Moving Against the Stream, by Dennis Lingwood

[admin]

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Road to Delphi

Though we had gone to bed so late the previous night, Terry and I rose early, and on going on deck soon afterwards found hardly anyone about. It was a fine, clear morning, the sea could not have been more calm, and we were sailing between the mainland and some four or five small, widely separated islands. Despite the muffled hum of the ships engines, and the occasional muffled shout coming from the swimming pool, there was a breathless hush in the air, and as I gazed out over the dark blue waters it was as though time stood still, as though nothing had changed, and that I was seeing what Homer had he not been blind might have seen three thousand years ago. I felt much as D.H. Lawrence must have felt when he wrote, as he passed that way:

Now the sea is the Argonauts sea, and in the dawn
Odysseus calls the commands, as he steers past these foamy islands;
wait, wait, dont bring me the coffee yet, nor the pain grillé.
The dawn is still off the sea, and Odysseus ships
have not yet passed the islands, I must watch them still.

I don't remember if Terry and I were brought any coffee that morning or any pain grillé, but we had swallowed a cup of tea before going on deck and probably were still standing at the rail when the ferry reached Corfu, the largest of the Ionian islands, where a few passengers disembarked. Two hours later we were in Igoumenitsa, and after a delay in the customs found ourselves on the road to Yannina, the provincial capital, sixty-four miles away.

It was exciting to be in Greece at last, exciting that a dream had come true and we were actually on our way to Delphi. The countryside through which we were passing was brown and desolate, while above a certain altitude the sides of the mountains were entirely devoid of vegetation. Presently we saw a few miserable stone huts, though little evidence of any cultivation. As we approached Yannina, however, we started to see extensive fields of what I eventually recognized as tobacco, which I had not known was produced in Greece. There were also people on donkeys, and standing in a dusty yellow field, evidently just harvested, two bearded Orthodox priests in black gowns and cylindrical headgear could be seen bending and straightening up as between them they lifted bundles of what seemed to be hay on to the back of a donkey. They moved slowly and stiffly, in away that combined the laboriousness of the peasant and the dignity of the priest. The scene could well have been painted by the Millet of the Angelus, and it moved me deeply. Immemorially pastoral and immemorially patriarchal, it was reminiscent of the time when farmer, priest, and father were one and the same person, and when the powers of earth served religion and the forces of religion blessed the earth.

There was nothing pastoral about the filling station at which we stopped shortly before reaching the town, and nothing patriarchal about the voluble Shell agent we encountered there. Petrol was expensive, though whether because it was more heavily taxed in Greece than in the countries through which we had passed, or because it was a case of the wily Greek taking advantage of the innocent foreign travellers, we had no means of telling. In Yannina we parked beside an extensive lake, over the waters of which there was a view of the domes and minarets of what appeared to be a mosque. Epirus had been part of the Ottoman empire for 500 years, and Turkish cultural influence was still very much in evidence. While we were resting after lunch three inquisitive Greek boys appeared, one of whom proceeded to catch and dismember a crayfish, though whether with a view to cooking and eating it or out of sheer devilment was unclear. From the lake we drove to the town centre, where we strolled round what I could not help calling the bazaar, and where the shops were as poor and shabby as those of small-town provincial India.

In one of these shops I bought a black-and-green pottery wall plate of the head of Achilles, not realizing that in the course of our three weeks in Greece we would be seeing scores, even hundreds, of souvenir shops, and tens of thousands of cheap, mass-produced souvenirs of every kind. Achilles and the events of the Trojan War had been familiar to me since my boyhood, initially from a little book called The Story of the Iliad, which my father had given me, and later from the Iliad itself, in Chapman's translation, a second-hand copy of which I picked up in Bideford, during the War, and which I read in a state bordering on ecstasy. I was particularly delighted with the episodes in which the gods and goddesses appear, whether it was Hera whipping up the celestial horses and driving herself and Pallas Athene down from the heights of Olympus to the earth, the axle of the chariot groaning beneath the combined weight of the two goddesses, or Aphrodite being wounded in the hand by the Greek hero Diomedes as she removes her son Aeneas from the fray, or Thetis rising from the depths of the sea, stealing up to the throne of Zeus, and prevailing upon him to give victory to the Trojans until the Greeks gave due honour to her son, the valiant and glorious Achilles, who was fated to die young.

Zeus was king of the gods, and his oracle at Dodona claimed to be the eldest of the oracles of the Hellenic world. We arrived there from Yannina early in the evening, having turned off into the green, peaceful valley from the Arta road, and spent a couple of hours looking round the archaeological area, where except for the partly restored theatre there was little to be seen other than the exposed foundations of various ancient buildings. Whether on account of the bare mountains by which it was shut in, or because of the lingering influence of the feeling of awe with which visitors must have approached the sacred site, there was a strange quietness in the atmosphere of the valley, a quietness that was more than mere absence of sound. In classical times the oracle was regarded as having its seat in the leaves of an oak, the whisperings of which communicated the gods responses to the questions put to him. Originally, however, the place seems to have been the seat of a dream-oracle, the dreams coming to the attendant prophets, the Selloi, as they slept on the bare ground. There is an allusion to Dodona and the Selloi in the Iliad, in the speech in which Achilles prays to Zeus for the victory and safe return of his friend Patroclus, whom he has sent to fight against the Trojans in his place.

High Zeus, lord of Dodona, Pelasgian, living afar off,
brooding over wintry Dodona, your prophets about you living,
the Selloi who sleep on the ground with feet unwashed. Hear me.
As one time before when I prayed to you, you listened
and did me honour, and smote strongly the host of the Achaians,
so one more time bring to pass the wish that I pray for.

Within the archaeological area there stood a big old tree, more trunk than branch, that may or may not have been an oak, and may or may not have been the lineal descendant of the tree in whose leaves the oracle had had its seat. Probably because there was no wind, we heard no whisperings from the scanty foliage above our heads, neither did we see any trace of the Selloi, though at 10 o'clock the sites young Greek attendant came to lock up for the night, so to speak. He was friendly and inquisitive, as were two young Greeks who had turned up earlier and who came and visited us at the Little Bus the following morning. Such visits were to be a common feature of our journey through Greece, especially when we were in the more out-of-the-way places. No sooner had we settled down for the night, or simply stopped for a meal and a rest, than one or two young men usually two friends would appear from nowhere and approach us, sometimes after loitering for a while in our vicinity. In France and Italy such a thing had not happened even once. Communication often began with the young men smilingly asking, You have cigarette?, the question being put in a way that did not quite amount to a request but was more than just a simple enquiry. Terry and I would thereupon be forced to explain that we were non-smokers and had no cigarettes, and as our visitors had little English, usually no more than the three words already spoken, and we had no Greek, we had no alternative but to shake our heads vigorously, spread our fingers wide, and shrug our shoulders, and hope they would understand what we meant. Probably they did understand, for they never took offence at our failure to produce any cigarettes and remained as friendly as before. Their inquisitiveness was directed as much to the Little Bus as to Terry and me. They walked round it slowly and admiringly, peered through the windows, and were evidently much taken by the way it was fitted out within. One young man, after peering inside, turned to us in surprise, saying, No women? The most common enquiry, after You have cigarette? was German or English? In certain places the latter was indeed the initial enquiry, and no smiles would be forthcoming until the question of our nationality had been cleared up. The Germans had attacked and overrun Greece in 1941, and the wounds of war were taking a long time to heal. Once the young men had satisfied their curiosity they would drift away, disappearing as quietly as they had arrived on the scene. They appeared to have nothing to do, and may well have been unemployed.

Rather to my surprise, Terry seemed not to mind these intrusions upon our privacy. Sometimes he appeared almost to welcome them. This was only partly due to the obvious inoffensiveness of the intruders, if such they could really be called. It was also due to the fact that, as could be safely assumed, they were not more educated and more knowledgeable than he was and that there was no question, therefore, of his being at a disadvantage with them. Even had they happened to be more educated and knowledgeable, in the absence of a common language this would not have become apparent. Thus there was no danger of my friend being made to feel inadequate and inferior, as sometimes was the case in England, and he could meet the advances of our friendly, inquisitive young visitors in a natural, easy manner. The truth was that Terry really liked people, and became anxious, and therefore stiff and re- served, only when he felt threatened by their superior education and knowledge. There were times when I thought he felt threatened even by me, though the fact that in certain fields he was the more knowledgeable of the two should have been enough to rule out any feelings of this kind. I might know more about religion and philosophy, but he knew more about the practicalities of modern urban living. If I was to stay on in the West indefinitely, as I had now decided to do, I would need to know more about those practicalities. I already knew a little about them, thanks to Terry, and could expect that in time I would know as much as he did. In that case there would be an imbalance between us; he might feel threatened, and this could affect our friendship. But that was all in the hypothetical future, and it was best not to speculate. Now we were at Dodona, within sight of the big old tree that may or may not have been an oak. The two young Greeks had just paid their second visit, Terry seeming not to mind the intrusion, and it was time for us to leave.

We left at 10 o'clock, not without regrets, driving back through the green, peaceful valley and rejoining the highway. Many wild flowers, notes my diary. Along banks of Lauros River, through fine mountain scenery, to Arta.' Lauros! The name conjures up a vision of crystal-clear waters waters that wound their rapid way between smooth grey boulders and were half hidden by overhanging trees. So beautiful was the river, and so mysterious in its flow, that it was not difficult to believe, as an Ancient Greek would have done, that it was the haunt of nymphs and that one might, if one was lucky, catch a glimpse of two or three of them sporting in the water. In Arta we stayed only long enough for Terry to photograph some storks. We had seen storks in Yannina, nesting on the chimney tops, but here a pair of them had built their big untidy nest on the top of a tall, rather ornamental church tower, and the opportunity was too good to miss. With an eye to the lucrative travel brochure market, Terry had already taken shots of the Grand Canal in Venice, and of divers tiny figures silhouetted against a sky of ultramarine about to plunge from a huge rock on the Adriatic coast, but I suspected his heart was not really in the work, reminiscent as it was of the job he had so recently quitted. At Amphilokhia we stopped again, there being a magnificent view over the Gulf of Arta, and Terry took a few more photographs. We then headed for Stratos, the old capital of the area, which was just off the main road, in the hope of finding there a place to park during the hot afternoon hours. On the way we passed three lakes, one large and two small. Though pleasant to look at, the large lake smelt badly, and it was very windy. In Stratos our hopes of finding somewhere to park were quickly dashed. The place turned out to be no more than a tumbledown village plus a few ruins, and we decided to press on to Agrinion. Unfortunately, we missed the town, probably bypassing it, and in the end simply drove into a convenient field and parked beneath a tree.

Here for the next four hours we camped, on this occasion without any friendly, inquisitive young men intruding on our privacy. We had lunch, and I read Euripides The Madness of Herakles. In years to come the figure of this the greatest of the Greek heroes, with his lion skin and his club, was to occupy a special place in my imagination and be the subject of one of my longer poems. That Herakles (or Hercules, as he is called in the poem) was not so much the boisterous, brutal Herakles of popular legend as the altruistic Herakles whose might was at the service of right and who for centuries had been the patron saint, so to speak, of the Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome. Traces of this altruistic Herakles were to be found even in the oldest legends. In Euripides play itself the Chorus of Theban elders, having lamented the passing of youth, breaks out in praise of Memory and of the greatness of Herakles, singing:

Proud theme hath minstrelsy, to sing mine hero's high achieving:
He is Zeus son, but deeds hath done whose glory mounts, far-leaving
The praise of birth divine behind,
Whose toils gave peace to human kind,
Slaying dread shapes that filled mans mind with terrors ceaseless-haunting.

Since Herakles toils (no doubt a reference to the famous Twelve Labours) gave peace to human kind, and thus were of an altruistic character, their glory surpasses the praise due to the hero as son of the king of the gods. Indeed, it is altruism itself that is the true divinity, and Herakles is to be praised, even worshipped, not on account of his supposed divine paternity, but as the embodiment of altruism. Embodying as he does the principle of altruism he exemplified, for the Stoics especially, a definite ideal, an ideal that may be regarded as representing, on its own ethical level and within its own Greco-Roman cultural context, the transcendental altruism that is exemplified, for Buddhists, in the idea of the infinitely wise and boundlessly compassionate Bodhisattva who, in the words of the Devotion to Tãrã, labours for the weal of all beings'.

Euripides play was still giving me food for thought when, shortly be- fore six o'clock, we struck camp and drove coastward to Missolonghi. It was in this nondescript little town that Byron had died in 1824, at the age of thirty-seven, the victim (it has been said), as he was the author, of his own legend. One of our books on Greece described Missolonghi as being situated on the edge of a wide, stagnant lagoon, only navigable by flat-bottomed boats, but we saw nothing of either the lagoon or the boats, and very little of the town itself other than the fat brown pipes of the new sewerage system. All the roads having been dug up for laying them, it was difficult to get around, and we therefore had to drive on without seeing the museum or the statue of Byron. Between Missolonghi and Naupactus, as if to compensate us for any disappointment we may have felt, there was a fine view of the Gulf of Patras to the south and west. Naupactus, renamed by the Venetians as Lepanto, was situated further along the coast, on the Gulf of Corinth. As Lepanto, the town had given its name to the great sea battle of 1571 in which the combined Christian forces under Don Juan of Austria, the half-brother of Philip II of Spain, had inflicted a crushing defeat on the forces of the Ottoman Empire. From the Christian point of view it was a famous victory, and one that G.K. Chesterton celebrates with his usual gusto in his poem Lepanto, which I had more than once encountered in anthologies of twentieth-century poetry. Since we were hoping to reach Delphi that night, we drove straight through Naupactus, as it was again being called, without stopping to see the remains of either Venetian or Turkish occupation.

For the second time that day our hopes were dashed this time in a more serious manner. Our route lay through the mountains, and we were not long out of Naupactus before we hit a fifteen-mile stretch of extremely bad road. To make matters worse night fell, and as there was no moon we had to find our way by the light of our headlamps as best we could. The road evidently was being widened. Rocks had been blasted and trees felled on either side of it; in places it was impassable, and the little detours that had been created were no more than the roughest of rough tracks. Driving was not only difficult but dangerous. More than once we found ourselves on the edge of a precipice, and more than once we had to cross what appeared to be a ravine by means of a bridge that was no more than half a dozen tree trunks laid edge to edge and covered with a layer of dirt. Progress was therefore painfully slow, and it was only after at least three hours of anxiety that we were clear of the roadworks and again on tarmac. Before long we saw in the distance the lights of the little mountain village of Mornos. The lights shone brightly, but no sound was to be heard, as though no one was living there. So many and so bright were the lights, and so profound the silence, that it was positively eerie, and I was reminded of old tales in which a wandering knight, lost in the depths of the forest, at midnight sees lights glimmering among the trees and rides towards them not knowing if they are those of a kings castle, a hermits chapel, or a sorcerers magically created palace. As there was no campsite in Mornos we drove straight through the strange little place without stopping and eventually, the road having descended, out of the mountains and into a small valley.

In this valley we spent the night the last night of the outward part of our journey. It was Delphi we had come all this way to see, and once we had seen Delphi we would be homeward bound, however wide a detour we might thereafter make and whatever else of importance or interest we might happen to see on the way back. Delphi was the perihelion of the orbit of our journey. It was the point at which we would be spiritually nearest to the mysterious force that for the Ancient Greeks was embodied in the great and glorious figure of Apollo, god of the sun, music, poetry, and prophecy.

Henry Miller wrote about Delphi within a year of his visiting the place. I am having to write about my own visit thirty-four years after it occurred, so that despite the help provided by a few diary notes there is no question of my being able to write about my impressions of the sacred site with the freshness and immediacy not to mention the genius of the author of The Colossus of Maroussi. Having passed a quiet night in the small valley, in the morning Terry and I drove over the hills into another valley in which there were tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of olive trees, all growing so close together that from a distance it was as though the floor of the valley was covered by a sea of silver-green foliage. At our approach the sea divided, so to speak, and we drove on through Bonnichora and Amphissa, after which several miles of straight road took us, through more olive groves, up to Chruson. From Chruson, which must have been several thousand feet above sea level, there was a view back over the Gulf of Corinth that my diary is content to describe as magnificent and which must have been truly so.

At 9 o'clock in the morning, on Sunday 3 July, we reached our destination.

Henry Miller had 'come upon' Delphi at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, after driving up from Athens. It was midwinter, there was a mist blowing in from the sea, and seen in that strange twilight mist the ancient sit had seemed even more sublime and awe-inspiring than he had imagined it to be. Later it rained. Terry and I arrived early in the day, at the height of summer, and instead of mist from the sea there was only a slight haze. Unlike Henry Miller, I had not imagined Delphi to be sublime and awe-inspiring or, in fact, anything else, so that whether the place exceeded my expectations or fell short of them was not a question that could arise. Such imaginings were in any case utterly irrelevant. The last bend of the road once turned, the prospect that lay before us was one in which there was a perfect harmony of the sublime and the beautiful, of the work of nature and the creations, now fragmentary and ruined, of the human brain and hand. Delphi was situated on the steep lower slope of Mount Parnassus, in a kind of natural amphitheatre, with the Phaedriades or Shining Rocks rising high above it to the north and with a view southward across the Pleistus gorge to the mountain range beyond. The sacred precinct, within whose walls the great temple of Apollo had once stood, occupied what appeared to be the centre of the amphitheatre. On the mountainside, and here and there among the ruins, grew olive, fig, and pomegranate trees, as well as slim, dark cypresses, all bathed in the calm morning sunshine beneath a sky intensely blue.

Deeply impressed though I was by the sublimity and beauty of the scene, what I felt most strongly about Delphi was that it was a holy place. I had been in holy places before, notably in Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kusinara, and other Buddhist holy places of northern India. These sites were holy by virtue of their association with events in the life of the Buddha. In Bodh Gaya he had attained Supreme, Perfect Enlightenment, in Sarnath he had taught his first five disciples, and in Kusinara he had died, and each of these places had its distinctive atmosphere. That of Bodh Gaya was intense and powerful, that of Sarnath joyful and expansive, that of Kusinara solemn and mysterious, and so on. Delphi was different. It was not holy by virtue of its association with a particular event, at least not of the historical order. Delphi was itself holy. It was not a holy place simply because it was there that Apollo's temple and oracle were located. Temple and oracle were located at Delphi because Delphi was a holy place. It was as if the very earth was holy, and as if this holiness penetrated the rocks and the trees and permeated the air, so that one felt it in the warmth of the sun and drew it in with every breath. Though the temple was in ruins, and though the oracle had been silent for more than a thousand years, Delphi was still a holy place and its influence could still be felt. I certainly felt that influence during the two days Terry and I stayed there, despite the noisy tourists, of whom there were quite a few wandering among the ruins even at 9 o'clock in the morning and who arrived by the coachload throughout the day.

Our first visit was to the two temples of Athene Pronoia and the Tholos, which stood with a few smaller structures on a terrace below the road, well away from the sacred precinct. All three were, of course, in ruins, three fluted Doric columns with a section of entablature being practically all that survived, more or less intact, of the Tholos, a mysterious circular structure the purpose of which is unknown. From the sanctuary of the Marmorea, as the place was called, we made our way round to Kastri, the small town or large village adjacent to Delphi though out of sight, so far as I remember, of the sacred precinct and the other ancient sites. What we took to be the principal street was lined with souvenir shops and we spent some time looking at reproductions of the various types of ancient pottery red, red-and-white, black, and black-and-green in colour and of every imaginable size, shape, and decorative style. Almost without exception they were extraordinarily graceful, and the thought that the ancient originals were for the most part articles of everyday household use gave rise to some very Ruskinian reflections not all favourable to modern civilization. Having already bought a wall plate in Yannina, I did not buy anything, but Terry bought two hand-woven bags, one for his mother and one for Vivien. Souvenir shops not being the only ones in Kastri, we were able to buy a loaf of good Greek bread and a pot of good Greek yoghurt, both of which we had already come to appreciate, sometimes making a meal of the latter.

In the afternoon, having lunched back at the Little Bus, we visited the Castalian spring, which was situated half a mile to the east of the sacred precinct and was dedicated to Apollo and the Muses. Earlier in the day we had seen it running down the hillside and through the olive groves near the Marmorea. Now we were at its source. The cold, clear water came gushing from a deep cleft in the Phaedriades and poured into the court of an artificial grotto. Bending down, we scooped a little of it up in our hands and drank. Originally, people had purified themselves at the Castalian spring before approaching the oracle, but in later, post-classical times the waters came to be regarded as a source of poetic inspiration. Purified and inspired, or at least refreshed, we then made our way down to the ruins of the gymnasium complex, with its double running track, one indoor and one outdoor, its Greek and Roman baths, and other buildings, which stood on a terrace a little higher than that on which stood the ruins of the Marmorea. Much of the site was overgrown, besides being surrounded not so much by groves as by a whole forest of olive trees, so that few tourists ventured there. In the welcome shade of a cluster of the bushy-headed old trees, with their silver-green foliage, we sat down and read. I read an interesting but confused book on the history and mythology of Delphi, Terry a book on Zen by D.T. Suzuki, to whose writings and the Lankãvatãra Sûtra he remained faithful for much of our journey. After a while I became aware that my friend was feeling very depressed, so that I laid aside my book (he had already laid aside his) and we had what my diary terms a little talk. Apparently he was depressed because Delphi was far more crowded than we had expected it to be, depressed because some of the tour groups were quite rowdy, and depressed, most fundamentally, because our being surrounded by the remains of an ancient civilization and culture about which he knew very little served to remind him of his lack of education and thus to trigger those feelings of inferiority and inadequacy that were never far from the surface.

Just what I said to Terry I do not remember. I never attempted to argue him out of his depressions, or to convince him that since there was no reason, objectively speaking, for his depression, he ought not to be feeling depressed. Much less still did I ever urge him to snap out of it. Usually, after acknowledging that he felt depressed and empathizing with him (not having suffered from depression myself, I did not find this easy), I would gradually change the subject and start talking about something which was of interest to both of us and calculated to evoke a positive response from him. This served to divert his attention from the depression which, as he became more and more engrossed in the topic under discussion, would little by little subside of its own accord. Probably this is what happened that hot afternoon, as we sat in the shade of the olive trees, among the ruins of the gymnasium complex. In any case, as a result of our little talk, Terry regained his cheerfulness, at least for the time being, but as it was now four o'clock we repaired to the Little Bus to partake of the cups that cheer but not inebriate, generously laced with condensed milk, though in view of the classical nature of our surroundings

a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

would no doubt have been more appropriate. Thus fortified, we spent the rest of the afternoon, and the early part of the evening, visiting the temple of Apollo, the theatre, and the stadium, and then the museum.

The temple was one of the glories of the ancient world. Now all that could be seen of it, apart from the numerous fragments strewn around, were the five or six weather-beaten Doric columns, only one of them of full height and with a capital, that stood on the north-eastern end of the temples rectangular plinth and had probably been put together from scattered drums by archaeologists in the late nineteenth century. The theatre, which seated 5,000 people, was situated higher up the hillside, in the north-west corner of the sacred precinct, and had for backdrop a view of the temple and the valley beyond. It was in a much better state of preservation than the temple, which being a place of pagan worship had been first vandalized and then destroyed by the Christians, and seats, staircases, and orchestra were all more or less intact. From the theatre a steep path wound through pine trees up to the stadium, the tiers of seats on the north side of which had been cut out of the hillside just below the Amphissa road. After the cluttered, uneven terraces lower down the sight of the bare, perfectly level track two hundred yards long and thirty wide on which the games had been held, and could still have been held, was strangely soothing. Unlike Henry Miller, I had no impression of charioteers driving their steeds over the ridge and into the blue, much less still did I find the atmosphere superhuman, intoxicating to the point of madness. Instead, all was silence, solitude, and peace.

The exhibits in the museum were all from Delphi and the surrounding area. Most of them belonged to the period from the seventh up to and including the fourth century BCE, and many were only fragments. There were inscriptions in Greek and Latin, mosaics, bronze dedications, metopes, Corinthian capitals, and grave goods of various kinds, from weapons to bracelets and fibulae. Above all there were the free-standing sculptured figures, of which I particularly remember the Charioteer, the Two Brothers, and the statue of Antinoüs. The Charioteer stood erect, looking a little to his right, the vertical folds of his long racing costume, the xystis, serving to accentuate the uprightness of his posture. In his right hand he grasped the reins (most of the left arm was missing); his gaze was intent but calm. Severe in youthful beauty he stood there, having won the chariot race, and being about to take part, apparently, in the triumphal parade that was held after the race.

Whereas the Charioteer was of bronze and belonged to the fifth century BCE, the colossal figures of the Two Brothers, which were of marble, must have antedated it by at least a hundred years. Cleobis and Biton were two young Argives, the sons of a priestess of Hera, who when the oxen failed to arrive and their mother was in danger of being late for a festival, harnessed themselves to the wagon and drew her from Argos all the way across the plain to the temple. For this service they were honoured above all other men by their fellow Argives and their statues, carved in the chunky style considered by some scholars to be characteristic of the Peloponnese, were set up in Delphi, where they remained until their discovery in modern times. One of them had an arm and a hand missing, and the faces of both were slightly damaged; otherwise the two colossi were more or less intact. They stood side by side in the room bearing their name, as they must have stood for centuries in the place where they were originally installed, the clenched fists of the less damaged brother suggesting that the sculptor had depicted them in the act of performing the service for which they were honoured. According to one of the books on Greece I was reading at the time, the broad faces, wide open eyes, and naked bodies of the Two Brothers were fixed in an almost Egyptian rigidity. Almost Egyptian, too, were the wig-like braids, three on either side, that hung down over their broad shoulders from be- hind their ears. What struck me most about these two massive archaic statues from the Peloponnese was not, however, their rugged strength and dignity, great as these were, so much as the fact that they had been set up in Delphi, the holiest of all the holy places of ancient Greece, by way of giving public recognition to an outstanding act of filial piety. If the Charioteer bore witness to the ancient Greeks love of sporting contests, and their enthusiastic admiration for the qualities of skill and courage such contests helped promote, the Two Brothers bore witness to the high esteem in which they held a virtue we tend to associate less with Ancient Greece than with Confucian China.

Antinoüs was the favourite of the emperor Hadrian, and after his death in mysterious circumstances the afflicted monarch caused statues of the beautiful youth to be set up even temples to be dedicated to him -- in cities throughout the Roman world. One such statue, evidently, had been set up in Delphi, where it was found, still standing, when a room in a building within the Sacred Precinct was cleared of earth and rubble in the course of excavations. Belonging as it did to the second century CE, it was in a style very different from that of the Charioteer, and still more different from that of the Two Brothers, even as Antinoüs himself represented a type of masculine beauty that differed markedly from that of either the upstanding winner of the chariot race or the hefty young Argives who had harnessed themselves to their mothers wagon. It depicted him as the divine ephebe, broad-shouldered, but with thick, luxuriant curls, and a thoughtful, almost melancholy expression. Both forearms of the statue were missing, and with them the hands, and the nose was slightly chipped. Otherwise it was complete and one could not but admire the harmonious proportions and full contours of the young favourite's magnificent physique. With his very individual physiognomy and style of beauty it indeed was Antinoüs, not Keatss Psyche, who was

the latest and the loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus faded hierarchy.

He was an unforgettable figure. I certainly did not forget him, and when we encountered busts and statues of him in Athens and other places in the course of our homeward journey I recognized him immediately.

