The Cult of Loving Kindness (5 page)

There was quiet in the room after he had spoken, except for the sound of people breathing or resettling their weight. When he was talking they had strained to hear, for his voice was labored and unsteady. Now they relaxed and looked around, until he spoke again: “It is possible that some of you have questions but are unwilling to express them, either out of respect for me, or because you fear each other’s ridicule. Once again I remind you that you will not have another chance. Therefore, so as not to reproach yourself later when you find that there is some piece of understanding that you cannot reach, please, ask me now, or else whisper your question to your friend, so that he or she can ask it in your place.”

Again there was a silence as people looked around. Then a woman who was sitting in the middle of the floor raised up her hand.

“Sir,” she said. “I have a question. I heard you answer it before and while I listened I thought I understood you. But then after a few hours I couldn’t remember anymore. So I asked someone and then a few people and every time they told me, I understood less than before. So tell me now again—how can I, a simple woman and not gifted in debates, hope to understand the difference between good and evil in my life and in the world? I want to know, and sometimes it is hard.”

No sooner had she finished speaking than Mayadonna Bey—one of the master’s senior students who was sitting by his bed—turned toward her. “Old woman,” he said, “do not waste the master’s patience with your stupidness. Any child could explain to you the master’s seven noble precepts for an honorable life. Anyone can explain them; I myself will cheerfully explain them at another time. But not today. This is a day for serious discussion.”

When he heard this, a flicker of annoyance passed over the master’s face, and in the first few words of his response his students could hear traces of his old asperity—“You are the stupid one.” Ashamed, the student bowed his head. But then the master calmed himself. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and then opened them. He made a gesture to the novice beside his head to lift him up.

Then he was silent for a little while. He frowned, and small wrinkles seemed to spread out from his eyes all over his large face. “Think of it this way,” he said. “If I were to take all of you out into a field and stand before you with a jewel in one of my hands and a potato in the other, is it only the wisest student that would see the difference?”

“No,” said Mayadonna Bey, bowing humbly.

“And is there anyone here who is so simple and so foolish that they would not be able to understand the difference between the jewel in my right hand and the potato in my left?”

“No.”

“And is there any condition or circumstance at all that might hinder any one of you from understanding the difference between the jewel in my right hand and the potato in my left?”

“No.”

“Yes,” corrected the master, smiling and relaxing, so that the wrinkles around his eyes all fled away, and his face was smooth again. “There are four conditions at least. The first is if I stand before you when the ground mist rises from the fields, so that you cannot see my open hands. The second is if I hold my fists behind me, so that you cannot tell what they contain. The third is if you turn your back to me, willfully, and look away. The fourth is if you have some blindness or infirmity. Now let us examine each of these four conditions in turn, so that if in the future we might have some difficulty in understanding, we may learn first to classify that difficulty, and then perhaps to overcome it.” Then he raised his head to look back at the woman who had first asked the question.

 

At the same time that the master was speaking, Honest Toil had led the travelers to his own hut, which was meager and humble and made of mud, thatched with banana fronds. It was separate from the rest, beyond the ditches on the south skirt of the village.

 

Mr. Goldbrick had left them and gone up to give the news, but he had found all the houses deserted until he reached the master’s house. There he saw the screens were drawn and friends of his were crowding the veranda, so he went up to join them.

But Honest Toil, unaware of what was happening, poured water for his guests. Sarnath had carried the little girl partway along the path, but as they approached the hut she had squirmed out of his arms and asked to be put down. In high spirits once again, she had limped across the threshold into Honest Toil’s hut; with a quizzical expression on her face, she had accepted a dish of water from her host’s grave hands. But instead of drinking it or thanking him, she threw it at her brother as he stood sulking by the wall. He jerked aside; missing him, the water splashed upon the hard-packed floor.

“Oh now stop that please,” said Honest Toil. He stood in the middle of the single room, holding an earthenware pitcher he had made himself.

