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  "Charming," said Will, as he watched her go. "Couldn't be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she's doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practicing?"

  "She's practicing," Vijaya explained, "the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side."

  "And do you highbrows encourage this kind of thing?"

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  "We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making flytraps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there's a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that's religion. Good religion or bad religion—it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr. Andrew was brought up in, you're given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jugful of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favor of truth and decency. Our local Old-Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison."

  Will nodded. "Offerings of white orchids to an image of compassion and enlightenment—it certainly seems harmless enough. And after what I saw yesterday, I'd be prepared to put in a good word for cosmic dancing and divine copulation."

  "And remember," said Vijaya, "this sort of thing isn't compulsory. Everybody's given a chance to go further. You asked what that child thinks she's doing. I'll tell you. With one part of her mind, she thinks she's talking to a person—an enormous, divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants. But she's already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha's statue and about the experiences that give birth to those profounder symbols. Consequently with another part of her mind she knows perfectly well that Amitabha isn't a person. She even knows,

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  because it's been explained to her, that if prayers are sometimes answered it's because, in this very odd psychophysical world of ours, ideas have a tendency, if you concentrate your mind on them, to get themselves realized. She knows too that this temple isn't what she still likes to think it is—the house of Buddha. She knows it's just a diagram of her own unconscious mind—a dark little cubbyhole with lizards crawling upside down on the ceiling and cockroaches in all the crevices. But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment. And that's another thing the child is doing—she's unconsciously learning a lesson about herself, she's being told that if she'd only stop giving herself suggestions to the contrary, she might discover that her own busy little mind is also Mind with a large M."

  "And how soon will the lesson be learned? When will she stop giving herself those suggestions?"

  "She may never learn. A lot of people don't. On the other hand, a lot of people do."

  He took Will's arm and led him into the deeper darkness behind the image of Enlightenment. The chanting grew more distinct, and there, hardly visible in the shadows, sat the chanter—a very old man, naked to the waist and, except for his moving lips, as rigidly still as Amitabha's golden statue. "What's he intoning?" Will asked. "Something in Sanskrit."

  Seven incomprehensible syllables, again and again. "Good old vain repetition!"

  "Not necessarily vain," Mrs. Rao objected. "Sometimes it really gets you somewhere."

  "It gets you somewhere," Vijaya elaborated, "not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they're being repeated. You could repeat Hey Diddle Diddle and it would work just as well as Om or Kyrie Eleison or La ila ilia 'llah. It works because when you're busy with the repetition of Hey Diddle Diddle or the name of God, you can't be entirely

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  preoccupied with yourself. The only trouble is that you can hey-diddle-diddle yourself downwards as well as upwards—down into the not-thought of idiocy as well as up into the not-thought of pure awareness."

  "So, I take it, you wouldn't recommend this kind of thing," said Will, "to our little friend with the orchids?"

  "Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn't. I know her very well; she plays with my children."

  "Then what would you do in her case?"

  "Among other things," said Vijaya, "I'd take her, in another year or so, to the place we're going to now."

  "What place?"

  "The meditation room."

  Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened onto a little garden planted with banana and breadfruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.

  "My word!" he said at last. "Who is it by?"

  "Gobind Singh."

  "And who's Gobind Singh?"

  "The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in 'forty-eight."

  "Why haven't we ever seen anything by him?"

  "Because we like his work too well to export any of it."

  "Good for you," said Will. "But bad for us." He looked again at the picture. "Did this man ever go to China?"

  "No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he'd seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes."

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  "A Sung master," said Will, "who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro."

  "Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard."

  Will nodded. "One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture." He went on looking at the picture in silence. "Why do you hang it in the meditation room?" he asked at last.

  "Why do you suppose?" Vijaya countered.

  "Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?"

  "The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It's an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It's a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge."

  "What clouds!" said Will. "And the light!"

  "The light," Vijaya elaborated, "of the last hour before dusk. It's just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow."

  "Deepens every shadow," Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the center of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how

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  perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, "Of what?" you found no answer. Will put the question into words.

  "What do they mean?" Vijaya repeated. "They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that's why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudoreligious pictures always refer to something else, somet
hing beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that's why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room."

  "Always landscapes?"

  "Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who

  they are."

  "Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?"

  Vijaya nodded. "It's the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a behaviorist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you're confronted with a landscape like this, it's psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You're almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you're practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing."

  "Self-knowing?"

  "Self-knowing," Vijaya insisted. "This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody's mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that's getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a

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  notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts." He pointed a finger at the picture. "The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapor above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those faraway peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance," he added parenthetically, "their ability to express the fact of distance—that's yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures."

