Chinese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn Read Free Book Online

highest heaven of his contemplation, bringing his soul down, down, reeling and fluttering, back to the World of Illusion. Again the memory made dizzy his thought, like the perfume of some venomous flower. Yet he had seen the bayadere for an instant only, when passing through Kasí upon his way to China—to the vast empire of souls that thirsted after the refreshment of Buddha’s law, as sun-parched fields thirst for the life-giving rain. When she called him, and dropped her little gift into his mendicant’s bowl, he had indeed lifted his fan before his face, yet not quickly enough; and the penalty of that fault had followed him a thousand leagues—pursued after him even into the strange land to which he had come to bear the words of the Universal Teacher. Accursed beauty! surely framed by the Tempter of tempters, by Mara himself, for the perdition of the just! Wisely had Bhagavat warned his disciples:
          O ye Çramanas, women are not to be looked upon! And if ye chance to meet women, ye must not suffer your eyes to dwell upon them; but, maintaining holy reserve, speak not to them at all. Then fail not to whisper unto your own hearts, “Lo, we are Çramanas, whose duty it is to remain uncontaminated by the corruptions of this world, even as the Lotus, which suffereth no vileness to cling unto its leaves, though it blossom amid the refuse of the wayside ditch.”
    Then also came to his memory, but with a new and terrible meaning, the words of the Twentieth-and-Third of the Admonitions:
          Of all attachments unto objects of desire, the strongest indeed is the attachment to form. Happily, this passion is unique; for were there any other like unto it, then to enter the Perfect Way were impossible.
    How, indeed, thus haunted by the illusion of form, was he to fulfill the vow that he had made to pass a night and a day in perfect and unbroken meditation? Already the night was beginning! Assuredly, for sickness of the soul, for fever of the spirit, there was no physic save prayer. The sunset was swiftly fading out. He strove to pray:
    “ O the Jewel in the Lotus!
    “Even as the tortoise withdraweth its extremities into its shell, let me, O Blessed One, withdraw my senses wholly into meditation!
    “O the Jewel in the Lotus!
    “For even as rain penetrateth the broken roof of a dwelling long uninhabited, so may passion enter the soul uninhabited by meditation.
    “O the Jewel in the Lotus!
    “Even as still water that hath deposited all its slime, so let my soul, O Tathâgata, be made pure! Give me strong power to rise above the world, O Master, even as the wild bird rises from its marsh to follow the pathway of the Sun!
    “O the Jewel in the Lotus!
    “By day shineth the sun, by night shineth the moon; shineth also the warrior in harness of war; shineth likewise in meditations the Çramana. But the Buddha at all times, by night or by day, shineth ever the same; illuminating the world.
    “O the Jewel in the Lotus!
    “Let me cease, O thou Perfectly Awakened, to remain as an Ape in the World-forest, forever ascending and descending in search of the fruits of folly. Swift as the twining of serpents, vast as the growth of lianas in a forest, are the all-encircling growths of the Plant of Desire.
    “O the Jewel in the Lotus! ”
    Vain his prayer, alas! vain also his invocation! The mystic meaning of the holy text—the sense of the Lotus, the sense of the Jewel—had evaporated from the words, and their monotonous utterance now served only to lend more dangerous definition to the memory that tempted and tortured him. O the jewel in her ear! What lotus-bud more dainty than the folded flower of flesh, with its dripping of diamond-fire! Again he saw it, and the curve of the cheek beyond, luscious to look upon as beautiful brown fruit. How true the Two Hundred and Eighty-Fourth verse of the Admonitions!
          So long as a man shall not have torn from his heart even the smallest rootlet of that liana of desire