What kind of impression the Charioteer, the Two Brothers, and the statue of Antinoüs made on Terry I cannot say. He undoubtedly felt much more at home with the art of Ancient Greece than he did with Christian art, especially as so much Greek sculpture, whether of the archaic or the classical period, was devoted to the representation of the human figure, and could be appreciated for its formal and expressive qualities without that knowledge of sacred history and religious symbolism that was often essential to a proper understanding of Christian art. Nonetheless, despite his having appeared to enjoy the sculptures in the museum, it was not long before Terry was again feeling depressed and not long, therefore, before we were having another of our little talks. We had it not sitting in the shade of the olive trees but parked beside a rubbish tip outside Kastri from which, by way of contrast, there was a fine view of the Gulf of Corinth. This time I was more successful in my efforts to cheer him up, and some days were to pass before he again felt depressed. So successful was I that in the morning, the two of us having gone down to the Tholos, he was happily taking photographs of the mysterious circular structure just as the rays of the rising sun struck the tops of the three remaining Doric columns.

That day was perhaps the best day of our holiday so far. Such is the testimony of my diary, at least. Not that we did a lot of sightseeing. In fact we did none at all. Having breakfasted we found a sheltered nook above the theatre and there spent the greater part of the day, returning to the Little Bus only in order to bring a flask of tea and something to eat up to the spot where we had established ourselves. Above our heads, there was nothing but blue sky; immediately below our feet, only the theatre descending the hillside in tier after semi-circular tier to the level on which stood the temple all around, and so far as eye could see the landscape was steeped in clear, bright, invigorating sunshine which, as the sun ascended, threw shorter and shorter blue shadows. Probably because it was a weekday, there were far fewer people than the day before, and the sounds that came up from the little groups of tourists wandering among the ruins reached our ears but faintly. In the course of the morning I read Euripides Ion. It was no coincidence that I was reading this particular play in this particular place, for the scene of the play was Delphi, in the forecourt of the very temple of Apollo on which Terry and I were then looking down, and I had deliberately postponed the reading of the work to this moment.

Ion is an attendant in the temple, at the entrance to which he was found as a baby. Now grown to manhood, he has been made treasurer of the god and steward of all trust, and when we first see him he is busy decorating the portals of the temple with garlands of bay leaves, sprinkling the pavement with water from the Castalian spring, and scaring birds away from the offerings with his bow and arrows. Among those approaching the oracle is Kreusa, Queen of Athens. She and her husband Xuthus, king-consort of Athens, are childless, and she wants to know if they will have issue. From the exchange that takes place between her and Ion we learn that she wishes to question the oracle secretly, on behalf of a friend, and that she does not want her husband to know of this. The question concerns the fate of the child whom this friend, without her fathers knowledge, bore to Apollo some years ago and then abandoned. Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Xuthus, who has been consulting the oracle of the hero Trophonius. While not presuming to forestall the utterance of Apollo, Trophonius has assured the king that neither he nor his wife will return home from Delphi childless. Having broken the joyful news to Kreusa, Xuthus exits to the inner temple where Apollo speaks through the lips of the Pythia, leaving Ion to wonder why Kreusa should seem to rail upon the god, and Kreusa's attendant handmaids, who form the Chorus, to sing the praises of the virgin goddesses Pallas Athene and Artemis, Apollos sisters, as well as to celebrate the joy of having sons to continue the family line and inherit the ancestral wealth, and to lament the fact that the offspring of the gods by mortal women are never happy.

The sound of their voices has hardly died away before Xuthus is back (dramatic time and real time do not coincide). Apollo has spoken. He has told Xuthus that the first man he meets on leaving the inner temple is his truly-begotten son. As it happens, the first man he meets is Ion. Initially Ion refuses to believe that Xuthus is his father and angrily repulses him. But eventually he is convinced, Xuthus having admitted, under questioning, that in his younger days he had visited Delphi at the time of the nocturnal Bacchic orgies and taken part in them in the company of the local girls. Ion must be the fruit of that visit and father and son, overjoyed, fall into each others arms. Kreusa is far from overjoyed. On learning from the Chorus that Apollo has given Xuthus a son, while she remains childless, she is distraught with anger and grief, and when a loyal old servant offers to kill Ion while he and Xuthus are feasting she gives him a deadly poison with which to do the deed. On no account will she allow her husbands bastard to inherit the throne of Athens! A timely omen having frustrated the plot at the last moment, the old servant confesses everything, the rulers of Delphi condemn Kreusa to death for attempted murder within the sacred precinct, and Ion comes with a band of armed men to carry out the sentence. He finds Kreusa sitting on the altar in front of the temple, where she had taken refuge, and a fierce altercation takes place between them. At this point the Pythia enters, bearing the ark in which, as a baby, Ion was found at the entrance to the temple. Kreusa recognizes the ark, and without seeing them is able to describe the objects it contains objects which she herself once placed there. She has found her son, and Ion has found his mother. Mutual hate is transformed into mutual love, and both are beside themselves with joy. But who, Ion wants to know, is his father? Is it Apollo, as Kreusa maintains, or is it Xuthus, as Apollo himself, apparently, has declared?

He is about to go and ask the god when there appears high above the temple, in a blaze of light, an awe-inspiring figure. It is Pallas Athene in her chariot. She has come from Athens with a message from Apollo. He is indeed Apollo's son by Kreusa, she tells Ion, and Kreusa is to take him with her to Athens and seat him on the throne of her fathers. He will have four sons, who will give their names to the four Athenian tribes, the descendants of whom will spread overseas and be called Ionians. Kreusa and Xuthus, too, will have offspring, but Xuthus is to be kept in ignorance of Ions true parentage. Apollo has done all things well, the goddess tells Kreusa in conclusion. Having given her an easy delivery, he caused Ion to be brought up in his own temple, and has saved him from death by means of a timely omen. Kreusa thankfully acknowledges this, and the play ends with the Chorus hailing Zeus and Apollo and affirming their belief that those who despite adversity continue to honour the divine powers 'at last attain their right'.

Ion was an enthralling work. It was based on a story of deep human interest, and with its sudden reversals of fortune, its violent confrontations, its eloquent speeches, its dazzlingly beautiful lyric flights on the part of the Chorus (flights that could be appreciated, to an extent, even in English translation), and its daring exploration of the mystery of divine justice, it was proof that Euripides fully deserved his place as one of the three master tragedians of Ancient Greece, little as he may have been appreciated, in his own day, in comparison with his two great rivals. As I read the play that morning in our nook above the theatre, every now and then raising my eyes from the page to look down at the remains of the temple in whose forecourt the action took place, it was as though I could see the drama unfolding before me. Indeed, it was as though I saw not buskined actors but living human beings moving and speaking there. I saw Ion decorating the portals of the temple, saw the arrival first of Kreusa and then Xuthus, saw Ion repulsing and finally embracing his (supposed) father, saw Kreusa give poison to the old servant, saw her taking refuge on the altar in front of the temple, saw the Pythia enter with the ark, saw mother and son reunited at last even saw high above the temple roof, in the midst of the blue sky, the majestic figure of Pallas Athene, helmeted and carrying a spear and with her breast covered by the aegis.

In Euripides Andromache too, which I read that afternoon, the Delphic oracle plays a crucial role, though the scene of the play is the temple of Thetis in Phthia, a town of Thessaly. All the principal cities and people of Ancient Greece appear to have maintained close relations with Delphi and its presiding deity, as was evinced by the little temple-like state treasuries or their ruins that could be seen lining the Sacred Way, much of it still paved, that wound up through the Sacred Precinct to the temple. Delphi and Athens, Apollo and Pallas Athene, enjoyed particularly close relations, and it was therefore fitting that at 7 o'clock that evening, having paid a second visit to the souvenir shops without my buying anything, Terry and I should have left Delphi for Athens, following the very route via Lebadeia that Ion, Kreusa, and Xuthus had followed in the distant, legendary past.

[admin]

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Athens and the Peloponnese

Athens was both extremely crowded and extremely hot, and instead of its ancient violet crown it wore a dun-coloured mantle of modern industrial smog. Terry and I arrived in the city shortly before midday. We had spent the night at a spot a few miles on from Labadeia, once the seat of the oracle of Trophonius, and having crossed the Boeotian plain, with its newly harvested wheatfields, had made our way over range upon range of low mountains to emerge, eventually, into the plain of Attica, where we were at once surrounded by the silver-green of the olive Pallas Athene's gift to the people of Athens. Soon we were driving past Eleusis, and as we approached the coast we could see not only a skyline disfigured by tall factory chimneys but also, through the haze, the vision of a white rock on which stood a pure white temple the Acropolis and, crowning it, the Parthenon.

Parking proved to be a matter of some difficulty, but after driving around for a while, and incidentally enjoying a view of the Parthenon from the west, we managed to find a spot. According to my diary we found it near Onomia, by which I must have meant Omonia -- or Concord Square, for my diary further records thatwe explored the area a little on foot and ate some rather sickly Greek sweetmeats. We also looked in some of the bigger souvenir shops, but to our disappointment the reproduction pottery was inferior in quality to what we had seen in Delphi. At 3 o'clock we decided to find a campsite. Unfortunately, we took the wrong road out of Athens and found ourselves down at the harbour of the Piraeus, so that, having re-entered the city and found the right road, it was 4 o'clock before we booked in at Athens Camping, as the site was called. Here we spent the rest of the day, as we felt too tired to do more than make a few purchases at the camp shop and go for a little walk.

In the same way that Delphimeant the temple and oracle of Apollo, so for me Athens meant the Parthenon, where the great chryselephantine statue of the Virgin Goddess had once dominated the inner sanctum, and the following morning Terry and I lost no time driving into the city centre through the thick haze the product less of car exhausts than of the countless smoking chimneys and then round to the western slope of the Acropolis. Here we parked the Little Bus, and having climbed up to the Boule Gate and followed the zigzag ramp through the forest of ruined Doric and Ionic columns that was the Propylae at last attained the summit of the Acropolis, 512 feet above the surrounding city. Before me, planted firmly on the highest point of the great limestone rock, with nothing behind it but the bluest of blue skies, there rose dazzlingly white in the brilliant morning sunshine the miracle that was the Parthenon. Though time, vandalism, and war had damaged the structure badly (there was nothing left of the roof, or the walls of the cella), most of the fifty or more enormous, fluted Doric columns were still standing or had been restored, and Terry and I wandered among them admiring their beautiful proportions. Except for the Erechtheum, famous for the Porch of the Caryatids, and the Sanctuary of Zeus, both of which we also explored, much of the area surrounding the Parthenon was a waste of white marble fragments from which the sunlight was reflected so dazzlingly as almost to hurt the eyes. Such sculptures and carvings as had survived more or less intact, and were not in the Berlin Staatliche Museen, the British Museum, or the Louvre, were housed in the Acropolis museum, which was situated in the south-east corner of the citadel and into whose coolness and gloom we were glad to escape from the growing heat outside. Though the rooms contained much that was memorable, I recollect only the enigmatically smiling Norai or Maidens, a Calf-bearer that could well have been the prototype of Early Christian representations of Christ as the Good Shepherd, and a calmly beautiful bas-relief of Pallas Athene leaning on her spear.

Before leaving the Acropolis we stood and gazed down for a while at the urban sea which, spreading in all directions, lapped against the tree-girt lower slopes of sharply-pointed Mount Lycabettus a mile or so away to the north-east. Beyond Lycabettus, on the horizon to the north, there extended the shadowy blue shapes of the mountains where ancient Athens had obtained the marble from which the Parthenon was built. Sweating profusely in the intense heat, we walked back to the Little Bus, and from the Little Bus to the Pnyx, the hill on which the Athenian democracy met, and then to the ancient central Agora or market-place, which were situated west and north-west, respectively, of the Acropolis. The Agora was dominated by the Doric so-called Theseum, said to be the best-preserved Greek temple in the world, it having been used, successively, as a Christian and as a Muslim place of worship. Like the bigger and slightly later Parthenon it was surrounded by a waste of white marble fragments fragments that had once been part of the various administrative and religious buildings which then occupied the area. Near the Theseum stood an Orthodox church, but although we ventured inside I remember nothing of what we saw. I do, however, recollect the little wayside chapels in themselves miniature churches that we saw here and there in the bustling modern city. Some were hardly bigger than a good-sized dolls house, but all were complete with the traditional round-arched doors and windows, triangular gables, and red-tiled domes.

On our way back to the Little Bus we decided to visit Cape Sounion, the southernmost point of the Attic peninsula. Why we decided to visit it I cannot say. Perhaps we wanted to get away from people, by whom we seemed to be always surrounded, even on the steps of the Parthenon and in the Acropolis museum. Perhaps we wanted to escape from the polluted atmosphere of twentieth-century Athens and breathe the ozone-laden air of the coast. Or perhaps, again, we simply wanted to see the famous temple of Poseidon. Whatever the reason for our decision may have been, we left for Cape Sounion straight away, driving first down to the Piraeus via Omonia, and from there following the scenic coastal road south.

We spent three days at the coast, camping one night near the fishing village of Lagonissa and one night in the vicinity of the Cape. During the day we explored the little rocky bays and inlets, where pebbles of many beautiful hues could be picked up, wandered along the fine, sandy beaches, washed clothes, brewed tea, and heated up can after can of minestrone. Terry spent a good deal of time swimming in the warm, sunlit coastal waters, the colour of which ranged from pale turquoise near the shoreline to cobalt blue farther out. While he was thus disporting himself I sat on a nearby rock reading, on different occasions, Plato's Apology of Socrates, Ion, and Meno, and Euripides Bacchae, all of which I had read before but never in such propitious surroundings. One afternoon we drove a few miles up the other side of the peninsula to a stretch of coast known, according to the guidebook, as the Green Coast. Why it was so called was a mystery. Though the view over the Saronic Gulf was a sufficient recompense for the journey, there was not a scrap of vegetation to be seen. There was only naked rock and sun, and no shade, consequently, in which to park, so that we were obliged to turn round and drive on until we found, back on the eastern side of the peninsula, a line of what I took to be tamarisk trees. Tamarisks or not, they were certainly trees, and we were glad to take advantage of their scanty shade.

