الفصل الفصل 9 · BY FORCE OF KARMA

. BY FORCE OF KARMA

"The face of the beloved and the face of the risen sun cannot be

looked at."--Japanese Proverb.

I

Modern science assures us that the passion of first love, so far

as the individual may be concerned, is "absolutely antecedent to

all relative experience whatever(1)." In other words, that which

might well seem to be the most strictly personal of all feelings,

is not an individual matter at all. Philosophy discovered the

same fact long ago, and never theorized more attractively than

when trying to explain the mystery of the passion. Science, so

far, has severely limited itself to a few suggestions on the

subject. This seems a pity, because the metaphysicians could at

no time give properly detailed explanations,--whether teaching

that the first sight of the beloved quickens in the soul of the

lover some dormant prenatal remembrance of divine truth, or that

the illusion is made by spirits unborn seeking incarnation. But

science and philosophy both agree as to one all-important fact,

that the lovers themselves have no choice, that they are merely

the subjects of an influence. Science is even the more positive

on this point: it states quite plainly that the dead, not the

living, are responsible. There would seem to be some sort of

ghostly remembrance in first loves. It is true that science,

unlike Buddhism, does not declare that under particular

conditions we may begin to recollect our former lives. That

psychology which is based upon physiology even denies the

possibility of memory-inheritance in this individual sense. But

it allows that something more powerful, though more indefinite,

is inherited,--the sum of ancestral memories incalculable,--the

sum of countless billions of trillions of experiences. Thus can

it interpret our most enigmatical sensations,--our conflicting

impulses,--our strangest intuitions; all those seemingly

irrational attractions or repulsions,--all those vague sadnesses

or joys, never to be accounted for by individual experience. But

it has not yet found leisure to discourse much to us about first

love,--although first love, in its relation to the world

invisible, is the very weirdest of all human feelings, and the

most mysterious.

In our Occident the riddle runs thus. To the growing youth, whose

life is normal and vigorous, there comes a sort of atavistic

period in which he begins to feel for the feebler sex that

primitive contempt created by mere consciousness of physical

superiority. But it is just at the time when the society of girls

has grown least interesting to him that he suddenly becomes

insane. There crosses his life-path a maiden never seen

before,--but little different from other daughters of men,--not

at all wonderful to common vision. At the same instant, with a

single surging shock, the blood rushes to his heart; and all his

senses are bewitched. Thereafter, till the madness ends, his life

belongs wholly to that new-found being, of whom he yet knows

nothing, except that the sun's light seems more beautiful when it

touches her. From that glamour no mortal science can disenthrall

him. But whose the witchcraft? Is it any power in the living

idol? No, psychology tells us that it is the power of the dead

within the idolater. The dead cast the spell. Theirs the shock in

the lover's heart; theirs the electric shiver that tingled

through his veins at the first touch of one girl's hand.

But why they should want her, rather than any other, is the

deeper part of the riddle. The solution offered by the great

German pessimist will not harmonize well with scientific

psychology. The choice of the dead, evolutionally considered,

would be a choice based upon remembrance rather than on

prescience. And the enigma is not cheerful.

There is, indeed, the romantic possibility that they want her

because there survives in her, as in some composite photograph,

the suggestion of each and all who loved them in the past. But

there is the possibility also that they want her because there

reappears in her something of the multitudinous charm of all the

women they loved in vain.

Assuming the more nightmarish theory, we should believe that

passion, though buried again and again, can neither die nor rest.

They who have vainly loved only seem to die; they really live on

in generations of hearts, that their desire may be fulfilled.

They wait, perhaps though centuries, for the reincarnation of

shapes beloved,--forever weaving into the dreams of youth their

vapory composite of memories. Hence the ideals unattainable,--the

haunting of troubled souls by the Woman-never-to-be-known.

In the Far East thoughts are otherwise; and what I am about to

write concerns the interpretation of the Lord Buddha.

(1) Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology: "The Feelings."

II

A priest died recently under very peculiar circumstances. He was

the priest of a temple, belonging to one of the older Buddhist

sects, in a village near Osaka. (You can see that temple from the

Kwan-Setsu Railway, as you go by train to Kyoto.)

