A CITY OF GOD
I had escaped to the Ganges, as myriads of transitory pilgrims
have escaped before. From the distractions of politics and the
dust of practical reforms I had come to the quiet river, sliding
under immemorial walls. The water was still white and dove-coloured
with morning, but already along the thin crescent of the shore,
white-robed men and women were coming down the steps with naked
feet, and silently approaching the edge. They threw long strings of
marigolds into the stream. Stooping down, they scooped up the water
in brazen pots, and set a marigold upon the mouth of each. Hung with
flowers, and bearing on their foreheads the triple mark of the god,
men settled cross-legged upon slabs of stone or wooden platforms, and
plunged at once into prayer, or, opening long and narrow books, began
to recite aloud the words of inspired ancestors. Men and women alike,
still draped in white, walked step by step down into the water, till
it passed over their heads, and then came back step by step, and
stood dripping in prayer. They raised water in their hands, splashed
it three times on their mouths and foreheads, and with arms lifted
to the risen sun, poured what was left back into the river. Covering
her face with her hands, one girl knelt upon the bare stone so long
in adoration that the sun dried her one white length of sari, and it
hung loose around her form again.
The common life of the holy city began, and the calling of
the milkmen, the cake-sellers, the fruiterers, and drivers of
bullock-carts mingled with the temple bells. They brought the dead
down to the river, hung with marigolds, and wrapped in cotton cloths
as when they lived. Pushing them feet forwards a little way out
from shore, they let them soak in the holy water until wooden pyres
should be ready to consume their deserted forms, happy in a double
purification. Washerwomen carried down their bundles of linen, and
swung each piece over their heads again and again upon flat stones
in the water, until it was cleansed, with the added advantage of
sanctity. Ascetics in brick-dust robes passed up and down among
the crowd, bearing long staves in memory of their vow to constrain
their thoughts, their speech, and their desires. Other ascetics,
dressed only in a transparent coating of ashes, sat in perpetual
contemplation, forgetful of the body and the world. One man I saw in
faded yellow robe, worn by sun and rain, passing quietly in and
out of the worshipping throng, as he followed the little footpath
by the water’s brink. He was of those who all the year long tread
the bank of the Ganges, from her source in the mountains to her
mouth among the forest swamps, and back again to her source in
the mountains. On that day’s walk he happened to be passing again
through her most sacred city, but that seemed hardly to interrupt his
contemplation of her holiness.
[Illustration: ON THE BANK.
[_Face p. 264._ ]
“Yours is the Order I should belong to by nature,” I said, giving him
a halfpenny, for which he had not asked.
“For you it would be easy and difficult,” he answered, in good
English, and led me up many steps and along galleries overhanging
a cliff of ruinous masonry to a cool courtyard, where Brahmans are
daily fed on boiled rice and salt, laid out upon a plate of stitched
banana leaves.
“Obviously it would be easy for you as for any one,” he went on as
we climbed up, after his meal, to the top of the flat roof where a
little shelter had been erected for shade and worship; “but for you
it would be difficult also, because you hang upon the world, and your
soul is entangled in illusions and desires. Like all your people, you
call the unreal things realities, and for reality you have no name.”
Having devoted himself for a while to prayer, he continued: “You see
this low parapet? Many years ago a boy was seated upon it reading
a Sanscrit book of wisdom, when, it is thought, a monkey, inspired
by the god, pushed him, and he fell. Look over and you will see
the projecting slab half way down which he broke as he fell. They
gathered up his shattered body, and laid it, almost alive, in the
Ganges. I cannot doubt that he attained at once to salvation, his
soul returning to the universal consciousness, as the space inside
a pot returns to universal space when the pot is broken. And in his
salvation I may claim a share, for I was his father.”
It was noon, and the sun blazed upon the roof. Green parrots flew
screaming among the trees of a garden far below us. The hum of the
city arose, pierced with loud cries, and over the far-off iron
bridge across the Ganges a train was slowly passing with prolonged
and shrieking whistle. But still the crowding pilgrims moved down
the steps to the water’s edge, and bathed and offered flowers, and
stretched up their hands in silent adoration, or recited ancient and
sacred words aloud.
