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THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE
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THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE
BY
H. FIELDING
'For to see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth'
MATTHEW ARNOLD
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1899
_First Edition, 1898_
_Second Edition, 1898_
_Third Edition, 1899_
DEDICATION TO SECOND EDITION
_I dedicate this book to you about whom it is written. It has been made
a reproach to me by the critics that I have only spoken well of you,
that I have forgotten your faults and remembered only your virtues. If
it is wrong to have done this, I must admit the wrong. I have written of
you as a friend does of a friend. Where I could say kind things of you I
have done so, where I could not I have been silent. You will find plenty
of people who can see only your faults, and who like to tell you of
them. You will find in the inexorable sequence of events a corrector of
these faults more potent than any critics can be. But I am not your
critic, but your friend. If many of you had not admitted me, a stranger,
into your friendship during my many very solitary years, of what sort
should I be now? How could I have lived those years alone? You kept
alive my sympathies, and so saved me from many things. Do you think I
could now turn round and criticise you? No; but this book is my tribute
of gratitude for many kindnesses._
PREFACE
In most of the quotations from Burmese books containing the life of the
Buddha I am indebted, if not for the exact words, yet for the sense, to
Bishop Bigandet's translation.
I do not think I am indebted to anyone else. I have, indeed, purposely
avoided quoting from any other book and using material collected by
anyone else.
The story of Ma Pa Da has appeared often before, but my version is taken
entirely from the Burmese song. It is, as I have said, known to nearly
every Burman.
I wanted to write only what the Burmese themselves thought; whether I
have succeeded or not, the reader can judge.
I am indebted to Messrs. William Blackwood and Sons for permission to
use parts of my article on 'Burmese Women'--_Blackwood's Magazine_, May,
1895--in the present work.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LIVING BELIEFS 1
II. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--I. 17
III. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--II. 34
IV. THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 46
V. WAR--I. 56
VI. WAR--II. 77
VII. GOVERNMENT 87
VIII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 102
IX. HAPPINESS 116
X. THE MONKHOOD--I. 127
XI. THE MONKHOOD--II. 153
XII. PRAYER 158
XIII. FESTIVALS 166
XIV. WOMEN--I. 185
XV. WOMEN--II. 205
XVI. WOMEN--III. 224
XVII. DIVORCE 228
XVIII. DRINK 242
XIX. MANNERS 248
XX. 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 256
XXI. ALL LIFE IS ONE 277
XXII. DEATH, THE DELIVERER 302
XXIII. THE POTTER'S WHEEL 322
XXIV. THE FOREST OF TIME 342
XXV. CONCLUSION 348
THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE
CHAPTER I
LIVING BELIEFS
'The observance of the law alone entitles to the right of belonging
to my religion.'--_Saying of the Buddha._
For the first few years of my stay in Burma my life was so full of
excitement that I had little care or time for any thought but of to-day.
There was, first of all, my few months in Upper Burma in the King's time
before the war, months which were full of danger and the exhilaration of
danger, when all the surroundings were too new and too curious to leave
leisure for examination beneath the surface. Then came the flight from
Upper Burma at the time of the war, and then the war itself. And this
war lasted four years. Not four years of fighting in Burma proper, for
most of the Irrawaddy valley was peaceful enough by the end of 1889; but
as the central parts quieted down, I was sent to the frontier, first on
the North and then on the East by the Chin mountains; so that it was not
until 1890 that a transfer to a more settled part gave me quiet and
opportunity for consideration of all I had seen and known. For it was in
those years that I gained most of whatever little knowledge I have of
the Burmese people.
Months, very many months, I passed with no one to speak to, with no
other companions but Burmese. I have been with them in joy and in
sorrow, I have fought with them and against them, and sat round the
camp-fire after the day's work and talked of it all. I have had many
friends amongst them, friends I shall always honour; and I have seen
them killed sometimes in our fights, or dead of fever in the marshes of
the frontier. I have known them from the labourer to the Prime Minister,
from the little neophyte just accepted into the faith to the head of all
the Burmese religion. I have known their wives and daughters; have
watched many a flirtation in the warm scented evenings; and have seen
girls become wives and wives mothers while I have lived amongst them. So
that although when the country settled down, and we built houses for
ourselves and returned more to English modes of living, I felt that I
was drifting away from them into the conventionality and ignorance of
our official lives, yet I had in my memory much of what I had seen, much
of what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt that I had
been--even if it were only for a time--behind the veil, where it is so
hard to come.