The most rewarding part of our little excursion was the visit we paid to the temple of Poseidon, god of the sea, or rather, which we paid to the twelve white Doric columns that were practically all that was left of the imposing fifth-century BCE structure. The temple stood on a headland, and commanded a fine view of the Mirtoön Sea, whose calm waters were dotted, here and there, with the dim shapes of islands. According to the guidebook, Lord Byron had written his name on one of the columns. We did not see the signature, but if the noble lord had indeed committed such an act of vandalism he had set later visitors to the site a bad example.

That evening -- the evening of the day on which we paid our respects to the trident-wielding god of the sea -- Terry admitted to feeling rather depressed, which indeed was obvious. Though the attack was not a serious one, it necessitated our having a long talk and we were late getting to bed. In the morning my poor friend was still feeling depressed, but as the day wore on the dark cloud lifted and by the time we returned to Athens, in the late afternoon, he was quite cheerful. Fortunately the cloud remained lifted, and except for the occasional minor relapse he stayed cheerful for the remaining weeks of our tour.

In Athens we drove straight to the Acropolis, where Terry took photo- graphs and we watched the sunset, and from there to Athens Camping. That night we had a problem to discuss a problem that might have caused us serious inconvenience and even disrupted our travel plans. On the way back to Athens we had become aware that the Little Bus had developed engine trouble and was in danger, perhaps, of breaking down. What were we to do? We could not do anything that night, but early the following morning we drove -- very gingerly -- into Athens in search of information and advice. The Greek Automobile and Touring Club was not very helpful, but eventually, after we had walked around for two or three hours (and cashed travellers cheques, posted cards, and bought a new cylinder of Gaz), we succeeded in locating the Volkswagen repair centre. They would not be able to do anything until Monday, they told us (it was now Friday), but if we took the Little Bus in early on Monday morning they would give the engine an overhaul and with this we had to be content. Sunday was perforce a day of rest, for not wanting to risk having a breakdown on the way we did not go anywhere. Instead, we spent the whole day at the campsite, where I read Plutarch and Aeschylus and started on The Pelican History of Greece.

As we did not know what was wrong, exactly, with the Little Buss engine, nor how much time it would take to put it right, Monday was a day of some uncertainty. It was also a day of disappointment, in one respect at least. Having left the Little Bus at the repair centre we walked via Euripides Street and America Street (piquant juxtaposition!) all the way to the National Archaeological Museum, our idea being to spend the rest of the morning in its galleries. We arrived there punctually at the usual opening time, only to discover that it was closed on Mondays. Fortunately, the museum gardens were open, and still more fortunately on our way through America Street we had called in at the English book- shop and added to our stock of classical authors. Instead of spending the morning with the masterpieces of Greek sculpture, therefore, we spent it with Richard Lattimore's The Odes of Pindar, Benjamin Rogers's translation of five comedies of Aristophanes, and The Essential Works of Stoicism. Though both he and I dipped into all three volumes, Terry, I think, spent more time with the philosophers and I with the poets.

We had been told that the Little Bus might be ready for collection by 2 o'clock. Having had our fill of poets and philosophers, at least for the time being, at 11.30 we left the museum gardens and set out for the Volkswagen repair centre, stopping on the way only to buy some Greek sweetmeats and sit in one of the squares eating them. Though the Little Bus was not ready for collection by 2 o'clock, it was ready an hour or so later, and we were able to take delivery of it knowing that its engine was now in perfect working order and that there was no danger of our travel plans being disrupted by an untimely breakdown. We therefore returned to Athens Camping in high spirits high spirits not untouched by a feeling of relief. We were glad to have the Little Bus back with us. We were glad to have it back, not simply because it was our means of getting from place to place. It was also our home, at least for the duration of our tour, and if we were obliged to be without it for any length of time, as had been the case that day, we felt naked and exposed, rather like a tortoise without its shell. With his extreme sensitiveness to other people, and especially to crowds, Terry felt such exposure more than I did. He also was quite attached to his convenient, comfortable Dormobile. In fact he was quite fond of it, and in the course of our travels I, too, became fond of the particoloured vehicle, half red and half white.

Tuesday was our last day in Athens. Having decided to leave for Corinth and the Peloponnese by midday we spent the morning in the National Archaeological Museum, the doors of which now stood wide open and which was full, unfortunately, of parties of noisy tourists being shepherded from room to room by vociferous guides-cum-lecturers. Though the museum covered all the periods of ancient Greek civilization, pride of place appeared to belong to the Bronze Age treasure from Mycenae. The treasure itself was not of bronze but of gold, which probably accounted for the fact that the room in which it was displayed was the most crowded part of the museum, the majority of visitors no doubt being drawn to the artefacts less on account of their artistic refinement, which was of a high order, than because they were made of gold. Such was the crush that Terry and I caught only a glimpse of the gold masks that had covered the face of the dead, the gold bracelets and earrings and the gold cups. We had a better view of the various kouroi, once known as archaic Apollos, as well as of the famous bronze statue of Poseidon on the point of hurling his trident, the graceful Praxitelean bronze boy, his eyes inset, I seem to remember, with white stone and coloured glass, and above all -- though only a Roman copy -- the marvellously posed Discobolus or Discus-Thrower. Whether gods or mortal men, they were all represented nude, as were the other male figures in the museums collection, whereas the female figures were usually draped, and the more I contemplated them the more I was inclined to think, with Goethe, Schopenhauer, and others, that the male human form was more beautiful than the female. Hardly less impressive than the statues, in their own way, were the funeral stelae, with their reliefs of an old man and his hunter son, a girl taking incense from a small box, and other scenes of a tender, domestic nature. There was also the famous bas-relief from Eleusis, depicting the youthful Triptolemus between Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, was shown giving Triptolemus the first grain of corn. According to the myth, she also gave him a winged chariot harnessed with dragons, and bade him travel the world spreading the benefits of agriculture among all men.

It was in honour of Demeter and Persephone, together with Dionysus, the god of wine, that the Eleusinian Mysteries -- the most famous mysteries of antiquity -- were celebrated. They were celebrated in the Telesterion or Hall of Initiation at Eleusis, fifteen miles from Athens, and it was in Eleusis that Terry and I found ourselves half an hour after leaving the National Archaeological Museum. A small, independent city state before it came into the Athenian sphere of influence in the sixth century BCE, it was now an industrial town. Writing in the year of our own visit, one traveller described it as singularly unattractive. Not only had the Goths and time wrought their usual destruction, but the foundations of the great hall and the scattered blocks of marble were surrounded by the smoking chimneys of several factories, so that he found it hard to imagine how such a scene of desolation could once have inspired the master of irreverence, Aristophanes, who wrote:

To us alone, initiated men,
Who act aright by stranger and by friend,
The sun shines out to light us after death.

This 'sun' was the light which blazed forth when, at the supreme moment of the initiation, the doors of the Anaktoron or Kings House, which stood within the Hall of Initiation, were suddenly opened to re- veal the Hiera or Sacred Objects. On the far side of the archaeological area there was a museum. Much of the statuary in it was Roman, but it also contained small scale models of the temples and other structures that had occupied the sacred precincts, and these gave us, between them, a good idea of how ancient Eleusis must have looked. But no models, however accurate, could revive the atmosphere of the place. Though tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of people had received there the deepest spiritual experience of their lives, no trace of that atmosphere remained. Unlike Delphi, the Eleusis of the Mysteries was spiritually dead, and it was therefore with thoughts not untouched by sadness that Terry and I left the once sacred site on the next stage of the day's journey.

Corinth was situated at the foot of the isthmus connecting the Peloponnese with mainland Greece. Having joined the Italian-style motorway and driven south-west along the coast, we reached it in the middle of the afternoon. Or rather, we reached them, for there were two Corinths, the Old and the New. Our business was with Old Corinth, a quiet, pleasant little town, hardly bigger than a village, but not so small as not to have several souvenir shops, in which we looked before visiting the archaeological area and the museum that stood on its outskirts. The archaeological area was a waste of ancient ruins from the midst of which there rose, relatively intact, the seven squat, monolithic Doric columns that were all that remained of the sixth-century BCE temple of Apollo, while in the museum there was little of interest except the Roman mosaics. We then drove to the Acro-Corinth, the great rock on the south which towered to a height of some 1,800 feet above Old Corinth. Commanding as it did the approaches to the Peloponnese, the citadel had been fought over not only by Greeks and Romans but also, in more recent times, by Franks, Venetians, Byzantines, and Turks, all of whom had occupied it for a while and all of whom had left their mark on the place. Terry and I did not climb to the top, but we climbed as far as the third gate, which was flanked by high towers and from which there was a fine view of the surrounding countryside.

We spent five days in the Peloponnese, visiting Mycenae, Tiryns, Nauplia, Epidaurus, and Argos in the east, Sparta in the south, and Olympia in the west -- all of them names no less redolent of myth, legend, and history than were Dodona, Delphi, and Athens. My companion and I had not been long on the road out of Corinth, heading for Mycenae, before we noticed that there was more vegetation here than in the Attica region. A good deal of tobacco was being grown, and there were olive gardens and vineyards, as well as plenty of wild thyme, the agreeably pungent scent of which filled the air. It was beside a field of tobacco, with the scent of thyme in our nostrils, that we slept that night, and before we left in the morning I picked some of the aromatic herb. Though I had already bought an Achilles pottery plate, and was to buy a small handmade rug, the real memento of my visit to Greece was those sprigs of wild thyme, which I kept in a small pot on my desk for many years and whose fragrance served to remind me not just of the days I spent in the Peloponnese with Terry but of our whole Greek experience.

On arriving at Mycenae we were dismayed to find several coachloads of tourists already there and streaming up to the citadel. Following in their wake, we soon found ourselves standing in front of the famous Lion Gate and gazing up at the massive lintel and the triangular bas-relief above. This relief depicted two lions confronted, resting their forelegs on the edge of a low, altar-like structure on which was a pillar which stood between them. Within the gate, surrounded by a double circle of stone slabs, were the shafts of the royal tombs in which Heinrich Schliemann, in 1876, had discovered the Bronze Age gold treasure that was now in Athens. Here we sat for a while consulting our guidebooks before ascending the broad, graded road that led to the summit of the acropolis and so to the terraces on which had once stood the palace of Agamemnon the palace to which he had returned in triumph from the sack of Troy only to be murdered by his adulterous wife Clytemnestra. Ruins lay all around -- ruins not only of the palace and of the Doric temple which, more than a thousand years later, was superimposed on its remains, but also of the many houses that had surrounded the royal residence in its days of glory. From the acropolis there was a view southward over the fertile Argolis plain.

Back at the circle of stone slabs we sat down and tried to read, but the chattering tour groups and loud-voiced lecturers in French, German, and English made it impossible for us to do this, and we therefore took refuge in one of the less important of the beehive tombs outside the Lion Gate. Here I read the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the action of which takes place in the very palace whose ruins we had just been visiting. This was the first Greek play I ever read, and its grandeur inspired me, in my fourteenth or fifteenth year, with a wholehearted admiration for the genius of the great Attic tragedians, and for Aeschylus in particular, that I was never to lose. On my finishing the work we visited the 'Tomb of Clytemnestra' and 'Aegisthus Tomb', as the two beehive structures had been known since the time of their discovery, though the period to which they belonged was not that of the adulterous queen and her paramour but a much earlier one, that of the sixteenth century BCE. The biggest of the beehive tombs was the so-called 'Treasury of Atreus', also known as the 'Tomb of Agamemnon'. According to the guidebooks this was a very grand affair, and well worth a visit, but so great was the number of people trying to get in that we decided to give it a miss and press on to Epidaurus.

Between Mycenae and Epidaurus lay Argos and Tiryns, the former being -- it was said -- the oldest continuously inhabited town in Europe. It was a pleasant little place, and apparently flourishing, even if not to the extent that it had flourished during the spacious days of the Heroic Age. We halted there only long enough to buy provisions, telling ourselves that we would see the archaeological area and museum on our way from Epidaurus to Tripoli, which for reasons I no longer recollect we failed to do. Tiryns was remarkable for its massive 'Cyclopean' walls, so called from the Cyclopes, the race of one-eyed giants who the ancient Greeks believed had built the city for the legendary king Proetus. Some of the blocks used in its construction were 17 feet long and 7 feet high, and Hercules himself could hardly have moved them from their place. Tiryns had, in fact, a close connection with Hercules. It was to Tiryns that the Delphic oracle had sent the hero to serve for twelve years under King Eurystheus, in expiation for the crime of having killed his own children in a fit of madness, and it was Eurystheus who had imposed on Hercules his famous Twelve Labours. As in Mycenae, there was an acropolis and the remains of a Bronze Age royal palace, both of which we saw, but so gloomy and oppressive was the place that we did not stay long in Tiryns. The very name of Tiryns, I thought, had a sinister sound, as if echoing down the corbelled stone galleries that ran within the thickness of the outer walls.

Dodona, Delphi, and the Parthenon to an extent, all had their distinctive atmospheres. Epidaurus, too, had its atmosphere -- one that was immediately perceptible. It was a calm, healthy, harmonious atmosphere, as though a blessing rested upon the place, and it was not surprising that for a thousand years the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus should have been renowned as a centre of physical and mental healing. Terry and I arrived there towards evening, after a pleasant drive through low, pine-clad hills, and past orange orchards and lemon orchards, and whitewashed stone dwellings half hidden by olive trees. On our arrival we parked at the edge of the archaeological area, in a grove of pines. It was a peaceful spot, and when I had read the Chosphori or 'Libation Bearers', the second part of the great trilogy of which the Agamemnon is the first, and we had eaten, the two of us set out for the ancient theatre, in which there had been accommodation for 17,000 spectators, and which Pausanius, the second-century geographer, had described as the most beautiful theatre in Greece. A rehearsal of Euripides' The Trojan Women was in progress. The play was being performed, as we soon realized, not in the original language, or even in modern Greek, but in French. Nonetheless, with a sprinkling of other visitors we sat and watched for a while, the semicircles of stone seating rising tier upon tier behind us. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes, were regularly performed there during the summer months, we gathered, for though nothing remained of the stage buildings, the greater part of the auditorium had survived more or less intact and had needed little in the way of restoration.

