Island (29 page)

“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 I? Meanwhile let’s take another look at these diagrams on the blackboard. Public words, more or less public events, and then people, completely private centers of pain and pleasure. “
Completely
private?” he questioned. “But perhaps that isn’t quite true. Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication between the circles—not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly. And maybe that was what the Buddha was talking about when his wordless flower-sermon was over. ‘I have the treasure of the unmistakable teachings,’ he said to his disciples, ‘the wonderful Mind of Nirvana, the true form without form, beyond all words, the teaching to be given and received outside of all doctrines. This I have now handed to
Mahakasyapa.’” Picking up the chalk again, he traced a rough ellipse that enclosed within its boundaries all the other diagrams on the board—the little circles representing human beings, the square that stood for events, and the other square that stood for words and symbols. “All separate,” he said, “and yet all one. People, events, words—they’re all manifestations of Mind, of Suchness, of the Void. What Buddha was implying and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can’t speak these teachings, one can only
be
them. Which is something you’ll all discover when the moment comes for your initiation.”

“Time to move on,” the Principal whispered. And when the door had closed behind them and they were standing again in the corridor, “We use this same kind of approach,” she said to Will, “in our science teaching, beginning with botany.”

“Why with botany?”

“Because it can be related so easily to what was being talked about just now—the Mahakasyapa story.”

“Is that your starting point?”

“No, we start prosaically with the textbook. The children are given all the obvious, elementary facts, tidily arranged in the standard pigeonholes. Undiluted botany—that’s the first stage. Six or seven weeks of it. After which they get a whole morning of what we call bridge building. Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge.”

“Botany and self-knowledge—how do you build
that
bridge?”

“It’s really quite simple,” Mrs. Narayan assured him. “Each of the children is given a common flower—a hibiscus, for example, or better still (because the hibiscus has no scent) a gardenia. Scientifically speaking, what is a gardenia? What does it consist of? Petals, stamens, pistil, ovary, and all the rest of it. The children are asked to write a full analytical description of the flower, illustrated by an accurate drawing. When that’s done there’s a
short rest period, at the close of which the Mahakasyapa story is read to them and they’re asked to think about it. Was Buddha giving a lesson in botany? Or was he teaching his disciples something else? And, if so, what?”

“What indeed?”

“And of course, as the story makes clear, there’s no answer that can be put into words. So we tell the boys and girls to stop thinking and just look. ‘But don’t look analytically,’ we tell them, ‘don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labeling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the Other Shore.’”

“All this,” Will commented, “sounds very like what Dr. Robert was saying at the initiation ceremony.”

“Of course it does,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Learning to take the Mahakasyapa’s-eye view of things is the best preparation for the
moksha
-medicine experience. Every child who comes to initiation comes to it after a long education in the art of being receptive. First the gardenia as a botanical specimen. Then the same gardenia in its uniqueness, the gardenia as the artist sees it, the even more miraculous gardenia seen by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa. And it goes without saying,” she added, “that we don’t confine ourselves to flowers. Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions. Everything from dissected frogs to the spiral nebulae, it all gets looked at receptively as well as conceptually, as a fact of aesthetic or spiritual experience as well as in terms of science or history or economics. Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of
training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.”

There was a silence. “How should one look at other people?” Will asked at last. “Should one take the Freud’s-eye view or the Cézanne’s-eye view? The Proust’s-eye view or the Buddha’s-eye view?”

Mrs. Narayan laughed. “Which view are you taking of me?” she asked.

“Primarily, I suppose, the sociologist’s-eye view,” he answered. “I’m looking at you as the representative of an unfamiliar culture. But I’m also being aware of you receptively. Thinking, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you seem to have aged remarkably well. Well aesthetically, well intellectually and psychologically, and well spiritually, whatever that word means—and if I make myself receptive it means something important. Whereas, if I choose to project instead of taking in, I can conceptualize it into pure nonsense.” He uttered a mildly hyenalike laugh.

“If one chooses to,” said Mrs. Narayan, “one can always substitute a bad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity. The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice? Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonize their views? The analyzing tradition-bound concept maker and the alertly passive insight receiver—neither is infallible; but both together can do a reasonably good job.”

“Just how effective is your training in the art of being receptive?” Will now enquired.

“There are degrees of receptivity,” she answered. “Very little of it in a science lesson, for example. Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the
moksha
-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don’t select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It’s like that poem of Wordsworth’s,
‘Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.’ In these bridge-building sessions I’ve been describing there’s still quite a lot of busy selecting and projecting, but not nearly so much as in the preceding science lessons. The children don’t suddenly turn into little Tathagatas; they don’t achieve the pure receptivity that comes with the
moksha
-medicine. Far from it. All one can say is that they learn to go easy on names and notions. For a little while they’re taking in a lot more than they give out.”

