It was a time of opulent, mysterious luminescence before the dusk of evening. A time controlled by light, when the contours of all things were perfect, every dove painted in detail, when everything was dyed a faded yellow-rose, when a languid harmony reigned with the exquisiteness of an etching between the reflection on the river and the glow in the sky.
The ghats are great architectural structures suitable precisely to this sort of light. They consist of colossal staircases, like those of palaces or great cathedrals, that lead down to the water, and behind each one stands a great monolithic wall. The columns and arches forming the background for the ghats are only pilasters, and the arcades have blind windows. The staircase alone has the dignity of a sacred place. Some capitals are Corinthian in style, others are quite syncretic in the Near Eastern fashion. On the pillars white lines are drawn as high as forty feet, the heights reached in the yearly flood disasters, especially the notorious ones of 1928 or 1936. Above the staggeringly lofty pilasters, cantilevered arcades jut out for the people who live at the top of the walls, and rows of pigeons perch on the stone balustrades. Over the rooftops a halo of evening sun paused, gradually fading in brilliance.
Honda’s boat was nearing one of the ghats called Kedar. There a man was fishing with a net near his boat. Kedar ghat was quiet, and the thin, ebony bathers as well as the spectators on the steps were all lost in prayer and meditation.
Honda’s attention was caught by a man who had come down the center of the great staircase and was about to bathe. Behind him stood a line of magnificent ochre columns, and in the fading glow everything was clear and distinct, even to the ornamented crannies in the capitals. He was standing in the midst of holiness, yet it was questionable whether he could be called a man at all, so great was the contrast of his skin with that of the black bodies of the tonsured priests about him. A tall, stately old man, he alone was a radiant pink.
He wore a small topknot of white hair on his head, and with his left hand he held a heavy scarlet loincloth around his hips. The rest was an ample expanse of slightly slackened pink nudity. His eyes were rapturously transfixed, as though no one existed about him, and he gazed vacuously at the sky above the opposite bank. His right hand slowly stretched heavenward in adoration. The skin of the face, chest, and abdomen was a fresh pinkish white in the evening light, and his nobility completely removed him from his surroundings. But remnants of the black skin of this world remained here and there on the upper half of his arms, on the backs of his hands, or on his thighs, almost peeling off, but still forming blotches, marks, and stripes. These remnants made his glowing pink body appear even more sublime. He was a white leper.
A multitude of pigeons took flight.
As the boat started upstream, the movement of one startled bird was instantly transmitted to the others, and the sudden flutter of many wings took Honda by surprise. His attention was drawn from the foliage of the lime trees stretching out over the river surface between the many ghats. Each leaf was said to house for ten days the soul of one just deceased while it waited to be reborn.
The boat had already passed the Dasasvamedha ghat and was alongside the House of Widows, a building of red sandstone by the river. The window frames were decorated with green and white mosaic and the interior was painted green. Incense wafted from the windows, and bells and the chanting of kirtana could be heard echoing from the ceiling and spilling over the river surface. Here widows gathered from all corners of India to await their death. Emaciated by sickness and anticipating the salvation of extinction, for these people their last days in Mumukshu Bhavan, or the “House of Happiness,” in Benares were their happiest. Everything was conveniently close. The crematory ghat was situated to the immediate north, while just above rose the golden spire of the Nepalese Temple of Love, on which the sculptures honored the thousand postures of sexual intercourse.
Honda’s eyes picked out a package wrapped in cloth floating beside the boat. He remarked that the shape, bulk, and length suggested the corpse of a two- or three-year-old child and was told that that was precisely what it was.
Honda glanced at his watch. It was forty minutes past five. The evening dusk was gathering. At that instant, he distinctly saw a fire in front of him. It was the funeral pyre of the Mani Karnika ghat.