In the morning we looked round the museum, where a plaster model of the buildings that had formed the nucleus of the sanctuary enabled us to imagine what the place had been like in its heyday in the fourth century BCE. There was the temple of Asclepius, the god of healing, the much smaller temple of Artemis, the maiden goddess of the hunt and the wild, and the mysterious Tholos, with its two concentric circles of columns, an outer Doric circle and an inner Corinthian one. Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the Abaton, or Porch, where patients spent the night and where they received, in their dreams, indications as to the kind of treatment they should be given by the establishments priest-physicians. Such treatment must often have been effective. In the museum there were stelae inscribed with descriptions of miraculous cures, as well as ex votos in the form of replicas of different limbs and organs, such as we had seen in the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua. The beliefs and customs of pagan Greece had been inherited by Roman Catholic Italy. St Anthony was the direct descendant of Asclepius. To me, Asclepius was the more attractive figure of the two. Indeed, he was one of the most attractive figures in the Greek pantheon. I do not recall seeing a statue of him in the little museum (the temples famous chrys-elephantine statue had long since disappeared), but his lineaments, as represented in ancient sculpture, were in any case familiar to me. He was represented standing, dressed in a long cloak, with bare breast, and grasping a club-like staff round which coiled a serpent. Himself the son of Apollo, he was sometimes accompanied by Telephorus, the boy genius of healing, and his daughters Hygeia, the goddess of health, and Panacea. As Terry and I left the museum, and as we wandered round the archaeological area, it was not difficult for me to imagine that the benign spirit of the divine physician still brooded over his ancient sanctuary.

According to the traveller who had described Eleusis as singularly unattractive, the remains of the temple and other buildings at Epidaurus were of archaeological rather than artistic interest, and in this he was probably right. Still, it was pleasant, in the morning sunshine, to wander in and out of the great piles of marble blocks and slabs, and past the rows of truncated columns, the whiteness of which contrasted very agreeably with the green of the pines and of the slimmer, darker cypresses. It was pleasant to breathe the same thyme-scented air that we had breathed on the road to Mycenae and which was a feature, so it appeared, of much of the Peloponnese. The only remains that were readily identifiable were those of the Tholon, the beautiful carvings from which we had seen in the museum, and those of the temple of Asclepius, and once we had surveyed them we returned to the Little Bus to read our classics, eat, and write postcards. Having written our postcards, we naturally wanted to buy stamps and post them; but by then it was siesta time and everyone was either absent or asleep, and not caring to wait until they resurfaced we were soon on the road to Nauplia and Argos.

Nauplia had been a seaport since ancient times, but it was the Venetians who, in the seventeenth century, had fortified the Palamidhi rock and developed the town. Driving round the place, now very much a tourist centre, we had a fine view of the fortifications, as well as of the tiny fortified Bourtsi Island a few hundred yards out in the bay. The road between Nauplia and Argos was on the level, but from Argos our way lay over a high mountain range, which meant that we had many hairpin bends to negotiate and made a fairly rapid descent on the other side. Soon we saw large flocks of curly-horned goats and sheep, and small, irregularly shaped fields bordered by low stone walls. There were also hundreds of little piles of stones, usually three or four to a pile, and all whitewashed. What might be the significance of these rude monuments, if monuments indeed they were, we could not tell, and we were still wondering about them when we reached Tripoli. Located practically at the geographical centre of the Peloponnese as it was, Tripoli was a town of some importance, but it was a modern town, and we stopped only to buy provisions before heading south, in the direction of Sparta. By this time we were both rather tired, and half an hour after leaving Tripoli we found a place to camp. It was below the road, in a ravine in which grew an abundance of giant thistles. Here we cooked a meal, read, and slept -- in Terry's case only fitfully.

Next day we set out quite early. It was a fine morning, and having driven over a low-lying range of mountains, and crossed the thin silver trickle that was the river Eurotas, we were in Sparta by seven. The town was situated at the foot of the mighty Taygetus range, which towered to a height of 8,000 feet above it to the west. Though it occupied the site of the famous ancient city of the same name -- the city of Lycurgus and Leonidas -- Sparta, like Tripoli, was a modern town, and we therefore drove straight on, past olive gardens and orange groves, to Mistra, five miles away, and soon were in another world.

To me Greece meant ancient Greece. It meant the Greece of Hesiod and Homer, of Pindar and the Attic dramatists, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Pericles, Phidias and Myron. It meant, what for me was no less significant, the Greece of pagan myth and legend. It meant the Greece of Zeus, Pallas Athene, Apollo, and the rest of the immortals, and of the shrines that had been dedicated to their worship. It was this Greece I had come to see, especially what for centuries had been the spiritual centre of the Greek world the temple and oracle of Apollo at Delphi. I was not interested in modern Greece, or even, at that time, in ancient Greece's heir in certain respects, the Orthodox-Christian Byzantine Empire. Culturally and spiritually speaking, therefore, the visit Terry and I paid to Mistra that morning represented an interlude in our tour of the Peloponnese; for Mistra, perched on a spur of the Taygetus, was a Frankish and Byzantine city, and had no classical remains.

We arrived at the gate of the old city only to find it did not open until eight. We therefore made our way round the ramparts up to the gate of the thirteenth-century Frankish castle. The castle was situated on the topmost part of the spur, high above the city, and from the gate also closed -- there was a fine view over the Eurotas valley. By this time the lower gate was open, and on entering it we found ourselves in what was virtually a city of the dead. Not that it was a city of ruins only. Some of the Byzantine buildings, especially the churches and monasteries, were still standing, or had been restored recently, and one was actually inhabited. This was the fifteenth-century convent of the Pantanassa, where two or three decrepit, black-habited nuns moved noiselelssly from chapel to frescoed chapel lighting lamps in front of the icons. The atmosphere of the place, as of the other churches and monasteries we saw there, was serene and peaceful -- a serenity and peace that whitewashed walls and window-boxes of bright flowers served only to enhance. From the ruins beyond there was direct access to the interior of the castle, and before long we were surveying what was left of the buildings surrounding the vast central courtyard, where pines and a solitary cypress grew, and looking down at the red-tiled roofs and domes of the city below. In the last days of the Byzantine Empire cosmopolitan Mistra with its 40,000 inhabitants had been second only to Constantinople, the capital, in prosperity and importance. Moreover, it had been a centre of culture and intellect, as well as of freedom of thought, and it was from Mistra that, in 1438, the philosopher Gemistos Plethon, the last of the Hellenes, had travelled to Italy, there to teach Greek, pioneer the revival of Platonism, and inspire Cosimo de Medici to found the Platonic Academy at Florence, thereby contributing significantly to the Renaissance. Mistra therefore had played an important part in the cultural history of western Europe, and three centuries later perhaps it was his appreciation of this fact that had led Goethe, in the Second Part of Faust, to represent the union of Faust and Helen of Troy that union of the spirit of the Middle Ages with the spirit of ancient Greece that had given birth to Romanticism, as embodied in the figure of their child Euphorion as taking place in the richly decorated inner courtyard of the castle of Mistra.

To what extent these were my actual reflections as Terry and I looked down on the red-tiled roofs and domes of the deserted city I cannot say. Certainly I was in a thoughtful mood as we left Mistra and drove back to Sparta. After visiting the museum, in which there was a sculpture of Helen of Troy between her twin brothers Castor and Pollux, we set out for the coastal town of Kalamata, our intention being to drive from there up the western side of the Peloponnese to Olympia. To get to Kalamata we had to cross the Taygetus range. Hardly were we into it, however, than we found the road closed for repair. It would be opened at twelve, we were told, but not being sure if we could rely on this we decided to return to Tripoli via Sparta and drive to Olympia from there. Two hours later, therefore, we were in Tripoli again. This time we walked round the town, and looked into the nineteenth-century church, so that it was not until early afternoon that we were clear of Tripoli and on our way to Olympia. There were thousands of grasshoppers on the road, and however carefully Terry drove it was impossible for us to avoid crushing some of the unfortunate little creatures. Exactly halfway between Tripoli and Olympia, in a clearing on the pine-covered hillside, we found a campsite. After we had rested and eaten, and Terry had read for awhile, we walked over to the open-fronted little shop that stood opposite the campsite, on the other side of the highway. It was run by a young man in traditional dress, and was chock-full of the most beautiful handmade rugs and floor coverings we had so far seen, all made, the young man told us, by him and his mother and sister. For the equivalent of three pounds I bought myself, to use as a meditation mat, a rug with a soft green background. Later that night I read Euripides Helen, and we had a long talk with a German who was also travelling in a Dormobile, in his case alone, and who had spent two years in India.

Our journey next morning took us over a range of mountains, through lush, sometimes hilly, country, and past villages so picturesque that Terry could not resist taking a few photographs. A lot of maize was being grown, but the plants were small and stunted, and bore little resemblance to the tall, leafy specimens I was accustomed to seeing in Kalimpong. Pines and cypresses dotted the landscape, and as we approached Olympia we saw olive gardens and orange orchards. There was an abundance of wild flowers. During the last stage of our journey the road ran for a while beside the river Alpheus, or rather, beside the dried-up bed of the river, which wound its grey, rock-strewn way through scenery of exceptional beauty. At eleven we reached Olympia. It was quite hot. After buying stamps and groceries in what my diary calls the Olympic village, we drove to the campsite, which was 'pleasant, but primitive', and where a rough table and benches stood invitingly beneath a tree. Here we spent the remainder of the day, except for a brief excursion into the village for the sake of the souvenir shops, and here I finished Helen and read Aristophanes' The Clouds. What was more to the purpose, I read Pindar's Olympian Odes, in which the 'Theban eagle', as Gray calls him, celebrates, in language of great power and beauty, and with many mythological allusions and digressions, the success of various victors in the great quadrennial games that Hercules, according to legend, had instituted at the site in honour of his father Zeus.

Originally, of all the sites we visited in the Peloponnese Olympia must have been the grandest. Besides the temples of Zeus and Hera and the principal altars and votive offerings, which were all situated within the Altis or 'sacred grove of Zeus', as the sacred precinct was called, there were administrative buildings, state treasuries, guest quarters, gymnasia, and colonnades, as well, of course, as the stadium and hippodrome where the foot races and horse races, respectively, were held. Above all, in the temple of Zeus with its six frontal and thirteen lateral Doric columns, there was Phidias' chryselephantine seated statue of Zeus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But these had all long since disappeared, and with them Olympia's former grandeur. When Terry and I drove to the archaeological area in the morning, we saw among the pines that had been planted in an attempt, apparently, to recreate the ancient 'grove of Zeus', only rows of truncated columns, scattered drums, and immense quantities of marble fragments. On the whole it was a mournful sight, and after walking round for half an hour we were glad to visit the museum. Here our spirits were revived by the well-known statue of Hermes carrying the infant Dionysus, the work of Praxiteles, and by the quite substantial fragments of sculpture from the western pediment of the temple of Zeus. The latter represented the battle of the centaurs and Lapiths, and I was greatly struck by the upright, calmly majestic figure of Apollo, who stood with right arm outstretched and head turned in the same direction, apparently in the act of repulsing a centaur. Of that figure it has been said that it marks the final achievement of Greek sculpture before the full 'classical' naturalism of the Parthenons sculpture. Nonetheless, standing before it that morning, there in the Olympia museum, I realized that although in the transition to naturalism much had been gained, something precious had been lost, and that certain archaic and early classical sculptures possessed a quality that affected me, for one, at a deeper level than did any of the masterpieces of the fully naturalistic period.

My attention was also drawn by a terracotta group of a bearded Zeus, looking rather pleased with himself, carrying off, tucked under one arm, an unresisting Ganymede, as well as by a metope of Hercules performing one of his twelve labours that of bringing the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. According to one account, the hero persuaded Atlas to pick the apples for him while he, Hercules, supported the world on his shoulders, and the metope represented him doing just this. Immediately behind him, clad in a simple garment with straight folds, stood Pallas Athene, helping him take the weight with her left hand. There was a striking contrast between the bowed head and straining muscles of the hero and the calm, relaxed attitude of the goddess, who appeared to be making no effort at all. Her features, like those of the pedimental Apollo, were expressionless. Superhuman in power and beauty as they were, the immortal gods were untouched by the troubles of mortal men.

Olympia was the last ancient site we visited in the Peloponnese, and having left the museum we set out for Patras, driving through flat, well-cultivated countryside the monotony of which was relieved by a generous sprinkling of cypresses. Our intention had been to stay at the Kato Achaia campsite, but there being no sign of any such place we decided to stay -- despite its name -- at Villy's Park-Camping Bamboo, which was situated at the seaside, only a few miles from Patras. Both the beach and the water were dirty, and there were no bamboos, though there were several fine red oleanders. During the afternoon things were quiet, and I was able to read Sophocles Antigone and ?Euripides Rhesus, but from seven o'clock onwards there was so horrid a din coming from the jazz band next door that we went for a walk in order to get away from it. The road was hardly less noisy, however, as well as being dusty, and we were soon forced to return to the campsite, where the din continued unabated far into the night. The result was that neither of us slept very well, so that when morning came we were glad to pay our bill and go.

In Patras we bought a box of Turkish delight as a present for Francoise, then drove to Rion, where there was a fine view over the Gulf of Patras. It was a very hot day, and we waited half an hour in the sun before boarding the car ferry to Antirion. Fifteen minutes later we were on the mainland and heading for Missolonghi.