In looking over these memories it seemed to me that there were many
things I did not understand, acts of theirs and customs, which I had
seen and noted, but of which I did not know the reason. We all know how
hard it is to see into the heart even of our own people, those of our
flesh and blood who are with us always, whose ways are our ways, and
whose thoughts are akin to ours. And if this be so with them, it is ten
thousand times harder with those whose ways are not our ways, and from
whose thoughts we must be far apart. It is true that there are no dark
places in the lives of the Burmese as there are in the lives of other
Orientals. All is open to the light of day in their homes and in their
religion, and their women are the freest in the world. Yet the barriers
of a strange tongue and a strange religion, and of ways caused by
another climate than ours, is so great that, even to those of us who
have every wish and every opportunity to understand, it seems sometimes
as if we should never know their hearts. It seems as if we should never
learn more of their ways than just the outside--that curiously varied
outside which is so deceptive, and which is so apt to prevent our
understanding that they are men just as we are, and not strange
creations from some far-away planet.
So when I settled down and sought to know more of the meaning of what I
had seen, I thought that first of all I must learn somewhat of their
religion, of that mainspring of many actions, which seemed sometimes
admirable, sometimes the reverse, and nearly always foreign to my ideas.
It is true that I knew they were Buddhists, that I recognized the
yellow-robed monks as followers of the word of Gaudama the Buddha, and
that I had a general acquaintance with the theory of their faith as
picked up from a book or two--notably, Rhys Davids' 'Buddhism' and
Bishop Bigandet's book--and from many inconsequent talks with the monks
and others. But the knowledge was but superficial, and I was painfully
aware that it did not explain much that I had seen and that I saw every
day.
So I sent for more books, such books as had been published in English,
and I studied them, and hoped thereby to attain the explanations I
wanted; and as I studied, I watched as I could the doings of the people,
that I might see the effects of causes and the results of beliefs. I
read in these sacred books of the mystery of Dharma, of how a man has no
soul, no consciousness after death; that to the Buddhist 'dead men rise
up never,' and that those who go down to the grave are known no more. I
read that all that survives is the effect of a man's actions, the evil
effect, for good is merely negative, and that this is what causes pain
and trouble to the next life. Everything changes, say the sacred books,
nothing lasts even for a moment. It will be, and it has been, is the
life of man. The life that lives tomorrow in the next incarnation is no
more the life that died in the last than the flame we light in the lamp
to-day is the same that went out yesternight. It is as if a stone were
thrown into a pool--that is the life, the splash of the stone; all that
remains, when the stone lies resting in the mud and weeds below the
waters of forgetfulness, are the circles ever widening on the surface,
and the ripples never dying, but only spreading farther and farther
away. All this seemed to me a mystery such as I could not understand.
But when I went to the people, I found that it was simple enough to
them; for I found that they remembered their former lives often, that
children, young children, could tell who they were before they died, and
remember details of that former existence. As they grew older the
remembrance grew fainter and fainter, and at length almost died away.
But in many children it was quite fresh, and was believed in beyond
possibility of a doubt by all the people. So I saw that the teachings of
their sacred books and the thoughts of the people were not at one in
this matter.
Again, I read that there was no God. Nats there were, spirits of great
power like angels, and there was the Buddha (the just man made perfect),
who had worked out for all men the way to reach surcease from evil; but
of God I saw nothing. And because the Buddha had reached heaven
(Nirvana), it would be useless to pray to him. For, having entered into
his perfect rest, he could not be disturbed by the sharp cry of those
suffering below; and if he heard, still he could not help; for each man
must through pain and sorrow work out for himself his own salvation. So
all prayer is futile.
