by Norman Lewis
Buddhism, as I had gathered from various sermons printed in the Rangoon press, had suddenly become injected with evangelical fervour, a rare phenomenon in the history of the religion. And perhaps with the notion of making the message more palatable to the West, great emphasis was now being laid on its ‘scientific’ character. Having held back, in the way of religions in which the final and perfect revelation is given once and for all, until it has seen itself in danger of being left high and dry by the times – a survival of medievalism – it has now come forward, almost as if an intolerably compressed spring had been released, with something of a jerk. Buddhist sermons now feature such topics as atomic fission, and the Buddha is sometimes referred to as the first atomic scientist. Even before having been subjected to such propaganda, one cannot have helped noticing that primitive Buddhism, in its rarely found, untainted form, could loosely be described as scientific in its attitude, and in its conception – a feat of great intuitive power on the part of its founder – of the soul’s slow evolution through countless ages from lower to higher forms. This foreshadowing of Darwinism is now belatedly exploited by his followers. It is much stressed by the organisers of the Third Missionary Movement – the only previous movements recognised being those of Buddha, and the Indian king, Asoka. U Thein Zan’s reconstruction of the sermon was a thick soup; a conventional stock of Buddhist mysticism into which much Freud and Einstein had been stirred. Afterwards he produced a pamphlet by the Venerable Lokanatha of Hong Kong, the leading spirit of this movement, of whose previous announcements I had acquired copies in Rangoon. This worthy monk, described as being in the truth-exporting business, was on his way to the United States, where the construction of an ‘incomparable Skyscraper Pagoda in New York, dedicated to World Peace’ would be the crowning achievement of his work.
As in many Buddhist sermons, there was an earthiness, a downright manner in the attack. This was strong stuff for the squeamish. There were no airy abstractions here. Briskly the venerable monk settled down to a classification of the body’s ‘thirty-two filthy parts’. He seeks to shatter the image of fleshly beauty and does so in a few, shrewd blows. The body is ‘a foul latrine on two legs’ he begins, then, warming to his subject with the relish of an Aldous Huxley, he invites our attention to a dead body, ‘… an excellent subject for meditation. The swollen, stinking corpse, bluish-black, with swarms of worms issuing from the nine holes is enough to make any one disgusted with the foul nature of the body. We should sit down and identify ourselves with the horrible corpse, with the following reflection: “As I am now, so once was he; as he is now, so shall I be.” By thinking in this way the idea will finally dawn on us that our body is a corpse bound to our neck. And we shall loathe and hate our body and the bodies of others. This is the way to destroy lust for ever.’ But in case this exercise in meditation should fail to work we are presented with a monkish technique of taming this disturbing and disgusting machine. It reads a little like one of those slightly repellent chats about fitness and the body beautiful in a sunbathing journal – the note of obsession is common to both – except of course, in reverse. All you do is take as little sleep as you can – four hours at the most, avoid nourishing food, and above all, never relax. In this way you can be sure of building-up the body unbeautiful in a reasonably short time.
But as the Reverend Lokanatha’s appeal is directed above all to the citizens of the New World, he feels it necessary to put in a word about how to get rich. ‘Men are born poor because they were stingy in the past. Men are born rich because they were generous in the past. Therefore don’t be jealous of the rich man driving in a fancy limousine car. Give as he did, and you too will become rich …’ A yardstick for calculation is thoughtfully provided in a quotation from the Master’s words: ‘Herein Ananda, the yield to be looked for from a donation to an animal is a hundredfold, to an ordinary non-virtuous man a thousandfold, to the Saint, incalculable and beyond all measure.’
It is extraordinary how the fascination of America is felt equally by Burmese bobby-soxers and venerable monks. There is no doubt that the USA has become the Cathay of our times. ‘The scientific American will readily embrace Scientific Buddhism. They are eagerly awaiting for our Atomic Bomb of Love. Our incomparable Skyscraper Pagoda in New York dedicated to World Peace will surely crown the world. The year 2500 (a.d. 1956) will see the rise of Buddhism, and we must start now by preaching in America …’ The wheel has turned a full circle and now the Marco Polos and the Francis Xaviers of the Orient set out for the Hang-chow of the West, on Manhattan Island.