Facing the Ganges, it consisted of five-tiered platforms of varying widths on a Hindu-style base. The temple was formed of a group of stupas of different heights that surrounded a large central one, and every structure had a Mohammedan-style arched balcony in the shape of a lotus petal. As this gigantic brown cathedral was smoke-stained and stood on high colonnades, the closer Honda’s boat approached the more its gloomy, imposing silhouette, uninhabited and smoke-swathed, loomed like an ominous hallucination in the sky. But a vast muddy stretch of water still lay between the boat and the ghat. On the darkening surface of the water, a profusion of flower offerings—including the red java flowers he had seen in Calcutta—and incense came floating down like trash; and the inverted reflection of the towering flames of the funeral pyre played clearly on the water.
The pigeons inhabiting the stupas fluttered about in confusion, mingling with the sparks that rose high in the sky. The heavens had turned a dark indigo touched with gray.
A sooty stone grotto stood near the water, and flowers had been placed before the statues of Shiva and one of his wives, Sati, who had flung herself into a fire in order to uphold her husband’s honor.
Many boats piled high with wood for the funeral pyres were moored in the area, and Honda’s craft hung back from the center of the ghat. Behind the brightly burning fire a small flame was visible deep under the temple arcade. It was the sacred, eternal flame, and every funeral pyre received its fire from it.
The river breeze had died and a suffocating heat hung over the area. Like everywhere else in Benares, noise rather than silence prevailed here too; it mingled with the constant movement of people, cries, children’s laughter, and the chanting of sutras. People were not the only bathers; emaciated dogs followed the children into the water; and from the dark depths away from the fires, there where the extremity of the ghat steps lay submerged, the sinewy, shiny backs of water buffalo suddenly emerged one by one, herded on by the cackling shouts of their keepers. As they teetered up the steps, the funeral fires were mirrored on their wet black backs.
Sometimes the flames were enveloped in white smoke and flickering red tongues would appear through rifts. The smoke wafted up to the temple balconies and eddied like some living thing in the dark recesses of the building.
The Mani Karnika ghat offered the ultimate in purification: it was the outdoor, public crematorium in which all was out in the open in Indian fashion. Yet it was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all things deemed sacred and pure in Benares. Beyond question this location marked the end of the world.
A corpse wrapped in red cloth was propped against an easy slope of steps adjoining the grotto of Shiva and Sati. It had been soaked in the waters of the Ganges and now awaited its turn for cremation. The red wrapping around the human form showed that the body was that of a woman. White cloth was reserved for men. Relatives waited with tonsured priests under the tent in order to fulfill their duty by throwing butter and incense upon the corpse after the pyre was lit. Just then another white-swathed corpse arrived, borne on a bamboo litter and surrounded by chanting priests and all the relatives. Several children and a black dog chased each other around their feet. As observable in any Indian town, the living were all very much alive and making considerable noise.
It was six o’clock. Flames suddenly rose in four or five places. As the smoke was blown away in the direction of the temple, the offensive odor did not reach Honda in the boat, but he could see everything clearly.
To the extreme right all the ashes were gathered together and left to soak in the river water. Individual characteristics that had so obstinately clung to each body were no longer, and the ashes of all, conjoined and finally dissolved in the holy
water of the Ganges, thus returned to their four elemental constituents and the vast Universe. The under part of the ash mound was inextricably mixed with the damp earth of the area before being soaked in the Ganges. The Hindus do not build tombs. Honda suddenly recalled the shudder that had gone through him at the Aoyama Cemetery when he had visited Kiyoaki’s grave, the horror he had felt that Kiyoaki was quite definitely not under the gravestone.
The corpses were laid on the fire one after the other. As the binding cords burned away and the red and white shrouds were consumed in the fire, a black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep. The corpses that had been placed on the pyre first turned a dark gray. Sizzling sounds, like those of a pot boiling over, could be heard across the water. The skulls did not burn easily, and a cremator constantly walked about, poking a bamboo pole through the ones that were still smoldering well after the bodies had been reduced to ash. The sinews in his strong black arms that powerfully drove the pole through the skulls reflected the flames, while the crunching sounds he made reverberated against the temple walls.
