THE POTTER'S WHEEL
'Life is like a great whirlpool wherein we are dashed to and fro by
our passions.'--_Saying of the Buddha._
It is a hard teaching, this of the Buddha about death. It is a teaching
that may appeal to the reason, but not to the soul, that when life goes
out, this thing which we call 'I' goes out with it, and that love and
remembrance are dead for ever.
It is so hard a teaching that in its purity the people cannot believe
it. They accept it, but they have added on to it a belief which changes
the whole form of it, a belief that is the outcome of that weakness of
humanity which insists that death is not and cannot be all.
Though to the strict Buddhist death is the end of all worldly passion,
to the Burmese villager that is not so. He cannot grasp, he cannot
endure that it should be so, and he has made for himself out of Buddhism
a belief that is opposed to all Buddhism in this matter.
He believes in the transmigration of souls, in the survival of the 'I.'
The teaching that what survives is not the 'I,' but only the result of
its action, is too deep for him to hold. True, if a flame dies the
effects that it has caused remain, and the flame is dead for ever. A new
flame is a new flame. But the 'I' of man cannot die, he thinks; it lives
and loves for all time.
He has made out of the teaching a new teaching that is very far from
that of the Buddha, and the teaching is this: When a man dies his soul
remains, his 'I' has only changed its habitation. Still it lives and
breathes on earth, not the effect, but the soul itself. It is reborn
among us, and it may even be recognised very often in its new abode.
And that we should never forget this, that we should never doubt that
this is true, it has been so ordered that many can remember something of
these former lives of theirs. This belief is not to a Burman a mere
theory, but is as true as anything he can see. For does he not daily see
people who know of their former lives? Nay, does he not himself, often
vaguely, have glimpses of that former life of his? No man seems to be
quite without it, but of course it is clearer to some than others. Just
as we tell stories in the dusk of ghosts and second sight, so do they,
when the day's work is over, gossip of stories of second birth; only
that they believe in them far more than we do in ghosts.
A friend of mine put up for the night once at a monastery far away in
the forest near a small village. He was travelling with an escort of
mounted police, and there was no place else to sleep but in the
monastery. The monk was, as usual, hospitable, and put what he had, bare
house-room, at the officer's disposal, and he and his men settled down
for the night.
After dinner a fire was built on the ground, and the officer went and
sat by it and talked to the headman of the village and the monk. First
they talked of the dacoits and of crops, unfailing subjects of interest,
and gradually they drifted from one subject to another till the
Englishman remarked about the monastery, that it was a very large and
fine one for such a small secluded village to have built. The monastery
was of the best and straightest teak, and must, he thought, have taken a
very long time and a great deal of labour to build, for the teak must
have been brought from very far away; and in explanation he was told a
curious story.
It appeared that in the old days there used to be only a bamboo and
grass monastery there, such a monastery as most jungle villages have;
and the then monk was distressed at the smallness of his abode and the
little accommodation there was for his school--a monastery is always a
school. So one rainy season he planted with great care a number of teak
seedlings round about, and he watered them and cared for them. 'When
they are grown up,' he would say, 'these teak-trees shall provide
timber for a new and proper building; and I will myself return in
another life, and with those trees will I build a monastery more worthy
than this.' Teak-trees take a hundred years to reach a mature size, and
while the trees were still but saplings the monk died, and another monk
taught in his stead. And so it went on, and the years went by, and from
time to time new monasteries of bamboo were built and rebuilt, and the
teak-trees grew bigger and bigger. But the village grew smaller, for the
times were troubled, and the village was far away in the forest. So it
happened that at last the village found itself without a monk at all:
the last monk was dead, and no one came to take his place.
It is a serious thing for a village to have no monk. To begin with,
there is no one to teach the lads to read and write and do arithmetic;
and there is no one to whom you can give offerings and thereby get
merit, and there is no one to preach to you and tell you of the sacred
teaching. So the village was in a bad way.