* * *
That night, I dealt with the sleeping problem more efficiently, tucking the mosquito net under the bedding so that it was under a continuous even strain all round. Shoulders, ankles and outsides of arms, where they might touch the net, were smeared with insect-repellent cream, which I now used for the first time. A few baffled cockroaches soon appeared, silhouetted like coracles on the outside of the net, but after mooching about for a while they went away. Rats rustled behind the shrine and ran squeaking along the timbers. From all quarters of the night horizon came the muffled hallooing of owls. In pleasant anticipation of the next day’s journey, I fell asleep.
But the next day brought no hope of leaving Lashio. At the market we learned that the only movement signalled was the return of a lorry to Mandalay. The trouble was that there was nobody who could be approached for definite information, no set point of departure. If a driver got a load, he was likely to move off at short notice, and only those who hung about the market continually could be sure of a seat. Then again an owner might announce his intention of going to a town on my route, and then for any one of a number of reasons, suddenly change his mind, and go off in the other direction. This happened in the case of an Indian who had to make the run to Nam Hkam at some time, to pick up some goods there. But there was a rumour that the Chinese bandits had cut the road; so he said, with a kind of jellied smile, that the Nam Hkam trip could wait for another day. The only offer I got that day was of a ride on a bullock-cart going to Mong Pang, about twenty miles along the road. I was warned that although Burmese bullock-carts are a rather more rapid form of transport than one would imagine, this journey might take two days.
At this moment the market was full of rumours. Without particular excitement the knowledgeable hangers-on who foregathered there spoke of heavy fighting to the south, where a Chinese Nationalist division had been split up by Burmese forces, supported by planes. To lend colour to this account, we had at one time, with the stirring of the breeze, heard a distant thudding which might have been the sound of falling bombs. The incident on the Mandalay road came back to us in thunderous and distorted echoes of slaughter, rapine and destroyed convoys. More ominous was the fact that the post-lorry from Nam Hkam was long overdue, and it was generally assumed that the driver and guard were lying somewhere in a ditch, with their throats cut. Merchants are most phlegmatic and enterprising people, but it was clear that their present attitude to journeyings was tinged with unwonted caution. Into such a state had Burma, and indeed most of South-East Asia fallen! Travel had become almost as slow as in the days of Marco Polo, and probably more hazardous. Certainly the security of the roads under the Mongols’ dominion, when the Venetians made their great Eastern journey, was much superior to that of twentieth-century Burma.
And now as the days passed a pattern of life in Lashio began to evolve. There were the hours immediately following the dawn, when the town emerged from mist like the image on a photographic plate, and when I was now permitted to assist the youngest brother in the serious passage with the watering-can from plant to plant. Then would follow the morning walk down to the market to interrogate drivers on their intentions, followed by a ritual drinking of tea, with its accompanying saffron-cake, undesired but bought out of decency because plain tea was always free of charge. Before midday a shower bath was taken in a shed in the garden. I was attended by the youngest brother, who brought the pitchers of water. At this point I l
earned the prim Burmese method of bathing with longyi in position and then releasing the knot in the wet longyi and stepping out of it when the dry one was in position over it. Such douchings were frequent and obligatory. The Burmese bathe as often as possible, and also use water for their most intimate sanitary toilet, relating as a cautionary tale the fate of one of their kings who, because in his immediately previous incarnation he had been an ogre, scorned these matters of hygienic routine and was in consequence deserted by his principal queen.