“Cassia,” admonished Mr. Sarnath. He had sunk down upon the only stool, and then he reached out his hands. The boy stood by the entrance to the hut, but when he saw his sister limp to Mr. Sarnath once again, whining, fretting, rubbing her knee, he ducked outside through the cloth door and disappeared.

Sarnath never turned his head. He accepted the boy’s departure, knowing there was nothing he could do to hinder it, knowing also that in an hour or a day the boy would find them once again, wherever they had gone. And he would be bruised and battered from running in the forest, and he would accept no comfort, and he would not even be hungry. Already he was as strong and fierce as other children twice his age.

The girl sat squirming on his lap, her small head near his head. She whimpered underneath his hands. Her skin gave off a sweet smell.

He put his nose into the back of her neck. He was powerless to help her with her bruises, and in fact she wanted simple consolation, nothing more. In a minute she had squirmed away again and jumped up on Honest Toil’s bed, and she was examining a row of small clay objects. They were balanced on a ledge in the mud wall.

 

“Where is Honest Toil?” asked the master suddenly. He had closed his eyes and sunk down on his pillows, listening to a senior student, who in answer to another question was expatiating on the twenty-four subsidiary truths. The argument was a complex one, and the master had fallen back and closed his eyes with a discouraged look upon his face. Now he raised himself and looked around. “Where is my friend Honest Toil? Where is he today?”

 

Interrupted in midspeech, Mr. Canan bowed his head, his mouth constricted in a narrow line. He sat back on his heels and was silent. It was another of the senior students, the third in the semicircle, who raised his voice to answer: “Sir, he is not here. Forgive me, but I thought that it would serve no purpose to distress him with talk that he could never understand. Also, he finds it difficult to distance himself from his own passions. He loves you very much, and I was afraid that he might disturb the serenity of this last gathering with childish tears.”

At ten o’clock the day was achieving its dull heat. The children in the room were restless; the adults fanned themselves with square pieces of banana leaf. The master’s face was covered with a sheen of moisture, and also at that hour, the smell from his gangrenous leg began to penetrate to every corner of the room.

“And you,” he said to the third student. “What do you feel for me?”

The third student was a small, potbellied man named Palam Bey. The knot of his belt was only lightly touched with pink. Taken by surprise, he stammered, “Sir … a great affection and a great respect… .”

“Yet you would not willingly spare yourself this moment. My friend, you cannot protect Honest Toil from my death, for I will die today, and I am dying now. It is a false compassion to protect a person from his own experience—go and get him, please. If I ask him not to cry, he will not cry.”

At that, Mr. Goldbrick stood up in the back of the room next to the screen, where he was sitting with the novices. “Sir,” he said. “Honest Toil and I were on the almond path and saw three people, someone from this village and two human children. Now they’re at his house.” But the master had turned his face into his pillows. Palam Bey got up to leave, but he lingered for a moment first.

The master put his hands together in his lap. He joined his ring finger and his thumb together on his right palm, and his left hand he made into a fist. That is the way he is represented in most statues from the period: propped up on some pillows with his face turned to the side, his fingers arranged in a way that was always associated later with a certain school of teaching, though it is unlikely that he meant much by the gesture at the time.

He said: “It is true that my friend Honest Toil is not able to appreciate much that I have told him, and there is much that is obvious to the simplest of you which is still a mystery to him. Yet there are other lessons which he understands in all the deepest fabric of his heart, lessons which are at the center of everything that I have taught you, and which many of the cleverest of you would never understand, even if I lived forever and I told you these things every day.”