Then at last one evening, when the girls were all out at the well
drawing water, they were surprised by the arrival of a monk walking in
from the forest, weary with a long journey, footsore and hungry. The
villagers received him with enthusiasm, fearing, however, that he was
but passing through, and they furbished up the old monastery in a hurry
for him to sleep in. But the curious thing was that the monk seemed to
know it all. He knew the monastery and the path to it, and the ways
about the village, and the names of the hills and the streams. It
seemed, indeed, as if he must once have lived there in the village, and
yet no one knew him or recognised his face, though he was but a young
man still, and there were villagers who had lived there for seventy
years. Next morning, instead of going on his way, the monk came into the
village with his begging-bowl, as monks do, and went round and collected
his food for the day; and in the evening, when the villagers went to see
him at the monastery, he told them he was going to stay. He recalled to
them the monk who had planted the teak-trees, and how he had said that
when the trees were grown he would return. 'I,' said the young monk, 'am
he that planted these trees. Lo, they are grown up, and I am returned,
and now we will build a monastery as I said.'
When the villagers, doubting, questioned him, and old men came and
talked to him of traditions of long-past days, he answered as one who
knew all. He told them he had been born and educated far away in the
South, and had grown up not knowing who he had been; and that he had
entered a monastery, and in time became a Pongyi. The remembrance came
to him, he went on, in a dream of how he had planted the trees and had
promised to return to that village far away in the forest.
The very next day he had started, and travelled day after day and week
upon week, till at length he had arrived, as they saw. So the villagers
were convinced, and they set to work and cut down the great boles, and
built the monastery such as my friend saw. And the monk lived there all
his life, and taught the children, and preached the marvellous teaching
of the great Buddha, till at length his time came again and he returned;
for of monks it is not said that they die, but that they return.
This is the common belief of the people. Into this has the mystery of
Dharma turned, in the thoughts of the Burmese Buddhists, for no one can
believe the incomprehensible. A man has a soul, and it passes from life
to life, as a traveller from inn to inn, till at length it is ended in
heaven. But not till he has attained heaven in his heart will he attain
heaven in reality.
Many children, the Burmese will tell you, remember their former lives.
As they grow older the memories die away and they forget, but to the
young children they are very clear. I have seen many such.
About fifty years ago in a village named Okshitgon were born two
children, a boy and a girl. They were born on the same day in
neighbouring houses, and they grew up together, and played together, and
loved each other. And in due course they married and started a family,
and maintained themselves by cultivating their dry, barren fields about
the village. They were always known as devoted to each other, and they
died as they had lived--together. The same death took them on the same
day; so they were buried without the village and were forgotten; for the
times were serious.
It was the year after the English army had taken Mandalay, and all Burma
was in a fury of insurrection. The country was full of armed men, the
roads were unsafe, and the nights were lighted with the flames of
burning villages. It was a bad time for peace-loving men, and many such,
fleeing from their villages, took refuge in larger places nearer the
centres of administration.
Okshitgon was in the midst of one of the worst of all the distressed
districts, and many of its people fled, and one of them, a man named
Maung Kan, with his young wife went to the village of Kabyu and lived
there.
Now, Maung Kan's wife had born to him twin sons. They were born at
Okshitgon shortly before their parents had to run away, and they were
named, the eldest Maung Gyi, which is Brother Big-fellow, and the
younger Maung Nge, which means Brother Little-fellow. These lads grew up
at Kabyu, and soon learned to talk; and as they grew up their parents
were surprised to hear them calling to each other at play, and calling
each other, not Maung Gyi and Maung Nge, but Maung San Nyein and Ma
Gywin. The latter is a woman's name, and the parents remembered that
these were the names of the man and wife who had died in Okshitgon about
the time the children were born.
So the parents thought that the souls of the man and wife had entered
into the children, and they took them to Okshitgon to try them. The
children knew everything in Okshitgon; they knew the roads and the
houses and the people, and they recognised the clothes they used to wear
in a former life; there was no doubt about it. One of them, the younger,
remembered, too, how she had borrowed two rupees once of a woman, Ma
Thet, unknown to her husband, and left the debt unpaid. Ma Thet was
still living, and so they asked her, and she recollected that it was
true she had lent the money long ago.
Shortly afterwards I saw these two children. They are now just over six
years old. The elder, into whom the soul of the man entered, is a fat,
chubby little fellow, but the younger twin is smaller, and has a curious
dreamy look in his face, more like a girl than a boy. They told me much
about their former lives. After they died they said they lived for some
time without a body at all, wandering in the air and hiding in the
trees. This was for their sins. Then, after some months, they were born
again as twin boys. 'It used,' said the elder boy, 'to be so clear, I
could remember everything; but it is getting duller and duller, and I
cannot now remember as I used to do.'