He was young, earnest, and extremely handsome--very much too

handsome for a priest, the women said. He looked like one of

those beautiful figures of Amida made by the great Buddhist

statuaries of other days.

The men of his parish thought him a pure and learned priest, in

which they were right. The women did not think about his virtue

or his learning only: he possessed the unfortunate power to

attract them, independently of his own will, as a mere man. He

was admired by them, and even by women of other parishes also, in

ways not holy; and their admiration interfered with his studies

and disturbed his meditations. They found irreproachable pretexts

for visiting the temple at all hours, just to look at him and

talk to him; asking questions which it was his duty to answer,

and making religious offerings which he could not well refuse.

Some would ask questions, not of a religious kind, that caused

him to blush. He was by nature too gentle to protect himself by

severe speech, even when forward girls from the city said things

that country-girls never would have said,--things that made him

tell the speakers to leave his presence. And the more he shrank

from the admiration of the timid, or the adulation of the

unabashed, the more the persecution increased, till it became the

torment of his life(1).

His parents had long been dead; he had no worldly ties: he loved

only his calling, and the studies belonging to it; and he did not

wish to think of foolish and forbidden things. His extraordinary

beauty--the beauty of a living idol--was only a misfortune.

Wealth was offered him under conditions that he could not even

discuss. Girls threw themselves at his feet, and prayed him in

vain to love them. Love-letters were constantly being sent to

him, letters which never brought a reply. Some were written in

that classical enigmatic style which speaks of "the Rock-Pillow

of Meeting," and "waves on the shadow of a face," and "streams

that part to reunite." Others were artless and frankly tender,

full of the pathos of a girl's first confession of love.

For a long time such letters left the young priest as unmoved, to

outward appearance, as any image of that Buddha in whose likeness

he seemed to have been made. But, as a matter of fact, he was not

a Buddha, but only a weak man; and his position was trying.

One evening there came to the temple a little boy who gave him a

letter, whispered the name of the sender, and ran away in the

dark. According to the subsequent testimony of an acolyte, the

priest read the letter, restored it to its envelope, and placed

it on the matting, beside his kneeling cushion. After remaining

motionless for a long time, as if buried in thought, he sought

his writing-box, wrote a letter himself, addressed it to his

spiritual superior, and left it upon the writing-stand. Then he

consulted the clock, and a railway time-table in Japanese. The

hour was early; the night windy and dark. He prostrated himself

for a moment in prayer before the altar; then hurried out into

the blackness, and reached the railway exactly in time to kneel

down in the middle of the track, facing the roar and rush of the

express from Kobe. And, in another moment, those who had

worshiped the strange beauty of the man would have shrieked to

see, even by lantern-light, all that remained of his poor

earthliness, smearing the iron way.

The letter written to his superior was found. It contained a bare

statement to the effect that, feeling his spiritual strength

departing from him, he had resolved to die in order that he might

not sin.

The other letter was still lying where he had left it on the

floor,--a letter written in that woman-language of which every

syllable is a little caress of humility. Like all such letters

(they are never sent through the post) it contained no date, no

name, no initial, and its envelope bore no address. Into our

incomparably harsher English speech it might be imperfectly

rendered as follows:--

_To take such freedom may be to assume overmuch; yet I feel that

I must speak to you, and therefore send this letter. As for my

lowly self, I have to say only that when first seeing you in the

period of the Festival of the Further Shore, I began to think;

and that since then I have not, even for a moment, been able to

forget. More and more each day I sink into that ever-growing

thought of you; and when I sleep I dream; and when, awaking and

seeing you not, I remember there was no truth in my thoughts of

the night, I can do nothing but weep. Forgive me that, having

been born into this world a woman, I should utter my wish for the

exceeding favor of being found not hateful to one so high.

Foolish and without delicacy I may seem in allowing my heart to

be thus tortured by the thought of one so far above me. But only

because knowing that I cannot restrain my heart, out of the depth

of it I have suffered these poor words to come, that I may write

them with my unskillful brush, and send them to you. I pray that

you will deem me worthy of pity; I beseech that you will not send

me cruel words in return. Compassionate me, seeing that this is

but the overflowing of my humble feelings; deign to divine and

justly to judge,--be it only with the least of kindliness,--this

heart that, in its great distress alone, so ventures to address

you. Each moment I shall hope and wait for some gladdening

answer_.