From Missolonghi we travelled up to Igoumenitsa, following (in reverse) the route down which we had driven three weeks earlier, passing through Agrinion (the town we had missed before), Amphilochia, Arta, and Yannina, and spending three nights on the road. In the course of the journey we watched the sun go down over the mountains, were an object of curiosity to goatherds and small boys, read Pindar and the Pelican History of Greece (me) and Suzuki on Zen (Terry), stopped for meals beneath big, shady trees, and posted the last of the cards we would be sending from Greece. In Igoumenitsa we found the shipping office closed (it was siesta time). We therefore had to return and complete the formalities in the evening, after we had booked ourselves into a campsite near the beach. Next morning we were at the quayside soon after five-thirty, embarked at six, and half an hour later were on our way to Brindisi. It was a fine, sunny day. The sea was a deep, dark blue, and very quiet. Terry and I passed the time either walking round the deck or sitting in deckchairs at the side of the ship reading. My reading was Plato (the Gorgias) and Walt Whitman, whose 'Passage to India' I had read the night before. At 4.30 we reached Brindisi. There were no formalities of any kind, and after shopping in the supermarket we drove straight to the campsite.

[admin]

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Naples, Rome, and Florence

Terry and I spent two nights in Brindisi. During the second night there was a storm, with plenty of thunder and lightning. It also rained heavily, so that on our leaving for Taranto the following morning, in bright, clear weather, there was an agreeable freshness in the air and the olive gardens, vineyards, and tobacco fields of the flat countryside through which we passed had a rejuvenated look. Taranto, on the gulf of that name, was a modern town, and much larger than we had expected. But though it was a modern town, there were no signposts, and we found our way through it with difficulty, incidentally catching a glimpse of the sea and of the old town on its island.

Taranto behind us at last, we drove on through a number of much smaller towns -- all the time gradually ascending. At Castellanetta there was a large, gaudy monument to Rudolph Valentino, the archetypal romantic hero of the Hollywood silent films, and at Matera we found people living in what apparently were abandoned stone quarries. From Matera onwards the road became steeper. So much steeper did it become, and so numerous were the bends, that I was overcome by altitude sickness and we had to call a halt. Terry was unaffected, and while he ate a good lunch I started reading Aristotle's Ethics, which I had begun a few days before, but soon fell asleep. We then pressed on through the mountains to earthquake-prone Potenza, 2,700 feet above sea level. The scenery was very fine, and with its wooded slopes reminded me of that of Switzerland. After Potenza there were more towns on peaks, and I had another attack of altitude sickness. This time we did not stop, except to buy grapes at Eboli, our descent being in any case slowed down by all the road-widening work that was going on. Soon we were out of the mountains and driving through Campania, past the British war cemetery and past field after field of tomato plants. When we were a few miles short of Salerno we turned off the main road to the Lido di Salerno campsite, where we arrived at 7.30, having driven more than 230 miles and crossed from one side of the Italian peninsula to the other. The camp was situated within a few yards of the sea, and before retiring we went for a stroll on the beach. There was a strong wind blowing. Though the sea was a little rough, with big breakers, to me the sight was very appealing.

Salerno was famous in medieval times on account of its medical school, the earliest in Europe. Now it was a popular holiday resort, and as Terry and I drove into the modern town via the coastal road we saw that the beaches were strewn with litter. Indeed, parts of them were being used as rubbish dumps. The towns principal monument, the eleventh-century cathedral, was a building of considerable interest. In front of it there was a spacious quadrangular courtyard, the arcades surrounding which were formed of ancient Corinthian columns that no doubt once belonged to a pagan temple. The bronze doors of the cathedral were of Byzantine workmanship. At the time of our arrival a prelate, perhaps the bishop himself, was celebrating morning mass for the benefit of a very small congregation; but we were able to see the apse mosaics, where a rather naturalistic Virgin Mary was the central figure, and the two inlaid marble pulpits. From Salerno we drove to the resort of Sorrento, situated round the tip of the peninsula of that name, following the scenic coastal road, and turning aside to visit Ravello on the way. Not that we had to make much of a turn. The little town, or village, clung to the face of the cliff, almost immediately above the road, so that the climb up to it -- past orange trees and lemon trees and curious rock formations -- was a steep one. At the top of the steps stood the cathedral. Built in the eleventh century (thus our self-appointed guide) it had been 'modernized' at the end of the eighteenth, though the Corinthian columns that had then been enclosed were in process of being freed. In the shabby sacristy we found a fine, Sienese-style painting of the Virgin and Child, and some old vestments. We were not able to see the twelfth-century mosaics. Tomorrow the town would be celebrating the feast of the cathedrals patron saint, and the interior walls of the building were entirely covered with crimson draperies. Strings of coloured electric-light bulbs were still going up -- a form of decoration not at all to my taste. Like those we had seen on the way, the shops outside the cathedral were selling the local handmade pottery. In one of them we were approached for alms by an elderly, respectable-looking nun in black, the first religious mendicant we had seen. Having myself lived on alms for a while, I wanted to give her something, but before I could do so the woman shopkeeper intervened with what was evidently a scolding for bothering us and she turned silently away.

Driving on from picturesque Ravello (the hackneyed epithet is unavoidable), along the winding, rock-cut coastal road, we passed in quick succession through the no less picturesque Amalfi, Praiano, and Positano. Whitewashed houses, nestling amid orange trees and cypresses, climbed tier upon tier up the hillside on our right, and on our left fell tier upon tier down to the soft blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Little rocky peninsulas thrust themselves out into the calm waters, their every coign of vantage occupied by the colourful umbrellas and tiny thatched pavilions of the bathers. It was an idyllic, even a paradisaical scene, and one that in its opulent loveliness rivalled the more austere beauty of coastal Greece. But of course there was a serpent in this paradise, in the form of the slow-moving, pollutant-emitting stream of cars, coaches, and campers of which we were ourselves a part. So slowly did the stream move in the hot sun, at times crawling along bonnet to bumper, especially when we turned and crossed to the other side of the peninsula, that it was not until mid-afternoon that Terry and I reached Sorrento and found the campsite.

In the cool of the evening we went into the resort and walked round for an hour. Horse-drawn carriages were very much in evidence, and there were many souvenir shops. In one of the shops I bought two bookmarks, a copy of Axel Münthe's The Story of San Michele, and an illustrated guide to Pompeii, which we were planning to visit the following day, on our way to Naples. The Story of San Michele was a fashionable Swedish doctors account of his life in Capri in the halcyon days before the First World War, and in particular of the creation of San Michele, the villa he had built there with his own hands, incorporating into it marble fragments from the ruins of the palace of Tiberius, the old Roman emperor having spent the last years of his life on the island. I had read the book in Bombay, on the recommendation of my friend Arjundev Rashk, a Punjabi poet and scriptwriter of about my own age, and had enjoyed it greatly. That was ten years ago, and I was glad not only that I had the opportunity to read it again, but that I had come across it -- and could start reading it -- in a place so close to Capri, which geologically was an extension of the Sorrento peninsula, and which we hoped to be able to see from Naples. The illustrated guide to Pompeii, with its photographs of the excavated remains of houses, shops, and public buildings, and its artists reconstructions of what the city must have been like 2,000 years ago, helped prepare us for what we would be seeing -- and not be seeing -- on the morrow. In my own case, at least, the name of Pompeii had long been a familiar one. As a boy of eight or nine, confined to bed with what was believed to be heart disease, I had read Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, and his vivid account of the city's destruction had left an indelible impression on my mind.

From Sorrento onwards the road round the peninsula was relatively uninteresting, and after Castellammare di Stabia, equidistant from Sorrento and Naples, it passed through an area of an increasingly built-up and industrialized character. Owing to the bad signposting, we experienced some difficulty finding the way to Pompeii, a way which took us, eventually, through very dirty streets and past piles of garbage. On arriving at our destination we were surprised to find, not the reconstructed pagan temple one might have expected, but a big Roman Catholic church. The church was indeed a basilica, and judging by the fact that all the shops and stalls in the vicinity were selling cheap religious souvenirs it was a centre of pilgrimage. There was also a Pontifical Institute, in whose modest museum we saw an interesting series of old prints depicting all the eruptions of Vesuvius from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as various objects recovered from beneath the layers of volcanic ash which for centuries had covered Pompeii. Thus prepared, we made our way to the excavations, and there spent more than two hours treading the pavements of the old city and seeing the remains, in some cases very extensive, of the buildings which the spade of the archaeologist had exposed to view. We saw the spacious Forum or market-place, with its lateral rows of truncated columns, the Basilica or hall of justice (some ancient churches so styled were originally public buildings of this type), the House of the Faun, named for the bronze dancing figure that had been found there and whose place was now occupied by a replica, the elegant House of Menander, in the atrium of which there were frescoes of the Sack of Troy, and the sad remains of the Temple of Isis, which I remembered as having featured prominently in the Last Days of Pompeii -- together with much else that my diary lumps together under a terse etc.

Many of the objects found at Pompeii were in private hands, but many were in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, and as we were eager to see them we drove straight from the excavations to Naples and straight to the museum. The streets through which we passed were all incredibly dirty; piles of rotting garbage rose breast-high at regular intervals, and in Naples itself -- an otherwise beautiful city, occupying one of the finest sites in the world -- the same filth was to be seen, even in the principal thoroughfares. Were the municipal dustmen all on strike, then, or was this the normal state of affairs? We had no means of knowing. The museum, unfortunately, was closed, or rather, it closed just after our arrival, either because it was siesta time or because Monday was early closing day. Taking the coastal road, we therefore drove on to Pozzuoli, which was rather cleaner, and from Pozzuoli to the campsite at Solfatara. It was a big, quiet camp, with plenty of trees, and I spent much of the evening reading The Story of San Michele.

As we discovered the following day, the National Archaeological Museum contained not only frescoes, mosaics, and encaustic portraits from Pompeii and its sister in disaster, Herculaneum, but an astonishingly rich array of Greek and Roman antiquities of every kind. On entering the building we were confronted by a perfect forest of white marble statues in which it was easy, as one wandered from room to crowded room, to get lost. Besides the Farnese Hercules, the group of the Punishment of Dirce, the bronze Hermes in Repose, and a hundred other sculptures hardly less famous, there were portrait busts of Greek philosophers and Roman emperors, elaborately carved sarcophagi, and colossal statues of river gods. The object that made the strongest impression on me, whether because of its non-naturalistic character, its warmer colouring, or its more subliminal appeal, was the rigidly hieratic statue of the Ephesian Artemis. This was not the fleet-footed virgin goddess of the Greeks, but a deity of a very different kind. Apart from her outstretched hands, her most conspicuous feature were the rows of breasts -- more recently identified as the testicles of bulls sacrificed in her honour -- that adorned the upper part of her body, and the friezes of beasts that covered the mummy-like remainder. On her head rested a square mitre, and there were more representations of beasts within the flat disc of her halo. Her attitude was reassuring, her expression benign.

On our way into Naples that morning we had enjoyed a fine view of the splendid curve of the Bay. We had also encountered roads which, while they may have been wider than those of yesterday, were no less filthy. On emerging from the museum we therefore lost no time getting on to the Autostrada del Sole and heading for Rome. This twentieth-century equivalent of the Appian Way ran through mountainous, well-wooded countryside; at one point we saw, perched on a neighbouring peak, the famed abbey of Monte Cassino -- unfortunately badly damaged during the Second World War. Three hours after leaving Naples we were in the Eternal City and looking for the Villa Ada campsite.

The first thing we did after having a meal was go to the camp shop and buy a guidebook. There was a lot to see in Rome -- perhaps more than in all the places we had so far seen put together -- and during the next five days we probably saw as much of the city and its monuments as could be comfortably seen in so short a time. Each morning we left the campsite straight after breakfast, and each day we spent the morning and much of the afternoon sightseeing. Since we did most of our sightseeing on foot, often in the open air, we were glad the weather was now cooler, and that there was an occasional sprinkling of rain. Evenings were spent at the campsite, where we cooked, washed clothes, read, studied our guide- book, and planned the following days excursion.

On the first day we saw first the Forum of Trajan and the Colosseum, then the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill. 'Walked round the whole area and saw everything,' my diary records with satisfaction, adding, 'Strong impression of greatness in size rather than in artistic conception. Everything seemed dark and heavy. None of the lightness of Greece.' We also visited the Capitoline Museum, among whose treasures were the Dying Gaul ('very fine') and the Spinarius or Boy With a Thorn. The second day began with a visit to the Pantheon (simple but grand), after which we saw St Peters in Vincula, with the famous statue of Moses by Michelangelo ('rather smaller than I thought it was'), and the Basilica of St Clement, beneath which there was a much older underground church and, what was still more interesting, a Mithraic sanctuary. From St Clements we drove to the Basilica of St John Lateran, on which my diary comments, Big and impressive, but cold. Typical papal triumphalism. Mosaics in apse beautiful, though. Sadly overpowered by rest of structure. The days excursion ended in the National Museum in the ruins (stupendous) of the Baths of Diocletian, where we saw a marble copy of the Discobolus of Myron (extraordinarily beautiful), the Pugilist at Rest, and the famous relief of the Bath of Hera.

Our third day in Rome was devoted to St Peters and to the Vatican Museums. Though I could not but agree that the dome of St Peters Michelangelo's dome -- was one of the most beautiful in the world, I was disappointed by the interior of the vast building. It was magnificent, but it was cold. Walking round the nave, we saw the bronze statue of St Peter (people were kissing its toe) and Michelangelo's Pietà. We also saw, at the foot of one of the great piers, the altar and bodily remains, apparently complete -- of St Josaphat. Could this be the Josaphat of the popular medieval legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, which scholars had shown to be based, ultimately, on a version of the life of the Buddha, Josaphat being a corrupted form of Bodhisattva and Barlaam of 'Bhagavan' or Lord? In that case the bodily remains of St Josaphat, enshrined there at the very centre of Roman Catholic power and prestige, would be, if genuine, those of Gautama the Buddha. As it happened, the accidents of history had been responsible for no such irony. Years later I discovered that the St Josaphat whose remains reposed beneath the dome of St Peters was a Polish bishop, martyred in 1623,who had devoted his life to reuniting schismatics with the Holy See. But I also discovered that both Barlaam and Josaphat had a formal place in the roll of Christian saints, and that special days in the calendar were set apart in their memory. In the Menology of the Greek Church, the commemoration of St Josaphat was on August 26 -- my own birthday.

