by Talbot Mundy
Finding he could not make head or tail of Kant in the original German (he spent ten minutes trying to find the subject of one verb) he laid the book down and began to wonder whether this was the place in which his sister and Jack Terry had died. Time vanished. Thought took him back to the days when he had sent for his sister Elsa, then seventeen, to come to India and keep house for him. He frowned, blaming himself for having been the cause of all she suffered. They had had so much in common, and he had understood so well her craving for knowledge that is not in any of the textbooks, that he had tacitly encouraged her to make acquaintances which his better judgment should have warned him to keep out of her reach. He wondered just to what extent a man is justified in guiding or obstructing a younger sister’s explorations into unknown realms of thought — knew that he himself would resent any leading-rein — knew nevertheless, that he felt guilty of having neglected to protect his sister until protection and precaution were too late. He had done his best then, but —
“Dammit, are we or aren’t we free agents?” he asked aloud, staring at the fire; and then he heard Diana’s tail beating the Chinese rug. It sounded as if the dog were laughing at him! He turned his head sharply — and saw the Lama standing in the doorway.
“We are free — to become agents of whatever power we wish,” said the Lama, smiling. “Don’t get up, my son. I know how thighs ache after a climb up the stairs of the Temple of Stars. The sirdar does not know the other entrance to the valley.”
“Where is he?” asked Ommony, staring. He was not particularly interested in the sirdar. A suggestion as to who and what the Lama might be, had occurred to him suddenly. He was sparring for time to follow up that thought.
“He returned,” said the Lama, sitting on a chair before the fire, betraying an inclination to tuck his legs up under him but resisting it. “The Ahbors would have killed him if he passed beyond the opening. They would have killed you — if it were not for Diana the dog. My son, you wonder why I left you in Darjeeling? There were seven reasons; of which the first is that I have no right to lead you out of your environment; and the second, that you have the right to make your own decision. The third reason was that these Ahbors guard their valley very strictly; it is their valley; they also have their rights. The fourth reason was, that an excuse must be presented to the Ahbors for admitting you. The fifth, that I alone could do that. The sixth, that I must make the excuse in advance of your coming, since they would not listen unless given time to consider the matter. And the seventh reason was, that it was fitting you should learn why this has been kept from you for twenty years, before you learn as much of the secret as I can show you. Behind each of those seven reasons are seven more beyond your comprehension. You spoke with Miss Sanburn?” Ommony nodded. Suspicion was approaching certainty. He wondered that the thought had not occurred to him long before.
“Where is the chela — Samding — Elsa Terry — my niece?” he asked. There is no foretelling which emotion will come uppermost. He felt a bit humiliated. It annoyed him to think he had lived for two months in almost constant association with his sister’s child and had never guessed it; annoyed him more to think that the Lama should not have trusted him from the beginning; most of all that he had not guessed the Lama’s identity. He felt almost sure that he had guessed right at last. Nothing but a western dread of seeming foolish restrained him from guessing aloud.
But the Lama read his thoughts, and answered the unspoken question first in his own way, his bright old eyes twinkling amid the wrinkles.
“Those who are trustworthy, my son, eventually prove it — always, and it is only they to whom secrets should be told. It is not enough that a man shall say, ‘Lo, I am this, or I am that.’ Nor is it enough that other men shall say the same of him. Some men are trustworthy in some respects, and not in others. He who trusts, and is betrayed, is answerable to his own soul. — Do you think it would have been fair to trust you with the secret of my chela?” he asked suddenly.
Ommony side-stepped the question by asking another: “Why do you call her San-fun-ho?”
“It is her name. It was I who gave it to her. She accepted it, when she was old enough to understand its meaning. Do you know Chinese? The word means ‘Possessor of the three qualities,’ but its inner meanings are many — righteousness, virtuous action, purity, benevolence, moral conduct, ingenuousness, knowledge, endurance, music — and all the qualities that lie behind those terms.”
“You think she has all of them?” Ommony asked. His voice held a hint of sarcasm. He intended that it should.
“My son, we all have them,” said the Lama. “But she is the first ordinary mortal I have known, who could express them.”
Ommony pricked his ears at the word “ordinary.”
“You know — you have seen the Masters?” he demanded.
The Lama blinked, but otherwise ignored the question, exactly as every one Ommony had asked, who was likely to know, always had avoided it. There is a legend about mysterious “Mahatmas,”* whom all the East believes in, but whom none from the West has ever met (and talked much about afterward).
“No man ever had such a chela,” said the Lama, changing the subject and betraying the first hint of personal emotion Ommony had ever noticed in him.
“Are you one of the Masters?” Ommony demanded, sitting bolt upright, studying the old man’s face.
But the Lama laughed, his wrinkles dancing with amusement.
“My son, that is a childish question,” he said after a moment. “If a man were to tell you he is one of the Masters, he would be a liar and a boaster; because it must be evident to anyone who thinks, that the more a man knows, the more surely he knows there are greater ones than himself. He is a Master, whose teaching you accept. But if he should tell you there is none superior to himself, it would be wise to look for another Master!”