The slow progress of purification of the human body, returning its parts to its four elemental constituents . . . the resistant human flesh and its useless odor lingering after death . . . something red opening in the flames, something shiny writhing, black powdery particles dancing up with the fiery sparks. There was a flashing animation in the flames, as though something were being created. From time to time, when suddenly the firewood noisily collapsed and part of the fire disappeared, the cremator would pile on more wood; and from time to time unexpectedly lofty flames would leap upward, almost licking at the temple balcony.
There was no sadness. What seemed heartlessness was actually pure joy. Not only were samsara and reincarnation basic belief, but they were actually accepted as a part of nature, constantly renewing itself before one’s eyes, the rice paddy and its growing plants, the trees bringing forth their fruit. Some assistance from human hands was necessary, just as harvest and cultivation required human intervention; people were born to take their turns in this natural progression.
In India the source of everything that seemed heartless was connected with a hidden, gigantic, awesome joy! Honda was afraid of grasping such delight. But having witnessed the extremes he had, he knew that he should never recover from the shock. It was as though all of Benares were afflicted with a holy leprosy and that his very vision had been contaminated by this incurable disease.
But his impression of having seen the ultimate was incomplete until the following moment arrived, one that struck Honda’s heart with a crystalline thrill of fright.
It was the moment when the sacred cow turned toward him.
In this crematorium there was a white cow, one of those sacred animals permitted anything anywhere in India. The sacred cow, accustomed to the fires, had been chased off by the cremator and stood just out of reach of the flames in front of the dark temple arcade. Inside was total blackness; and the white of the animal seemed awe-inspiring and full of sublime wisdom. The white belly reflecting the flickering flames appeared like cold Himalayan snow bathed in moonlight. It was a pure synthesis of impassible snow and sublime flesh in the body of an animal. The flames were smoke-logged; sometimes flashes of red dominated, again to be hidden by the swirling smoke.
Just then the sacred cow turned its majestic white face to Honda through the vague smoke rising from the burning bodies and looked directly at him.
That night, as soon as he finished dinner, Honda left word that he would be leaving before dawn the next morning, and fell asleep with the help of a nightcap.
Legions of phantasmagoria cluttered his dreams. His dream fingers brushed a keyboard they had never touched before, producing strange sounds. They examined like an engineer all corners of the structured universe so far known to him. The limpid Mount Miwa suddenly appeared, then the Offing Rock, reclining rock of horror on the peak of which dwelt the gods; blood spouted from a crevice and the goddess Kali emerged, her red tongue protruding. A burned corpse rose in the form of a beautiful youth, his hair and loins covered with the brilliantly pure leaves of the sacred sakaki tree. Then the obscene scene at the temple instantly turned into the cool precincts of a Japanese shrine covered with clean pebbles. All ideas, all gods were jointly turning the handle of the gigantic wheel of samsara. The great disk like a spiral nebula was slowly turning, carrying masses of people who, unaware of the effects of samsara, were simply happy, angry, sad, or joyful, quite like those who lived their daily lives totally unaware of the rotation of the earth. It was like a ferris wheel at night all decorated with lights in the amusement park of the gods.
Perhaps Indians knew all this. This fear had followed Honda into his very dreams. Just as the fact of the earth’s rotation is never detected through any of the human senses and is barely recognizable by scientific reasoning, samsara, karma, and reincarnation too were perhaps not discernible through ordinary perception and reason, but only through some supernatural power, some extremely accurate, systematic, intuitive super-logic. And perhaps this perception made the Indians appear so listless, so resistant to progress, and so devoid of all those human emotions—joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—that are common standards for measuring ordinary human beings.
