—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
It was in Benares that I saw another living god. That makes two. I believe I have seen most of the greater and lesser5 wonders of the world, but I do not remember that any of them interested me so overwhelmingly as did that pair of gods.
When I try to account for this effect I find no difficulty about it. I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand. We are eager to see any celebrated6 thing—and we never fail of our reward; just the deep privilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm or evoked7 the reverence3 or affection or admiration8 of multitudes of our race is a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we have seen it, we are permanently9 enriched from having seen it, we would not part with the memory of that experience for a great price. And yet that very spectacle may be the Taj. You cannot keep your enthusiasms down, you cannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble of marble breaks upon your view. But these are not your enthusiasms and emotions—they are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasms of a thousand fervid10 writers, who have been slowly and steadily11 storing them up in your heart day by day and year by year all your life; and now they burst out in a flood and overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit12 happier if they were your very own. By and by you sober down, and then you perceive that you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else’s cork13. For ever and ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the Taj will compensate14 me for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege.
But the Taj—with all your inflation of delusive15 emotions, acquired at second-hand16 from people to whom in the majority of cases they were also delusions17 acquired at second-hand—a thing which you fortunately did not think of or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined were your own what is the Taj as a marvel18, a spectacle and an uplifting and overpowering wonder, compared with a living, breathing, speaking personage whom several millions of human beings devoutly19 and sincerely and unquestioningly believe to be a God, and humbly20 and gratefully worship as a God?
He was sixty years old when I saw him. He is called Sri 108 Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati. That is one form of it. I think that that is what you would call him in speaking to him—because it is short. But you would use more of his name in addressing a letter to him; courtesy would require this. Even then you would not have to use all of it, but only this much:
Sri 108 Matparamahansrzpairivrajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati.
You do not put “Esq.” after it, for that is not necessary. The word which opens the volley is itself a title of honor “Sri.” The “108” stands for the rest of his names, I believe. Vishnu has 108 names which he does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods and a privilege sacred to their order to keep 108 extra ones in stock. Just the restricted name set down above is a handsome property, without the 108. By my count it has 58 letters in it. This removes the long German words from competition; they are permanently out of the race.
Sri 108 S. B. Saraswati has attained22 to what among the Hindoos is called the “state of perfection.” It is a state which other Hindoos reach by being born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation after another—a tiresome23 long job covering centuries and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks, too, like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the Ganges some time or other and waking up in the form of an ass24, with a fresh start necessary and the numerous trips to be made all over again. But in reaching perfection, Sri 108 S. B. S. has escaped all that. He is no longer a part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly25 holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate26 this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme27 Deity28 and be at peace forever.
The Hindoo Scriptures29 point out how this state is to be reached, but it is only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that candidate accomplishes it. This one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from the beginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for the call which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part nor lot. First, he passed through the student stage, and became learned in the holy books. Next he became citizen, householder, husband, and father. That was the required second stage. Then—like John Bunyan’s Christian30 he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and went wandering away. He went far into the desert and served a term as hermit31. Next, he became a beggar, “in accordance with the rites32 laid down in the Scriptures,” and wandered about India eating the bread of mendicancy33. A quarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity. This needs no garment; its symbol is nudity; he discarded the waist-cloth which he had previously34 worn. He could resume it now if he chose, for neither that nor any other contact can defile35 him; but he does not choose.
There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember what they are. But he has been through them. Throughout the long course he was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon the sacred books. He was also meditating36 upon Brahma, and he does that now.
White marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about India. He lives in a good house in a noble great garden in Benares, all meet and proper to his stupendous rank. Necessarily he does not go abroad in the streets. Deities37 would never be able to move about handily in any country. If one whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroad in our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all traffic would be blocked and business would come to a standstill.
This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly build it. Sometimes he sees devotees for a moment, and comforts them and blesses them, and they kiss his feet and go away happy. Rank is nothing to him, he being a god. To him all men are alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper38; at other times he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However, he does not receive many of either class. He has to husband his time for his meditations40. I think he would receive Rev2. Mr. Parker at any time. I think he is sorry for Mr. Parker, and I think Mr. Parker is sorry for him; and no doubt this compassion41 is good for both of them.
When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while and wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning away Maharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged in between, somewhere. But presently, a servant came out saying it was all right, he was coming.
And sure enough, he came, and I saw him—that object of the worship of millions. It was a strange sensation, and thrilling. I wish I could feel it stream through my veins42 again. And yet, to me he was not a god, he was only a Taj. The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me secondhand from those invisible millions of believers. By a hand-shake with their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster battery’s whole charge.
He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated43. He had a clean cut and conspicuously44 intellectual face, and a deep and kindly45 eye. He looked many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation39 and fasting and prayer, with the arid46 life he had led as hermit and beggar, could account for that. He is wholly nude47 when he receives natives, of whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a concession48 to Mr. Parker’s European prejudices, no doubt.
As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together, and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. He had heard a deal about Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable49 interest in it, for a god. It all came of the World’s Fair and the Congress of Religions. If India knows about nothing else American, she knows about those, and will keep them in mind one while.
He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me believe in him, but I had been having my doubts before. He wrote his in his book, and I have a reverent50 regard for that book, though the words run from right to left, and so I can’t read it. It was a mistake to print in that way. It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindoo holy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for perfection myself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he looked tired, and I knew that if it didn’t do him any good it wouldn’t do him any harm.
He has a scholar meditating under him—Mina Bahadur Rana—but we did not see him. He wears clothes and is very imperfect. He has written a little pamphlet about his master, and I have that. It contains a wood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. The portrait of the master is very good indeed. The posture51 is exactly that which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man. There is a life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S. in the garden. It represents him in this same posture.