But Ommony felt more sure than ever. He knew that Pythagoras, for instance, and Appolonius, and scores of others had gone to India for their teaching. For twenty years he had kept ears and eyes alert for a clue that might lead him to one of the preservers of the ancient wisdom, who are said to mingle with the crowd unrecognized and to choose to whom they will impart their secrets. He had met self-styled Gurus by the dozen — a perfect host of more or less obvious charlatans — some self-deceived dabblers in the occult, whose motives might be more or less respectable — but never a one, unless this man, whose speech and conduct had appeared to him consistent with his idea of what a real Mahatma might be.
“Hannah Sanburn told me,” he said slowly, “that there are individuals to whom you go for advice. Did she tell the truth?”
“She received that truth from my lips,” said the Lama, nodding.
“Are they the Masters?”
“The Masters are only discoverable to those, who in former lives have earned the right to discover them,” the Lama answered. “There is a Higher Law that governs these things. It is the Law of Evolution. We evolve from one state to another, life after life, being born into such surroundings as provide us with the proper opportunity. It was not by accident, my son, that San-fun-ho was brought into the Ahbor Valley to be born.”
“Do the Masters live here?”
“No,” said the Lama, smiling again.
“Then what is the particular advantage of the Ahbor Valley?”
“My son, I do not rule the Universe! It was not my province to arrange the stars! There is no place, no circumstance that does not have particular advantages. The Ahbor Valley is more suitable to some than to others, but I am not the one who selects those who shall come here.”
“Who does?”
“There is a law that governs it, just as there is a law that rules the stars, and a law that obliges one to be born rich and another poor. When did cause begin? And when shall effect cease? Can you answer that?”
“At any rate, you were the cause of my coming here,” said Ommony.
“Nay, my son! No more than I was the cause of your coming into the worl
d. If I should have caused you to come here, I should be responsible for all the consequences; and I do not know what those might be. I have permitted you to come here. I have removed some difficulties.”
“Why?”
“Because I sought to remove other difficulties from the path of someone else, and it seemed to me possible that you might be the one who can assist. Remember: it was not I who caused you to resign your position under the Indian Government; not I who appointed you a Trustee at Tilgaun; nor I who invited you to disguise yourself as a Bhat-Brahmin. Have I ever given you advice on any of those matters?”
“No,” Ommony admitted. “But you have corresponded with me ever since Marmaduke died, and if your letters weren’t educative, what were they?”
“Evocative!” the Lama answered. “Shall I show you the copies of all the letters I have written to you? I believe you will not find one word in them that might evoke from you anything except your higher nature, nor one word that you could twist into inducement to do this, or to do that. I have taught you nothing. You have tried to understand my letters, and have found a guiding force within yourself. I am not your guide.”
“Well then — why the interest in me?” Ommony retorted.
“My son, you are immensely interesting. You were forced on my attention. I have my work to do, and I have nearly finished it.”
The old man paused, and suddenly he seemed so old and tired that all his previous exertions — night-long rides on camel-back, two months of journeying in the heat of the Indian plains, patient control of a dramatic company, and (not least) the return across the mountains to his home — appeared incredible. For a moment sadness seemed to overwhelm him. Then he smiled, and as if his will shone through the cloud and warmed the worn-out flesh, he threw off fifty years.
“For what purpose are we in the world?” he asked. “The purpose lies in front of each of us. It is never more than one step in advance, and whither it leads, who knows? It is the best that we can do at any moment that is required of us. A tree should grow. Water should run. A shoemaker should make shoes. A musician should make music. A teller of tales should tell them. Eyes are to see with. Ears are for hearing. Each man’s own environment is his own universe, and he the master or the victim of it in exactly the degree by which he governs or is governed by himself. Could you have patience with me, if I should tell a little — just a little of my own experience?”
“Good God!” said Ommony. “I’d rather hear it than find a fortune! Ears are to hear with!” he added, grinning, settling himself back into the chair to listen.
“Some men listen to the wrong sound,” said the Lama. “It is good to listen carefully, and to speak only after much thought. I will not tell more than is required to make a certain matter clear. Thereafter, you must use your own judgment, my son.”
CHAPTER XXIX. The Lama’s Story
I have conversed with many priests; and some were honest men, and some were not, but three things none of them could answer: if their God is all-wise, what does it matter if men are foolish? And if they can imagine and define their God, must he not be smaller than their own imaginations? Furthermore, if their God is omnipotent, why does he need priests and ritual?
— from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup
“I AM a Ringding, of the order of Gelong Lamas. That is neither a high rank nor a low one; but high enough to provide the outer forms of dignity, and low enough to avoid the snares of pride. I have ever found contentment in the Middle Way. I was born in Lhasa,” Tsiang Samdup began, and then paused and got down on the rug, where he could sit cross-legged and be comfortable. Diana went and laid her great head on his knee.
“Just a minute,” said Ommony. “How old are you?”
