DUST

"Let the Bodhisattva look upon all things as having the

nature of space,--as permanently equal to space; without

essence, without substantiality."--SADDHARMA-PUNDARÎKA.

I have wandered to the verge of the town; and the street I followed

has roughened into a country road, and begins to curve away through

rice-fields toward a hamlet at the foot of the hills. Between town

and rice-fields a vague unoccupied stretch of land makes a favorite

playground for children. There are trees, and spaces of grass to roll

on, and many butterflies, and plenty of little stones. I stop to look

at the children.

By the roadside some are amusing themselves with wet clay, making tiny

models of mountains and rivers and rice-fields; tiny mud villages,

also,--imitations of peasants' huts,--and little mud temples, and mud

gardens with ponds and humped bridges and imitations of stone-lanterns

(_tōrō_); likewise miniature cemeteries, with bits of broken stone for

monuments. And they play at funerals,--burying corpses of butterflies

and _semi_ (cicadæ), and pretending to repeat Buddhist sutras over the

grave. To-morrow they will not dare to do this; for to-morrow will be

the first day of the festival of the Dead. During that festival it is

strictly forbidden to molest insects, especially semi, some of which

have on their heads little red characters said to be names of Souls.

Children in all countries play at death. Before the sense of personal

identity comes, death cannot be seriously considered; and childhood

thinks in this regard more correctly, perhaps, than self-conscious

maturity. Of course, if these little ones were told, some bright

morning, that a playfellow had gone away forever,--gone away to be

reborn elsewhere,--there would be a very real though vague sense

of loss, and much wiping of eyes with many-colored sleeves; but

presently the loss would be forgotten and the playing resumed. The

idea of ceasing to exist could not possibly enter a child-mind: the

butterflies and birds, the flowers, the foliage, the sweet summer

itself, only play at dying;--they seem to go, but they all come back

again after the snow is gone. The real sorrow and fear of death arise

in us only through slow accumulation of experience with doubt and pain;

and these little boys and girls, being Japanese and Buddhists, will

never, in any event, feel about death just as you or I do. They will

find reason to fear it for somebody else's sake, but not for their own,

because they will learn that they have died millions of times already,

and have forgotten the trouble of it, much as one for-gets the pain of

successive toothaches. In the strangely penetrant light of their creed,

teaching the ghostliness of all substance, granite or gossamer,--just as

those lately found X-rays make visible the ghostliness of flesh,--this

their present world, with its bigger mountains and rivers and

rice-fields, will not appear to them much more real than the mud

landscapes which they made in childhood. And much more real it probably

is not.

At which thought I am conscious of a sudden soft shock, a familiar

shock, and know myself seized by the idea of Substance as Non-Reality.

*

This sense of the voidness of things comes only when the temperature

of the air is so equably related to the temperature of life that I can

forget having a body. Cold compels painful notions of solidity; cold

sharpens the delusion of personality; cold quickens egotism; cold numbs

thought, and shrivels up the little wings of dreams.

To-day is one of those warm, hushed days when it is possible to think

of things as they are,--when ocean, peak, and plain seem no more real

than the arching of blue emptiness above them. All is mirage,--my

physical self, and the sunlit road, and the slow rippling of the

grain under a sleepy wind, and the thatched roofs beyond the haze

of the ricefields, and the blue crumpling of the naked hills behind

everything. I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of

being haunted,--haunted by the prodigious luminous Spectre of the World.

*

There are men and women working in those fields. Colored moving

shadows they are; and the earth under them--out of which they rose, and

back to which they will go--is equally shadow. Only the Forces behind

the shadow, that make and unmake, are real,--therefore viewless.

Somewhat as Night devours all lesser shadow will this phantasmal

earth swallow us at last, and itself thereafter vanish away. But the

little shadows and the Shadow-Eater must as certainly reappear,--must

rematerialize somewhere and somehow. This ground beneath me is old as

the Milky Way. Call it what you please,--clay, soil, dust: its names

are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with

it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies,

tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of

that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out

of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it

feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it. Dust it is of Karma,

waiting to enter into novel combinations,---dust of elder Being in that

state between birth and birth which the Buddhist calls _Chū-U._ It is

made of forces, and of nothing else; and those forces are not of this

planet only, but of vanished spheres innumerable.

*

Is there aught visible, tangible, measurable, that has never been

mixed with sentiency?--atom that has never vibrated to pleasure

or to pain?--air that has never been cry or speech?--drop that

has never been a tear? Assuredly this dust has felt. It has been

everything we know; also much that we cannot know. It has been nebula

and star, planet and moon, times unspeakable. Deity also it has

been,--the Sun-God of worlds that circled and worshiped in other

æons. "_Remember, Man, thou art but dust!_"--a saying profound

only as materialism, which stops short at surfaces. For what is

dust? "Remember, Dust, thou hast been Sun, and Sun thou shalt become

again!... Thou hast been Light, Life, Love;--and into all these, by

ceaseless cosmic magic, thou shalt many times be turned again!"

*

For this Cosmic Apparition is more than evolution alternating

with dissolution: it is infinite metempsychosis; it is perpetual

palingenesis. Those old predictions of a bodily resurrection were not

falsehoods; they were rather foreshadowings of a truth vaster than all

myths and deeper than all religions.