Then I remembered I had seen the young mother going to the pagoda on the
hilltop with a little offering of a few roses or an orchid spray, and
pouring out her soul in passionate supplication to Someone--Someone
unknown to her sacred books--that her firstborn might recover of his
fever, and be to her once more the measureless delight of her life; and
it would seem to me that she must believe in a God and in prayer after
all.
So though I found much in these books that was believed by the people,
and much that was to them the guiding influence of their lives, yet I
was unable to trust to them altogether, and I was in doubt where to seek
for the real beliefs of these people. If I went to their monks, their
holy men, the followers of the great teacher, Gaudama, they referred me
to their books as containing all that a Buddhist believed; and when I
pointed out the discrepancies, they only shook their heads, and said
that the people were an ignorant people and confused their beliefs in
that way.
And when I asked what was a Buddhist, I was told that, to be a Buddhist,
a man must be accepted into the religion with certain rites, certain
ceremonies, he must become for a time a member of the community of the
monks of the Buddha, and that a Buddhist was he who was so accepted, and
who thereafter held by the teachings of the Buddha.
But when I searched the life of the Buddha, I could not find any such
ceremonies necessary at all. So that it seemed that the religion of the
Buddha was one religion, and the religion of the Buddhists another; but
when I said so to the monks, they were horror-struck, and said that it
was because I did not understand.
In my perplexity I fell back, as we all must, to my own thoughts and
those of my own people; and I tried to imagine how a Burman would act if
he came to England to search into the religion of the English and to
know the impulses of our lives.
I saw how he would be sent to the Bible as the source of our religion,
how he would be told to study that if he would know what we believed and
what we did not--what it was that gave colour to our lives. I followed
him in imagination as he took the Bible and studied it, and then went
forth and watched our acts, and I could see him puzzled, as I was now
puzzled when I studied his people.
I thought of him reading the New Testament, and how he would come to
these verses:
'27. But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them
which hate you,
'28. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you.
'29. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the
other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid him not to take thy
coat also.
'30. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away
thy goods ask them not again.'
He would read them again and again, these wonderful verses, that he was
told the people and Church believed, and then he would go forth to
observe the result of this belief. And what would he see? He would see
this: A nation proud and revengeful, glorying in her victories, always
at war, a conqueror of other peoples, a mighty hater of her enemies. He
would find that in the public life of the nation with other nations
there was no thought of this command. He would find, too, in her inner
life, that the man who took a cloak was not forgiven, but was terribly
punished--he used to be hanged. He would find---- But need I say what he
would find? Those who will read this are those very people--they know.
And the Burman would say at length to himself, Can this be the belief of
this people at all? Whatever their Book may say, they do not think that
it is good to humble yourself to your enemies--nay, but to strike hard
back. It is not good to let the wrong-doer go free. They think the best
way to stop crime is to punish severely. Those are their acts; the Book,
they say, is their belief. Could they act one thing and believe another?
Truly, _are_ these their beliefs?
And, again, he would read how that riches are an offence to
righteousness: hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of God. He
would read how the Teacher lived the life of the poorest among us, and
taught always that riches were to be avoided.
And then he would go forth and observe a people daily fighting and
struggling to add field to field, coin to coin, till death comes and
ends the fight. He would see everywhere wealth held in great estimation;
he would see the very children urged to do well, to make money, to
struggle, to rise in the world. He would see the lives of men who have
become rich held up as examples to be followed. He would see the
ministers who taught the Book with fair incomes ranking themselves, not
with the poor, but with the middle classes; he would see the dignitaries
of the Church--the men who lead the way to heaven--among the wealthy of
the land. And he would wonder. Is it true, he would say to himself, that
these people believe that riches are an evil thing? Whence, then, come
their acts, for their acts seem to show that they hold riches to be a
good thing? What is to be accepted as their belief: the Book they say
they believe, which condemns riches, or their acts, by which they show
that they hold that wealth is a good thing--ay, and if used according to
their ideas of right, a very good thing indeed?
