Part 17 (1/2)

A great many pilgrims--may G.o.d have pity, as He will, on their poor untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. ”_Rama, nama, satya hai_” (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.

Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. ”But where are the bereaved families?” I asked a Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning human flesh. ”Oh, those are the families you see there,” he replied.

And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them only the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the cremation is concluded it is the son's duty--in some places I visited, at least--to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to release his father's spirit!

But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propitiated G.o.ds, is ”remerging in the general soul,” the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encas.e.m.e.nt in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son of G.o.d and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible ident.i.ty throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic of the social and political inst.i.tutions of the Orient.

{205}

[Ill.u.s.tration: TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI, CENTRAL INDIA.]

India has not a h.o.m.ogeneous population. There are almost as many races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is a praying-wheel.

{206}

TWO RANGOON TYPES.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Supi-yaw-lat and her ”whackin' white cheroot.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Hindu girl.]

Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized:

”'Er petticoat was yaller and 'er little cap was green, An er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.

An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot'”

{207 continued}

But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of ”Mother Gunga,” as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are many temples in which they must wors.h.i.+p, many priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for his services--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).

And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for cra.s.s and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are ”temples” in Benares--so-called ”temples” that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called ”priests” to act as guides to their foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu ”religious”(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the resort of the lowest cla.s.s of women, ”temple girls”

dedicated to G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, but their presence is openly defended as proper.

Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as they are from G.o.dliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked wors.h.i.+ppers, its holy cesspool known as ”The Well of Knowledge,” its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its l.u.s.tful G.o.d Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good ill.u.s.tration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look at them.

That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, ”What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”

Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range.

In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.

Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite ma.s.ses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of ma.s.sive chasms and rugged foothills (these ”foothills” themselves perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of Mount Mitch.e.l.l and imagine four other Mount Mitch.e.l.ls on top of one another above its highest point--the ma.s.sive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.

Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not meet for any but the high G.o.ds themselves to see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldliness.

It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in which man's fretful spirit--