“What do you make them do with what they’ve taken in?”

“We merely ask them,” Mrs. Narayan answered, with a smile, “to attempt the impossible. The children are told to translate their experience into words. As a piece of pure, unconceptualized giveness, what
is
this flower, this dissected frog, this planet at the other end of the telescope? What does it mean? What does it make you think, feel, imagine, remember? Try to put it down on paper. You won’t succeed, of course; but try all the same. It’ll help you to understand the difference between words and events, between knowing about things and being acquainted with them. ‘And when you’ve finished writing,’ we tell them, ‘look at the flower again and, after you’ve looked, shut your eyes for a minute or two. Then draw what came to you when your eyes were closed. Draw whatever it may have been—something vague or vivid, something like the flower itself or something entirely different. Draw what you saw or even what you didn’t see, draw it and color it with your paints or crayons. Then take another rest and, after that, compare your first drawing with the second; compare the scientific description of the flower with what you wrote about it when you weren’t analyzing what you saw, when you behaved as though you didn’t know anything about the flower and just permitted the mystery of its existence to come to you, like that, out of the blue. Then compare your drawings and writings with the drawings and writings of the other boys and girls in the class. You’ll notice that the analytical descriptions and illustrations are very similar, whereas the draw
ings and writings of the other kind are very different one from another. How is all this connected with what you have learned in school, at home, in the jungle, in the temple?’ Dozens of questions, and all of them insistent. The bridges have to be built in all directions. One starts with botany—or any other subject in the school curriculum—and one finds oneself, at the end of a bridge-building session, thinking about the nature of language, about different kinds of experience, about metaphysics and the conduct of life, about analytical knowledge and the wisdom of the Other Shore.”

“How on earth,” Will asked, “did you ever manage to teach the teachers who now teach the children to build these bridges?”

“We began teaching teachers a hundred and seven years ago,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Classes of young men and women who had been educated in the traditional Palanese way. You know—good manners, good agriculture, good arts and crafts, tempered by folk medicine, old-wives’ physics and biology and a belief in the power of magic and the truth of fairy tales. No science, no history, no knowledge of anything going on in the outside world. But these future teachers were pious Buddhists; most of them practiced meditation and all of them had read or listened to quite a lot of Mahayana philosophy. That meant that in the fields of applied metaphysics and psychology they’d been educated far more thoroughly and far more realistically than any group of future teachers in your part of the world. Dr. Andrew was a scientifically trained, antidogmatic humanist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied Mahayana. His friend, the Raja, was a Tantrik Buddhist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied science. Both, consequently, saw very clearly that, to be capable of teaching children to become fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds.”

“And how did those early teachers feel about it? Didn’t they resist the process?”

Mrs. Narayan shook her head. “They didn’t resist, for the good reason that nothing precious had been attacked. Their Buddhism was respected. All they were asked to give up was the old-wives’ science and the fairy tales. And in exchange for those they got all kinds of much more interesting facts and much more useful theories. And these exciting things from your Western world of knowledge and power and progress were now to be combined with, and in a sense subordinated to, the theories of Buddhism and the psychological facts of applied metaphysics. There was really nothing in that best-of-both-worlds program to offend the susceptibilities of even the touchiest and most ardent of religious patriots.”

“I’m wondering about
our
future teachers,” said Will after a silence. “At this late stage, would they be teachable? Could they possibly learn to make the best of both worlds?”

“Why not? They wouldn’t have to give up any of the things that are really important to them. The non-Christian could go on thinking about man and the Christian could go on worshiping God. No change, except that God would have to be thought of as immanent and man would have to be thought of as potentially self-transcendent.”

“And you think they’d make those changes without any fuss?” Will laughed. “You’re an optimist.”

“An optimist,” said Mrs. Narayan, “for the simple reason that, if one tackles a problem intelligently and realistically, the results are apt to be fairly good. This island justifies a certain optimism. And now let’s go and have a look at the dancing class.”

They crossed a tree-shaded courtyard and, pushing through a swing door, passed out of silence into the rhythmic beat of a drum and the screech of fifes repeating over and over again a short pentatonic tune that to Will’s ears sounded vaguely Scotch.

“Live music or canned?” he asked.

“Japanese tape,” Mrs. Narayan answered laconically. She
opened a second door that gave access to a large gymnasium where two bearded young men and an amazingly agile little old lady in black satin slacks were teaching some twenty or thirty little boys and girls the steps of a lively dance.