He had little idea as to where Dwarka was, but was content to ask his way day by day, and trust to God and the hospitality of his co-religionists on the way for sustenance.
“Yes,” he said, “sometimes I do want to see my family. My brothers are all gryasthas (married householders) now, and I sometimes take a few days’ leave from my master to visit them and my parents. I am quite happy in this life, and do not desire money or service or children; for when my heart is lonely I read in my copy of the Bhagvad Gita and get consolation, and I like that better than any other book because it makes my heart glad. No, I have never met anyone who has spoken to me of Christ, and I do not know anything about Him; but I am quite happy because I am sure that if I continue a life of penury and celibacy and pilgrimage I shall attain salvation.”
To resume my own experiences at Rishikes. When night came on I was given shelter in one of the monasteries, and though the floor was stone, and a chill wind blew through the cloisters, I should have slept soundly had not my next bed-fellow—or rather floor-fellow, for there were no beds—thought it incumbent on him to spend the night shouting out in varying cadence, “Ram, Ram, Jai Sita Ram, Ram, Ram!” I suggested that keeping a weary fellow-pilgrim awake all night would detract from the merit he was acquiring, but only received the consolation that if he kept me awake I was thereby sharing, though in a minor degree, in that merit; so it perforce went on till, in the early morning hours, my ears grew duller to the “Ram, Ram,” and my mind gradually shaped itself into an uneasy dream of ash-covered faqirs, chapattis, cows, and squatting Sadhus. Next day, in the forest road near Rishikes, I came across a string of hillmen bowed down under heavy loads of firewood, which they had been cutting in the hills near to sell for a few pice in the bazaar. This was their daily lot, earning just sufficient by continuous hard labour to find for themselves and their families sufficient coarse food for a meagre sustenance. The question rose in my mind, Who approached nearer the ideal?—the idle Sadhu, who makes religion an excuse for living in greasy plenty on the hard-won earnings of others, while doing next to nothing himself, or these woodmen of the forest, and all the dusty toilers in the ranks of honest labour? And an answer came, clear and sure:
“Honest toil is holy service; faithful work is praise and prayer.
They who tread the path of labour follow where My feet have trod;
They that work without complaining do the holy will of God.
Where the many toil together, there am I among My own;
Where the tired labourer sleepeth, there am I with him alone.”
The ascetics of Afghanistan are almost all Muhammadans, and I shall therefore speak of them as faqirs, that being the counterpart of the Hindu Sadhu. These faqirs have started from an entirely different religious standpoint, and travelled along a very different experimental road to those of their Hindu brethren; but the ultimate result is strikingly similar in many salient features, and Hindu asceticism and pantheistic thought have deeply coloured their ideas and habits.
There are endless different orders of Muhammadan faqirs, most of which had their origin in Central Asia, Bukhara and Baghdad having contributed perhaps the largest share. Each of these orders has its own method of initiation, its own habit of dress, set phrases and formulæ, and other characteristics.