After hearing these words, Palam Bey nodded his head and went out past the screen to the veranda. He went out down the steps. When he was gone, the master raised his voice. And with his hands joined in his lap he delivered his last great sermon, his lesson on humility and love. Alone of all his sermons it was never written down. Later it was darkened and distorted even in the memory of those who had first heard it, even in the memory of those whose lives it changed. Later on, the memory of the master’s words were twisted into just another reason to believe a lie, but at the time, many of the people in that stifling room felt they caught a glimpse of some new country through an open door, and everything that here is dark and strange and terrifying, there is clean and plain. Or that they had been taken up onto some clean mountaintop, and they were standing where the air is bright and hard to breathe, and they were looking down on where they used to live and all the people that they used to know. To them suddenly the small streets of the village were laid out in a pattern, and they could see the pattern of the reeds upon the river, and even the minute pattern of the stones upon the bank. And some felt they could see for the first time the subtlest and smallest pattern of all these, the pattern in their own suffering and joy, the proof they had not lived in vain.

This lesson, which was the single clearest distillation of the master’s thought, exists only as the memory of an ideal. Later theologians have speculated that the master had intended it that way, that he had intentionally sent from the room his faithful, perfect secretary upon some minor errand. For by the time Palam Bey returned leading the old novice, followed by Mr. Sarnath and the child, the master again had closed his eyes.

And he was roused only by the sound of Honest Toil’s snuffling tears, and the sound of movement in the crowd. Finally the old man flopped down in the inner circle with the tears wet on his cheeks. For though his memory for facts was more than perfect, and though he could more accurately than anybody in the room have recited the history and prognosis of the master’s illness, still his memory for the importance of events was flawed. In that hot room where the master lay dying and his students sat in concentric circles fanning themselves with pieces of banana leaf, it was as if the old novice was confronted for the first time with the significance of what he knew. He burst into tears, demonstrating once again for anyone who cared the truth of the master’s apothegm that passionate emotion comes from a deficiency of understanding.

“Stop that,” the master said. Honest Toil knelt down and held his breath, puffing out his cheeks and wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. In this way he dutifully suppressed his grief, though all that day from time to time his sobs would burst out suddenly redoubled, venting as if under pressure; then he would gulp and swallow and control himself.

But even in that first flush of emotion, with the tears still running down his cheeks, he smiled suddenly, as if remembering some secret joy. And when his breath was quiet enough for speech, he leaned forward. “Sir,” he said, “I would like you to meet my friend Sarnath Bey.”

The master smiled in his turn. “But there’s no need,” he said. And he raised his eyes to where Mr. Sarnath stood with Cassia by the screen, and indicated with a gesture of his head that they should come forward. Again the senior students had to budge themselves, and it was not until Mr. Sarnath was sitting near him, cross-legged, with Cassia on his lap, that the master spoke again. At this time his face was sometimes touched with quick spasms of pain.

“What have you brought for me?” he asked.

Mr. Sarnath bowed his head, unsure of what to say, how to behave after so long. He stared at the back of his own hand, meditating in silence. And it was not until the master had repeated his question that Mr. Sarnath pulled his knapsack from his shoulder. It was almost empty: just a few worn shirts and T-shirts, and a ragged quilt. Then from the bottom he produced a bundle, wrapped in a tangle of worn paper and bound up with strips of linen.

He untied the skull and held it up. The master reached out his hand, and with his forefinger he traced the inside of the skull’s left eye socket. Then he let his finger run along the cranium, which was carved with scenes from his own life: how his parents sealed him in the bell of a bass horn when he was ten days old; how they smuggled him away out of the siege of Caladon; how they were set upon and killed by members of the Desecration League; how a drunkard, finding the horn abandoned in the grass, was astonished by its mournful voice.

“What did you see?” asked the master, taking the skull into his hands.

Mr. Sarnath said: “The night when I decided to start home—it was a Friday. I saw the junior customs deputy at Camran Head. He gave me gifts, too much for me to carry. But I kept this—he carved it as a gift for you.”

The master shook his head. “Tell me about what you saw.”

“I saw the moon reflected in a bowl of water. A moth was sticking to a piece of flypaper. It fell into the bowl and drowned, spreading water on important documents.”