The Vatican Museums were very much in the plural number. There were at least five separate museums, besides numerous galleries, rooms, courts, chapels, and loggias, all full of works of art of various kinds, from ancient Greek sculptures to Italian Renaissance paintings, and from Etruscan vases to medieval illuminated manuscripts. By the time Terry and I arrived the Museums had been open for an hour or more, and the tourist season being at its height the place was uncomfortably crowded. 'Tremendous crush', my diary records. Working our way through the press, we managed to visit the museums and the Vatican library, as well as the picture gallery and most of the chapels and apartments. With so many people everywhere, it was at times difficult to get a proper view of the works of art, and the only ones of which I have a distinct recollection are the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere ('grey with dust, especially on the shoulders'), and Raphael's School of Athens. The Sistine Chapel was particularly crowded, but we sat there for a while, gazing up at Michelangelo's frescoes of the Creation on the ceiling and at the frescoes of the Last Judgement on the wall behind the high altar.

Our next days excursion took us, initially, to the semi-rural outskirts of Rome and to the catacombs of St Domitilla and St Calixtus. The former appeared to be the less well-known of the two. At any rate, Terry and I were the only visitors, and the young man who showed us round appeared to be the only guide there was. I had not realized that these Early Christian underground cemeteries were so extensive. The catacombs of St Domitilla were on four levels. At each level there was a network of galleries, the different levels being connected by flights of steps. Excavated from the dark volcanic rock, the galleries were only a few feet in width, and the walls on either side were lined from floor to ceiling with row upon row of horizontal burial-niches. There was also a small (restored) basilica, the upper part of which had originally projected above the ground. At the catacombs of St Calixtus there were a dozen or more visitors, and our guide was a well-informed young Canadian priest. There were between twelve and fourteen miles of galleries on four levels, he told us, before we followed him down the steps into the dimly-lit passages of the labyrinth below. The principal objects of interest were the Crypt of the Popes, which contained the sarcophagi of nine third-century pontiffs, and the Crypt of St Cecilia, where there was a marble copy of Moderno's recumbent statue of the martyred patroness of music. In the afternoon, having cashed travellers' cheques in the Piazza di Spagna and looked in vain for affordable marble statuary, we drove to the Villa Borghese. It had just closed for the siesta, so taking the hint we went and had a siesta of our own back at the campsite, returning three hours later to view one of the choicest collections of sculptures and paintings we had so far encountered. There was Bernini's David, together with his Apollo and Daphne and Rape of Persephone, all of which I thought particularly fine, as well as Cranach's Venus and Cupid, Caravaggio's St Jerome, Dossi's Circe, and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.

Our fifth and last day in Rome happened to be a Sunday, and the streets through which we drove on our way to the Church of St Ignatius -- the church of the Jesuits -- were comparatively deserted. The interior of the imposing 'Jesuit-baroque' building was highly ornate, with gilding and coloured marbles very much in evidence. Mass was still in progress, the congregation being a fairly large one in which there were many nuns, all conspicuous in the black, white, blue, or parti-coloured habits of their respective orders. Afterwards we went and looked at the sumptuous polychromemarble altar of St Ignatius -- said to be the richest monument in Rome -- and gazed up at the famous trompe l'oeil fresco of the triumph of St Ignatius in the cupola of the church. From the _____ we walked the few hundred yards to Santa Maria sopra Minerva ('extremely beautiful and impressive', says my diary), the only large Gothic church in the city. It was a church of the Dominicans, and though I did not realize it at the time, in a marble sarcophagus under the high altar lay the body of St Catherine of Siena. Having sat through mass, celebrated for the benefit of a very small congregation, we walked round the building and saw the tomb of Fra Angelico and the chapel dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas.

Our next port of call was Santa Maria in Cosmedin. In order to get there we had not only to drive along the bank of the Tiber, but also to cross the river more than once, which meant that we had a good view of the famous boat-shaped Island. Santa Maria in Cosmedin was a small church, and its ninth-century interior, unlike that of the _____,was simple to the point of austerity. Nearby stood the Temple of Vesta, where the Vestal Virgins had once tended the sacred fire. The principal object of the mornings excursion, however, was St Paul's Outside the Walls, which as its name suggested was situated beyond the walls that had surrounded the ancient city. Dating from the fourth century, this was a basilica-type church, and next to St Peter's' the biggest church in Rome. 'More truly grand than St Peter's', my diary records admiringly, 'especially the interior'. The latter consisted of a nave and four aisles. From the alabaster windows of the clerestory a soft amber light fell on the long double rows of Corinthian columns, lit up the carved and gilded ceiling and the glittering mosaics of the chancel arch, and penetrated into the apse. The overall impression was one of peace and harmony. No less peaceful were the cloisters, round which Terry and I walked as soon as the sung mass was over and the congregation had dispersed. On our way back into the city we passed the Pyramid of Caius Cestius Shelley's 'wedge sublime' -- and the Baths of Caracalla, and paid a second visit to the Colosseum,where Terry took photographs. Our last stop was at Santa Maria Maggiore, a fifth-century basilica church the interior of which my diary pronounces 'glorious', and where there was the biggest congregation we had seen that day.

During our five days in Rome, some monuments -- and some works of art -- naturally impressed me more deeply than others, but there were three monuments that must have made a particularly deep impression, inasmuch as for many years they occupied, in recollection, the forefront of my picture of Rome, everything else being relegated to the background. The three were the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Catacombs. In the case of the Colosseum it was not the actual building I remembered so much as the experience I had there. During which of our two visits the experience took place I do not know. Probably it was during the second, when I wandered off on my own while Terry was taking his photographs. Whichever it was, as I stood at the centre of the vast amphitheatre I became aware of all the blood that had been shed there -- of all the human beings and animals that had been 'butchered to make a Roman holiday' on that spot. I did not simply remember having read about such horrors in books. It was as though the pain and terror that had accompanied those countless dreadful deaths had left permanent traces on the atmosphere of the place and that I was picking up those traces. My memory of the Pantheon was of a very different kind. It was a memory not of the exterior of the second-century building, grand though this was, so much as its hemispherical interior. As I stood beneath the centre of the vast dome, looking up through the circular opening that was the principal source of light, it was as though I was standing on the surface of the earth and looking through a hole in the outermost crystalline sphere of the Ptolemaic universe -- the sphere of the fixed stars -- directly into the Empyrean.

If in the Pantheon I ascended in spirit to the heights, in the Catacombs I descended into the depths. The descent was as much temporal as spatial. It was a descent not only into terrene depths but into the 'dark backward and abysm of time'. From there one could see how vast was the difference between the splendour of the ornate, triumphalist structures of the Church's later days and the stark simplicity of those tomb-lined subterranean galleries. Christianity had changed radically in the course of its nineteen hundred years of history. In St Peter's one breathed a very different atmosphere, spiritually speaking, from that which one breathed in the Catacombs. Pagan temples may have been converted into places of Christian worship, but Rome was still Rome, and the Pope was the successor, in many respects, not so much of the Prince of the Apostles as of Caesar.

Back at the Villa Ada campsite we had a meal, rested, and read, and then at five o'clock left for Florence by the Autostrada del Sole. The countryside through which we passed was pleasant, but not very interesting, and except for Orvieto on its rock we saw nothing remarkable in the course of our journey. At 8.30 we reached Florence, where we soon located the International, as the campsite was called. Though it was the best campsite we had seen in Italy, very few people were staying there, and we had the olive grove in which we were parked all to ourselves. When darkness fell, we could see the lights of the Certosa -- the monastery of the Carthusians -- glittering in the distance.

Our five days in Rome had left us with a multitude of impressions to digest, and it was perhaps for this reason that in the morning neither my friend nor I felt like going anywhere. We were content, instead, to stay in the olive grove and read. For the last few days I had been reading A.H. Armstrong's An Introduction to Ancient Philosophy and Karl Jaspers' Way to Wisdom, but I now put them aside in favour of Plato's First Alcibiades and the Svetãsvatara and Kaivalya Upanishads. Why I should have wanted to read the Upanishads there in Florence, or indeed have taken a volume of these ancient Hindu scriptures with me to Italy and Greece in the first place, I do not know. Perhaps I was unconsciously preparing for my forthcoming visit to India. During my first two or three years in the East I had studied the Upanishads intensively, and the Svetãsvatara or 'White Horse' Upanishad was a great favourite of mine. I was particularly fond of its more poetical verses, such as those in which the inspired author of the Upanishad, addressing the god Rudra (a form of Shiva), exclaims, 'You are the dark blue bird, you are the green parrot with red eyes. You are the cloud with the lightning in its womb. You are the seasons and the seas.' The image of the green parrot with red eyes had stayed with me ever since.

There were no green parrots in our olive grove. In view of the Italian sportsman's penchant for shooting anything that moved, there were probably no birds there at all. Birds or no birds, the grove was very peaceful, and Terry and I spent the best part of our first day in Florence happily absorbed in our books. At four o'clock, however, having completed a few chores, we both experienced a change of mood and decided to drive into the city. Half an hour later we were in the Piazza del Duomo. The huge Cathedral with its red-tiled dome and polychrome marble facing, the tall, slim bell tower, and the octagonal Baptistery, were all looking extremely beautiful in the rays of the setting sun, and formed between them what was perhaps the most harmonious complex of buildings we had seen in Italy. The interior of the Cathedral was dimly lit and cavernous, that of the much smaller Baptistery lined with coloured marbles and Byzantine mosaics. We were particularly drawn to Ghiberti's bronze-gilt east doors of the Baptistery -- the Doors of Paradise, Michelangelo called them -- and spent some time looking at the sculptured panels depicting biblical scenes and at the statuettes of prophets and sibyls. In the streets nearby there were several good bookshops, in one of which I bought Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy for myself, as well as Luigi Barzini's The Italians, and the Modern Library Philosophy of Kant for Terry, who at that time was reading Will Durant's Outlines of Philosophy. We also looked at various other shops. The level of craftsmanship was higher than anything we had found elsewhere in Italy, and Terry bought two cheap but attractive necklaces, one for Nicki and one for Vivien.

Unlike Rome, where the ancient and the modern existed in uncomfortable juxtaposition, Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, had succeeded in relegating modern urban and industrial development to the hinterland of the old, historic city. Terry and I were made aware of this fact when we drove, the following morning, across the river Arno and up to the broad sunlit expanse of the Piazzale Michelangelo, in the centre of which there stood a monument dedicated to the great artist. As we looked from the balcony of the Piazzale, which commanded a panoramic view of practically the whole of Florence, we saw a perfect sea of red-tiled roofs out of which there rose, looking for all the world like a ship serenely riding waves made red by the rays of the sun, the great bulk of the Cathedral. Where the red sea ended there stretched the smudged grey line of the more modern part of the city, while beyond the grey line there rose, tier upon tier, the green, gently undulant Tuscan hills. For some time we stood gazing down at the scene. The sun shone, the air was completely still, and not a sound came up to us from below. I felt much as Wordsworth must have felt when, crossing Westminster Bridge in the early morning, on his way to France, as he looked from the top of the coach at the city of London,

The river glideth at its own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The Arno, no less than the Thames, may well have glided at its own sweet will, but as Terry and I quickly discovered on descending from the Piazzale and re-crossing the river, the houses of Florence were certainly not asleep that morning and its heart was far from still. Florence was a busy, bustling, crowded place, and nowhere was it more crowded than in the Uffizi Gallery, which we visited after going round the Palazzo Vecchio or Old Palace of the Signoria and looking at Cellini's Perseus and other sculptures in the arcades of the adjacent Loggia. There were more than forty rooms in the Uffizi. Only two or three of them were closed at the time, and despite the crush we managed to shoulder and squeeze our way into all the rest. How Terry felt about the paintings I do not remember, but for my part I particularly enjoyed the Botticelli Room, where the Allegory of Spring, the Birth of Venus, and other masterpieces from the hand of the same artist were on view. By the time we left the Uffizi we were both feeling rather tired, though this was due not so much to our having been so long on our feet as to the fact that the gallery had been so uncomfortably crowded. After looking at the souvenir stalls in the market-place, and buying a few provisions, we therefore headed back to our peaceful olive grove, where we spent the rest of the day by ourselves. I continued reading The Italians, while Terry made a start on Kant but did not find the philosopher very easy going.

For the remainder of our stay in Florence our daily programme followed much the same pattern. The morning was spent sightseeing, the afternoon and evening reading in the olive grove. In a way it was unfortunate that we were seeing Florence towards the end of our tour rather than at the beginning, for by this time we had seen so many cities, monuments, archaeological sites, and works of art that even I was beginning to feel fatigued and we were not, perhaps, in a position to appreciate the glories of Florence as much as we might otherwise have done. Moreover, Terry felt rather depressed after one of our forays, and one morning, on our way into the city, I felt sick and faint. Nonetheless, in the course of the next three days we visited Santa Maria Novella, San Marco, Santa Croce, and other churches, the Gallery of the Academy, and the Medici chapels, and besides sculptures by Michelangelo, including his David and various unfinished Captives, saw paintings by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Masaccio, as well as the tunic and girdle of St Francis, the allegedly miraculous veil of the Virgin, and in the crypt of San Miniato, situated on a hill above the Piazzale Michelangelo, what my diary describes as 'strange relics'. In the evenings we read. I finished The Italians and started on The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; Terry continued reading Outlines of Philosophy. On our last day in Florence I read Dante's La Vita Nuova, the Penguin translation of which I had bought that morning, when Terry and I were looking for presents for our friends -- a search that took us as far as the shops on either side of the Ponte Vecchio or Old Bridge, which had been blown up by the retreating Germans in 1944 and subsequently restored. I had first read La Vita Nuova or The New Life when I was fourteen or fifteen, and it seemed fitting that I should read it again while staying in the city of the poet's birth.

