Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

She was silent for a very long time. She was playing with her beads, thoughtfully.

‘We are a nation of gamblers,’ I said.

‘Of gamblers? How so?’ she asked abruptly, sitting up.

‘“Play not with dice but cultivate thy cornfield”, you know, is a famous Rig-Vedic hymn.’ ‘Oh.’

‘You remember Dharmaraja sold his kingdom — nay, even his wife — gambling? Even so did Harishchandra give away his kingdom for the Truth. Sri Rama went into exile because his gamble-minded father promised anything she wanted to his young wife, and his young wife gambled for the kingdom of her own son. Recently Mahatma Gandhi said to the British — in the middle of the war, mind you, when the Japanese were at our door—”Clear out and leave India to anarchy. We will know what to do with ourselves.”’

‘A strange theory. But like many of your dear theories it sits comfortably on the head of history.’ After a moment she asked, ‘From where, though, does this spirit come? You are such a serious people.’

‘We are so serious, deadly serious, about everything, that we are perhaps the only nation that throughout history has questioned the existence of the world — of the object.’

‘That may be true. True also that the Chinese were very realistic.’

‘There can be only two attitudes to life. Either you believe the world exists and so — you. Or you believe that you exist — and so the world. There is no compromise possible. And the history of philosophy — remember that in the eighteenth century even scientists were called “les philosophes”—is nothing but a search for a clue to this problem: “If I am real, then the world is me.” It also means you are not what you think and feel you are, that is, a person. But if the world is real, then you are real in terms of objects, and that is a tenable proposition. The first is the Vedantin’s position — the second is the Marxist’s — and they are irreconcilable.’

‘And in between the two?’

‘And in between are the many poetic systems: monism, tempered monism, non-dualistic modified dualism, God and Paradise, Islam, etc., etc….’

‘Where does Buddhism come into your system then?’

‘The supreme religion of a poet,’ and I laughed, so loudly that I could have been heard from the cypress or from M. Béguin’s meadow.

‘I don’t grasp what you mean.’

‘You do,’ I said, still laughing. ‘But you do not want to accept it. To have compassion, remember, presupposes the existence of the world. You must have compassion towards some suffering thing, so suffering exists and compassion as well.’

‘But how is Buddhism so poetic?’

‘First, we know more about the beautiful and moving life of the Buddha than of any other spiritual figure in India. What do we know of Krishna, let us say? Yet he has more influence in India today than any other figure. Second, the Jatakas are among the most poetical stories of mankind. Take the Sibi Jataka, for example, and compare it to the Mahabharata. How moving and personal the Jatakas seem to the impersonal figure of, say, a Bhisma, a Karna, a Dharmaraja. India believes — and it is of this belief that have arisen not only our philosophies, but our temples, theatres, and castles; our grammar, poetics, and mathematics; our knowledge of jewellery; even the science of erotics and that fine system of medicine the Ayurveda — India believes that to prove the world as being real or unreal is being really objective. To be objective to it is to have a scientific outlook. That is why Lowes Dickinson said we were more like modern scientists than the mystical people we were supposed to be.’

‘What happens to Buddhism then?’

‘It tries to take more and more of Vedanta into it, so that the Buddha becomes a Hindu Avatara, and the Mahayana almost a Vedantic system — but a negative one, that is all. What is Indian remains.’

‘And what is not Indian…?’

‘… Is exported for others’ benefit, even unto Aix,’ I said, and laughed till she laughed too. ‘And so Lezo can study Pali texts, surrounded by his Communist comrade and his little Buddhist baby. You know the baby is called Ananda?’

‘You are too clever for me,’ said Madeleine.

‘Brahmins are like racehorses, they are either good at their job, or they’re sent to the vet to be shot. They are never sent to the common butchery; they could not be. Biology and eugenics are very interesting — you can grow almost anything out of anything. In Russia they will soon grow horses on pear trees, and babies from hyacinths.’

‘Now, now, don’t get childish. One more question, and then Monsieur le Professor can retire to his room.’

‘The historian is here to answer questions.’

‘Then my question is, what was Christ?’

‘A poet like the Buddha, and with the great Indian to be banished from the perfect state of Plato. The new civilization has to be a technocratic one. It will have to banish the personal, the romantic, the poetic from life. The true poet sees poetry as poet, and the world as “I”.’

‘Then there is no world?’

‘The perfect civilization, then, is where the world is not, but where there is nothing but the “I”. It is like the perfect number, which is always a manifestation of 1. 1. 1. The Buddhists say the world, the perception is real, “Sarvam-Kshanikam” , that everything is minutous the moment we see it. The Vedantin says the perception is real, yes; but that reality is “my Self’. And that difference is big enough to drive the Buddhism of Gautama outside our frontiers.’

‘But what happens when it comes in?’

‘It will be treated as a separate caste, and maybe given a compassionate bath, when the wound is painful, at the feet. Love, not compassion, is impersonal.’

‘Then leave me to my poetic world.’

‘Yes, I was thinking only yesterday: the miraculous itself is but the dual made manifest, albeit magnanimously. The miracle proves the power it proves.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Formerly, Madeleine, you read Paul Valéry and I read Rainer Maria Rilke. And now you read Rilke—’

‘And do you now read Valéry?’

‘Yes, I read him a lot in India. Valéry is on the edge of Vedanta. Rilke’s angels bore me. Like Tagore’s Ganges they are ennuyeux. There can never be a Paradise.’

‘How so?’ she asked, spacing herself with a long silence.

‘The world is either unreal or real — the serpent or the rope. There is no in-between-the-two — and all that’s in-between is poetry, is sainthood. You might go on saying all the time, “No, no, it’s the rope,” and stand in the serpent. And looking at the rope from the serpent is to see paradise, saints, avataras, gods, heroes, universes. For wheresoever you go, you see only with the serpent’s eyes. Whether you call it duality or modified duality, you invent a belvedere to heaven, you look at the rope from the posture of the serpent, you feel you are the serpent — you are — the rope is. But in true fact, with whatever eyes you see there is no serpent, there never was a serpent. You gave your own eyes to the falling evening and cried, “Ayyo! Oh! It’s the serpent!” You run and roll and lament, and have compassion for fear of pain, others’, or your own. You see the serpent and in fear you feel you are it, the serpent, the saint. One — the guru — brings you the lantern; the road is seen, the long, white road, going with the statutory stars. “It’s only the rope.” He shows it to you. And you touch your eyes and know there never was a serpent. Where was it, where, I ask you? The poet who saw the rope as serpent became the serpent, and so a saint: Now, the saint is shown that his sainthood was identification, not realization. The actual, the real has no name. The rope is no rope to itself.’