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  "Just how effective is your training in the art of being receptive?" Will now enquired.

  "There are degrees of receptivity," she answered. "Very little of it in a science lesson, for example. Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don't select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It's like that poem of Wordsworth's,

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  'Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.' In these bridge-building sessions I've been describing there's still quite a lot of busy selecting and projecting, but not nearly so much as in the preceding science lessons. The children don't suddenly turn into little Tathagatas; they don't achieve the pure receptivity that comes with the moksha-medicine. Far from it. All one can say is that they learn to go easy on names and notions. For a little while they're taking in a lot more than they give out."

  "What do you make them do with what they've taken in?" "We merely ask them," Mrs. Narayan answered, with a smile, "to attempt the impossible. The children are told to translate their experience into words. As a piece of pure, unconceptual-ized giveness, what is this flower, this dissected frog, this planet at the other end of the telescope? What does it mean? What does it make you think, feel, imagine, remember? Try to put it down on paper. You won't succeed, of course; but try all the same. It'll help you to understand the difference between words and events, between knowing about things and being acquainted with them. 'And when you've finished writing,' we tell them, 'look at the flower again and, after you've looked, shut your eyes for a minute or two. Then draw what came to you when your eyes were closed. Draw whatever it may have been—something vague or vivid, something like the flower itself or something entirely different. Draw what you saw or even what you didn't see, draw it and color it with your paints or crayons. Then take another rest and, after that, compare your first drawing with the second; compare the scientific description of the flower with what you wrote about it when you weren't analyzing what you saw, when you behaved as though you didn't know anything about the flower and just permitted the mystery of its existence to come to you, like that, out of the blue. Then compare your drawings and writings with the drawings and writings of the other boys and girls in the class. You'll notice that the analytical descriptions and illustrations are very similar, whereas the draw-

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  ings and writings of the other kind are very different one from another. How is all this connected with what you have learned in school, at home, in the jungle, in the temple?' Dozens of questions, and all of them insistent. The bridges have to be built in all directions. One starts with botany—or any other subject in the school curriculum—and one finds oneself, at the end of a bridge-building session, thinking about the nature of language, about different kinds of experience, about metaphysics and the conduct of life, about analytical knowledge and the wisdom of the Other Shore."

  "How on earth," Will asked, "did you ever manage to teach the teachers who now teach the children to build these bridges?"

  "We began teaching teachers a hundred and seven years ago," said Mrs. Narayan. "Classes of young men and women who had been educated in the traditional Palanese way. You know—good manners, good agriculture, good arts and crafts, tempered by folk medicine, old-wives' physics and biology and a belief in the power of magic and the truth of fairy tales. No sci-ence, no history, no knowledge of anything going on in the outside world. But these future teachers were pious Buddhists; most of them practiced meditation and all of them had read or listened to quite a lot of Mahayana philosophy. That meant that in the fields of applied metaphysics and psychology they'd been educated far more thoroughly and far more realistically than any group of future teachers in your part of the world. Dr. Andrew was a scientifically trained, antidogmatic humanist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied Mahayana. His friend, the Raja, was a Tantrik Buddhist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied science. Both, consequently, saw very clearly that, to be capable of teaching children to become fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds."

  "And how did those early teachers feel about it? Didn't they resist the process?"

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  Mrs. Narayan shook her head. "They didn't resist, for the good reason that nothing precious had been attacked. Their Buddhism was respected. All they were asked to give up was the old-wives' science and the fairy tales. And in exchange for those they got all kinds of much more interesting facts and much more useful theories. And these exciting things from your Western world of knowledge and power and progress were now to be combined with, and in a sense subordinated to, the theories of Buddhism and the psychological facts of applied metaphysics. There was really nothing in that best-of-both-worlds program to offend the susceptibilities of even the touchiest and most ardent of religious patriots."

  "I'm wondering about our future teachers," said Will after a silence. "At this late stage, would they be teachable? Could they possibly learn to make the best of both worlds?"

  "Why not? They wouldn't have to give up any of the things that are really important to them. The non-Christian could go on thinking about man and the Christian could go on worshiping God. No change, except that God would have to be thought of as immanent and man would have to be thought of as potentially self-transcendent."

  "And you think they'd make those changes without any fuss?" Will laughed. "You're an optimist."

  "An optimist," said Mrs. Narayan, "for the simple reason that, if one tackles a problem intelligently and realistically, the results are apt to be fairly good. This island justifies a certain optimism. And now let's go and have a look at the dancing class."

  They crossed a tree-shaded courtyard and, pushing through a swing door, passed out of silence into the rhythmic beat of a drum and the screech of fifes repeating over and over again a short pen-tatonic tune that to Will's ears sounded vaguely Scotch.

