HAPPINESS
'The thoughts of his heart, these are the wealth of a man.'
_Burmese saying._
As I have said, there was this very remarkable fact in Burma--that when
you left the king, you dropped at once to the villager. There were no
intermediate classes. There were no nobles, hereditary officers, great
landowners, wealthy bankers or merchants.
Then there is no caste; there are no guilds of trade, or art, or
science. If a man discovered a method of working silver, say, he never
hid it, but made it common property. It is very curious how absolutely
devoid Burma is of the exclusiveness of caste so universal in India, and
which survives to a great extent in Europe. The Burman is so absolutely
enamoured of freedom, that he cannot abide the bonds which caste
demands. He will not bind himself with other men for a slight temporal
advantage; he does not consider it worth the trouble. He prefers
remaining free and poor to being bound and rich. Nothing is further
from him than the feeling of exclusiveness. He abominates secrecy,
mystery. His religion, his women, himself, are free; there are no dark
places in his life where the light cannot come. He is ready that
everything should be known, that all men should be his brothers.
And so all the people are on the same level. Richer and poorer there
are, of course, but there are no very rich; there is none so poor that
he cannot get plenty to eat and drink. All eat much the same food, all
dress much alike. The amusements of all are the same, for entertainments
are nearly always free. So the Burman does not care to be rich. It is
not in his nature to desire wealth, it is not in his nature to care to
keep it when it comes to him. Beyond a sufficiency for his daily needs
money has not much value. He does not care to add field to field or coin
to coin; the mere fact that he has money causes him no pleasure. Money
is worth to him what it will buy. With us, when we have made a little
money we keep it to be a nest-egg to make more from. Not so a Burman: he
will spend it. And after his own little wants are satisfied, after he
has bought himself a new silk, after he has given his wife a gold
bangle, after he has called all his village together and entertained
them with a dramatic entertainment--sometimes even before all this--he
will spend the rest on charity.
He will build a pagoda to the honour of the great teacher, where men
may go to meditate on the great laws of existence. He will build a
monastery school where the village lads are taught, and where each
villager retires some time in his life to learn the great wisdom. He
will dig a well or build a bridge, or make a rest-house. And if the sum
be very small indeed, then he will build, perhaps, a little house--a
tiny little house--to hold two or three jars of water for travellers to
drink. And he will keep the jars full of water, and put a little
cocoanut-shell to act as cup.
The amount spent thus every year in charity is enormous. The country is
full of pagodas; you see them on every peak, on every ridge along the
river. They stand there as do the castles of the robber barons on the
Rhine, only with what another meaning! Near villages and towns there are
clusters of them, great and small. The great pagoda in Rangoon is as
tall as St. Paul's; I have seen many a one not three feet high--the
offering of some poor old man to the Great Name, and everywhere there
are monasteries. Every village has one, at least; most have two or
three. A large village will have many. More would be built if there was
anyone to live in them, so anxious is each man to do something for the
monks. As it is, more are built than there is actual need for.
And there are rest-houses everywhere. Far away in the dense forests by
the mountain-side you will find them, built in some little hollow by
the roadside by someone who remembered his fellow-traveller. You cannot
go five miles along any road without finding them. In villages they can
be counted by tens, in towns by fifties. There are far more than are
required.
In Burmese times such roads and bridges as were made were made in the
same way by private charity. Nowadays, the British Government takes that
in hand, and consequently there is probably more money for rest-house
building than is needed. As time goes on, the charity will flow into
other lines, no doubt, in addition. They will build and endow hospitals,
they will devote money to higher education, they will spend money in
many ways, not in what we usually call charity, for that they already
do, nor in missions, as whatever missions they may send out will cost
nothing. Holy men are those vowed to extreme poverty. But as their
civilization (_their_ civilization, not any imposed from outside)
progresses, they will find out new wants for the rich to supply, and
they will supply them. That is a mere question of material progress.
The inclination to charity is very strong. The Burmans give in charity
far more in proportion to their wealth than any other people. It is
extraordinary how much they give, and you must remember that all of this
is quite voluntary. With, I think, two or three exceptions, such as
gilding the Shwe Dagon pagoda, collections are never made for any
purpose. There is no committee of appeal, no organized collection. It is
all given straight from the giver's heart. It is a very marvellous
thing.
I remember long ago, shortly after I had come to Burma, I was staying
with a friend in Toungoo, and I went with him to the house of a Burman
contractor. We had been out riding, and as we returned my friend said he
wished to see the contractor about some business, and so we rode to his
house. He came out and asked us in, and we dismounted and went up the
stairs into the veranda, and sat down. It was a little house built of
wood, with three rooms. Behind was a little kitchen and a stable. The
whole may have cost a thousand rupees. As my friend and the Burman
talked of their business I observed the furniture. There was very
little; three or four chairs, two tables and a big box were all I could
see. Inside, no doubt, were a few beds and more chairs. While we sat,
the wife and daughter came out and gave us cheroots, and I talked to
them in my very limited Burmese till my friend was ready. Then we went
away.
That contractor, so my friend told me as we went home, made probably a
profit of six or seven thousand rupees a year. He spent on himself about
a thousand of this; the rest went in charity. The great new monastery
school, with the marvellous carved facade, just to the south of the
town, was his, the new rest-house on the mountain road far up in the
hills was his. He supported many monks, he gave largely to the gilding
of the pagoda. If a theatrical company came that way, he subscribed
freely. Soon he thought he would retire from contracting altogether, for
he had enough to live on quietly for the rest of his life.