But Tsiang Samdup smiled. “My son,” he answered, “we live as long as we are useful, and as long as it is good for us to live. Thereafter we die, which is another form of living, even as ice and water and rain and dew are the same thing in different aspects. When the appointed time comes, we return, as the rain returns, to the earth it has left for a season. As I told you, I was born in Lhasa.” He rubbed the dog’s head as if he were erasing unnecessary details from the tablets of memory. Then he laid a stick of pine-wood on the fire deliberately, and watched it burn. It was several minutes before he spoke again.
“The Dalai Lama is a person who is mocked by Western thinkers. The few Europeans who have been to Lhasa have hastened to write books about him, in which they declare he is the ignorant head of a grossly superstitious religion. To which I have nothing to say, except this: that it is evident the writers of those books have been unable to expose the Dalai Lama’s secrets. An army which invaded Lhasa failed to expose them with its bayonets. I, who took the highest possible degrees at Oxford and have lived in Paris, in Vienna, and in Rome — so that I know at least something of the western culture — regard the Dalai Lama with respect, which is different, my son, from superstitious awe. The Tashi Lama, who does not live in Lhasa, is as high above the Dalai Lama as a principle is higher than a consequence.
“There was a Tashi Lama who selected me, for reasons of his own, for certain duties. I was very young then — conscious of the host of lower impulses and far from the self-knowledge that discriminates between the higher and the lower. To me in those days my desire was law, and I had not yet learned to desire the Middle Way, which leads between the dangers of ambition and inertia.”
Tsiang Samdup paused again and stared out of the window at an eagle which soared higher and higher on motionless wings, adjusting its balance accurately to the flukes of wind.
“We learn by experience,” he went on after a while. “Few of us remember former lives and those who say they do are for the most part liars, although there are some who are deceived by imagination. But the experience of former lives is in our favor — or against us, as the case may be. Its total is what some call instinct, others intuition; but there is a right name for it, and there are those whose past experience equips them with ability to recognize that stage in others at which the higher nature begins to overwhelm the lower. They are able to assist the process. But such men are exceedingly rare, though there are hosts of fools and rogues who pretend to the gift, which comes not by desire but by experience endured in many lives.
“That Tashi Lama said to me: ‘My son, it may amuse you to linger for a few lives on the lower path; for you are strong, and the senses riot in you; and it is not my duty to impose on you one course of conduct, if you prefer another. It is very difficult to rise against the will, but very easy if the will directs.’ And I, because I loved him, answered I would do his bidding. But he said: ‘Nay. Each man must, each minute, make his destiny. It is your own will, not mine, that directs you. Shall I fight your will, and force you to attempt the better way? Not so; because in that case you would surely fall, for which I should be responsible. But I perceive that the time has come when you may choose, and that your will is strong enough to make the choice and hold to it. You may be a benefactor or a beneficiary — a man, aware of manhood, or a victim of the lower senses, bound to the wheel of necessity. Which shall it be?’ — And because he had discerned, and had chosen the right moment, there was a surging of the spirit in me, and as it were an awakening.
“I said to him: ‘I have chosen.’ And he asked me ‘Which way?’ To which I answered at once: ‘The higher.’ Whereat he laughed; for I do not doubt that he saw the pride and the ambition that were cloaked within the answer.
“Thereafter he considered me for a long time before he spoke. And when I had waited so long that I supposed he would say no more at all, he said this: ‘They who take the higher way in the beginning are consumed with arrogance; they mortify the flesh and magnify the will until there is no balance left; and when, after their period of death, they are born again, it is into a feeble body possessed by a demon will that tortures it; even as they who choose the lower way are reborn into brutal bodies with feeble wills.’
“Whereat I asked him: ‘How then
shall I choose between the higher and the lower, since both are evil?’ And he considered me again, a long time.
“At last he said this: ‘There is the Middle Way; but there are few who find it, and yet fewer who persist in it, because pride tempts one way and sloth the other.’
“And I said: ‘I have chosen.’ And he said: ‘Speak.’ And I said: ‘Let it be the Middle Way.’ Whereat he did not laugh, but considered me again for many minutes; and at the end of it, he said: ‘My son, you have much strength. If you persist and keep the Middle Way, you have a destiny and you shall not die until you have fulfilled it. But beware of pride; and above all, seek no knowledge for your own sake.’
“At that time he said no more, but I became his chela. I washed his feet, and I swept the floor of his chamber, which was less than this one and less comfortably furnished. He taught me many things, but mainly patience, of which I lacked more in those days than a snake lacks legs. I supposed that before his time should come to die he would prefer me to high office. But nay. On a certain day he sent for me and said: ‘I shall die on the eleventh day from now, at noon. Tomorrow at dawn take the road into India, and go to Delhi, to a certain house in a certain street, and there learn the tongue of the English. Thence, I having made provision for it, journey to England, to a University called Oxford; and there learn all that the University can teach — and particularly all they think they know about philosophy and religion.’