Of children such as this you may find any number. Only you have to look
for them, as they are not brought forward spontaneously. The Burmese,
like other people, hate to have their beliefs and ideas ridiculed, and
from experience they have learned that the object of a foreigner in
inquiring into their ways is usually to be able to show by his contempt
how very much cleverer a man he is than they are. Therefore they are
very shy. But once they understand that you only desire to learn and to
see, and that you will always treat them with courtesy and
consideration, they will tell you all that they think.
A fellow officer of mine has a Burmese police orderly, a young man about
twenty, who has been with him since he came to the district two years
ago. Yet my friend only discovered accidentally the other day that his
orderly remembers his former life. He is very unwilling to talk about
it. He was a woman apparently in that former life, and lived about
twenty miles away. He must have lived a good life, for it is a step of
promotion to be a man in this life; but he will not talk of it. He
forgets most of it, he says, though he remembered it when he was a
child.
Sometimes this belief leads to lawsuits of a peculiarly difficult
nature. In 1883, two years before the annexation of Upper Burma, there
was a case that came into the local Court of the oil district, which
depended upon this theory of transmigration.
Opposite Yenangyaung there are many large islands in the river. These
islands during the low water months are joined to the mainland, and are
covered with a dense high grass in which many deer live.
When the river rises, it rises rapidly, communication with the mainland
is cut off, and the islands are for a time, in the higher rises,
entirely submerged. During the progress of the first rise some hunters
went to one of these islands where many deer were to be found and set
fire to the grass to drive them out of cover, shooting them as they came
out. Some deer, fleeing before the fire, swam across and escaped, others
fell victims, but one fawn, barely half grown, ran right down the
island, and in its blind terror it leaped into a boat at anchor there.
This boat was that of a fisherman who was plying his trade at some
distance, and the only occupant of the boat was his wife. Now this woman
had a year or so before lost her son, very much loved by her, but who
was not quite of the best character, and when she saw the deer leaping
into the boat, she at once fancied that she saw the soul of her erring
son looking at her out of its great terrified eyes. So she got up and
took the poor panting beast in her arms and soothed it, and when the
hunters came running to her to claim it she refused. 'He is my son,' she
said, 'he is mine. Shall I give him up to death?' The hunters clamoured
and threatened to take the deer by force, but the woman was quite firm.
She would never give him up except with her life. 'You can see,' she
said, 'that it is true that he is my son. He came running straight to
me, as he always did in his trouble when he was a boy, and he is now
quite quiet and contented, instead of being afraid of me as an ordinary
deer would be.' And it was quite true that the deer took to her at once,
and remained with her willingly. So the hunters went off to the court of
the governor and filed a suit for the deer.
The case was tried in open court, and the deer was produced with a
ribbon round its neck. Evidence there was naturally but little. The
hunters claimed the deer because they had driven it out of the island by
their fire. The woman resisted the claim on the ground that it was her
son.
The decision of the court was this:
'The hunters are not entitled to the deer because they cannot prove that
the woman's son's soul is not in the animal. The woman is not entitled
to the deer because she cannot prove that it is. The deer will therefore
remain with the court until some properly authenticated claim is put
in.'
So the two parties were turned out, the woman in bitter tears, and the
hunters angry and vexed, and the deer remained the property of the
judge.
But this decision was against all Burmese ideas of justice. He should
have given the deer to the woman. 'He wanted it for himself,' said a
Burman, speaking to me of the affair. 'He probably killed it and ate it.
Surely it is true that officials are of all the five evils the
greatest.' Then my friend remembered that I was myself an official, and
he looked foolish, and began to make complimentary remarks about English
officials, that they would never give such an iniquitous decision. I
turned it off by saying that no doubt the judge was now suffering in
some other life for the evil wrought in the last, and the Burman said
that probably he was now inhabiting a tiger.
It is very easy to laugh at such beliefs; nothing is, indeed, easier
than to be witty at the expense of any belief. It is also very easy to
say that it is all self-deception, that the children merely imagine that
they remember their former lives, or are citing conversation of their
elders.
How this may be I do not know. What is the explanation of this, perhaps
the only belief of which we have any knowledge which is at once a living
belief to-day and was so as far back as we can get, I do not pretend to
say. For transmigration is no theory of Buddhism at all, but was a
leading tenet in the far older faith of Brahmanism, of which Buddhism
was but an offshoot, as was Christianity of Judaism.
I have not, indeed, always attempted to reach the explanation of things
I have seen. When I have satisfied myself that a belief is really held
by the people, that I am not the subject of conscious deception, either
by myself or others, I have conceived that my work was ended.