[Illustration: THE BURNING PLACE.
THE RIVER WALLS.
[_Face p. 266._
]
“It is possible for you,” I said, after a long time, “to desire
escape from the danger of rebirth, and to speak of being merged in
the universal consciousness as salvation. But how about these people
who come in millions to the river? All their lives they struggle
only to live. From day to day their thought is only to keep alight
their little glimmer of life, and hand it on to others who are
their children. How is it to be supposed that they come to the river
so wearied of existence as to pray only to be saved from being born
again? I myself, who am one of them, would walk in the opposite
direction if I thought the river was going to extinguish my life, and
for choice I should rather be born a mouse than nothing.”
“You remind me,” he answered, “of those worshippers of Vishnu, who
pray in great humility, ‘Let me be born a cat or dog, if only I may
love thee, O God.’ It is a great prayer, and you may join in it, for,
being a wanderer through the world, you can always hope to become a
religious man, avoiding the many-sided degradation of which people
tell me who have visited the West. I, too, was once engaged in common
business, managing large estates in this very city, and I know the
rich men in the streets, though they cannot now tell who passes
them so close. But each day I gave much time to contemplation, and
I took the vow of kindliness to every living thing, just as you see
those Jain monks there who are feeding ants with sugar, and would
not wittingly kill a cholera germ; or like those wandering Sisters
of the faith who wear a strip of white felt across their mouths lest
they should breathe a midge to death, and carry soft brooms in their
hands to sweep the place where they are about to sit, lest the weight
of their frail bodies should crush an irrecoverable life. By such
means, even in your present body, you may begin to penetrate the
illusions of existence, and at rare moments may perceive some gleam
from what one of your poets has called the white radiance of eternity.
“As for these pilgrims,” he went on, “they are like a woman who
lights her cow-dung fire at evening, not considering as she cooks
that the flame is composed of ten divisions, each symbolic of a
faculty of the soul. Or they are like a man who walks by the light
of sun and moon, not considering that sun and moon are nothing but
symbols of creative power, as are men and women, fire and water, heat
and cold. Or they are like the nautch girls who have a separate song
for every hour of the day and night, but do not know that their songs
are only the pulses of eternity. In cooking, in light, and in song,
each finds an ignorant joy, and in the same way these pilgrims have
a dim sense of righteousness and purification in the outward symbols
of truths that they will never learn in their present life. By such
means, for a few hours together, they may free themselves from the
illusions of existence, and in some cases even reach the state of
those highly religious men who devour putrid cats, to prove that in
their estimation all material things are alike, all being equally
unimportant.
[Illustration: A PLACE OF PRAYER.
[_Face p. 268._
]
“But for people like you,” he continued with pity, “what can one say?
You are still ensnared by political anxieties, artistic interests,
and the desires of personality. You have far to go before, by
contemplation and hard discipline, you perceive how like happiness is
to its opposite—how accurately the joy of existence may be compared
to a fire-fly wandering in an unlimited vault of darkness, or to the
inch of cool shadow thrown by a snake’s head upon a burning desert.
Till you can reach that supreme state when birth, and life, and death
have no separate meaning, you have far to go. But there is always
hope for one who will begin by overcoming earthly desire. For, as you
may have heard, there has been one being and one alone who in this
flesh attained to salvation without death, and he was Janaka, the
father of Sita, Rama’s wife. He sat still, you remember, with one
hand in a blazing fire and the other upon a woman’s breast, showing
that to him the one was the same as the other, and both indifferent.”
We descended, and I went away in the rapid twilight, sorrowful
because I was not in the least like Janaka. But as I went, I came
to the courtyard of a temple to Shiva, the dissolver of existence,
and there in the darkness I found a lonely woman walking round and
round a sacred tree, driven by the blind desire to bear a child. So
untameable among the unlearned is the passion for life.