who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with open eyes and open mind.
But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism and more than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I must give more than a paragraph to my impressions of it.
The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win the favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving massive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares. For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on the throne of Israel.
But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly {203} unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one see crowds like these--crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river's edge through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own households-- they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, man-borne palki and are taken within boats with closed sides, where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place.
A great many pilgrims--may God have pity, as He will, on their poor untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. "Rama, nama, satya hai" (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.
Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked a Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see there," he replied. And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them only the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the cremation is concluded it is the son's duty--in some places I visited, at least--to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to release his father's spirit!
But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propitiated gods, is "remerging in the general soul," the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic of the social and political institutions of the Orient.
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