With infinite reverence I was given two leaves, collected as they fell; and it is difficult to look on them unmoved if indeed this Tree be directly descended from the other, which sheltered the triumphant conflict with evil.
The city itself is drowned in the jungle. In the green twilight you meet a queen’s palace, with reeling pillars and fallen capitals, beautiful with carved moonstones, for so are called the steps of ascent. Or lost in tangle, a manger fifty feet long for the royal elephants, or a nobly planned bath for the queens, where it is but to close the eyes and dream that dead loveliness floating in the waters once so jealously guarded, now mirroring the wild woodways. A little creeper is stronger than all our strength, and our armies are as nothing before the silent legions of the grass.
Later, I stood before the image of that Buddha who is to come—who in the Unchanging awaits his hour; Maitreya, the Buddha of Love. A majestic figure, robed like a king, for he will be royal. In his face, calm as the Sphinx, must the world decipher its hope, if it may. Strangely enough, in most of his images this Saviour who shall come is seated like a man of the West, and many learned in the faith believe that this Morning Star shall rise in the West. May he come quickly!
I set out one day for Mihintale, in a world of dewy, virginal loveliness, washed with morning gold, the sun shooting bright arrows into the green shade of the trees, a cloud of butterflies radiant as little flower angels going with me. One splendour, rose-red, velvet-black, alighted with quivering wings on the mouse-grey shoulder of the meek little bull who drew my cart and so went with us.
I was glad that my companion should be a devout Buddhist, for his reverence and delight in the beauty of his faith taught me many things. We climbed up through trees so still that the rustling of their shadows on the ground might have been audible, and as we went he told me a very ancient Buddhist story which must have reached the Island with the Apostle Mahinda, son of the high Emperor Ashoka, who brought the faith from his father’s court in India. Ashoka is one of the great world-rulers, the Constantine of the Buddhist teaching and himself a devout disciple. This story is a Jataka or Birth Story of the Lord, one of those to which I have already alluded, as conveying moral teaching (and often much folk lore), and this is called “The Dancing Peacock.”
“Thus have I heard. In the old days the Blessed Buddha sat at Jetavana, and they told him of a monk who had become drowned in luxury, eating, drinking and adorning his person with magnificence, so that he cared nothing for the faith. And at last they brought him before the Lord that he might be admonished. And the Perfect One said:
“ ‘Is it true, monk, that despising all nobility you have surrendered yourself to idle luxury?’
“And without waiting to hear a word more the monk flew into a violent anger, and tearing off his magnificent robe he stood naked before the Master, crying:
“ ‘Then, if you like not my robes, this is the way I will go about!’
“So the bystanding monks cried out: ‘Shame, Shame!’ and in a fury he rushed from the hall and returned to the condition of a layman. And the Lord said: