All are aware that we have no abiding city here, but that, says the
hymn-writer, is a truth which should not cost the saint a tear, and our
politicians appear to lament it as little as the saints. Their eyes are
dry; it does not distress their mind, it seems hardly to occur to them,
unless, perhaps, they are defeated candidates. One might suppose from
their manner that eternal truths depended on their efforts, and that the
city they seek to build would abide for ever. Could all this toil and
expenditure be lavished on a transitory show, all this eloquence upon
the baseless fabric of a vision, all this hatred and malice upon things
that wax old as doth a garment and like a vesture are rolled up? One
would think from his preoccupied zeal that every politician was laying
the foundation stone of an everlasting Jerusalem, did not reason and
experience alike forbid the possibility.
May it not rather be that the politicians, like the saints, keep the
tears of mortality out of their eyes by contemplating this passing dream
under the aspect of eternal realities? In months when the heavens at
night are filled with constellations of peculiar beauty, may we not
suppose that the politician, emerging from the Town Hall amid the cheers
and execrations of the voice that represents the voice of God, lifts up
his eyes unto the heavens, where prone Orion still grasps his sword,
and Auriga drives his chariot of fire, and the pole star hangs
immovable, by which Ulysses set his helm? And as he gazes, he recognises
with joy in his heart that the stars themselves, with all their
recurrent comets and flaming meteors and immovable constellations,
hardly cast a stain upon the white radiance of eternity, under which he
has been striving and crying and perpetrating comparatively trifling
deviations from exactness.
It is a consolation which a large proportion, probably more than half,
of mankind shares with our politicians. Like them, the greater part of
mankind is aware that there is peace somewhere beyond these voices, that
life with all its unsatisfied longings and its repetition of care is
transitory as a summer cloud, and that the only way of escape from the
pain and misery, the foulness and corruption, of this material universe
is by the destruction of all desires, except the one engrossing desire
for non-existence. That is why the majority of mankind has set itself to
overcome the unholy urgings of ambition, the pleasure of selfish and
revengeful purposes, and the deeply-implanted delight in cruelty and
unkindness. Such conquest is the essential part of the Fourfold Path by
which the bliss of extinction may be attained. Let him cease to be
ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or
unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a
politician may slowly be extinguished. Life follows life, and each life
fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain
of previous existences. "Quisque suos patimur manes." The sin that most
easily besets us fixes the shape of our next incarnation, and, did not a
politician strictly follow the guidance of the Fourfold Path, the first
election after his death might see him re-appear as a sheep, a
cave-dweller, or a rat.
Never to have been born is best; never to be born again is the hope and
motive of all good men among the greater part of mankind. It is not only
the teaching of the most famous Buddha which has told them so. A
Preacher more familiar to us has said the same, and our Western churches
do but repeat an echo from the East. "I praised the dead who are already
dead more than the living who are yet alive," he wrote; "yea, better is
he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil
work that is done under the sun." Wherefore is light given to him that
is in misery? asked Job. From age to age the question has been asked by
far more than half the human race, and yet the human race continues,
miserable and unholy though it is.
But the widest expression of this common cry is found in Buddhism, and
therein is found also a doctrine of peace that seeks to answer it. From
the turmoil of the street and market-place, from the atomic vortex of
public meetings, ballot stations, and motors decked with flags, let us
turn to the "Psalms of the Sisters," those Buddhist nuns whose
utterances Mrs. Rhys Davids has edited for the Pali Text Society. In
this inextricable error of existence--this charnel-house of corrupting
bodies wherein the soul lies imprisoned too long--time and space do not
seriously matter. Let us turn from Haggerston and Battersea and the
Parliamentary squabbles of to-day, and visit the regions where the great
mountains were standing and the holy Ganges flowed within two or three
centuries before or after the birth of Christ. Somewhere about that
time, somewhere about that place, these women, having in most cases,
fulfilled their various parts in wives, mothers, or courtesans, retired
to the Homeless Life in mountains, forests, or the banks of streams
where they might seek deliverance for their souls. With shaven heads,
and clad in the deep saffron cloth such as the ascetic wanderer of India
still wears, furnished only with a bowl for the unasked offerings of the
pious and compassionate, they went their way, free from the cares and
desires of this putrefying world. As one of them--a goldsmith's
daughter, to whom the Master himself had taught the Norm of the Fourfold
Path--as one of them explained to the tiresome relations who tried to
call her back:
"Why herewithal, my kinsmen--nay, my foes--
Why yoke me in your minds with sense desires?
