“Good,” Shanta was still murmuring to her baby, “good, good, good.”
Too good—that was their crime. It simply wasn’t permissible. And yet how precious it was! And how passionately he wished that he might have had a part in it! “Pure sentimentality!” he said to himself; and then aloud, “Good, good, good,” he echoed ironically. “But what happens when the child grows a little bigger and discovers that a lot of things and people are thoroughly bad, bad, bad?”
“Friendliness evokes friendliness,” she answered.
“From the friendly—yes. But not from the greedy, not from the power lovers, not from the frustrated and embittered. For them, friendliness is just weakness, just an invitation to exploit, to bully, to take vengeance with impunity.”
“But one has to run the risk, one has to make a beginning. And luckily no one’s immortal. The people who’ve been conditioned to swindling and bullying and bitterness will all be dead in a few years. Dead, and replaced by men and women brought up in the new way. It happened with us; it can happen with you.”
“It can happen,” he agreed. “But in the context of H-bombs and nationalism and fifty million more people every single year, it almost certainly won’t.”
“You can’t tell till you try.”
“And we shan’t try as long as the world is in its present state. And, of course, it will remain in its present state until we do try. Try and, what’s more, succeed at least as well as you’ve succeeded. Which brings me back to my original question. What happens when good, good, good discovers that, even in Pala, there’s a lot of bad, bad, bad? Don’t the children get some pretty unpleasant shocks?”
“We try to inoculate them against those shocks.”
“How? By making things unpleasant for them while they’re still young?”
“Not unpleasant. Let’s say real. We teach them love and confidence, but we expose them to reality, reality in all its aspects. And then give them responsibilities. They’re made to understand that Pala isn’t Eden or the Land of Cockaigne. It’s a nice place all right. But it will remain nice only if everybody works and behaves decently. And meanwhile the facts of life are the facts of life. Even here.”
“What about the facts of life in those bloodcurdling snakes I met halfway up the precipice? You can say ‘good, good, good’ as much as you like; but snakes will still bite.”
“You mean, they still can bite. But will they in fact make use of their ability?”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“Look over there,” said Shanta. He turned his head and saw that what she was pointing at was a niche in the wall behind him. Within the niche was a stone Buddha, about half life-size, seated upon a curiously grooved cylindrical pedestal and surmounted by a kind of lead-shaped canopy that tapered down behind him into a broad pillar. “It’s a small replica,” she went on, “of the Buddha in the Station Compound—you know, the huge figure by the lotus pool.”
“Which is a magnificent piece of sculpture,” he said. “And the smile really gives one an inkling of what the Beatific Vision must be like. But what has it got to do with snakes?”
“Look again.”
He looked. “I don’t see anything specially significant.”
“Look harder.”
The seconds passed. Then, with a shock of surprise, he noticed something strange and even disquieting. What he had taken for an oddly ornamented cylindrical pedestal had suddenly revealed itself as a huge coiled snake. And that downward tapering canopy under which the Buddha was sitting was the expanded hood, with the flattened head at the center of its leading edge, of a giant cobra.
“My God!” he said. “I hadn’t noticed. How unobservant can one be?”
“Is this the first time you’ve seen the Buddha in this context?”
“The first time. Is there some legend?”
She nodded. “One of my favorites. You know about the Bodhi Tree, of course?”
“Yes, I know about the Bodhi Tree.”
“Well, that wasn’t the only tree that Gautama sat under at the time of his Enlightenment. After the Bodhi Tree, he sat for seven days under a banyan, called the Tree of the Goatherd. And after that he moved on to the Tree of Muchalinda.”
“Who was Muchalinda?”
“Muchalinda was the King of the Snakes and, being a god, he knew what was happening. So when the Buddha sat down under his tree, the Snake King crawled out of his hole, yards and yards of him, to pay Nature’s homage to Wisdom. Then a great storm blew up from the west. The divine cobra wrapped its coils round the more than divine man’s body, spread its hood over his head and, for the seven days his contemplation lasted, sheltered the Tathagata from the wind and rain. So there he sits to this day, with cobra beneath him, cobra above him, conscious simultaneously of cobra and the Clear Light and their ultimate identity.”
“How very different,” said Will, “from our view of snakes!”
“And your view of snakes is supposed to be God’s view—remember Genesis.”
“‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman,’” he quoted, “‘and between her seed and thy seed.’”
“But Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere. All those senseless pointless cockfights between Man and Nature, between Nature and God, between the Flesh and the Spirit! Wisdom doesn’t make those insane separations.”
“Nor does Science.”
“Wisdom takes Science in its stride and goes a stage further.”
“And what about totemism?” Will went on. “What about the fertility cults? They didn’t make any separations. Were they Wisdom?”
“Of course they were—primitive Wisdom, Wisdom on the neolithic level. But after a time people begin to get self-conscious and the old Dark Gods come to seem disreputable. So the scene changes. Enter the Gods of Light, enter the Prophets, enter Pythagoras and Zoroaster, enter the Jains and the early Buddhists. Between them they usher in the Age of the Cosmic Cockfight—Ormuzd versus Ahriman, Jehovah versus Satan and the Baalim, Nirvana as opposed to Samsara, appearance over against Plato’s Ideal Reality. And except in the minds of a few Tankriks and Mahayanists and Taoists and heretical Christians, the cockfight went on for the best part of two thousand years.”
“After which?” he questioned.
“After which you get the beginnings of modern biology.”
Will laughed. “‘God said, Let Darwin be,’ and there was Nietzsche, Imperialism and Adolf Hitler.”
“All that,” she agreed. “But also the possibility of a new kind of Wisdom for everybody. Darwin took the old totemism and raised it to the level of biology. The fertility cults reappeared as genetics and Havelock Ellis. And now it’s up to us to take another half turn up the spiral. Darwinism was the old neolithic Wisdom turned into scientific concepts. The new conscious Wisdom—the kind of Wisdom that was prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra—is biological theory realized in living practice, is Darwinism raised to the level of compassion and spiritual insight. So you see,” she concluded, “there isn’t any earthly reason—much less any heavenly reason—why the Buddha, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn’t contemplate the Clear Light as manifested in a snake.”
“Even though the snake might kill him?”
“Even though it might kill him.”
“And even though it’s the oldest and most universal of phallic symbols?”
Shanta laughed. “‘Meditate under the Tree of Muchalinda’—that’s the advice we give to every pair of lovers. And in the intervals between those loving meditations remember what you were taught as children; snakes are your brothers; snakes have a right to your compassion and your respect; snakes, in a word, are good, good, good.”
“Snakes are also poisonous, poisonous, poisonous.”
“But if you remember that they’re just as good as they’re poisonous, and act accordingly, they won’t use their poison.”
“Who says so?”
“It’s an observable fact. People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten. Next week I’m borrowing our neighbor’s pet python. For a few days I’ll be giving Rama his lunch and dinner in the coils of the Old Serpent.”
From outside the house came the sound of high-pitched laughter, then a confusion of children’s voices interrupting one another in English and Palanese. A moment later, looking very tall and maternal by comparison with her charges, Mary Sarojini walked into the room flanked by a pair of identical four-year-olds and followed by the sturdy cherub who had been with her when Will first opened his eyes on Pala.
“We picked up Tara and Arjuna at the kindergarten,” Mary Sarojini explained as the twins hurled themselves upon their mother.
With the baby in one arm and the other round the two little boys, Shanta smiled her thanks. “That was very kind of you.”
It was Tom Krishna who said, “You’re welcome.” He stepped forward and, after a moment of hesitation, “I was wondering…” he began, then broke off and looked appealingly at his sister. Mary Sarojini shook her head.
“What were you wondering?” Shanta enquired.
“Well, as a matter of fact, we were both wondering…I mean, could we come and have dinner with you?”
“Oh, I see.” Shanta looked from Tom Krishna’s face to Mary Sarojini’s and back again. “Well, you’d better go and ask Vijaya if there’s enough to eat. He’s doing the cooking today.”
“Okay,” said Tom Krishna without enthusiasm. With slow reluctant steps he crossed the room and went out through the door into the kitchen. Shanta turned to Mary Sarojini. “What happened?”
“Well, Mother’s told him at least fifty times that she doesn’t like his bringing lizards into the house. But this morning he did it again. So she got very cross with him.”
“And you decided you’d better come and have dinner here?”
“If it isn’t convenient, Shanta, we could try the Raos
