The morality to which a child goes on from the facts of ecology and the parables of erosion is a universal ethic. There are no Chosen People in nature, no Holy Lands, no Unique Historical Revelations. Conservation morality gives nobody an excuse for feeling superior, or claiming special privileges. ‘Do as you would be done by’ applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”
“A few weeks ago,” said Will after a moment of silence, “I was looking at Thorwald’s book about what happened in eastern Germany between January and May of 1945. Have either of you read it?”
They shook their heads.
“Then don’t,” Will advised. “I was in Dresden five months after the February bombing. Fifty or sixty thousand civilians—mostly refugees running away from the Russians—burned alive in a single night. And all because little Adolf had never learned ecology,” he smiled his flayed ferocious smile, “never been taught the first principles of conservation.” One made a joke of it because it was too horrible to be talked about seriously.
Mr. Menon rose and picked up his briefcase.
“I must be going.” He shook hands with Will. It had been a pleasure, and he hoped that Mr. Farnaby would enjoy his stay in Pala. Meanwhile, if he wanted to know more about Palanese education, he had only to ask Mrs. Narayan. Nobody was better qualified to act as a guide and instructor.
“Would you like to visit some of the classrooms?” Mrs. Narayan asked, when the Under-Secretary had left.
Will rose and followed her out of the room and along a corridor.
“Mathematics,” said the Principal as she opened a door. “And this is the Upper Fifth. Under Mrs. Anand.”
Will bowed as he was introduced. The white-haired teacher gave a welcoming smile and whispered, “We’re deep, as you see, in a problem.”
He looked about him. At their desks a score of boys and girls were frowning, in a concentrated, pencil-biting silence, over their notebooks. The bent heads were sleek and dark. Above the white or khaki shorts, above the long gaily colored skirts, the golden bodies glistened in the heat. Boys’ bodies that showed the cage of the ribs beneath the skin, girls’ bodies, fuller, smoother, with the swell of small breasts, firm, high-set, elegant as the inventions of a rococo sculptor of nymphs. And everyone took them completely for granted. What a comfort, Will reflected, to be in a place where the Fall was an exploded doctrine!
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 nonvisualizers 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 biweekly lesson in Elementary Applied Philosophy. Breasts here were smaller, arms thinner and less muscular. These philosophers 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, and 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 center 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, labeled 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 noes.
“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 center of pain to another center 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 center. “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 dithipleth that underthtood what the Buddha wath talking about.”
“And what was he talking about?”
“He wathn’t talking. That’th why they didn’t underthtand.”
“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 preatth 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 underthand 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. So 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 color.
“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