_Concerning all things fortunate, felicitation_.

_To-day,--

from the honorably-known,

to the longed-for, beloved, august one,

this letter goes._

(1) Actors in Japan often exercise a similar fascination upon

sensitive girls of the lower classes, and often take cruel

advantage of the power so gained. It is very rarely, indeed, that

such fascination can be exerted by a priest.

III

I called upon a Japanese friend, a Buddhist scholar, to ask some

questions about the religious aspects of the incident. Even as a

confession of human weakness, that suicide appeared to me a

heroism.

It did not so appear to my friend. He spoke words of rebuke. He

reminded me that one who even suggested suicide as a means of

escape from sin had been pronounced by the Buddha a spiritual

outcast,--unfit to live with holy men. As for the dead priest, he

had been one of those whom the Teacher called fools. Only a fool

could imagine that by destroying his own body he was destroying

also within himself the sources of sin.

"But," I protested, "this man's life was pure.... Suppose he

sought death that he might not, unwittingly, cause others to

commit sin?"

My friend smiled ironically. Then he said:--"There was once a

lady of Japan, nobly torn and very beautiful, who wanted to

become a nun. She went to a certain temple, and made her wish

known. But the high-priest said to her, 'You are still very

young. You have lived the life of courts. To the eyes of worldly

men you are beautiful; and, because of your face, temptations to

return to the pleasures of the world will be devised for you.

Also this wish of yours may be due to some momentary sorrow.

Therefore, I cannot now consent to your request.' But she still

pleaded so earnestly, that he deemed it best to leave her

abruptly. There was a large hibachi--a brazier of glowing

charcoal--in the room where she found herself alone. She heated

the iron tongs of the brazier till they were red, and with them

horribly pierced and seamed her face, destroying her beauty

forever. Then the priest, alarmed by the smell of the burning,

returned in haste, and was very much grieved by what he saw. But

she pleaded again, without any trembling in her voice: 'Because I

was beautiful, you refused to take me. Will you take me now?' She

was accepted into the Order, and became a holy nun.... Well,

which was the wiser, that woman, or the priest you wanted to

praise?"

"But was it the duty of the priest," I asked, "to disfigure his

face?"

"Certainly not! Even the woman's action would have been very

unworthy if done only as a protection against temptation.

Self-mutilation of any sort is forbidden by the law of Buddha; and

she transgressed. But, as she burned her face only that she might

be able to enter at once upon the Path, and not because afraid of

being unable by her own will to resist sin, her fault was a minor

fault. On the other hand, the priest who took his own life

committed a very great offense. He should have tried to convert

those who tempted him. This he was too weak to do. If he felt it

impossible to keep from sinning as a priest, then it would have

been better for him to return to the world, and there try to

follow the law for such as do not belong to the Order."

"According to Buddhism, therefore, he has obtained no merit?" I

queried.

"It is not easy to imagine that he has. Only by those ignorant of

the Law can his action be commended."

"And by those knowing the Law, what will be thought of the

results, the karma of his act?"

My friend mused a little; then he said, thoughtfully:--"The whole

truth of that suicide we cannot fully know. Perhaps it was not

the first time."

"Do you mean that in some former life also he may have tried to

escape from sin by destroying his own body?"

"Yes. Or in many former lives."

"What of his future lives?"

"Only a Buddha could answer that with certain knowledge."

"But what is the teaching?"

"You forget that it is not possible for us to know what was in

the mind of that man."

"Suppose that he sought death only to escape from sinning?"

"Then he will have to face the like temptation again and again,

and all the sorrow of it, and all the pain, even for a thousand

times a thousand times, until he shall have learned to master

himself. There is no escape through death from the supreme

necessity of self-conquest."

After parting with my friend, his words continued to haunt me;

and they haunt me still. They forced new thoughts about some

theories hazarded in the first part of this paper. I have not yet

been able to assure myself that his weird interpretation of the

amatory mystery is any less worthy of consideration than our

Western interpretations. I have been wondering whether the loves

that lead to death might not mean much more than the ghostly

hunger of buried passions. Might they not signify also the

inevitable penalty of long-forgotten sins?

X