His action is no exception, but the rule. You will find that every
well-to-do man has built his pagoda or his monastery, and is called
'school-builder' or 'pagoda-builder.' These are the only titles the
Burman knows, and they always are given most scrupulously. The builder
of a bridge, a well, or a rest-house may also receive the title of
'well-builder,' and so on, but such titles are rarely used in common
speech. Even the builder of a long shed for water-jars may call himself
after it if he likes, but it is only big builders who receive any title
from their fellows. But the satisfaction to the man himself, the
knowledge that he has done a good deed, is much the same, I think.
A Burman's wants are very few, such wants as money can supply--a little
house, a sufficiency of plain food, a cotton dress for weekdays and a
silk one for holidays, and that is nearly all.
They are still a very young people. Many wants will come, perhaps, later
on, but just now their desires are easily satisfied.
The Burman does not care for a big house, for there are always the great
trees and the open spaces by the village. It is far pleasanter to sit
out of doors than indoors. He does not care for books. He has what is
better than many books--the life of his people all about him, and he has
the eyes to see it and the heart to understand it. He cares not to see
with other men's eyes, but with his own; he cares not to read other
men's thoughts, but to think his own, for a love of books only comes to
him who is shut always from the world by ill-health, by poverty, by
circumstance. When we are poor and miserable, we like to read of those
who are happier. When we are shut in towns, we love to read of the
beauties of the hills. When we have no love in our hearts, we like to
read of those who have. Few men who think their own thoughts care much
to read the thoughts of others, for a man's own thoughts are worth more
to him than all the thoughts of all the world besides. That a man should
think, that is a great thing. Very, very few great readers are great
thinkers. And he who can live his life, what cares he for reading of the
lives of other people? To have loved once is more than to have read all
the poets that ever sang. So a Burman thinks. To see the moon rise on
the river as you float along, while the boat rocks to and fro and
someone talks to you--is not that better than any tale?
So a Burman lives his life, and he asks a great deal from it. He wants
fresh air and sunshine, and the great thoughts that come to you in the
forest. He wants love and companionship, the voice of friends, the low
laugh of women, the delight of children. He wants his life to be a full
one, and he wants leisure to teach his heart to enjoy all these things;
for he knows that you must learn to enjoy yourself, that it does not
always come naturally, that to be happy and good-natured and
open-hearted requires an education. To learn to sympathize with your
neighbours, to laugh with them and cry with them, you must not shut
yourself away and work. His religion tells him that the first of all
gifts is sympathy; it is the first step towards wisdom, and he holds it
true. After that, all shall be added to you. He believes that happiness
is the best of all things.
We think differently. We are content with cheerless days, with an
absence of love, of beauty, of all that is valuable to the heart, if we
can but put away a little money, if we can enlarge our business, if we
can make a bigger figure in the world. Nay, we go beyond this: we
believe that work, that drudgery, is a beautiful thing in itself, that
perpetual toil and effort is admirable.
This we do because we do not know what to do with our leisure, because
we do not know for what to seek, because we cannot enjoy. And so we go
back to work, to feverish effort, because we cannot think, and see, and
understand. 'Work is a means to leisure,' Aristotle told us long ago,
and leisure, adds the Burman, is needed that you may compose your own
soul. Work, no doubt, is a necessity, too, but not excess of it.
The necessary thing to a man is not gold, nor position, nor power, but
simply his own soul. Nothing is worth anything to him compared with
that, for while a man lives, what is the good of all these things if he
have no leisure to enjoy them? And when he dies, shall they go down into
the void with him? No; but a man's own soul shall go with and be with
him for ever.
A Burman's ideas of this world are dominated by his religion. His
religion says to him, 'Consider your own soul, that is the main thing.'
His religion says to him, 'The aim of every man should be happiness.'
These are the fundamental parts of his belief; these he learns from his
childhood: they are born in him. He looks at all the world by their
light. Later on, when he grows older, his religion says to him, 'And
happiness is only to be found by renouncing the whole world.' This is a
hard teaching. This comes to him slowly, or all Buddhists would be
monks; but, meanwhile, if he does but remember the first two precepts,
he is on the right path.
He does do this. Happiness is the aim he seeks. Work and power and money
are but the means by which he will arrive at the leisure to teach his
own soul. First the body, then the spirit; but with us it is surely
first the body, and then the body again.
He often watches us with surprise. He sees us work and work and work;
he sees us grow old quickly, and our minds get weary; he sees our
sympathies grow very narrow, our ideas bent into one groove, our whole
souls destroyed for a little money, a little fame, a little promotion,
till we go home, and do not know what to do with ourselves, because we
have no work and no sympathy with anything; and at last we die, and take
down with us our souls--souls fit for nothing but to be driven for ever
with a goad behind and a golden fruit in front.
But do not suppose that the Burmese are idle. Such a nation of workers
was never known. Every man works, every woman works, every child works.
Life is not an easy thing, but a hard, and there is a great deal of work
to be done. There is not an idle man or woman in all Burma. The class of
those who live on other men's labour is unknown. I do not think the
Burman would care for such a life, for a certain amount of work is good,
he knows. A little work he likes; a good deal of work he does, because
he is obliged often to do so to earn even the little he requires. And
that is the end. He is a free man, never a slave to other men, nor to
himself.
Therefore I do not think his will ever make what we call a great nation.
He will never try to be a conqueror of other peoples, either with the
sword, with trade, or with religion. He will never care to have a great
voice in the management of the world. He does not care to interfere with
other people: he never believes interference can do other than harm to
both sides.
He will never be very rich, very powerful, very advanced in science,
perhaps not even in art, though I am not sure about that. It may be he
will be very great in literature and art. But, however that may be, in
his own idea his will be always the greatest nation in the world,
because it is the happiest.