  "Live music or canned?" he asked.

  "Japanese tape," Mrs. Narayan answered laconically. She

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  opened a second door that gave access to a large gymnasium where two bearded young men and an amazingly agile little old lady in black satin slacks were teaching some twenty or thirty little boys and girls the steps of a lively dance.

  "What's this?" Will asked. "Fun or education?"

  "Both," said the Principal. "And it's also applied ethics. Like those breathing exercises we were talking about just now—only more effective because so much more violent."

  "So stamp it out," the children were chanting in unison. And they stamped their small sandaled feet with all their might. "So stamp it out!" A final furious stamp and they were off again, jigging and turning, into another movement of the dance.

  "This is called the Rakshasi Hornpipe," said Mrs. Narayan.

  "Rakshasi?" Will questioned. "What's that?"

  "A Rakshasi is a species of demon. Very large, and exceedingly unpleasant. All the ugliest passions personified. The Rakshasi Hornpipe is a device for letting off those dangerous heads of steam raised by anger and frustration."

  "So stamp it out!" The music had come round again to the choral refrain. "So stamp it out!"

  "Stamp again," cried the little old lady setting a furious example. "Harder! Harder!"

  "Which did more," Will speculated, "for morality and rational behavior—the Bacchic orgies or the Republic) the Nico-machean Ethics or corybantic dancing?"

  "The Greeks," said Mrs. Narayan, "were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them, it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads. Without those tension-reducing hornpipes, the moral philosophy would have been impotent, and without the moral philosophy the hornpipers wouldn't have known where to go next. All we've done is to take a leaf out of
the old Greek book."

  "Very good!" said Will approvingly. Then remembering (as

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  sooner or later, however keen his pleasure and however genuine his enthusiasm, he always did remember) that he was the man who wouldn't take yes for an answer, he suddenly broke into laughter. "Not that it makes any difference in the long run," he said. "Corybantism couldn't stop the Greeks from cutting one another's throats. And when Colonel Dipa decides to move, what will your Rakshasi Hornpipes do for you? Help you to reconcile yourselves to your fate, perhaps—that's all."

  "Yes, that's all," said Mrs. Narayan. "But being reconciled to one's fate—that's already a great achievement."

  "You seem to take it all very calmly."

  "What would be the point of taking it hysterically? It wouldn't make our political situation any better; it would merely make our personal situation a good deal worse."

  "So stamp it out," the children shouted again in unison, and the boards trembled under their pounding feet. "So stamp it out."

  "Don't imagine," Mrs. Narayan resumed, "that this is the only kind of dancing we teach. Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important. But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression. Expressive movements, in this case, expressive gesture. If you had come yesterday, when our visiting master was here, I could have shown you how we teach that kind of dancing. Not today unfortu nately. He won't be here again before Tuesday."

  "What sort of dancing does he teach?"

  Mrs. Narayan tried to describe it. No leaps, no high kicks, no running. The feet always firmly on the ground. Just bendings and sideways motions of the knees and hips. All expression confined to the arms, wrists and hands, to the neck and head, the face and, above all, the eyes. Movement from the shoulders upwards and outwards—movement intrinsically beautiful and at the same time charged with symbolic meaning. Thought taking

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  shape in ritual and stylized gesture. The whole body transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, or attitudes modulating from significance to significance like a poem or a piece of music. Movements of the muscles representing movements of Consciousness, the passage of Suchness into the many, of the many into the immanent and ever-present One.

  "It's meditation in action," she concluded. "It's the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures."

  They left the gymnasium by a different door from that through which they had entered and turned left along a short corridor.

  "What's the next item?" Will asked.

  "The Lower Fourth," Mrs. Narayan answered, "and they're working on Elementary Practical Psychology."

  She opened a green door.

  "Well, now you know," Will heard a familiar voice saying. "Nobody has to feel pain. You told yourselves that the pin wouldn't hurt—and it didn't hurt."

  They stepped into the room and there, very tall in the midst of a score of plump or skinny little brown bodies, was Susila MacPhail. She smiled at them, pointed to a couple of chairs in a corner of the room, and turned back to the children. "Nobody has to feel pain," she repeated. "But never forget: pain always means that something is wrong. You've learned to shut pain off, but don't do it thoughtlessly, don't do it without asking yourselves the question: What's the reason for this pain? And if it's bad, or if there's no obvious reason for it, tell your mother about it, or your teacher, or any grown-up in your Mutual Adoption Club. Then shut off the pain. Shut it off knowing that, if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand? . . . And now," she went on, after all the questions had been asked and answered. "Now let's play some pretending games. Shut

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  your eyes and pretend you're looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?"

