Part 21 (2/2)

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 compa.s.sion to all the world alike.

'Gayuna,' compa.s.sion, that is the only pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sions 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 part.i.tions 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l of a palm-fruit. The nuisance was, he explained, that this sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 paG.o.da 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.

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