The seconds passed, the silence deepened. Suddenly, star-tlingly, one of the girls began to sob. Vijaya left his place and, kneeling down beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. The sobbing died down.
"Suffering and sickness," Dr. Robert resumed at last, "old age, decrepitude, death. I show you sorrow. But that wasn't the only thing the Buddha showed us. He also showed us the ending of sorrow."
"Shivayanama," the old priest cried triumphantly.
"Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you've already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially. But now look at Shiva's other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that gesture signify? It signifies, 'Don't be afraid; it's All Right.' But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid? How can anyone pretend that evil and suffering are all right, when it's so obvious that they're all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He's using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you'll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature-the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity, Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that's precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn't at this trampling right foot that he points his finger; it's at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he's in the act of raising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity-it's the symbol of release, of moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once-in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human, experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light. . . . And now," Dr. Robert went on after a moment of silence, "I want you to look at the other statue, the image of Shiva and the Goddess. Look at them there in their little cave of light. And now shut your eyes and see them again-shining, alive, glorified. How beautiful! And in their tenderness what depths of meaning! What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and atonement! Eternity in love with time. The One joined in marriage to the many, the relative made absolute by its union with the One. Nirvana identified with samsara, the manifestation in time and flesh and feeling of the Buddha Nature."
"Shivayanctma" The old priest lighted another stick of incense and softly, in a succession of long-drawn melismata, began to chant something in Sanskrit. On the young faces before him Will could read the marks of a listening serenity, the hardly perceptible, ecstatic smile that welcomes a sudden insight, a revelation of truth or of beauty. In the background, meanwhile, Murugan sat wearily slumped against a pillar, picking his exquisitely Grecian nose "Liberation," Dr. Robert began again, "the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it's like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this timelessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that the moksha-medicine will bring you in the years to come? Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be? Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you'll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that's for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird's advice: Attention! Pay attention and you'll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar."
"Shivayanama!" The old priest waved his stick of incense. At the foot of the altar steps the boys and girls sat motionless as statues. A door creaked, there was a sound of footsteps. Will turned his head and saw a short, thickset man picking his way between the young contemplatives. He mounted the steps and, bending down, murmured something in Dr. Robert's ear, then turned and walked back towards the door.
Dr. Robert laid a hand on Will's knee. "It's a royal command," he whispered, with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. "That was the man in charge of the Alpine hut. The Rani has just telephoned to say that she has to see Murugan as soon as possible. It's urgent." Laughing noiselessly, he rose and helped Will to his feet.
11
Will Farnaby had made his own breakfast and, when Dr. Robert returned from his early-morning visit to the hospital, was drinking his second cup of Palanese tea and eating toasted breadfruit with pumelo marmalade.
"Not too much pain in the night," was Dr. Robert's response to his enquiries. "Lakshmi had four or five hours of good sleep, and this morning she was able to take some broth."
They could look forward, he continued, to another day of respite. And so, since it tired the patient to have him there all the time, and since life, after all, had to go on and be made the best of, he had decided to drive up to the High Altitude Station and put in a few hours' work on the research team in the pharmaceutical laboratory.
"Work on the moksha-medicine?"
Dr. Robert shook his head. "That's just a matter of repeating a standard operation-something for technicians, not for the researchers. They're busy with something new."
And he began to talk about the indoles recently isolated from the ololiuqui seeds that had been brought in from Mexico last year and were now being grown in the station's botanic garden.
At least three different indoles, of which one seemed to be extremely potent. Animal experiments indicated that it affected the reticular system. . . .
Left to himself, Will sat down under the overhead fan and went on with his reading of the Notes on What's What.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In Pala, after three generations of Reform, there are no sheeplike flocks and no ecclesiastical Good Shepherds to shear and castrate; there are no bovine or swinish herds and no licensed drovers, royal or military, capitalistic or revolutionary, to brand, confine and butcher. There are only voluntary associations of men and women on the road to full humanity.
Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? "Tunes," answer Buddhism and modern science. "Pebbles," say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music. The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West is a figure in a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica.
The dancer's grace and, forty years on, her arthritis-both are functions of the skeleton. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheelchair. Analogously, the firm support of a culture is the prime-condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into a complete human being is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing.