding under immemorial walls. The water was still white and dove-coloured with morning, but already along the thin crescent of the shore, white-robed men and women were coming down the steps with naked feet, and silently approaching the edge. They threw long strings of marigolds into the stream. Stooping down, they scooped up the water in brazen pots, and set a marigold upon the mouth of each. Hung with flowers, and bearing on their foreheads the triple mark of the god, men settled cross-legged upon slabs of stone or wooden platforms, and plunged at once into prayer, or, opening long and narrow books, began to recite aloud the words of inspired ancestors. Men and women alike, still draped in white, walked step by step down into the water, till it passed over their heads, and then came back step by step, and stood dripping in prayer. They raised water in their hands, splashed it three times on their mouths and foreheads, and with arms lifted to the risen sun, poured what was left back into the river. Covering her face with her hands, one girl knelt upon the bare stone so long in adoration that the sun dried her one white length of sari, and it hung loose around her form again.
The common life of the holy city began, and the calling of the milkmen, the cake-sellers, the fruiterers, and drivers of bullock-carts mingled with the temple bells. They brought the dead down to the river, hung with marigolds, and wrapped in cotton cloths as when they lived. Pushing them feet forwards a little way out from shore, they let them soak in the holy water until wooden pyres should be ready to consume their deserted forms, happy in a double purification. Washerwomen carried down their bundles of linen, and swung each piece over their heads again and again upon flat stones in the water, until it was cleansed, with the added advantage of sanctity. Ascetics in brick-dust robes passed up and down among the crowd, bearing long staves in memory of their vow to constrain their thoughts, their speech, and their desires. Other ascetics, dressed only in a transparent coating of ashes, sat in perpetual contemplation, forgetful of the body and the world. One man I saw in faded yellow robe, worn by sun and rain, passing quietly in and out of the worshipping throng, as he followed the little footpath by the water’s brink. He was of those who all the year long tread the bank of the Ganges, from her source in the mountains to her mouth among the forest swamps, and back again to her source in the mountains. On that day’s walk he happened to be passing again through her most sacred city, but that seemed hardly to interrupt his contemplation of her holiness.
On the Bank.
[Face p. 264.
“Yours is the Order I should belong to by nature,” I said, giving him a halfpenny, for which he had not asked.
“For you it would be easy and difficult,” he answered, in good English, and led me up many steps and along galleries overhanging a cliff of ruinous masonry to a cool courtyard, where Brahmans are daily fed on boiled rice and salt, laid out upon a plate of stitched banana leaves.
“Obviously it would be easy for you as for any one,” he went on as we climbed up, after his meal, to the top of the flat roof where a little shelter had been erected for shade and worship; “but for you it would be difficult also, because you hang upon the world, and your soul is entangled in illusions and desires. Like all your people, you call the unreal things realities, and for reality you have no name.”
Having devoted himself for a while to prayer, he continued: “You see this low parapet? Many years ago a boy was seated upon it reading a Sanscrit book of wisdom, when, it is thought, a monkey, inspired by the god, pushed him, and he fell. Look over and you will see the projecting slab half way down which he broke as he fell. They gathered up his shattered body, and laid it, almost alive, in the Ganges. I cannot doubt that he attained at once to salvation, his soul returning to the universal consciousness, as the space inside a pot returns to universal space when the pot is broken. And in his salvation I may claim a share, for I was his father.”
It was noon, and the sun blazed upon the roof. Green parrots flew screaming among the trees of a garden far below us. The hum of the city arose, pierced with loud cries, and over the far-off iron bridge across the Ganges a train was slowly passing with prolonged and shrieking whistle. But still the crowding pilgrims moved down the steps to the water’s edge, and bathed and offered flowers, and stretched up their hands in silent adoration, or recited ancient and sacred words aloud.
The Burning Place.
The River Walls.
[Face p. 266.
“It is possible for you,” I said, after a long time, “to desire escape from the danger of rebirth, and to speak of being merged in the universal consciousness as salvation. But how about these people who come in millions to the river? All their lives they struggle only to live. From day to day their thought is only to keep alight their little glimmer of life, and hand it on to others who are their children. How is it to be supposed that they come to the river so wearied of existence as to pray only to be saved from being born again? I myself, who am one of them, would walk in the opposite direction if I thought the river was going to extinguish my life, and for choice I should rather be born a mouse than nothing.”
“You remind me,” he answered, “of those worshippers of Vishnu, who pray in great humility, ‘Let me be born a cat or dog, if only I may love thee, O God.’ It is a great prayer, and you may join in it, for, being a wanderer through the world, you can always hope to become a religious man, avoiding the many-sided degradation of which people tell me who have visited the West. I, too, was once engaged in common business, managing large estates in this very city, and I know the rich men in the streets, though they cannot now tell who passes them so close. But each day I gave much time to contemplation, and I took the vow of kindliness to every living thing, just as you see those Jain monks there who are feeding ants with sugar, and would not wittingly kill a cholera germ; or like those wandering Sisters of the faith who wear a strip of white felt across their mouths lest they should breathe a midge to death, and carry soft brooms in their hands to sweep the place where they are about to sit, lest the weight of their frail bodies should crush an irrecoverable life. By such means, even in your present body, you may begin to penetrate the illusions of existence, and at rare moments may perceive some gleam from what one of your poets has called the white radiance of eternity.
“As for these pilgrims,” he went on, “they are like a woman who lights her cow-dung fire at evening, not considering as she cooks that the flame is composed of ten divisions, each symbolic of a faculty of the soul. Or they are like a man who walks by the light of sun and moon, not considering that sun and moon are nothing but symbols of creative power, as are men and women, fire and water, heat and cold. Or they are like the nautch girls who have a separate song for every hour of the day and night, but do not know that their songs are only the pulses of eternity. In cooking, in light, and in song, each finds an ignorant joy, and in the same way these pilgrims have a dim sense of righteousness and purification in the outward symbols of truths that they will never learn in their present life. By such means, for a few hours together, they may free themselves from the illusions of existence, and in some cases even reach the state of those highly religious men who devour putrid cats, to prove that in their estimation all material things are alike, all being equally unimportant.
A Place of Prayer.
[Face p. 268.
“But for people like you,” he continued with pity, “what can one say? You are still ensnared by political anxieties, artistic interests, and the desires of personality. You have far to go before, by contemplation and hard discipline, you perceive how like happiness is to its opposite—how accurately the joy of existence may be compared to a fire-fly wandering in an unlimited vault of darkness, or to the inch of cool shadow thrown by a snake’s head upon a burning desert. Till you can reach that supreme state when birth, and life, and death have no separate meaning, you have far to go. But there is always hope for one who will begin by overcoming earthly desire. For, as you may have heard, there has been one being and one alone who in this flesh attained to salvation without death, and he was Janaka, the father of Sita, Rama’s wife. He sat still, you remember, with one hand in a blazing fire and the other upon a woman’s breast, showing that to him the one was the same as the other, and both indifferent.”
We descended, and I went away in the rapid twilight, sorrowful because I was not in the least like Janaka. But as I went, I came to the courtyard of a temple to Shiva, the dissolver of existence, and there in the darkness I found a lonely woman walking round and round a sacred tree, driven by the blind desire to bear a child. So untameable among the unlearned is the passion for life.