Know me as her who fled the life of sense,
Shorn of her hair, wrapt in her yellow robe.
The food from hand to mouth, glean'd here and there,
The patchwork robe--these things are meet for me,
The base and groundwork of the homeless life."
Some sought escape from the depression of luxury, some from the
wretchedness of the poor, some from the abominations of the wanton, some
from the boredom of tending an indifferent husband. One of them thus
utters her complaint with frank simplicity:
"Rising betimes, I went about the house,
Then, with my hands and feet well cleansed I went
To bring respectful greeting to my lord,
And taking comb and mirror, unguents, soap,
I dressed and groomed him as a handmaid might.
I boiled the rice, I washed the pots and pans;
And as a mother on her only child,
So did I minister to my good man.
For me, who with toil infinite then worked,
And rendered service with a humble mind,
Rose early, ever diligent and good,
For me he nothing felt, save sore dislike."
Others sought freedom of intellect, others the free development of
personality; but, in the end, it was deliverance from earthly desires
that all were seeking, for it is only through such deliverance that the
final blessedness of total extinction can be reached. Then, as they cry,
they cease to wander in the jungles of the senses, rebirth comes no
more, and the peace of Nirvana is won. A poor Brahmin's daughter who had
been married to a cripple, thus exults in a multiplied redemption:
"O free, indeed! O gloriously free
Am I in freedom from three crooked things:--
From quern, from mortar, from my crook-back'd lord!
Ay, but I'm free from rebirth and from death,
And all that dragged me back is hurled away."
But more truly characteristic of the spiritual mind is the joyful advice
of one who, having perfected herself in meditation, could thus commune
with her soul:
"Hast thou not seen sorrow and ill in all
The springs of life? Come thou not back to birth!
Cast out the passionate desire again to Be.
So shalt thou go thy ways calm and serene."
Thus only by the recognition of the sorrow of the world, by the conquest
of all desires, and by the exercise of kindliness to all that breathe
this life of misery, is that Path to be trodden of which the fourth
stage enters Nirvana's peace. Thus only can we escape from this
repulsive carcass--"this bag of skin with carrion filled," as one of the
Sisters called it--and so be merged into the element of calm, just as
the space inside a bowl is merged into the element of space when at last
the bowl is broken and will never need scrubbing more.
It is thought that Gautama, the great Buddha, whose effigy in the calm
of contemplation is the noblest work of Indian art, fondly believed that
all mankind would seek deliverance along the path he pointed out, and
that so, within a few generations, the human race, together, perhaps,
with every living thing that breathes beneath the law of Karma, would
pass from sorrow into nothingness. Mankind has not fulfilled his
expectation. The task of expiation is not yet completed, and, in the
midst of anguish, corruption, and the flux of all material things, the
human race goes swarming on. I suppose it is about as numerous as ever,
and, though something like half of it accepts the teaching of the Buddha
as divine, they seem in no more hurry to fulfil its precepts than are
the followers of other Founders. We cannot say that mankind has gone
very far along the Fourfold Path, for there are still many of us who
would rather be a mouse than nothing; yet it remains an accepted truth
of the Buddhistic doctrine, that above this fleeting and variegated
world there abides the element of calm. As the final Chorus "Mysticus"
of _Faust_ proclaims: "All things transitory are but a symbol," and if
any politician during the storm of worldly desires has for a moment lost
sight of truth's eternal stars that guide his way, let him now turn to
the "Psalms of the Sisters." Even if he has been successful in his
ambition, he will there find peace, discovering in Nirvana the quiet
Chiltern Hundreds of the soul.