There are those who, in investigating any foreign customs and strange
beliefs, can put their finger here and say, 'This is where they are
right'; and there and say, 'This belief is foolishly wrong and idiotic.'
I am not, unfortunately, one of these writers. I have no such confident
belief in my own infallibility of judgment as to be able to sit on high
and say, 'Here is truth, and here is error.'
I will leave my readers to make their own judgment, if they desire to do
so; only asking them (as they would not like their own beliefs to be
scoffed and sneered at) that they will treat with respect the sincere
beliefs of others, even if they cannot accept them. It is only in this
way that we can come to understand a people and to sympathize with them.
It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous effect that a belief in
transmigration such as this has upon the life and intercourse of the
people. Of their kindness to animals I have spoken elsewhere, and it is
possible this belief in transmigration has something to do with it, but
not, I think, much. For if you wished to illtreat an animal, it would be
quite easy, even more easy, to suppose that an enemy or a murderer
inhabited the body of the animal, and that you were but carrying out the
decrees of fate by ill-using it. But when you love an animal, it may
increase that love and make it reasonable, and not a thing to be ashamed
of; and it brings the animal world nearer to you in general, it bridges
over the enormous void between man and beast that other religions have
made. Nothing humanizes a man more than love of animals.
I do not know if this be a paradox, I know that it is a truth.
There was one point that puzzled me for a time in some of these stories
of transmigration, such as the one I told about the man and wife being
reborn twins. It was this: A man dies and leaves behind children, let us
say, to whom he is devoutly attached. He is reborn in another family in
the same village, maybe. It would be natural to suppose that he would
love his former family as much as, or even more than, his new one.
Complications might arise in this way which it is easy to conceive would
cause great and frequent difficulties.
I explained this to a Burman one day, and asked him what happened, and
this is what he said: 'The affection of mother to son, of husband to
wife, of brother to sister, belongs entirely to the body in which you
may happen to be living. When it dies, so do these affections. New
affections arise from the new body. The flesh of the son, being of one
with his father, of course loves him; but as his present flesh has no
sort of connection with his former one, he does not love those to whom
he was related in his other lives. These affections are as much a part
of the body as the hand or the eyesight; with one you put off the
other.'
Thus all love, to the learned, even the purest affection of daughter to
mother, of man to his friend, is in theory a function of the body--with
the one we put off the other; and this may explain, perhaps, something
of what my previous chapter did not make quite clear, that in the
hereafter[2] of Buddhism there is no affection.
When we have put off all bodies, when we have attained Nirvana, love and
hate, desire and repulsion, will have fallen from us for ever.
Meanwhile, in each life, we are obliged to endure the affections of the
body into which we may be born. It is the first duty of a monk, of him
who is trying to lead the purer life, to kill all these affections, or
rather to blend them into one great compassion to all the world alike.
'Gayuena,' compassion, that is the only passion that will be left to
us. So say the learned.
I met a little girl not long ago, a wee little maiden about seven years
old, and she told me all about her former life when she was a man. Her
name was Maung Mon, she said, and she used to work the dolls in a
travelling marionette show. It was through her knowledge and partiality
for marionettes that it was first suspected, her parents told me, whom
she had been in her former life. She could even as a sucking-child
manipulate the strings of a marionette-doll. But the actual discovery
came when she was about four years old, and she recognised a certain
marionette booth and dolls as her own. She knew all about them, knew
the name of each doll, and even some of the words they used to say in
the plays. 'I was married four times,' she told me. 'Two wives died, one
I divorced; one was living when I died, and is living still. I loved her
very much indeed. The one I divorced was a dreadful woman. See,'
pointing to a scar on her shoulder, 'this was given me once in a
quarrel. She took up a chopper and cut me like this. Then I divorced
her. She had a dreadful temper.'
It was immensely quaint to hear this little thing discoursing like this.
The mark was a birth-mark, and I was assured that it corresponded
exactly with one that had been given to the man by his wife in just such
a quarrel as the one the little girl described.
The divorced wife and the much-loved wife are still alive and not yet
old. The last wife wanted the little girl to go and live with her. I
asked her why she did not go.
'You loved her so much,' I said. 'She was such a good wife to you.
Surely you would like to live with her again.'
'But all that,' she replied, 'was in a former life.'
