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--"Venerable Nagasena, are there such things as demons in the world?"
--"Yes, O King."
--"Do they ever leave that condition of existence?"
--"Yes, they do."
--"But, if so, why is it that the remains of those demons are never
found?"...
--"Their remains are found, O King.... The remains of bad demons can
be found in the form of worms and beetles and ants and snakes and
scorpions and centipedes."...
--_The Questions of King Milinda._
I
There are moments in life when truths but dimly known before--beliefs
first vaguely reached through multiple processes of reasoning--suddenly
assume the vivid character of emotional convictions. Such an experience
came to me the other day, on the Suruga coast. While resting under
the pines that fringed the beach, something in the vital warmth
and luminous peace of the hour--some quivering rapture of wind and
light--very strangely bestirred an old belief of mine: the belief that
all being is One. One I felt myself to be with the thrilling of breeze
and the racing of wave,--with every flutter of shadow and flicker of
sun,--with the azure of sky and sea,--with the great green hush of the
land. In some new and wonderful way I found myself assured that there
never could have been a beginning,--that there never could be an end.
Nevertheless, the ideas of the moment were not new: the novelty of the
experience was altogether in the peculiar intensity with which they
presented themselves; making me feel that the flashing dragon-flies,
and the long gray sand-crickets, and the shrilling sémi overhead, and
the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines, were all of
them brothers and sisters. I seemed to understand, as never before, how
the mystery that is called the Soul of me must have quickened in every
form of past existence, and must as certainly continue to behold the
sun, for other millions of summers, through eyes of other countless
shapes of future being. And I tried to think the long slow thoughts of
the long gray crickets,--and the thoughts of the darting, shimmering
dragonflies,--and the thoughts of the basking, trilling cicadæ,--and
the thoughts of the wicked little crabs that lifted up their claws
from between the roots of the pines.
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Presently I discovered myself wondering whether the consequence of
such thoughts could have anything to do with the recombination of my
soul-dust in future spheres of existence. For thousands of years the
East has been teaching that what we think or do in this life really
decides,--through some inevitable formation of-atom-tendencies, or
polarities,--the future place of our substance, and the future state
of our sentiency. And the belief is worth thinking about--though no
amount of thinking can enable us either to confirm or to disprove it.
Very possibly, like other Buddhist doctrines, it may adumbrate some
cosmic truth; but its literal assertions I doubt, because I must doubt
the power ascribed to thought. By the whole infinite past I have been
moulded, within and without: how should the impulse of a moment reshape
me against the weight of the eternities?... Buddhism indeed answers
how, and that astounding answer is irrefutable,--but I doubt....
Anyhow, acts and thoughts, according to Buddhist doctrine, are
creative. Visible matter is made by acts and thoughts,--even the
universe of stars, and all that has form and name, and all the
conditions of existence. What we think or do is never for the moment
only, but for measureless time: it signifies some force directed to the
shaping of worlds,--to the making of future bliss or pain. Remembering
this, we may raise ourselves to the zones of the Gods. Ignoring it, we
may deprive ourselves even of the right to be reborn among men, and may
doom ourselves, though innocent of the crimes that cause rebirth in
hell, to reënter existence in the form of animals, or of insects, or of
goblins,--_gaki_.[1]
So it depends upon ourselves whether we are to become insects or
goblins hereafter; and in the Buddhist system the difference between
insects and goblins is not so well defined as might be supposed. The
belief in a mysterious relation between ghosts and insects, or rather
between spirits and insects, is a very ancient belief in the East,
where it now assumes innumerable forms,--some unspeakably horrible,
others full of weird beauty.
"The White Moth" of Mr. Quiller-Couch would not impress a Japanese
reader as novel; for the night-moth or the butterfly figures in
many a Japanese poem and legend as the soul of a lost wife. The
night-cricket's thin lament is perhaps the sorrowing of a voice once
human;--the strange red marks upon the heads of cicadæ are characters
of spirit-names;--dragon-flies and grasshoppers are the horses of the
dead. All these are to be pitied with the pity that is kin to love.
But the noxious and dangerous insects represent the results of another
quality of karma,--that which produces goblins and demons. Grisly
names have been given to some of these insects,--as, for example,
_Jigokumushi,_ or "Hell-insect," to the ant-lion; and _Kappa-mushi_,
to a gigantic water-beetle which seizes frogs and fish, and devours
them alive, thus realizing, in a microcosmic way, the hideous myth of
the _Kappa_, or River-goblin. Flies, on the other hand, are especially
identified with the world of hungry ghosts. How often, in the season of
flies, have I heard some persecuted toiler exclaim, "_Kyō no hai wa,
gaki no yo da ne?_" (The flies to-day, how like gaki they are!)
[Footnote 1: The word gaki is the Japanese Buddhist rendering of the
Sanscrit term "preta," signifying a spirit in that circle or state of
torment called the World of Hungry Ghosts.]