Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 16

The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties {191} in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, and for the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of apparel--or the lack of it. Most of the laborers on the streets wear only a loin-cloth and a turban (with the addition of a caste-mark on the forehead in case they are Hindus), but others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped, ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or trousers: and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors.

"The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kipling's "Road to Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or perhaps instead of the white cheroot it is an enormous black cigar. In either case it is as large as a medium-sized corncob, that the newly landed tourist is moved to stare thereat in open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's verses go?

"'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green.

An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen, An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.

An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot."

They are all there in Rangoon yet--the gorgeous coloring of the lady's raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols--

"Bloomin' idol made o' mud.

Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud."

How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossible to estimate--I saw them not only in the paG.o.das, but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior--and the gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon PaG.o.da, "the most celebrated shrine of the entire Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before you reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washington Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom--with actual gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim--and around it are innumerable smaller paG.o.das and shrines glittering with mosaics of colored gla.s.s in imitation of all the gems known to mortals. {192} Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin's palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the PaG.o.da after my second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a G.o.d who tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather than a G.o.d of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives of the women--all a result, in the main, of the difference in religion.

And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough--its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faith mingled with gross superst.i.tions and charms to propitiate the "nats"

or spirits which are supposed to inhabit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc., and to have infinite power over the lives and fortunes of the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offerings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days and get his living in this way.

The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian {193} bullock.

Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance and with a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; and it may be that the small boys utilize the long-eared goats (they have heavy, drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their small carts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China's capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating.

One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. It was better than a circus.

"Elephants a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek."

It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings in the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed"

in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, while the others pulled them with chains. But the most marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half-naked driver, or mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders, makes him {194} understand what to do in each case by merely kicking his neck or prodding his ears.

At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about his trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in the camp.

For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plank he is remarkably careful about matching. Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or any single piece out of place, in which case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib"

("Salute the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.

One of my fellow-pa.s.sengers, a rubber planter from the Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting stories concerning them. He had two--one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or $833-1/3, and the other a mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or $750. On one occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild," and went back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn't like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers.

I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in {195} on him, and the mahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts set about taming him--talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In a couple of months "my lord the Elephant" is fully civilized, responds promptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adopts some useful occupation.

In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the great quant.i.ty of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds a day will barely "jestify his stummuck," as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry "he wants what he wants when he wants it," and trumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be brought aboard for the elephants' breakfast.

I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon {196} Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question a.s.sured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.

I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will work through the Burman rice harvest--rice is the one great crop of the country--at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, and after three or four months of this will return home. Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carrying them back.

Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never sets on the English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders.

Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone--more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197} it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas welcomed it!

With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.

Rangoon, Bunna.

{198}

XX

HINDUISM--AND THE HIMALAYAS

If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life-- if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as "a sacred disease."

Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privileged and "superior" being, to whom all lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.

About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening combination of superst.i.tion, idolatry, and {199} vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, "Samsara," the belief that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the G.o.ds and win release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence will influence all your future rebirths--this is a doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that G.o.d can be worshipped only in spirit.

Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of G.o.d, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into G.o.d--this also (although destructive of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu G.o.ds themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal.

Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for mult.i.tude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pa.s.s in review before you, every eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.

It is an extreme ill.u.s.tration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta.

This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the b.l.o.o.d.y G.o.ddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and a.s.sa.s.sins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron G.o.ddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion."

The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, b.l.o.o.d.y head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible G.o.ddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.

In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a b.l.o.o.d.y human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.

From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the G.o.ds. On the way we pa.s.sed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest a.s.sured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his a.s.sistance--there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.

Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu "religion."

It was Sunday morning.

Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty G.o.ddess, herself only one of the many jealous G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one G.o.d whose characteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202} recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words into the strange tongue of the Bengali.

At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of those of

"Deaf ear and soul uncaring"

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 G.o.ds, 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 ma.s.sive 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 G.o.ds 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.