The Village in the Jungle

by Leonard Woolf

'Our women's feet are weary, but the day Must end somewhere for the followers in the way.'

Two days' journey from Beddagama they joined a larger and more frequented track. Here they continually met little bands of pilgrims bound for the same destination as themselves. The majority of them were Tamils, Hindus from India, from the tea estates, and from the north and east of the island; strange-looking men, such as Hinnihami had never seen before; very dark, with bodies naked to the waist; with lines of white and red paint on their shoulders, their foreheads smeared with ashes, and the mark of God's eye between their eyebrows. They wore clothes of fine white cotton, caught up between the legs, and they carried brass bowls and brass tongs. Their women, heavy and sullen-looking, followed, carrying bundles and children.

There were, however, also little bands of Buddhists, Sinhalese like themselves, and to one of these bands they attached themselves. Four of them were a family from a village only twenty miles north of Beddagama, and jungle people like themselves. They were taking a blind child to see whether, if they called upon the god, he would hear them and give him sight. There were a fisher and his wife from the coast; they were childless, and the woman had vowed to go to the festival and touch the heel of the kapurala, in order that the god might remove from her the curse of barrenness. Last, there was an old man, a trader from a large and distant village of another district; he wore immense spectacles, and all day long he walked reading or chanting from a large Sinhalese religious book, which he carried open in his hand. The rest of the party did not understand a word of what he read, but they felt that he was acquiring merit, and that they would share a little of it. He had been brought up in a Buddhist temple, and at night after the evening-meal he gathered the little party round him and preached to them, or read to them, by the light of the camp-fire, how they should live in order to acquire merit in this life. And at the appropriate places they all cried out together, 'Sadhu! sadhu!' or he made them all repeat together aloud the sil or rules; and as their voices rose and fell in the stillness of the night air, Karlinahami's face shone with ecstasy, and a sense of well-being and quiet, strange to her, stole over Hinnihami. Even in Silindu there came a change; he joined in the chant:

'Búddhun sáranam gáchchamí,'

with which they began and ended the day; he became less hopeless and sullen, and the look of fear began to leave his eyes. In the evenings, when the air grew cool and gentle after the pitiless heat and wind of the day; as they sat around the fire by the roadside; and the great trees rose black behind them into the night; and the stars blazed above them between the leaves; and up and down the road twinkled the fires of other pilgrims, and the air was sweet with the smell of the burning wood and the hum of voices; and the vast stillness of the jungle folded them round on every side; and they listened to the strange words, but half understood, of the Lord Buddha, and how he attained to Nirvana;—then the sufferings of the day were forgotten, and a feeling stole over them of peace and holiness and merit acquired.

And one evening, at Babun's suggestion, Karlinahami told them a story which had always been a favourite with the village women. At first the old man with the book and spectacles showed signs of being offended at this usurpation; but he was soothed by their saying that they did not want to tire him, and by their asking him to read to them again after the story was finished. In the end he was an absorbed listener as Karlinahami told the following story:[28]

'The Lord Buddha, in one of his previous lives, met a young girl carrying kunji[29] to her father, who was ploughing in the field. And when he saw her he thought, "The maiden is fair. If she is unmarried she would make me a fit wife." And she thought when she saw him, "If such a one took me to wife, I would bring fortune to my family." And he said to her, "What is your name?" Her name was Amara Devi, which means "undying," so she replied, "Sir, my name is that which never was, is, nor will be in this world. Nothing," he said, "born in this world is undying. Is your name Amara?" She answered, "Yes, sir." Then the Buddha said, "To whom are you taking the kunji? To the first god. You are taking it to your father? Yes, sir. What is your father doing? He makes one into two. To make one into two is to plough. Where is your father ploughing? He ploughs in that place from which no man returns. No man returns from the grave. Is he ploughing near the burial-ground? Yes, sir." Then Amara Devi offered the Buddha kunji to drink, and he accepted it, and he thought to himself, "If the maiden gives me the kunji without first washing the pot, I will leave her at once." But Amara Devi washed the pot first, and then gave the kunji. The Buddha drank the kunji, and said, "Friend, where is your house that I may go to it?" And Amara Devi answered, "Go by this path until you come to a boutique where they sell balls of rice and sugar; go on until you come to another where they sell kunji. From there you will see a flamboyant-tree in full blossom. At that tree take the path towards the hand with which you eat rice.[30] That is the way to my father's house." And the Buddha went as Amara Devi had directed him, and found the house, and went in. Amara Devi's mother was in the house, and she welcomed the Buddha, and made him sit down. And he, seeing the poverty of the house, said, "Mother, I am a tailor. Have you anything for me to sew?" And she said, "Son, there are clothes and pillows to mend, but I have no money to pay for the mending." Then he replied, "There is no need of money; bring them for me to mend." So the Lord Buddha sat and mended the torn clothes and pillows; and in the evening Amara Devi came back from the fields carrying a bundle of firewood on her head, and a sheaf of jungle leaves in the folds of her cloth. And Buddha lived in the house some days in order to learn the behaviour of the girl. At the end of three days he gave her half a seer[31] of rice, and said, "Amara Devi, cook for me kunji, boiled rice, and cakes." She never thought to say, "How can I cook so much out of half a seer of rice?" but was ready to do as she was told. She cleaned the rice, boiled the whole grains, made kunji from the broken grains, and cakes from the dust. She offered the kunji to the Buddha, and he took a mouthful and tasted the delight of its sweetness, but to try her he spat it out on the ground, and said, "Friend, since you do not know how to cook, why do you waste my rice?" Amara Devi took no offence, but offered him the cakes, saying, "Friend, if the kunji does not please you, will you eat of the cakes?" And the Buddha did the same with the cakes. Then Amara Devi offered him the rice, and again he spat out the rice, and pretended to be very angry, and smeared the food upon her head and body, and made her stand in the sun before the door. The girl showed no anger, but went out and stood in the sun. Then the Buddha said, "Amara Devi, friend, come here," and she came to him, and he took her as his wife, and lived with her in the city in the gatekeeper's house. And she still thought he was a tailor, and one day he sent two men to her with a thousand gold pieces to try her. The men took the gold pieces, and with them tempted her, but she said, "These thousand gold pieces are unworthy to wash my husband's feet." And three times she was tempted, and at last he told them to bring her to him by force. So they brought her to him by force, and when she came into his presence she did not know him, for he sat in state in his robes, but she smiled and wept when she looked at him. The Buddha asked her why she smiled and wept, and she said, "Lord, I smiled with joy to see your divine splendour and the merit acquired by you in innumerable births; but when I thought that in this birth you might by some evil act, such as this, by seducing another's wife, earn the pains of death, I wept for love of you." Then the Buddha sent her back to the house of the gatekeeper, and he told the king and queen that he had found a princess for his wife. And the queen gave jewels and gold ornaments to Amara Devi, and she was taken in a great chariot to the house of the Buddha, and from that day she lived happily with him as his wife.'

