Island (24 page)

They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand-new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and breadfruit trees, the narrow street led to a central marketplace. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of Oriental rococo with a pink stucco facade and gazebos at the four corners—evidently the town hall. Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha’s progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black-and-yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl’s gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.

“Everybody looks so healthy,” Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.

“They look healthy because they
are
healthy,” said Mrs. Rao.

“And happy—for a change.” He was thinking of the faces he
had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo—the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. “Even the women,” he noted, glancing from face to face, “even the women look happy.”

“They don’t have ten children,” Mrs. Rao explained.

“They don’t have ten children where I come from,” said Will. “In spite of which…‘Marks of weakness marks of woe.’” He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried breadfruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. “There’s a kind of radiance,” he concluded.

“Thanks to
maithuna
,” said Mrs. Rao triumphantly. “Thanks to the yoga of love.” Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervor and professional pride.

They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of worn steps, and into the gloom of the temple. A golden Bodhisattva loomed, gigantic, out of the darkness. There was a smell of incense and fading flowers, and from somewhere behind the statue the voice of an unseen worshiper was muttering an endless litany. Noiselessly, on bare feet, a little girl came hurrying in from a side door. Paying no attention to the grown-ups she climbed with the agility of a cat onto the altar and laid a spray of white orchids on the statue’s upturned palm. Then, looking up into the huge golden face, she murmured a few words, shut her eyes for a moment, murmured again, then turned, scrambled down and, softly singing to herself, went out by the door through which she had entered.

“Charming,” said Will, as he watched her go. “Couldn’t be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she’s doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practicing?”

“She’s practicing,” Vijaya explained, “the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side.”

“And do you highbrows encourage this kind of thing?”

“We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making flytraps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion. Good religion or bad religion—it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr. Andrew was brought up in, you’re given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jugful of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favor of truth and decency. Our local Old-Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison.”

Will nodded. “Offerings of white orchids to an image of compassion and enlightenment—it certainly seems harmless enough. And after what I saw yesterday, I’d be prepared to put in a good word for cosmic dancing and divine copulation.”

“And remember,” said Vijaya, “this sort of thing isn’t compulsory. Everybody’s given a chance to go further. You asked what that child thinks she’s doing. I’ll tell you. With one part of her mind, she thinks she’s talking to a person—an enormous, divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants. But she’s already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha’s statue and about the experiences that give birth to those profounder symbols. Consequently with another part of her mind she knows perfectly well that Amitabha isn’t a person. She even knows,
because it’s been explained to her, that if prayers are sometimes answered it’s because, in this very odd psychophysical world of ours, ideas have a tendency, if you concentrate your mind on them, to get themselves realized. She knows too that this temple isn’t what she still likes to think it is—the house of Buddha. She knows it’s just a diagram of her own unconscious mind—a dark little cubbyhole with lizards crawling upside down on the ceiling and cockroaches in all the crevices. But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment. And that’s another thing the child is doing—she’s unconsciously learning a lesson about herself, she’s being told that if she’d only stop giving herself suggestions to the contrary, she might discover that her own busy little mind is also Mind with a large M.”

“And how soon will the lesson be learned? When will she stop giving herself those suggestions?”

“She may never learn. A lot of people don’t. On the other hand, a lot of people do.”

He took Will’s arm and led him into the deeper darkness behind the image of Enlightenment. The chanting grew more distinct, and there, hardly visible in the shadows, sat the chanter—a very old man, naked to the waist and, except for his moving lips, as rigidly still as Amitabha’s golden statue.

“What’s he intoning?” Will asked.

“Something in Sanskrit.”

Seven incomprehensible syllables, again and again.

“Good old vain repetition!”

“Not necessarily vain,” Mrs. Rao objected. “Sometimes it really gets you somewhere.”

“It gets you somewhere,” Vijaya elaborated, “not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they’re being repeated. You could repeat
Hey Diddle Diddle
and it would work just as well as
Om
or
Kyrie Eleison
or
La ila illa ’llah
. It works because when you’re busy with the repetition of
Hey Diddle Diddle
or the name of God, you can’t be entirely
preoccupied with yourself. The only trouble is that you can hey-diddle-diddle yourself downwards as well as upwards—down into the not-thought of idiocy as well as up into the not-thought of pure awareness.”

“So, I take it, you wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing,” said Will, “to our little friend with the orchids?”

“Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn’t. I know her very well; she plays with my children.”

“Then what would you do in her case?”

“Among other things,” said Vijaya, “I’d take her, in another year or so, to the place we’re going to now.”

“What place?”

“The meditation room.”

Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened onto a little garden planted with banana and breadfruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.

“My word!” he said at last. “Who is it by?”

“Gobind Singh.”

“And who’s Gobind Singh?”

“The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in ’forty-eight.”

“Why haven’t we ever seen anything by him?”

“Because we like his work too well to export any of it.”

“Good for you,” said Will. “But bad for us.” He looked again at the picture. “Did this man ever go to China?”

“No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he’d seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes.”

“A Sung master,” said Will, “who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro.”

“Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard.”

Will nodded. “One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture.” He went on looking at the picture in silence. “Why do you hang it in the meditation room?” he asked at last.

“Why do you suppose?” Vijaya countered.

“Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?”

“The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It’s an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It’s a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge.”

“What clouds!” said Will. “And the light!”

“The light,” Vijaya elaborated, “of the last hour before dusk. It’s just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow.”

“Deepens every shadow,” Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the center of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how
perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, “Of what?” you found no answer. Will put the question into words.

“What do they mean?” Vijaya repeated. “They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that’s why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudoreligious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that’s why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room.”

“Always landscapes?”

“Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are.”

“Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?”

Vijaya nodded. “It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a behaviorist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you’re confronted with a landscape like this, it’s psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You’re almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you’re practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing.”

“Self-knowing?”

“Self-knowing,” Vijaya insisted. “This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody’s mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that’s getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a
notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts.” He pointed a finger at the picture. “The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapor above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those faraway peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance,” he added parenthetically, “their ability to express the fact of distance—that’s yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures.”

“Because distance lends enchantment to the view?”

“No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people—that there’s even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space—it’s the first and fundamental religious experience. ‘O Death in life, the days that are no more’—and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not
this
place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights—all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man’s capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind,” Vijaya added, “the worst feature of your nonrepresentational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a colored object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rorschach inkblot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his
own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we’re looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don’t find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract nonobjective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious—and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial.”