He Has Been
Described Again And Again - His Majesty, His Aloofness, And Every One Of
His Dimensions, The Smoky Little Shrine Within Him, And The Plumed Hill
That Makes The Background To His Throne.
For that reason he remains, as
he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description - as it
might be, a visible god sitting in the garden of a world made new.
They
sell photographs of him with tourists standing on his thumb nail, and,
apparently, any brute of any gender can scrawl his or its ignoble name
over the inside of the massive bronze plates that build him up. Think
for a moment of the indignity and the insult! Imagine the ancient,
orderly gardens with their clipped trees, shorn turf, and silent ponds
smoking in the mist that the hot sun soaks up after rain, and the
green-bronze image of the Teacher of the Law wavering there as it half
seems through incense clouds. The earth is all one censer, and myriads
of frogs are making the haze ring. It is too warm to do more than to sit
on a stone and watch the eyes that, having seen all things, see no
more - the down-dropped eyes, the forward droop of the head, and the
colossal simplicity of the folds of the robe over arm and knee. Thus,
and in no other fashion, did Buddha sit in the-old days when Ananda
asked questions and the dreamer began to dream of the lives that lay
behind him ere the lips moved, and as the Chronicles say: 'He told a
tale.' This would be the way he began, for dreamers in the East tell
something the same sort of tales to-day: 'Long ago when Devadatta was
King of Benares, there lived a virtuous elephant, a reprobate ox, and a
King without understanding.' And the tale would end, after the moral had
been drawn for Ananda's benefit: 'Now, the reprobate ox was such an one,
and the King was such another, but the virtuous elephant was I, myself,
Ananda.' Thus, then, he told the tales in the bamboo grove, and the
bamboo grove is there to-day. Little blue and gray and slate robed
figures pass under its shadow, buy two or three joss-sticks, disappear
into the shrine, that is, the body of the god, come out smiling, and
drift away through the shrubberies. A fat carp in a pond sucks at a
fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little worldly kiss. Then
the earth steams, and steams in silence, and a gorgeous butterfly, full
six inches from wing to wing, cuts through the steam in a zigzag of
colour and flickers up to the forehead of the god. And Buddha said that
a man must look on everything as illusion - even light and colour - the
time-worn bronze of metal against blue-green of pine and pale emerald of
bamboo - the lemon sash of the girl in the cinnamon dress, with coral
pins in her hair, leaning against a block of weather-bleached
stone - and, last, the spray of blood-red azalea that stands on the pale
gold mats of the tea-house beneath the honey-coloured thatch. To overcome
desire and covetousness of mere gold, which is often very vilely designed,
that is conceivable; but why must a man give up the delight of the eye,
colour that rejoices, light that cheers, and line that satisfies the
innermost deeps of the heart? Ah, if the Bodhisat had only seen his own
image!
OUR OVERSEAS MEN
All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the
world - those that stay at home and those that do not. The second are the
most interesting. Some day a man will bethink himself and write a book
about the breed in a book called 'The Book of the Overseas Club,' for it
is at the clubhouses all the way from Aden to Yokohama that the life of
the Outside Men is best seen and their talk is best heard. A strong
family likeness runs through both buildings and members, and a large and
careless hospitality is the note. There is always the same open-doored,
high-ceiled house, with matting on the floors; the same come and go of
dark-skinned servants, and the same assembly of men talking horse or
business, in raiment that would fatally scandalise a London committee,
among files of newspapers from a fortnight to five weeks old. The life
of the Outside Men includes plenty of sunshine, and as much air as may
be stirring. At the Cape, where the Dutch housewives distil and sell the
very potent Vanderhum, and the absurd home-made hansom cabs waddle up
and down the yellow dust of Adderley Street, are the members of the big
import and export firms, the shipping and insurance offices, inventors
of mines, and exploiters of new territories with now and then an officer
strayed from India to buy mules for the Government, a Government House
aide-de-camp, a sprinkling of the officers of the garrison, tanned
skippers of the Union and Castle Lines, and naval men from the squadron
at Simon's Town. Here they talk of the sins of Cecil Rhodes, the
insolence of Natal, the beauties or otherwise of the solid Boer vote,
and the dates of the steamers. The argot is Dutch and Kaffir, and
every one can hum the national anthem that begins 'Pack your kit and
trek, Johnny Bowlegs.' In the stately Hongkong Clubhouse, which is to
the further what the Bengal Club is to the nearer East, you meet much
the same gathering, minus the mining speculators and plus men whose
talk is of tea, silk, shortings, and Shanghai ponies. The speech of the
Outside Men at this point becomes fearfully mixed with pidgin-English
and local Chinese terms, rounded with corrupt Portuguese. At Melbourne,
in a long verandah giving on a grass plot, where laughing-jackasses
laugh very horribly, sit wool-kings, premiers, and breeders of horses
after their kind.
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