So, it seemed to me, would a Burman be puzzled if he came to us to find
out our belief; and as the Burman's difficulty in England was, _mutatis
mutandis_, mine in Burma, I set to work to think the matter out. How
were the beliefs of a people to be known, and why should there be such
difficulties in the way? If I could understand how it was with us, it
might help me to know how it was with them.
And I have thought that the difficulty arises from the fact that there
are two ways of seeing a religion--from within and from without--and
that these are as different as can possibly be. It is because we forget
there are the two standpoints that we fall into error.
In every religion, to the believers in it, the crown and glory of their
creed is that it is a revelation of truth, a lifting of the veil, behind
which every man born into this mystery desires to look.
They are sure, these believers, that they have the truth, that they
alone have the truth, and that it has come direct from where alone truth
can live. They believe that in their religion alone lies safety for man
from the troubles of this world and from the terrors and threats of the
next, and that those alone who follow its teaching will reach happiness
hereafter, if not here. They believe, too, that this truth only requires
to be known to be understood and accepted of all men; that as the sun
requires no witness of its warmth, so the truth requires no evidence of
its truth.
It is to them so eternally true, so matchless in beauty, so convincing
in itself, that adherents of all other creeds have but to hear it
pronounced and they must believe. So, then, the question, How do you
know that your faith is true? is as vain and foolish as the cry of the
wind in an empty house. And if they be asked wherein lies their
religion, they will produce their sacred books, and declare that in them
is contained the whole matter. Here is the very word of truth, herein is
told the meaning of all things, herein alone lies righteousness. This,
they say, is their faith: that they believe in every line of it, this
truth from everlasting to everlasting, and that its precepts, and none
other, can be held by him who seeks to be a sincere believer. And to
these believers the manifestation of their faith is that its believers
attain salvation hereafter. But as that is in the next world, if the
unbeliever ask what is the manifestation in this, the believers will
answer him that the true mark and sign whereby a man may be known to
hold the truth is the observance of certain forms, the performance of
certain ceremonies, more or less mystical, more or less symbolical, of
some esoteric meaning. That a man should be baptized, should wear
certain marks on his forehead, should be accepted with certain rites, is
generally the outward and visible sign of a believer, and the badge
whereby others of the same faith have known their fellows.
It has never been possible for any religion to make the acts and deeds
of its followers the test of their belief. And for these reasons: that
it is a test no one could apply, and that if anyone were to attempt to
apply it, there would soon be no Church at all. For to no one is it
given to be able to observe in their entirety all the precepts of their
prophet, whoever that prophet may be. All must fail, some more and some
less, but generally more, and thus all would fall from the faith at some
time or another, and there would be no Church left. And so another test
has been made necessary. If from his weakness a man cannot keep these
precepts, yet he can declare his belief in and his desire to keep them,
and here is a test that can be applied. Certain rites have been
instituted, and it has been laid down that those who by their submission
to these rites show their belief in the truth and their desire to follow
that truth as far as in them lies, shall be called the followers of the
faith. So in time it has come about that these ceremonial rites have
been held to be the true and only sign of the believer, and the fact
that they were but to be the earnest of the beginning and living of a
new life has become less and less remembered, till it has faded into
nothingness. Instead of the life being the main thing, and being
absolutely necessary to give value and emphasis to the belief, it has
come to pass that it is the belief, and the acceptance of the belief,
that has been held to hallow the life and excuse and palliate its
errors.
Thus of every religion is this true, that its essence is a belief that
certain doctrines are revelations of eternal truth, and that the fruit
of this truth is the observance of certain forms. Morality and works
may or may not follow, but they are immaterial compared with the other.
This, put shortly, is the view of every believer.
But to him who does not believe in a faith, who views it from without,
from the standpoint of another faith, the whole view is changed, the
whole perspective altered. Those landmarks which to one within the
circle seem to stand out and overtop the world are to the eyes of him
without dwarfed often into insignificance, and other points rise into
importance.
