Will uttered another of his hyena laughs. "What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement!"
"But you're the man who won't take yes for an answer. So why raise any objections?"
"I oughtn't to," he agreed. "But one remains an aesthete, one likes to have the no said with style. 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' " He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.
"And yet," said Susila, "in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying-three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies-but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."
"And rises again from the dead?" he asked sarcastically. "That's one of the questions the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did disbelieving. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that's the Buddha's advice) and get on with the job."
"Which job?"
"Everybody's job-enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness."
"But I don't want to be more aware," said Will. "I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary's death and the slums of Rendang-Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells-even of some delicious smells," he added as he caught, through the remembered essences of dog and cancer of the liver, a civetlike whiff of the pink alcove. "Less aware of my fat income and other people's subhuman poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies, 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I'm doing. Only too well. And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already."
"I'm not asking anything," she said. "I'm merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It'll help you to become aware of what you are in fact."
He shrugged his shoulders. "One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy."
"And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha's message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn't stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature."
"Absence of a soul-that's easy to cope with. But what about the presence of cancer, the presence of slow degradation? What about hunger and overbreeding and Colonel Dipa? Are they pure Suchness?"
"Of course. But, needless to say, it's desperately difficult for the people who are deeply involved in any of those evils to discover their Buddha Nature. Public health and social reform are the indispensable preconditions of any kind of general enlightenment."
"But in spite of public health and social reform, people still die. Even in Pala," he added ironically.
"Which is why the corollary of welfare has to be dhyana-all the yogas of living and dying, so that you can be aware, even in the final agony, of who in fact, and in spite of everything, you really are."
There was a sound of footsteps on the planking of the veranda, and a childish voice called, "Mother!" "Here I am, darling," Susila called back. The front door was flung open and Mary Sarojini came hur-rying into the room.
"Mother," she said breathlessly, "they want you to come at once. It's Granny Lakshmi. She's . . ." Catching sight for the first time of the figure in the hammock, she started and broke off. "Oh! I didn't know you were here."
Will waved his hand to her without speaking. She gave him a perfunctory smile, then turned back to her mother. "Granny Lakshmi suddenly got much worse," she said, "and Grandpa Robert is still up at the High Altitude Station, and they can't get through to him on the telephone." "Did you run all the way?" "Except where it's really too steep."
Susila put her arm round the child and kissed her, then very brisk and businesslike, rose to her feet. "It's Dugald's mother," she said.
"Is she . . . ?" He glanced at Mary Sarojini, then back at Susila. Was death taboo? Could one mention it before children? "You mean, is she dying?" He nodded. "We've been expecting it, of course," Susila went on. "But not today. Today she seemed a little better." She shook her head. "Well, I have to go and stand by-even if it is another world. And actually," she added, "it isn't quite so completely other as you think. I'm sorry we had to leave our business unfinished; but there'll be other opportunities. Meanwhile what do you want to do? You can stay here. Or I'll drop you at Dr. Robert's. Or you can come with me and Mary Sarojini."
"As a professional execution watcher?"
"Not as a professional execution watcher," she answered emphatically. "As a human being, as someone who needs to know how to live and then how to die. Needs it as urgently as we all do."
"Needs it," he said, "a lot more urgently than most. But shan't I be in the way?"
"If you can get out of your own way, you won't be in anyone else's."
She took his hand and helped him out of the hammock. Two minutes later they were driving past the lotus pool and the huge Buddha meditating under the cobra's hood, past the white bull, out through the main gate of the compound. The rain was over, in a green sky enormous clouds glowed like archangels. Low in the west the sun was shining with a brightness that seemed almost supernatural.
Soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. Da mi basin mille.
Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
"What do you say to people who are dying?" he asked. "Do you tell them not to bother their heads about immortality and get on with the job?"
"If you like to put it that way-yes, that's precisely what we do. Going on being aware-it's the whole art of dying."
"And you teach the art?"
"I'd put it another way. We help them to go on practicing the art of living even while they're dying. Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us-that's the art of living, and that's what one can help the dying to go on practicing. To the very end. Maybe beyond the end."
"Beyond?" he questioned. "But you said that was something that the dying aren't supposed to think about."
"They're not being asked to think about it. They're being helped, if there is such a thing, to experience it. If there is such a thing," she repeated, "if the universal life goes on, when the separate me-life is over."
"Do you personally think it does go on?"
Susila smiled. "What I personally think is beside the point. All that matters is what I may impersonally experience while I'm living, when I'm dying, maybe when I'm dead."
She swung the car into a parking space and turned off the engine. On foot they entered the village. Work was over for the day and the main street was so densely thronged that it was hard for them to pass.
"I'm going ahead by myself," Susila announced. Then to Mary Sarojini, "Be at the hospital in about an hour," she said. "Not before." She turned and, threading her way between the slowly promenading groups, was soon lost to view.