Meanwhile Mrs Anand was explaining — sotto voce so as not to distract the problem-solvers from their task — that she always divided her classes into two groups. The group of the visualizers, who thought in geometrical terms, like the ancient Greeks, and the group of the non-visualizers who preferred algebra and imageless abstractions. Somewhat reluctantly Will withdrew his attention from the beautiful unfallen world of young bodies and resigned himself to taking an intelligent interest in human diversity and the teaching of mathematics.
They took their leave at last. Next door, in a pale blue classroom decorated with paintings of tropical animals, Bodhisattvas and their bosomy Shaktis, the Lower Fifth were having their bi-weekly lesson in Elementary Applied Philosophy. Breasts here were smaller, arms thinner and less muscular. These were only a year away from childhood.
“Symbols are public,” the young man at the blackboard was saying as Will and Mrs Narayan entered the room. He drew a row of little circles, numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4, n. “These are people,” he explained. Then from each of the little circles he drew a line that connected it with a square at the left of the board. S he wrote in the centre of the square. “S is the system of symbols that the people use when they want to talk to one another. They all speak the same language — English, Palanese, Eskimo, it depends where they happen to live. Words are public; they belong to all the speakers of a given language: they’re listed in dictionaries. And now let’s look at the things that happen out there.” He pointed through the open window. Gaudy against a white cloud, half a dozen parrots came sailing into view, passed behind a tree and were gone. The teacher drew a second square at the opposite side of the board, labelled it E for ‘events’ and connected it by lines to the circles. “What happens out there is public — or at least fairly public,” he qualified. “And what happens when somebody speaks or writes words — that’s also public. But the things that go on inside these little circles are private. Private.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Private.” He rubbed his forehead. “Private.” He touched his eyelids and the tip of his nose with a brown forefinger. “Now let’s make a simple experiment. Say the word ‘pinch.’”
“Pinch,” said the class in ragged unison. “Pinch …”
“P-I-N-C-H — pinch. That’s public, that’s something you can look up in the dictionary. But now pinch yourselves. Hard! Harder!”
To an accompaniment of giggles, of aies and ows, the children did as they were told.
“Can anybody feel what the person sitting next to him is feeling?”
There was a chorus of No’s.
“So it looks,” said the young man, “as though there were — let’s see, how many are we?” He ran his eyes over the desks before him. “It looks as though there were twenty-three distinct and separate pains. Twenty-three in this one room. Nearly three thousand million of them in the whole world. Plus the pains of all the animals. And each of these pains is strictly private. There’s no way of passing the experience from one centre of pain to another centre of pain. No communication except indirectly through S.” He pointed to the square at the left of the board, then to the circles at the centre. “Private pains here in 1, 2, 3, 4, and n. News about private pains out here at S, where you can say ‘pinch’, which is a public word listed in a dictionary. And notice this: there’s only one public word, ‘pain’, for three thousand million private experiences, each of which is probably about as different from all the others as my nose is different from your noses and your noses are different from one another. A word only stands for the ways in which things or happenings of the same general kind are like one another. That’s why the word is public. And, being public, it can’t possibly stand for the ways in which happenings of the same general kind are unlike one another.”
There was a silence. Then the teacher looked up and asked a question.
“Does anyone here know about Mahakasyapa?”
Several hands were raised. He pointed his finger at a little girl in a blue skirt and a necklace of shells sitting in the front row.
“You tell us, Amiya.”
Breathlessly and with a lisp, Amiya began.
“Mahakathyapa,” she said, “Wath the only one of the dithciples that underthtood what the Buddha wath talking about.”
“And what was he talking about?”
“He wathn’t talking. That’th why they didn’t underthand.”
“But Mahakasyapa understood what he was talking about even though he wasn’t talking — is that it?”
The little girl nodded. That was it exactly. “They thought he wath going to preach a thermon,” she said, “But he didn’t. He jutht picked a flower and held it up for everybody to look at.”
“And that was the sermon,” shouted a small boy in a yellow loincloth, who had been wriggling in his seat, hardly able to contain his desire to impart what he knew.
“But nobody could underthtand that kind of a thermon. Nobody but Mahakathyapa.”
“So what did Mahakasyapa say when the Buddha held up that flower?”
“Nothing!” the yellow loincloth shouted triumphantly.
“He jutht thmiled,” Amiya elaborated. “And that thowed the Buddha that he underthtood what it wath all about. Tho he thmiled back, and they jutht that there, thmiling and thmiling.”
“Very good,” said the teacher. “And now,” he turned to the yellow loincloth, “let’s hear what you think it was that Mahakasyapa understood.”
There was a silence. Then, crestfallen, the child shook his head. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Does anyone else know?”
There were several conjectures. Perhaps he’d understood that people get bored with sermons — even the Buddha’s sermons. Perhaps he liked flowers as much as the Compassionate One did. Perhaps it was a white flower, and that made him think of the Clear Light. Or perhaps it was blue, and that was Shiva’s colour.