For the outsider judges a religion as he judges everything else in this
world. He cannot begin by accepting it as the only revelation of truth;
he cannot proceed from the unknown to the known, but the reverse. First
of all, he tries to learn what the beliefs of the people really are, and
then he judges from their lives what value this religion has to them. He
looks to acts as proofs of beliefs, to lives as the ultimate effects of
thoughts. And he finds out very quickly that the sacred books of a
people can never be taken as showing more than approximately their real
beliefs. Always through the embroidery of the new creed he will find the
foundation of an older faith, of older faiths, perhaps, and below these,
again, other beliefs that seem to be part of no system, but to be the
outcome of the great fear that is in the world.
The more he searches, the more he will be sure that there is only one
guide to a man's faith, to his soul, and that is not any book or system
he may profess to believe, but the real system that he follows--that is
to say, that a man's beliefs can be known even to himself from his acts
only. For it is futile to say that a man believes in one thing and does
another. That is not a belief at all. A man may cheat himself, and say
it is, but in his heart he knows that it is not. A belief is not a
proposition to be assented to, and then put away and forgotten. It is
always in our minds, and for ever in our thoughts. It guides our every
action, it colours our whole life. It is not for a day, but for ever.
When we have learnt that a cobra's bite is death, we do not put the
belief away in a pigeon-hole of our minds, there to rust for ever
unused, nor do we go straightway and pick up the first deadly snake that
we see. We remember it always; we keep it as a guiding principle of our
daily lives.
A belief is a strand in the cord of our lives, that runs through every
fathom of it, from the time that it is first twisted among the others
till the time when that life shall end. And as it is thus impossible for
the onlooker to accept from adherents of a creed a definition of what
they really believe, so it is impossible for him to acknowledge the
forms and ceremonies of which they speak as the real manifestations of
their creed.
It seems to the onlooker indifferent that men should be dipped in water
or not, that they should have their heads shaved or wear long hair. Any
belief that is worth considering at all must have results more
important to its believers, more valuable to mankind, than such signs as
these. It is true that of the great sign of all, that the followers of a
creed attain heaven hereafter, he cannot judge. He can only tell of what
he sees. This may or may not be true; but surely, if it be true, there
must be some sign of it here on earth beyond forms. A religion that fits
a soul for the hereafter will surely begin by fitting it for the
present, he will think. And it will show that it does so otherwise than
by ceremonies.
For forms and ceremonies that have no fruit in action are not marks of a
living truth, but of a dead dogma. There is but little thought of forms
to him whose heart is full of the teaching of his Master, who has His
words within his heart, and whose soul is full of His love. It is when
beliefs die, and love has faded into indifference, that forms are
necessary, for to the living no monument is needed, but to the dead.
Forms and ceremonies are but the tombs of dead truths, put up to their
memory to recall to those who have never known them that they lived--and
died--long ago.
And because men do not seek for signs of the living among the graveyards
of the dead, so it is not among the ceremonies of religions that we
shall find the manifestations of living beliefs.
It is from the standpoint of this outsider that I have looked at and
tried to understand the soul of the Burmese people. When I have read or
heard of a teaching of Buddhism, I have always taken it to the test of
the daily life of the people to see whether it was a living belief or
no. I have accepted just so much as I could find the people have
accepted, such as they have taken into their hearts to be with them for
ever. A teaching that has been but a teaching or theory, a vain breath
of mental assent, has seemed to me of no value at all. The guiding
principles of their lives, whether in accordance with the teaching of
Buddhism or not, these only have seemed to me worthy of inquiry or
understanding. What I have desired to know is not their minds, but their
souls. And as this test of mine has obliged me to omit much that will be
found among the dogmas of Buddhism, so it has led me to accept many
things that have no place there at all. For I have thought that what
stirs the heart of man is his religion, whether he calls it religion or
not. That which makes the heart beat and the breath come quicker, love
and hate, and joy and sorrow--that has been to me as worthy of record as
his hopes of a future life. The thoughts that come into the mind of the
ploughman while he leads his team afield in the golden glory of the
dawn; the dreams that swell and move in the heart of the woman when she
knows the great mystery of a new life; whither the dying man's hopes and
fears are led--these have seemed to me the religion of the people as
well as doctrines of the unknown. For are not these, too, of the very
soul of the people?