The other pilgrims, except the fisher, who had fallen asleep, were delighted with Karlinahami's story, and they wanted her to tell them another. But she was afraid to offend the old man again, so she refused. The old man read to them a while, and gradually, one after the other, they dropped off to sleep. And in the morning they started off again down the long white road; and at midday, when they were hot and footsore, the wall of jungle before them parted suddenly, and they came out into a great fertile plain. The green rice-fields stretched out before them, dotted over with watch-huts and clumps of cocoanut-trees and red-roofed houses, and the immense white domes of dagobas gleaming in the sun. Beyond shone the pleasant sheet of water through which the jungle had yielded the smiling plain; the dead trees still stood up gaunt and black from its surface; great white birds sat upon the black branches, or flapped lazily over the water with wild, hoarse cries; its bosom was starred and dappled with pink lotus-flowers. And beyond again lay the long dark stretch of jungle, out of which, far away to the north, towered into the fiery sky the line of dim blue hills. It was the tank and village of Maha Potana; and when the weary band of pilgrims suddenly saw the monotony of the trees and of the parched jungle give place to the water, and the green fields, and the white dagobas, the shrines built by kings long ago to hold the relics of the Lord Buddha, they raised their hands, salaaming, and cried aloud, 'Sadhu! Sadhu!'[32]

They picked lotus-flowers, and went to the great dagoba, which is called after an ancient king, and laid the flowers upon the shrine as an offering, and walked three times around, crying, 'Sadhu! Sadhu!' and thus acquired merit. Then they went into the bazaar which was crowded with pilgrims, Hindus and Buddhists, and Indian fakirs and Moormen. Innumerable bullock-carts stood on the road and paths and open spaces, and the air rang with the bells of the bulls, which lazily fed upon the great bundles of straw tied to the carts.

And the old man, who had noted the poverty of Silindu and his family, bought them rice and curry and plantains. So they sat under the shade of a great bo-tree, and ate a meal such as Hinnihami had never eaten before. Her eyes wandered vacantly from thing to thing; she was dazed by the crowd perpetually wandering to and fro, by the confused din of talking people, of coughing cattle, and jangling bells. In the evening they went to another dagoba, and then returned to the bo-tree and lighted their fire. All about them were other little fires, around which sat groups, like themselves, of pilgrims eating the evening meal. They ate rice again and cakes, and Hinnihami grew heavy with sleepiness. A great peace came upon her as she heard Karlinahami tell of how she had before come on pilgrimage to the great Buddhist festival at Maha Potana, when the crowds were tens of thousands more. And the old man told of a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Anuradhapura on the great poya day, when hundreds of thousands acquire merit by encircling the shrine; and the merit to be acquired by climbing Adam's Peak, or by visiting the ruined shrines of Situlpahuwa, which the jungle has covered, so that the bears and leopards have made their lairs in the great caves by the side of Buddhas, who lie carved out of rock. The air was heavy with the smell of cooking and the pungent smell of the burning wood; the voice of the old man seemed to come from very far away. She covered her head with a cloth and lay down on the bare ground. For the first time the bareness and fear and wildness of life had fallen from her; she fell asleep in the peace of well-being, and the merit which she had acquired.