"We do not believe in making statues of Enlightened One," Rama told me. "Ignorant people would worship statues, as they do gods of Brachmanes, instead of trying to lead right lives."
Rama bought a bunch of flowers from a flower seller at the entrance. Inside the temenos, he spoke to a couple of shaven-headed priests, clad in robes of thin yellow cotton wrapped round and round them. He laid his flowers before the statue, clapped his hands, and stood, palms together and head bowed, praying in a high, nasal voice.
The priests looked curiously at me, standing at the entrance. As he turned away from his devotions, Rama called out:
"Come on in, Captain Eudoxos. Every good man is welcome." He introduced me to the priests, who smiled, bowed, and spoke. "They are saying," he translated, " 'Peace to all beings!' You like to hear teachings of true religion?"
"Yes," I said. So, with Rama translating, the senior priest spoke somewhat as follows:
"My son, when the Enlightened One received his illumination, four hundred years ago, it was disclosed to him that all existence is misery. Birth is pain, life is pain, and death is pain. Nor is death the end of misery, because one is then reborn into another body, to begin again the wretched round of existence."
"As the Pythagoreans believe among us," I put in. But the priest merely looked annoyed at the interruption and continued:
"Now, the cause of misery is desire, which in the nature of things always expands beyond what can be satisfied and is therefore always thwarted. The only way to avoid misery is to extinguish desire. This can be done by following the eightfold path, namely: right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right occupation, right effort, right alertness, and right concentration.
"Practice these things, my son, and in time—not, perhaps, in this life, but then in a future one—you, too, will become enlightened. Then, when you die, you will not be reborn but will achieve the supreme bliss of nonexistence."
There was more of it, about the Four Noble Truths and so on. But this gives the gist of the doctrine, which has many points in common with Stoicism. When the priest had finished, I said:
"That is all very fine, Reverend Father, for those who find life a burden. But I enjoy it thoroughly. I've traveled to far lands and seen strange beasts and people. I've hunted and fished, galloped and sailed, gorged and guzzled, reveled and mourned, lain with fair women, and told tall tales. I've loved, hated, and fought with bloodthirsty foes. I've consorted with the great and the humble and found the same proportion of rascals among both. I've served my city and made money from my voyages. I've made new discoveries, written a book about them, and heard it praised by qualified critics. I've had narrow escapes from maiming and death, and I've rejoiced in every moment of it."
"But, my son! The pain of wounds and sickness—and I see from your scars and pockmarks that you have sustained both —far outweigh the pleasures of this material life, to say nought of the loss of dear ones and the waning of physical powers with age. Is it not so?"
"Not for me, it isn't. True, life has its pains and adversities. One of them, in fact, impelled me to come to India. But they merely add spice to the stew. If I were to perish painfully tomorrow, I should still say that life on the whole has been great fun."
"What adversity brings you to Bharata?" (For so the Indians call India.)
I told the priest of my masculine weakness and asked: "Now, you people are supposed to be full of the wisdom of the ages. None of the physicians of my country can help me; can you?"
The priest looked sadly at me and sighed, as if he were trying in vain to explain some obvious truth to a half-wit. "Oh, my dear son! Have you not heard what I said? Your loss, as you call it, is one of the luckiest things that could have befallen you. It will help you to suppress all attachment to mundane objects and beings. It will aid you to cultivate a benevolent indifference to earthly matters. It will enable you to extinguish all desire and thus to reach the true happiness of nonexistence. I cannot revive your fleshly lusts and give you the means of gratifying them, nor would I if I could. I see that you are not yet ready for the higher wisdom. Perhaps the yogin Sisonaga can help you, although we deem him a mere vulgar magician.
"Is it true that you have come thousands of yojanas across the Black Water, out of sight of land, in that great ship of yours?"
"It is. I wonder that you Indians, knowing of this seasonal wind, hadn't built ships to ply this route long ago."
"Ages ago, my son, we of Bharata had ships that flew through the air, magical weapons that blasted like lightning, medicines to give eternal youth, and other ingenious devices. But our wise men found that these earthly things are not important. They do but bind one to the material world and retard one's escape to blessed nonexistence. So the sages ceased to care about childish things like ships and weapons."
After some more small talk, I bid farewell to the priests. We entered the outer wall of Barygaza: a feeble affair of mud brick. I suppose that in case of attack, the people counted on withdrawing to the hilltop castle. Rama turned off into a side street.
"Now I go," he said. "I am seeing you this afternoon on ship."
"Why not come with me as guide and interpreter?" I said. "I'll stand you a drink."
He grinned. "I am sorry; must get home to see wives and children. I have much lovemaking to catch up on."
"Well, don't make love so hard that you can't stay awake this afternoon."
I left him and walked on into Barygaza. The streets were wandering tracks in the mud, lined by squalid little thatched mud huts set at every angle among palms and other trees. Monkeys chattered and scampered in the branches.
The town was as filthy as a Scythian peasant village, which is saying a lot. Dung—animal and human—lay everywhere; one could not walk without stepping in it. Barygaza was a good-sized center, whose streets swarmed With ox-carts, laden asses, carriages, chariots, gentlefolk being borne in Utters, two men riding an elephant, and other traffic. Crying their wares in a nasal singsong, peddlers trotted through the mud with wide, shallow baskets of goods balanced on their heads. But there was no real shopping district, only an occasional hut with an open front and the goods laid out on a board in the street in front of it. There did not seem to be any sort of inn, tavern, or wineshop in the entire place. The more I saw of Barygaza, the more convinced I became that it was not really a city at all, but an overgrown village.
Like Rama, the folk were very dark of skin, if not quite so dead-black as the Ethiopians of Adoulis and Mosyllon. The men wore dirty waist garments like his, although with many the skirt was a mere breechclout. Buddhist priests wore yellow robes like those I had already seen and carried staves with iron rings loosely strung on them at one end; the clatter of these rings, when the priest shook his staff, was their way of begging alms.
Dodging among the ubiquitous cows, which were nosing in the heaps of garbage in competition with beggar women, I passed an elderly man, completely naked, with long, matted hair and beard and his body smeared with ash. He was rolling his eyes and shouting incoherently. I took him for a madman but later learnt that he was a particularly holy ascetic.
The women wore longer—if equally soiled—skirts but, like the men, left their upper bodies naked save for necklaces and other ornaments, and a veil of thin stuff draped over then-hair. A common ornament was a golden plug, often set with a precious stone, inserted in one side of the nose. Among the more prosperous-looking younger women, their bare breasts were often attractively full and rounded; but the more numerous working-class women were skinny little things, no bigger than a well-developed Greek girl of twelve.