Now she loved only her present father and mother. The last life was like
a dream. Broken memories of it still remained, but the loves and hates,
the passions and impulses, were all dead.
Another little boy told me once that the way remembrance came to him was
by seeing the silk he used to wear made into curtains, which are given
to the monks and used as partitions in their monasteries, and as walls
to temporary erections made at festival times. He was taken when some
three years old to a feast at the making of a lad, the son of a wealthy
merchant, into a monk. There he recognised in the curtain walling in
part of the bamboo building his old dress. He pointed it out at once.
This same little fellow told me that he passed three months between his
death and his next incarnation without a body. This was because he had
once accidentally killed a fowl. Had he killed it on purpose, he would
have been punished very much more severely. Most of this three months he
spent dwelling in the hollow shell of a palm-fruit. The nuisance was, he
explained, that this shell was close to the cattle-path, and that the
lads as they drove the cattle afield in the early morning would bang
with a stick against the shell. This made things very uncomfortable for
him inside.
It is not an uncommon thing for a woman when about to be delivered of a
baby to have a dream, and to see in that dream the spirit of someone
asking for permission to enter the unborn child; for, to a certain
extent, it lies within a woman's power to say who is to be the life of
her child.
There was a woman once who loved a young man, not of her village, very
dearly. And he loved her, too, as dearly as she loved him, and he
demanded her in marriage from her parents; but they refused. Why they
refused I do not know, but probably because they did not consider the
young man a proper person for their daughter to marry. Then he tried to
run away with her, and nearly succeeded, but they were caught before
they got clear of the village.
The young man had to leave the neighbourhood. The attempted abduction of
a girl is an offence severely punishable by law, so he fled; and in
time, under pressure from her people, the girl married another man; but
she never forgot. She lived with her husband quite happily; he was good
to her, as most Burmese husbands are, and they got along well enough
together. But there were no children.
After some years, four or five, I believe, the former lover returned to
his village. He thought that after this lapse of time he would be safe
from prosecution, and he was, moreover, very ill.
He was so ill that very soon he died, without ever seeing again the girl
he was so fond of; and when she heard of his death she was greatly
distressed, so that the desire of life passed away from her. It so
happened that at this very time she found herself enceinte with her
first child, and not long before the due time came for the child to be
born she had a dream.
She dreamt that her soul left her body, and went out into space and met
there the soul of her lover who had died. She was rejoiced to meet him
again, full of delight, so that the return of her soul to her body, her
awakening to a world in which he was not, filled her with despair. So
she prayed her lover, if it was now time for him again to be incarnated,
that he would come to her--that his soul would enter the body of the
little baby soon about to be born, so that they two might be together in
life once more.
And in the dream the lover consented. He would come, he said, into the
child of the woman he loved.
When the woman awoke she remembered it all, and the desire of life
returned to her again, and all the world was changed because of the new
life she felt within her. But she told no one then of the dream or of
what was to happen.
Only she took the greatest care of herself; she ate well, and went
frequently to the pagoda with flowers, praying that the body in which
her lover was about to dwell might be fair and strong, worthy of him who
took it, worthy of her who gave it.
In due time the baby was born. But alas and alas for all her hopes! The
baby came but for a moment, to breathe a few short breaths, to cry, and
to die; and a few hours later the woman died also. But before she went
she told someone all about it, all about the dream and the baby, and
that she was glad to go and follow her lover. She said that her baby's
soul was her lover's soul, and that as he could not stay, neither would
she; and with these words on her lips she followed him out into the
void.
The story was kept a secret until the husband died, not long
afterwards; but when I came to the village all the people knew it.
I must confess that this story is to me full of the deepest reality,
full of pathos. It seems to me to be the unconscious protestation of
humanity against the dogmas of religion and of the learned. However it
may be stated that love is but one of the bodily passions that dies with
it; however, even in some of the stories themselves, this explanation is
used to clear certain difficulties; however opposed eternal love may be
to one of the central doctrines of Buddhism, it seems to me that the
very essence of this story is the belief that love does not die with the
body, that it lives for ever and ever, through incarnation after
incarnation. Such a story is the very cry of the agony of humanity.
'Love is strong as death; many waters cannot quench love;' ay, and love
is stronger than death. Not any dogmas of any religion, not any
philosophy, nothing in this world, nothing in the next, shall prevent
him who loves from the certainty of rejoining some time the soul he
loves.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] The hereafter = the state to which we attain when we have
done with earthly things.