  "Because distance lends enchantment to the view?" "No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there's a lot more to the universe than just people—that there's even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space—it's the first and fundamental religious experience. 'O Death in life, the days that are no more'—and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not this place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights—all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man's capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind," Vijaya added, "the worst feature of your nonrepresentational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a colored object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rorschach inkblot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his

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  own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we're looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don't find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract nonob-jective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious— and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial."

  "Do you come here often?" Will asked after a silence. "Whenever I feel like meditating in a group rather than alone."

  "How often is that?"

  "Once every week or so. But of course some people like to do it oftener—and some much more rarely, or even never. It depends on one's temperament. Take our friend Susila, for example—she needs big doses of solitude; so she hardly ever comes to the meditation room. Whereas Shanta (that's my wife) likes to look in here almost every day."

  "So do I," said Mrs. Rao. "But that's only to be expected," she added with a laugh. "Fat people enjoy company—even when they're meditating."

  "And do you meditate on this picture?" Will asked. "Not on it. From it, if you see what I mean. Or rather parallel with it. I look at it, and the other people look at it, and it reminds us all of who we are and what we aren't, and how what we aren't might turn into who we are."

  "Is there any connection," Will asked, "between what you've been talking about and what I saw up there in the Shiva temple?" "Of course there is," she answered. "The moksha-medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation." "So why bother to meditate?"

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  "You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?" "But, according to you, the moksha-medicne is dinner." "It's a banquet," she said emphatically. "And that's precisely why there has to be meditation. You can't have banquets every day. They're too rich and they last too long. Besides, banquets are provided by a caterer; you don't have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The moksha-medicine comes as an occasional treat."

  "In theological terms," said Vijaya, "the moksha-medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces—premystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces." "How?"

  "By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations. By getting to know oneself to the point where one won't be compelled by one's unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing."

  "You mean, it helps one to be more intelligent?" "Not more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument—more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships."

  "More intelligent on that level," said Mrs. Rao, "even though one may be very stupid upstairs." She patted the top of her head. "I'm too dumb to be any good at the things that Dr. Robert and Vijaya are good at—genetics and biochemistry and philosophy and all the rest. And I'm no good at painting or poetry or acting. No talents and no cleverness. So I ought to feel horribly inferior and depressed. But in fact I don't—thanks entirely to the moksha-medicine and meditation. No talents or cleverness. But when it comes to living, when it comes to understanding people and helping them, I feel myself growing more

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  and more sensitive and skillful. And when it comes to what Vijaya calls gratuitous graces ..." She broke off. "You could be the greatest genius in the world, but you wouldn't have anything more than what I've been given. Isn't that true, Vijaya?"

  "Perfectly true."

  She turned back to Will. "So you see, Mr. Farnaby, Pala's the place for stupid people. The greatest happiness of the greatest number—and we stupid ones are the greatest number. People like Dr. Robert and Vijaya and my darling Ranga—we recognize their superiority, we know very well that their kind of intelligence is enormously important. But we also know that our kind of intelli gence is just as important. And we don't envy them, because we're given just as much as they are. Sometimes even more."

  "Sometimes," Vijaya agreed, "even more. For the simple rea son that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the
way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces."

  "So you see," said Mrs. Rao, "you don't have to feel too sorry for us." She looked at her watch. "Goodness, I shall be late for Dillip's dinner if I don't hurry."

  She started briskly towards the door.

  "Time, time, time," Will mocked. "Time even in this place of timeless meditation. Time for dinner breaking incorrigibly into eternity." He laughed. Never take yes for an answer. The nature of things is always no.

  Mrs. Rao halted for a moment and looked back at him.

  "But sometimes," she said with a smile, "it's eternity that miraculously breaks into time—even into dinnertime. Goodbye." She waved her hand and was gone.

  "Which is better," Will wondered aloud as he followed Vijaya through the dark temple, out into the noonday glare, "which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?"

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  "Here we are," said Vijaya, when they had reached the end of the short street that led downhill from the marketplace. He opened a wicket gate and ushered his guest into a tiny garden, at the further end of which, on its low stilts, stood a small thatched house.

  From behind the bungalow a yellow mongrel dog rushed out and greeted them with a frenzy of ecstatic yelps and jumps and tail-waggings. A moment later a large green parrot, with white cheeks and a bill of polished jet, came swooping down from nowhere and landed with a squawk and a noisy fluttering of wings on Vijaya's shoulder.

  "Parrots for you," said Will, "mynahs for little Mary Sarojini. You people seem to be on remarkably good terms with the local fauna."