He read the passage once, and then again, slowly. After that he leaned a little farther over his book, no longer seeing the writing, hoping only that none observed him. Stupidly he sat there, for an hour or more, neither reading nor thinking, only conning over and over again the two simple verses that had undone him. And when he had been quiet for a very long time, an idea came, and he whispered it over, lingeringly, wistfully, to himself: “I shall not confess. I shall not confess; and so—they can never know.”
[7] “Sacred Books of the East,” Max Müller edition, Vol. XIII, Vinaya texts, Part I. Mahavagga, p. 222. (Trans. W. Rhys-Davids and H. Oldenburg.)
CHAPTER VII
THE WHEEL OF THE LAW
Four weeks passed, and Oman realized, dully, that September had come. For him, Time had lost the power of flight. He took little note now of the incidents in the life around him. He was in the grip of his conscience, wholly absorbed in the pangs of a new suffering. The consciousness that he was an outcast never left him for a single moment. The All-knowing, the master, the Buddha, had declared him ineligible for the serene life, had tacitly denoted him a creature unfit to attain to any degree of peace. This, after the first shock of discovery, was his chief thought. Instinctively, also, he clung to another: the passionate decision that he should stand alone in his knowledge. The broad inconsistency between these two points formed the land of his misery. He dared not reflect on the workings of the Dharma. He was forbidden, by every tenet of religion, to use his higher reason in the criticism of religion. But he knew that he was, by decision of the law, unfit for the Samgha; and that in the Samgha he intended, bitterly, to stay.
For long periods his brain went numb with the pressure of thought refused. Gradually his behavior took on an aspect of guilt; and he slunk among his fellows like one who had committed far worse than a Dukata offence. He fell off, wofully, in his work, in his comprehension of the Dharma. He went through his meditations dull-eyed, palpably unthinking; and the masters of the novices began to comment on his behavior. Finally, he got into the habit of torturing himself, daily, after the last meditation was over, by waiting till every one had left the hall, and then getting out the manuscript of the Mahavagga and reading his death-sentence over again, to make sure of every keenest pang that lay in it, every drop of poison hidden in its innocent characters. And after he had seen it, and found that it was real, that he had not been under the influence of some baleful misapprehension, he would steal silently to his cell, and wear the night away in woman’s tears or fierce rages of rebellion that left him, at dawn, a bundle of trembling nerves.
The load that he carried became nearly unendurable. It was lightened by only one thing: when, occasionally dragging his mind from himself, he looked around him at his high superiors, the doubly ordained. These, in their dignity, their approachment to Arahatship, gave cause for highest wonder at and admiration of their freedom from all worldly concern. He envied, indeed, the lowest of the novices. But it seemed to him that, if he could only receive the Upasampada ordination, he might, in some way, cheat both himself and his god into believing in his fitness for the honors of the holy life.
Poor Oman! It had been infinitely easier for him had he known to how little serenity those envied men had actually attained! In the strangeness and isolation of his lot, it was not given him to understand that there is never a creature that must not bear its burden and suffer under it, believing it a little heavier, a little less adaptable, than that of any one else.
The poor novice thought that Upasampada opened the door upon a life in which a tranquil and scholarly mounting to perfection, untroubled by a single jarring incident from the outer world, was a natural sequence. Those high beings, advancing with rapid paces toward Nirvâna—surely their hearts and minds knew nothing of the battles, the uprisings of self, the human desires and yearnings that he was forever struggling against! Perhaps, indeed, the monks of the Samgha knew no such troubles as these. Their difficulties were usually of a more ignoble kind. As in the monasteries of another faith, in the far west, the Buddhist Viharas, even during their pathetic decadence, were too often seething hot-beds of rivalry and inward strife, thinly whitewashed with an outer coat of obedience to precept and renunciation of the fivefold clinging to the world. In the Vihara, a man desirous of attaining to Nirvâna had not only his own weakness to conquer, his own nature to strengthen; but he had before him the long battle of rivalry with those who, for every step he advanced, strove to make him take two backward. The result was, that the Samgha became a place of inner plots and counter-plots, intrigues worthy of a royal court, stealthy meetings and conversings of one faction or another, where obstacles innumerable were devised for any man who desired to mount to a higher and holier estate.
Of all the men in the Vihara of Truth, probably no one had received more of the miserable stabs of envy and jealousy than had Hushka, the honey-throated. Greatly beloved—by more than Oman—he was also passionately hated. It was now twenty years since his Upasampada ordination; and in all that time he had known scarcely an hour when he was not enduring the malicious jealousy of a rival. For a long time now his opposing faction had been led by Mahapra, a man who had passed his Upasampada a year earlier than Hushka, and who had caused him more and bitterer disappointments and humiliations than any dozen of his other enemies. And there were those of his friends who whispered that, had Mahapra been out of the way, it had not been Sugata who stood now an Arahat, at the head of the Samgha. Never came there a Pavarana, scarcely even an Uposatha day, that Hushka was not made to taste the venom of his enemy; and there was surely no heart-sickness that he had not endured. He had suffered as few of his companions could suffer; for his nature was delicately organized, and he was sensible to the most refined stings of misery. With all this, Mahapra himself rarely caught a glimpse of the wounds he inflicted; for Hushka had the power of concealment, and the wisdom never to burden any one with a recital of his own unhappiness. It was thus that, to an outsider, his life could scarcely seem other than beautiful.
During the last weeks of the Vassa season the constant, hidden strife that went on in the Samgha centred itself, curiously enough, around the figure of Oman. In the early months Hushka, through Oman, had enjoyed a triumph, for having brought from the pilgrimage a novice, of Brahman caste, and, moreover, a pupil of such high intelligence and one so devoted to the Dharma. The Sugata himself had complimented Hushka on his pupil’s progress; and at this point Mahapra’s bitterest ire and fear were roused. Too soon Oman began to give opening enough for criticism and belittlement. His laxity in effort and the falling off in his work and behavior became grossly apparent during the latter half of August, while whispers and comments from the adverse faction penetrated even to the Chaitya hall. From day to day Oman, absorbed in his own misery, pursued his course unconscious of notice. And day by day Hushka’s eyes followed him, in doubt and dread.