Of course, these were the rough impressions of a traveler who had barely scratched the surface of the land. Dreams often combine the highest level of symbols and the most vulgar of thoughts. Perhaps Honda was following in his dreams the old habit of his judgeship days: a cold, prosaic, speculative process had inadvertently put in its appearance. His professional habits and his character seemed like a cat’s tongue, too sensitive to hot food, forcing him to cool at once any warm, unidentified elements and to transform them into conceptually frozen food. He was probably using this same old automatic defense mechanism, exactly like so many others who are particularly cautious in their dreams.
Far more than the ambiguity and strangeness of the dream, what he saw in reality was a much greater mystery to him, one that stubbornly rejected understanding or interpretation. When he awoke he perceived that the heat of this fact lingered clearly in his body and mind. He felt as though he had contracted a tropical fever.
Near the dim light of the front desk at the end of the hotel corridor, his bearded guide stood joking and chuckling with the bellboy on night duty. He recognized Honda approaching in his white linen suit and bowed respectfully from a distance.
Honda’s reason for leaving the hotel before the dawn was to see the crowds waiting to worship the sunrise at the ghats.
Benares was dedicated to the concept of the one from the many, the unity of Brahma, who was a transcendent godhead, being the One that contained the many. The solar disk was the embodiment of his divinity, and his godliness was greatest at the moment the sun rose above the horizon. The holy city of Benares and the heavens had been treated as equals in Indian religion. The pundit Shankara once said: “When God put the heavens and Benares on the scale, heavy Benares sank to the land and the lighter heavens rose.”
Hindus perceive the highest consciousness of the godhead in the sun and consider it the symbol of ultimate truth. Thus Benares is filled with devotion to and prayer for the solar disk. People’s consciousness frees itself from the rules governing the earth, and thus Benares itself, like a floating carpet, is elevated by the efficacy of prayer.
Unlike the day before, Dasasvamedha ghat was now swarming with masses of people, and the candles under countless umbrellas were flickering in the dusk before sunrise. In the sky above the jungle on the opposite side of the river, there was a hint of the approaching dawn below the tiers of clouds.
People had placed benches under each large bamboo umbrella and decorated the lingam stone, symbol of Shiva, with red flowers. Some were mixing red cinnabar powder in small mortars, preparing to paint their foreheads after the bath. Beside them attendant monks were mixing the paste with Ganges water in brass jugs which had been dedicated a
nd blessed at the temple. Some people had already descended the stairs in order to be in the water to meet the sunrise. After worshipping the water, which they scooped up in their hands, they slowly immersed their entire body. Some awaited the sunrise kneeling under the umbrellas.
As the first light of dawn broke over the horizon, the scene on the ghat instantly assumed outline and color; women’s saris, their skin, flowers, white hair, scabies, brass vessels—all began to cry out with color. The tortured morning clouds, slowly changing shape, gave way to the expanding light. Finally, just as the tip of the vermilion morning sun appeared above the low jungle, all at once a reverent sigh escaped from the lips of the people who had filled the square almost rubbing shoulders against Honda. Some of them knelt in devotion.
Those who were in the water pressed their hands together or opened their arms, praying to the red sun which gradually rose to display its full disk. The shadows of their torsos, cast far across the purplish golden river waves, reached to the feet of the people on the steps. Great rejoicing was heard, all directed toward the sun over the opposite shore. And all the while, one after the other, people stepped into the water, as though guided by some invisible hand.
The sun hung now above the green jungle. The scarlet disk, which had permitted itself to be looked upon, now turned in a trice into a cluster of brilliance that rejected even a momentary glance. It had already become a pulsating, threatening ball of flame.
Suddenly Honda knew! The sun which Isao had constantly seen in his suicide dream was this!
9
BUDDHISM suddenly deteriorated in India sometime after the fourth century of the Christian era. It has been rightly said that Hinduism stifled it in its friendly embrace. Like Christianity and Judaism in Judea and Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism had to be exiled from India for it to become a world religion. It was necessary for India to turn to a more primitive folk religion. Hinduism perfunctorily retained the name Buddha in a far corner of its pantheon, where he was preserved as the ninth of the ten avatars of Vishnu.
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