At high noon we would relax on the balcony before glasses of lemonade, while a sporadic snow of white butterflies drifted across the now sharply defined landscape. This was the time for the collections of snapshots to be produced, and on looking through them I felt that the camera had confirmed, perhaps more convincingly than anything before, the brotherhood of mankind. There were Burmese parties on a social outing to the pagoda, just as Europeans might visit a roadhouse. The halt on the way to be photographed against the blurred background of a waterfall, the girls in the group holding their heads at studied angles, their mouths set in the rictus of the film-star smile. And then there were records of more intimate occasions, such as the canoeing trip with the pretty Shan lady, a shorthand typist, by whom ‘pleasant expectations were aroused, but with vain outcome’. A Sawbwa’s daughter, whose face contained a suggestion of the forceful characteristics of Edda Mussolini, seemed to have been kinder, since Tin Maung’s lips were pursed at the memory – so much so that I almost expected a whistle to issue from them.
In the afternoon I would take up a book, while Tin Maung dismantled the wireless set and prepared it with dexterous tuning for the evening tussle with Radio Toulouse. The evening meal was taken in one of the Chinese restaurants, the opium-smoking and non-serious one being virtuously avoided; on our return, U Thein Zan would be ready with a homily. In a moment of mild exasperation Tin Maung gave away the reason for the present phase of religious fervour. ‘It is time now that the old man should die. If he should continue too much longer in this existence all the monetary resources will be vanished away.’ U Thein Zan’s face cracked into a crestfallen smile. It seemed that he had recently fallen into his old vice of gambling, and having staked heavy sums as an outcome of a fatal blunder in the calculation of his horoscope, his losses had been tremendous. ‘You should die, old man. You should die,’ said Tin Maung relentlessly; a verdict with which U Thein Zan seemed, humbly enough, to agree.
* * *
A day or two later, there was another report of a lorry going to Nam Hkam. It was said to be loading in the market – news which sent me hurriedly packing my things. When I was ready I wanted to go straight down and take my seat, and not leave it for a moment until we were on our way. But Tin Maung would not hear of this undignified procedure. A message would be sent for the lorry to call for me, and I could wait in comfort and propriety where I was. It might be hours before it was ready to depart. I wanted to photograph the family before I left, so they all retired for a few minutes to prepare themselves. U Thein Zan appeared dressed with flamboyant conservatism in a taung-mathein, a long, white coat, a sartorial survival of the last century equivalent to a frock-coat. His paso had been wound tightly round the waist and tied in front with a fine, impractical ebullience of material. The made-up turban was replaced by a scarf, tied with the swagger of a buccaneer. It was a fine turn-out, combining the maximum of difficulty of manipulation with good taste. By him stood his wife, wearing all the jewellery she had left to her after U Thein Zan’s gambling losses, flowers in her hair, her face powdered ghastly white. The youngest son was dressed as usual for the pampas; the second son with his everyday buckish elegance, which in any case could not have been improved upon; while Tin Maung, undaunted by the heat, had put on an army pullover. I photographed the little group in colour, amongst their flowers, having promised U Thein Zan to give him some lasting record of the rather pallid glory of his snapdragons and sweet peas. This was all done rather hurriedly, with an eye on the road, and my bags standing by the garden gate. But as the shadows lengthened and the hills across the valley began to gather about them their drapings of mist, there was no heartening cough, rattle and thump of well-worn mechanism coming up the hill. In the end, I went down to the market again where I heard that at the very last moment the lorry had been requisitioned by the Army.
Early next morning, without heralding, salvation came. A post wagon was taking mail to Nam Hkam, or as far as it could go along the road, and someone had told the driver about me. There was a scramble to get my things out. When I said goodbye to the others, the old mother was missing, and just as the lorry was moving off she came rushing out with food for the journey tied up in a palm-leaf bundle. She tried, without success, to persuade me to accept also the contents of a handkerchief, which appeared to be several precious or semi-precious stones – another reminder of the fact that, to the Burmese, liberality is the chief of the ten great virtues, and the second of the three works of perfection.