  Of course they could see him. The one-legged mynah was evidently an old friend.

  "See him just as clearly as you saw him today at lunchtime. And don't stare at him, don't make any effort. Just see what comes to you, and let your eyes shift—from his beak to his tail, from his bright little round eye to his one orange leg."

  "I can hear him too," a little girl volunteered. "He's saying 'Karuna, karuna!'"

  "That's not true," another child said indignantly. "He's saying 'Attention!' "

  "He's saying both those things," Susila assured them. "And probably a lot of other words besides. But now we're going to do some real pretending. Pretend that there are two one-legged mynah birds. Three one-legged mynah birds. Four one-legged mynah birds. Can you see all four of them?"

  They could.

  "Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And now let's make them change their color. They're white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue—and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They're purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale-green leg. Goodness, what's happening! There aren't five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?" Some of them could— without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn't go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals.

  "Just make twelve of them," she said. "Or if twelve is too many, make ten, make eight. That's still an awful lot of mynahs. And now," she went on, when all the children had conjured up

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  all the purple birds that each was capable of creating, "now they're gone." She clapped her hands. "Gone! Every single one of them. There's nothing there. And now you're not going to see mynahs, you're going to see me. One me in yellow. Two mes in green. Three mes in blue with pink spots. Four mes in the brightest red you ever saw." She clapped her hands again. "All gone. And this time it's Mrs. Narayan and that funny-looking man with a stiff leg who came in with her. Four of each of them. Standing in a big circle in the gymnasium. And now they're dancing the Rakshasi Hornpipe. 'So stamp it out, so stamp it out.' "

  There was a general giggle. The dancing Wills and Principals must have looked richly comical.

  Susila snapped her fingers.

  "Away with them! Vanish! And now each of you sees three of your mothers and three of your fathers running round the playground. Faster, faster, faster! And suddenly they're not there any more. And then they are there. But next moment they aren't. They are there, they aren't. They are, they aren't..."

  The giggles swelled into squeals of laughter and at the height of the laughter a bell rang. The lesson in Elementary Practical Psychology was over.

  "What's the point of it all?" Will asked when the children had run off to play and Mrs. Narayan had returned to her office.

  "The point," Susila answered, "is to get people to understand that we're not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we're disturbed by what's going on inside our heads, we can do something about it. It's all a question of being shown what to do and then practicing—the way one learns to write or play the flute. What those children you saw here were being taught is a very simple technique—a technique that we'll develop later on into a method of liberation. Not complete liberation, of course. But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread. This technique won't lead you to the discovery of your

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  Buddha Nature: but it may help you to prepare for that discovery—help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future."

  " 'Hauntings,' " Will agreed, "is the word."

  "But one doesn't have to be haunted. Some of the ghosts can be laid quite easily. Whenever one of them appears, just give it the imagination treatment. Deal with it as we dealt with those mynahs, as we dealt with you and Mrs. Narayan. Change its clothes, give it another nose, multiply it, tell it to go away, call it back again and mak
e it do something ridiculous. Then abolish it. Just think what you could have done about your father, if someone had taught you a few of these simple little tricks when you were a child! You thought of him as a terrifying ogre. But that wasn't necessary. In your fancy you could have turned the ogre into a grotesque. Into a whole chorus of grotesques. Twenty of them doing a tap dance and singing, 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.' A short course in Elementary Practical Psychology, and your whole life might have been different."

  How would he have dealt with Molly's death, Will wondered as they walked out towards the parked jeep. What rites of imaginative exorcism could he have practiced on that white, musk-scented succubus who was the incarnation of his frantic and abhorred desires?

  But here was the jeep. Will handed Susila the keys and laboriously hoisted himself into his seat. Very noisily, as though it were under some neurotic compulsion to overcompensate for its diminutive stature, a small and aged car approached from the direction of the village, turned into the driveway and, still clattering and shuddering, came to a halt beside the jeep.

  They turned. There, leaning out of the window of the royal Baby Austin, was Murugan, and beyond him, vast in white muslin and billowy like a cumulus cloud, sat the Rani. Will bowed in her direction and evoked the most gracious of smiles,

  which was switched off as soon as she turned to Susila, whose greeting was acknowledged only with the most distant of nods.

  "Going for a drive?" Will asked politely.

  "Only as far as Shivapuram," said the Rani.

  "If this wretched little crate will hold together that long," Murugan added bitterly. He turned the ignition key. The motor gave a last obscene hiccup and died.