“Good answers,” said the teacher. “Especially the first one. Sermons are pretty boring — especially for the preacher. But here’s a question. If any of your answers had been what Mahakasyapa understood when Buddha held up the flower, why didn’t he come out with it in so many words?”
“Perhapth he wathn’t a good thpeaker.”
“He was an excellent speaker.”
“Maybe he had a sore throat.”
“If he’d had a sore throat, he wouldn’t have smiled so happily.”
“You tell us,” called a shrill voice from the back of the room.
“Yes, you tell us,” a dozen other voices chimed in.
The teacher shook his head. “If Mahakasyapa and the Compassionate One couldn’t put it into words, how can I? Meanwhile let’s take another look at these diagrams on the blackboard. Public words, more or less public events and then people, completely private centres of pain and pleasure. Completely private?” he questioned. “But perhaps that isn’t quite true. Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication between the circles — not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly. And maybe that was what the Buddha was talking about when his wordless flower-sermon was over. ‘I have the treasure of the unmistakable teachings,’ he said to his disciples, ‘the wonderful Mind of Nirvana, the true form without form, beyond all words, the teaching to be given and received outside of all doctrines. This I have now handed to Mahakasyapa.’” Picking up the chalk again, he traced a rough ellipse that enclosed within its boundaries all the other diagrams on the board — the little circles representing human beings, the square that stood for events and the other square that stood for words and symbols. “All separate,” he said, “and yet all one. People, events, words — they’re all manifestations of Mind, of Suchness, of the Void. What Buddha was implying and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can’t speak these teachings, one can only be them. Which is something you’ll all discover when the moment comes for your initiation.”
“Time to move on.” the Principal whispered. And when the door had closed behind them, a
nd they were standing again in the corridor, “We use this same kind of approach,” she said to Will, “in our science teaching, beginning with botany.”
“Why with botany?”
“Because it can be related so easily to what was being talked about just now — the Mahakasyapa story.”
“Is that your starting point?”
“No, we start prosaically with the textbook. The children are given all the obvious, elementary facts, tidily arranged in the standard pigeon-holes. Undiluted botany — that’s the first stage. Six or seven weeks of it. After which they get a whole morning of what we call bridge-building. Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge.”
“Botany and self-knowledge — how do you build that bridge?”
“It’s really quite simple,” Mrs Narayan assured him. “Each of the children is given a common flower — a hibiscus for example, or better still (because the hibiscus has no scent), a gardenia. Scientifically speaking, what is a gardenia? What does it consist of? Petals, stamens, pistil, ovary and all the rest of it. The children are asked to write a full analytical description of the flower, illustrated by an accurate drawing. When that’s done there’s a short rest period, at the close of which the Mahakasyapa story is read to them and they’re asked to think about it. Was Buddha giving a lesson in botany? Or was he teaching his disciples something else? And, if so, what?”
“What indeed?”
“And of course, as the story makes clear, there’s no answer that can be put into words. So we tell the boys and girls to stop thinking and just look. ‘But don’t look analytically,’ we tell them, ‘Don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labelling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the other shore.’”
“All this,” Will commented, “sounds very like what Dr Robert was saying at the initiation ceremony.”
“Of course it does,” said Mrs Narayan. “Learning to take the Mahakasyapa’s-eye view of things is the best preparation for the moksha-medicine experience. Every child who comes to initiation comes to it after a long education in the art of being receptive. First the gardenia as a botanical specimen. Then the same gardenia in its uniqueness, the gardenia as the artist sees it, the even more miraculous gardenia seen by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa. And it goes without saying,” she added, “that we don’t confine ourselves to flowers. Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions. Everything from dissected frogs to the spiral nebulae, it all gets looked at receptively as well as conceptually, as a fact of aesthetic or spiritual experience as well as in terms of science or history or economics. Training in receptivity is the complement and anti-dote to training in analysis and symbol-manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.”
There was a silence. “How should one look at other people?” Will asked at last. “Should one take the Freud’s-eye view or the Cézanne’s-eye view? The Proust’s-eye view or the Buddha’s-eye view?”
Mrs Narayan laughed. “Which view are you taking of me?” she asked.
“Primarily, I suppose, the sociologist’s-eye view,” he answered. “I’m looking at you as the representative of an unfamiliar culture. But I’m also being aware of you receptively. Thinking, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you seem to have aged remarkably well. Well aesthetically, well intellectually and psychologically, and well spiritually, whatever that word means — and if I make myself receptive it means something important. Whereas, if I choose to project instead of taking in, I can conceptualize it into pure nonsense.” He uttered a mildly hyena-like laugh.
“If one chooses to,” said Mrs Narayan, “one can always substitute a bad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity. The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice? Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonize their views? The analysing tradition-bound concept-maker and the alertly passive insight-receiver — neither is infallible; but both together can do a reasonably good job.”
“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. ‘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, unconceptualized givenness, 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 colour 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 analysing 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 drawings 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 t
ales. No science, no history, no knowledge of anything going on in the outside world. But these future teachers were pious Buddhists; most of them practised 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, anti-dogmatic 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?”
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 programme 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?”
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 313