* * *
The post-wagon was undoubtedly the most decrepit, the most exhausted vehicle in which I had ever travelled. It was a phantom from a breaker’s yard, something which had been unearthed from a bombed building. The treads of all four tyres displayed a rippling pattern of canvas. There was no spare. Before the steering wheel could influence the car’s direction, it had to be spun through half a turn. Gaping sockets showed where all the instruments had been wrenched out of the dashboard. The floorboards above the engine had been removed, releasing a furnace heat and the rattling vibration of a million nails being shaken in a metal box. Above this pit sat the driver, stabbing like a frantic organist at the control pedals, which in some way had lost their normal independence of each other, since the application of the brake slightly opened the throttle, and the engine had to be switched off, or the accelerator held back, whenever this was necessary. Whenever he wanted to blow the horn, the driver, reaching out as if to catch a butterfly, seized two dangling wires and held them together. The body was insecurely fixed to the chassis, but settled down on a straight road to a steady seesawing motion to which one soon became accustomed, although the sudden opening of the doors as we took corners continued to surprise.
Our first stop was at the marketplace again where two Shan policemen, armed with swords, arrived in company with a Burmese women. The woman was singing in a penetrating voice, and the policemen looked embarrassed. All three climbed into the back. The policemen unbelted their swords, laid them down beside them and settled themselves. Two or three onlookers gathered; the woman waved gaily to them and started another song. One of the policemen picked up his sword, leaned over and tapped the driver on the shoulder with it, nodding to the road ahead. The driver screwed up his face, but said nothing. More onlookers strolled up and stood about, their faces amazed under their turbans while the Burmese woman serenaded them. Another policeman appeared, and checked the travellers’ passes, and then, as with a resounding crash the driver engaged bottom gear, our musical passenger broke into ‘I put my money on a coal-black mare, doodah, doodah’, and away we went.
Within minutes the last of Lashio’s cottage gardens was behind us. We were going down a gradient with a steep, flowering slope on our right, and then my heart sank. There was another lorry in the middle of the road, clearly in trouble. From it swarmed like troubled bees a colourful collection of passengers, Kachin women with a chain-mail of silver coins over their breasts, Palaungs with hips swathed in metal bands, and betel-stained holes where their mouths should have been. In the Far East, the courtesies of the road are observed with punctilio. We drew up alongside and immediately a team of experts from the post-wagon was formed to investigate and pronounce upon the breakdown. Petrol lines, pumps and carburettor were dismantled in a leisurely manner, fiddled with and reassembled. The engine started, wuffled for perhaps ten seconds, and stopped. Meanwhile our singer had reached a number in her repertoire which seemed to give her special pleasure, and was singing that simple tune, ‘Happy birthday to
you’, for the fifth or sixth time.
A moment later it became clear that the driver of the post-wagon had made a generous decision, for there was a sudden rush of whirling skirted forms in our direction, and in a few seconds we had taken on a jingling cargo. There was something miraculous about the compression involved. A young Indian girl of distracted Pre-Raphaelite beauty joined us. Jewels dripped from a nostril, and round her neck she wore a large iron key. Passing by an act of levitation over the crowded forms, she subsided in a ballet posture among some vegetable marrows. The Palaungs, a compact racial heap, stared around them with the frightened eyes of children in the presence of violence. The singing Burmese woman had been driven by the invasion into a position immediately behind me, although slightly higher. Every time she moved she struck me with her knee in the back of the neck. Forced thus into close contact, I took in the details of her dress, the grubby, flowered longyi, the unbuttoned blouse and, rather alarmingly, the necklace of beer-bottle tops.
We moved off down the hill, the overloaded post-wagon wallowing with a nautical motion. Whenever we went over a bump there was a sound from the interior like the clashing of circus accoutrements. Having covered a mile or two, we reached a gradient that was too much for us. Everyone got out, and while the passengers trotted by its side the lorry made a groaning, faltering climb. At the top of the hill there was a pause to let the engine cool. The Burmese woman, still singing, leaped suddenly from her perch, easily cleared a low hedge into a field, where, producing a clasp-knife, she hacked down a sugar-cane and began to tear at it with her teeth. I thought this extraordinary because I could never remember having seen a woman run in the Far East before. I got out my notebook and started to write and a young man dressed with striking formality came worming his way through the baggage, pulled my sleeve, and asked courteously, ‘What are you writing, sir?’ I told him I was writing poetry and received a brilliant smile from under the brown trilby hat.