Suns yield up their ghosts of flame; but out of their graves new suns

rush into being. Corpses of worlds pass all to some solar funeral pyre;

but out of their own ashes they are born again. This earth must die:

her seas shall be Saharas. But those seas once existed in the sun;

and their dead tides, revived by fire, will pour their thunder upon

the coasts of another world. Transmigration--transmutation: these

are not fables! What is impossible? Not the dreams of alchemists and

poets;--dross may indeed be changed to gold, the jewel to the living

eye, the flower into flesh. What is impossible? If seas can pass

from world to sun, from sun to world again, what of the dust of dead

selves,--dust of memory and thought? Resurrection there is,--but a

resurrection more stupendous than any dreamed of by Western creeds.

Dead emotions will revive as surely as dead suns and moons. Only, so

far as we can just now discern, there will be no return of identical

individualities. The reapparition will always be a recombination of the

preexisting, a readjustment of affinities, a reintegration of being

informed with the experience of anterior being. The Cosmos is a Karma.

*

Merely by reason of illusion and folly do we shrink from the notion

of self-instability. For what is our individuality? Most certainly

it is not individuality at all: it is multiplicity incalculable.

What is the human body? A form built up out of billions of living

entities, an impermanent agglomeration of individuals called cells.

And the human soul? A composite of quintillions of souls. We are, each

and all, infinite compounds of fragments of anterior lives. And the

universal process that continually dissolves and continually constructs

personality has always been going on, and is even at this moment going

on, in every one of us. What being ever had a totally new feeling,

an absolutely new idea? All our emotions and thoughts and wishes,

however changing and growing through the varying seasons of life, are

only compositions and recompositions of the sensations and ideas and

desires of other folk, mostly of dead people,--millions of billions of

dead people. Cells and souls are themselves recombinations, present

aggregations of past knittings of forces,--forces about which nothing

is known save that they belong to the Shadow-Makers of universes.

Whether you (by _you_ I mean any other agglomeration of souls)

really wish for immortality as an agglomeration, I cannot tell. But

I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"--not! Rather it is a

fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever

occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be

rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable.

I have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in

water (sea-water, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on

mountain tops. I have souls longing for the tumult of great cities,

and souls longing to dwell in tropical solitude;--souls, also, in

various stages of naked savagery--souls demanding nomad freedom

without tribute;--souls conservative, delicate, loyal to empire and to

feudal tradition, and souls that are Nihilists, deserving Siberia;

--sleepless souls, hating inaction, and hermit souls, dwelling in

such meditative isolation that only at intervals of years can I feel

them moving about;--souls that have faith in fetiches;--polytheistic

souls;--souls proclaiming Islam;--and souls mediæval, loving cloister

shadow and incense and glimmer of tapers and the awful altitude of

Gothic glooms. Cooperation among all these is not to be thought of:

always there is trouble,--revolt, confusion, civil war. The majority

detest this state of things: multitudes would gladly emigrate. And the

wiser minority feel that they need never hope for better conditions

until after the total demolition of the existing social structure.

*

_I_ an individual,--an individual soul! Nay, I am a population,--a

population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand

millions! Generations of generations I am, æons of æons! Countless

times the concourse now making me has been scattered, and mixed with

other scatterings. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration?

Perhaps, after trillions of ages of burning in different dynasties of

suns, the very best of me may come together again.

*

If one could only imagine some explanation of the Why! The questions of

the Whence and the Whither are much less troublesome, since the Present

assures us, even though vaguely, of Future and Past. But the Why!

*

The cooing voice of a little girl dissolves my reverie. She is trying

to teach a child brother how to make the Chinese character for Man,--I

mean Man with a big M. First she draws in the dust a stroke sloping

downwards from right to left, so:--

[Illustration]

then she draws another curving downwards from left to right, thus:--

[Illustration]

joining the two so as to form the perfect _ji_, or character, _hito,_

meaning a person of either sex, or mankind:--

[Illustration]

Then she tries to impress the idea of this shape on the baby memory

by help of a practical illustration,--probably learned at school. She

breaks a slip of wood in two pieces, and manages to balance the pieces

against each other at about the same angle as that made by the two

strokes of the character. "Now see," she says: "each stands only by

help of the other. One by itself cannot stand. Therefore the _ji_ is

like mankind. Without help one person cannot live in this world; but

by getting help and giving help everybody can live. If nobody helped

anybody, all people would fall down and die."

This explanation is not philologically exact; the two strokes

evolutionally standing for a pair of legs,--all that survives in

the modern ideograph of the whole man figured in the primitive

picture-writing. But the pretty moral fancy is much more important

than the scientific fact. It is also one charming example of that

old-fashioned method of teaching which invested every form and every

incident with ethical signification. Besides, as a mere item of moral

information, it contains the essence of all earthly religion, and the

best part of all earthly philosophy. A world-priestess she is, this

dear little maid, with her dove's voice and her innocent gospel of one

letter! Verily in that gospel lies the only possible present answer

to ultimate problems. Were its whole meaning universally felt,--were

its whole suggestion of the spiritual and material law of love and

help universally obeyed,--forthwith, according to the Idealists, this

seemingly solid visible world would vanish away like smoke! For it has

been written that in whatsoever time all human minds accord in thought

and will with the mind of the Teacher, _there shall not remain even one

particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood._

V