Dear me! It is a strange world. Particularly the Indian division of it. This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of distinguished52 capacities and attainments53, and, apparently54, he had a fine worldly career in front of him. He was serving the Nepal Government in a high capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago. He was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. But the longing55 to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and went away into the solitudes56 to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate57 upon virtue58 and holiness and seek to attain21 them. This sort of religion resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich to give away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly comfort. American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in religion. Yet many people scoff59 at them for this loyalty60 to duty, and many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like many Christians61 of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving labor62 of his life. Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy63 and honorable employment of it. Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men worthy of homage64 and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. But I shall not. He has my reverence. And I don’t offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing. Reverence for one’s own sacred things—parents, religion, flag, laws, and respect for one’s own beliefs—these are feelings which we cannot even help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can’t revere4 his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.
We are always canting about people’s “irreverence,” always charging this offense66 upon somebody or other, and thereby67 intimating that we are better than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves. Whenever we do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant65; for none of us are reverent—in a meritorious68 way; deep down in our hearts we are all irreverent. There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the earth. There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage69 has that—and, like the best of us, has nothing higher. To speak plainly, we despise all reverences70 and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us. Suppose we should meet with a paragraph like the following, in the newspapers:
“Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at Mount Vernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon71, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas.”
Should we be shocked? Should we feel outraged72? Should we be amazed? Should we call the performance a desecration73? Yes, that would all happen. We should denounce those people in round terms, and call them hard names.
And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers:
“Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires had a picnic in Westminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas.”
Would the English be shocked? Would they feel outraged? Would they be amazed? Would they call the performance a desecration? That would all happen. The pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; they would be called hard names.
In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America’s most honored son; in the Abbey, the ashes of England’s greatest dead; the tomb of tombs, the costliest74 in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built by a great Emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish75, whose love was his stay and support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it her ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place; to them it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is to the English.
Major Sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine):
“I would here enter my humble76 protest against the quadrille and lunch parties which are sometimes given to European ladies and gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly out of place in a sepulchre.”
Were there any Americans among those lunch parties? If they were invited, there were.
If my imagined lunch-parties in Westminster and the tomb of Washington should take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bitter eloquence77 about Barbarism and Irreverence; and it would come from two sets of people who would go next day and dance in the Taj if they had a chance.
As we took our leave of the Benares god and started away we noticed a group of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate—a Rajah from somewhere in India, and some people of lesser consequence. The god beckoned78 them to come, and as we passed out the Rajah was kneeling and reverently79 kissing his sacred feet.
If Barnum—but Barnum’s ambitions are at rest. This god will remain in the holy peace and seclusion80 of his garden, undisturbed. Barnum could not have gotten him, anyway. Still, he would have found a substitute that would answer.
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1
irreverence
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| n.不尊敬 | |
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rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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revere
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| vt.尊崇，崇敬，敬畏 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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fervid
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| adj.热情的；炽热的 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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whit
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| n.一点，丝毫 | |
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cork
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| n.软木，软木塞 | |
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compensate
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| vt.补偿，赔偿；酬报 vi.弥补；补偿；抵消 | |
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delusive
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| adj.欺骗的，妄想的 | |
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second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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delusions
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| n.欺骗( delusion的名词复数 )；谬见；错觉；妄想 | |
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marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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devoutly
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| adv.虔诚地，虔敬地，衷心地 | |
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humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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desecrate
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| v.供俗用，亵渎，污辱 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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scriptures
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| 经文，圣典( scripture的名词复数 )； 经典 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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hermit
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| n.隐士，修道者；隐居 | |
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rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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mendicancy
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| n.乞丐，托钵，行乞修道士 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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defile
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| v.弄污，弄脏；n.(山间)小道 | |
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meditating
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| a.沉思的，冥想的 | |
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deities
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| n.神，女神( deity的名词复数 )；神祗；神灵；神明 | |
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pauper
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| n.贫民，被救济者，穷人 | |
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meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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meditations
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| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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emaciated
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| adj.衰弱的，消瘦的 | |
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conspicuously
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| ad.明显地，惹人注目地 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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arid
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| adj.干旱的；(土地)贫瘠的 | |
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nude
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| adj.裸体的；n.裸体者，裸体艺术品 | |
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concession
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| n.让步，妥协；特许(权) | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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reverent
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| adj.恭敬的，虔诚的 | |
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posture
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| n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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attainments
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| 成就，造诣； 获得( attainment的名词复数 )； 达到； 造诣； 成就 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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solitudes
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| n.独居( solitude的名词复数 )；孤独；荒僻的地方；人迹罕至的地方 | |
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meditate
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| v.想，考虑，（尤指宗教上的）沉思，冥想 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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scoff
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| n.嘲笑，笑柄，愚弄；v.嘲笑，嘲弄，愚弄，狼吞虎咽 | |
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loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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cant
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| n.斜穿，黑话，猛扔 | |
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offense
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| n.犯规，违法行为；冒犯，得罪 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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meritorious
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| adj.值得赞赏的 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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reverences
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| n.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的名词复数 )；敬礼 | |
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71
luncheon
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| n.午宴，午餐，便宴 | |
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72
outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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73
desecration
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| n. 亵渎神圣, 污辱 | |
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74
costliest
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| adj.昂贵的( costly的最高级 )；代价高的；引起困难的；造成损失的 | |
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75
blemish
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| v.损害；玷污；瑕疵，缺点 | |
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76
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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77
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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78
beckoned
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| v.（用头或手的动作）示意，召唤( beckon的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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79
reverently
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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80
seclusion
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| n.隐遁，隔离 | |
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