Though my friend and I were not in a position to appreciate Florence as much as we might have done, the overall impression that the city left on me, at least, was a distinctive one. The predominant note of Florence was beauty, even as the predominant note of Rome was grandeur. The city as a whole was beautiful (that is, the red-roofed historic city of which the Cathedral was the centre), and it was full of beautiful things. There were beautiful churches, chapels, and palaces, and the churches, chapels, and palaces themselves were full of beautiful paintings and sculptures. Even the people seemed more beautiful than those in other parts of Italy. Certainly they were more smartly dressed, particularly the slim, elegant women, who more often than not were stylishly clad in fashion- able black and left behind them a trail of delicate perfume. At the same time, I noticed that the beauty that was Florence's predominant note was, at its best, a sober, even an austere beauty. This was especially true of the Palazzo Vecchio, whose vast square bulk and solitary corner tower dominated the square of that name, as well as of the city's numerous Renaissance palaces, some of them now museums or art galleries, the severe horizontal lines and rusticated stonework of which gave me a particularly keen thrill of aesthetic delight.

I also noticed that Florence set great store by the memory of her great men, whose names were to be met with on every side. Dante, Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Cosimo and Lorenzo deMedici, Savonarola, Marsilio Ficino, Galileo … the list seemed endless. Florence in fact valued her great men. She valued them because they were individuals and she valued individuality. It was therefore not surprising that Burckhardt, writing of biography in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance and comparing the two, should have pointed out that the search for the characteristic features of remarkable men was a prevailing tendency among the Italians, and that this it was that separated them from other Western peoples, among whom the same thing happened but rarely, and in exceptional cases. What was true of the Italians of the Renaissance generally was true, it seemed, of the citizens of Florence in particular; and, as Burckhardt had gone on to observe, This keen eye for individuality belongs only to those who have emerged from the half-conscious life of the race and become themselves individuals.

Neither Terry nor I slept much that night. This may have been due to the fact that our last night in Florence was also our last night in Italy, and because we both knew that once we had left Italy our tour would be virtually over, for we did not think of Belgium and the other countries through which we had passed on our way to Italy and, eventually, to Greece, and through which we would be passing -- in reverse order -- on our way back to England, as forming part of our true itinerary. But though we had not slept much, and were feeling rather tired, we rose early, left the campsite at six o'clock as planned, and were soon on the autostrada to Milan. It was a fine, cool morning. The countryside through which we passed was at first rather hilly, with plenty of cypresses, but afterwards it became quite flat and remained flat for the rest of our journey. At Milan, which we reached four hours after leaving Florence, we picked up the autostrada to Como, where we halted for a while beside the lake, then drove on to Chiasso. Though the customs formalities took only a few seconds, so heavy was the traffic that we spent nearly an hour getting from one side of the Italian-Swiss frontier to the other. Once across, we drove on to Lugano, where we decided to halt, having by this time been on the road for nine hours. The two lakeside campsites were full, but eventually we found a site away from the town, on the bank of a small river, and there passed the night.

[admin]

Chapter Forty: Picking up the Threads

The last time we had crossed the Alps there had been snow on each side of the road through the St Gotthard Pass. That snow had now melted, exposing the rock beneath, though the surrounding peaks glittered white and immaculate in the morning sunshine. As before, I experienced a slight nausea, and was glad when we began making the descent to Andermatt. From Andermatt, after a further descent, we drove on almost as far as Altdorf, pulling up for the night on a small side road when we were a few miles short of the town. The following day found us in Lucerne. On the way we had a fine view of the lake, which was misty, with rainbows overarching the grey waters. In Lucerne we walked around for a while, had a coffee, and did a little shopping, then drove on to Basel via Olten. By this time it was raining heavily, and shortly after three o'clock, having crossed the Franco-Swiss border, we pulled up at the side of the road beneath the sheltering eaves of a stretch of forest. Here we ate, and here, the weather continuing 'very dull and dismal' (to quote my diary), we spent the evening absorbed in our books.

For the last few days I had been reading two books. One was Ronald Segal's The Crisis of India, the other Elmer O'Brien's The Essential Plotinus, a new translation of selected treatises from the Enneads. What India's crisis was, according to Segal, I no longer remember, but now that Terry and I were now on the last lap of our homeward journey, with our forthcoming visit to India very much in prospect, I must have felt the need to start making myself better acquainted with what had been happening in the subcontinent since my departure from its shores. The need that led me to read The Essential Plotinus was of an entirely different order. Segal's book dealt with matters temporal; the Enneads were concerned with what Carlyle called the Eternities. I had been interested in Plotinus since I was sixteen or seventeen. At that time I was indebted for my knowledge of his philosophy, as of Neoplatonism in general, mainly to the writings of Dean Inge and Thomas Whittaker, for although I possessed the Bohn Select Works of Plotinus, as translated by Thomas Taylor, so abstruse was the thought of those treatises, and so unfamiliar were the terms in which that thought was expressed, that I was able to make very little of them. There was, however, one exception. This was the famous treatise 'On Beauty', which according to Porphyry, Plotinuss disciple and biographer, was the earliest of the treatises. I usually read the treatise in the translation made by the mysterious group known as the Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom, a copy of which I also possessed, and I never read the slim blue volume without experiencing a thrill of delight, such as I experienced when reading the Symposium or Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Reading it more than twenty years later, in a new translation, I experienced that thrill again.

Chiefly beauty is visual [the treatise began]. Yet in word patterns and in music (for cadences and rhythms are beautiful) it addresses itself to the hearing as well. Dedicated living, achievement, character, intellectual pursuits are beautiful to those who are above the realm of the senses; to such ones the virtues, too, are beautiful.

Beauty was chiefly visual! This was certainly true of the beauty that was the predominant note of Florence. It was a beauty of form and colour, of symmetry and proportion, of the contrast between dark and bright, light and shade, and the fact that I had responded to that beauty so keenly told me something about myself. It told me I was a lover of beauty. But beauty was not only bodily. There was a beauty that was supersensible the kind of beauty of which the Buddha had given Nanda a glimpse when he transported him to the paradise of Indra. That beauty, too, I could see, however dimly; to that beauty, too, I responded keenly. It was this keenness of response, indeed, that had helped me to become a Buddhist, or rather, that had helped me to realize that I was, in fact, already a Buddhist and had always been one. According to Plotinus, just as it is impossible for one born blind to talk about bodily beauty, so it is impossible for one who has never seen it to talk about the beauty that is supersensible.

Seeing of this sort is done only with the eye of the soul. And, seeing thus, one undergoes a joy, a wonder, and a distress more deep than any other because here one touches truth.

Such emotionall beauty must induce an astonishment, a delicious wonderment, a longing, a love, a trembling that is all delight. It may be felt for things invisible quite as for things you see, and indeed the soul does feel it, but souls that are apt for love feel it especially.

I had experienced something of that trembling that is all delight while I was in Florence, whether looking at the harmonious complex of Cathedral, bell tower, and Baptistery, at the paintings of Botticelli, or at the sculptures of Michelangelo, and it was perhaps this feeling of delight that had led me to read The Essential Plotinus, in which the first of the representative treatises translated happened to be the treatise 'On Beauty'. Be that as it may, the fact was that I had started reading Plotinus the night after our departure from Florence, when the spell of the city was still upon me, that I had continued reading him on the road between Andermatt and Altdorf, and that I now was reading him by a stretch of forest somewhere in France, with the rain dripping from the trees on to the roof of the Little Bus.

Despite the rain, both Terry and I slept well, and at ten o'clock, my friend having made tea and I having read a little more of Plotinus, we set out for Metz. It was a warm sunny day. In the course of our journey we passed through Mulhouse, Thonn, Col de Bussang, Remiremont, Épinal, and Nancy, stopping only twice on the way, once to do shopping, and once for a snack. From Épinal onwards the countryside was increasingly industrialized. At six o'clock, when we were a few miles from Metz, we halted for the night, parking in a beautiful green meadow beside a river. Terry had been a little depressed when we arrived there, but after reading Durant's chapter on Schopenhauer he declared he was feeling better, the teachings of the so-called philosopher of pessimism having cheered him up considerably. That night I had several strange dreams. In one dream perhaps a recollection of a previous life I was attending a party in Greek or Roman times. In another I was in Gangtok with Kachu Rimpoche, one of my Tibetan teachers, from whom I had received the Padmasambhava initiation and the name Urgyen.

Whether on account of these dreams, or simply because I had slept well, when I woke in the morning -- the morning of our last full day on the Continent -- I felt quite refreshed. It was a fine, sunny morning, and the countryside from Metz onwards, while not picturesque, was sufficiently pleasing to the eye. At midday, having driven through Thionville, Luxembourg, and Neufchateau, and thus crossed into Belgium, we pulled into the side of the road for lunch. It was a beautiful spot but every seven and a half minutes the quiet was disturbed by the sharp crack like that of a rifle -- evidently fired automatically, and meant to scare the birds from the crops. Nevertheless we stayed on there, and after a meal that concluded, for once, with pastries (bought in Neufchateau), we settled down to an afternoon of reading. Before my departure from England the editor of The Middle Way, Muriel Daw, had given me a book for review. The book was K. Venkata Ramanan's Nãgãrjuna's Philosophy, As Presented in the Mahã-Prajñãpãramitã-Sãstra, and to this I now turned. As I was already familiar with the authors views, having met him more than once in India, I read the work with particular interest, though so far as I remember I never found time to re- view it. His principal concern was to set forth the basic philosophical conceptions found in the Sãstra, which unlike some scholars he believed to be a genuine work of Nãgãrjuna, and to show that those conceptions constituted, in any case, a continuation and development of the thought of the Mãdhyamika-Kãrikã and other works universally attributed to the great Mahãyãna philosopher. From this he concluded that Nãgãrjuna's philosophy was not nihilistic, as some of its critics maintained, but in its ultimate import positive and affirmative.

The main purpose of the negative arguments in the Kãrikã was to expose the self-contradictions inherent in the position of the Sarvastivãdins who clung to the determinate as ultimate, the relative as self-contained. This is the error of misplaced absoluteness. The major function of the negative arguments in the Kãrikã is to reveal the relativity of the mundane; the question of the ultimate reality constitutes a minor part. It is the error in regard to the mundane nature of things that needs to be cleared up first. With the revelation of the essentially conditioned, non- substantial, relative nature of things, the tendency to cling might again operate, tending to end in negativism. This is an error in regard to the ultimate nature of things and it is in regard to this error that the sûnyatã of sûnyatã has been taught. What is sought to be revealed thereby is the non-ultimacy of the relative in their relative nature; the conditionedness of the conditioned is not their ultimate nature. The unconditioned is again not anything apart from the conditioned. The ultimate truth about the conditioned is that it is itself the unconditioned reality, the Nirvãna. This is the basic teaching of the Mãdhyamika.

By the end of the afternoon Terry had taken in enough of Kant and Schopenhauer for the time being, and I enough of Nãgãrjuna, and feeling the need for exercise we walked a mile or two up the road in the direction of Dinant, keeping to the narrow footpath between the roadway and the fields. On returning to the Little Bus we decided to drive further that evening, and were soon on our way.

From Dinant the road followed the course of the Meuse, and it was on the banks of this pleasant river that we spent the last night of our tour. In the morning we drove on to Namur, from Namur to Brussels, and from Brussels to Ostend. At half-past three we boarded the ferry, and half an hour later it left.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-One: Back to the Vihara

The voyage from Ostend to Dover was a rather noisy one. This was due less to the ferry's engines than to the behaviour of some of the passengers, returning holidaymakers who, having come on board already a little worse for drink, had proceeded to take full advantage of the vessels duty-free facilities. Terry and I kept as clear of them as we could. I read a little more of Nãgãrjuna's Philosophy, and from time to time we walked round the deck. At 8.30 we arrived in Dover. The customs gave us no trouble, and from Dover we drove straight to Canterbury, where we parked near the Cathedral. Whether we were as happy to be back from our travels as we were to set out on them my diary does not record and I do not remember. Perhaps we could not quite believe that we really were back from those travels, for prior to settling down for the night we went and walked round the outside of the Cathedral, as though we were still in Italy or Greece and still sightseeing. The vast Gothic pile was floodlit, and walls, roofs, buttresses and towers showed golden against the darkness of the sky. There was no one about, and a deep silence reigned. In the morning we went there again, and spent half an hour looking round the glorious interior of the building. On our way back to the Little Bus I bought a Telegraph and a New Statesman, as I liked to know what was going on in the world, and what people were thinking. (Terry never read the newspapers.) We then took the motorway to London.

During our two months away my hair had grown the longest it had been since my arrival in England in 1964, and did not look very monastic. We therefore stopped at Dartford so that I could get it cut. In India I had always shaved my head, but in England I had allowed my hair to grow a little, though not much beyond the regulation length, which was in any case a matter of dispute, or at least of disagreement in practice, among monks belonging to different schools. Even so, the length of my hair had been commented on unfavourably by some of the more rigid English Theravãdins, as I well knew, one or two of whom professed to believe that the reason I was allowing my hair to grow was that I had decided to give up the yellow robe and return to lay life. Not that all such comment was unfavourable. As I also knew, some of the people who attended my lectures and classes, both at the Vihara and at the Buddhist Society, were pleased to see me looking more human and less ascetic. George Goulstone's flirtatious wife, who occasionally attended my Sunday afternoon lectures, indeed went so far as to whisper in my ear, after one such meeting, I love your gorgeous sexy hair. I did not know quite what to make of this declaration. I had never thought of myself as being sexy in any respect, and was certainly not conscious of putting out the quasi-erotic vibes that seemed to emanate from some charismatic Buddhist and Hindu teachers. The vast majority of English Buddhists, in London and in the provinces, came not for the sake of my hair, whether long or short, sexy or otherwise, but for the sake of the Dharma. Nevertheless, I did not want to upset the Theravãdins unnecessarily, or give them too much of a handle against me, and the haircut I had in Dartford was therefore quite a short one.

Besides getting my hair cut before returning to the Vihara, I had to change back into my monastic robes. Just when I did this I do not remember, anymore than I remember at what point I changed into civilian clothes after leaving the Vihara for Greece, though I probably changed into them somewhere between Dartford and London and in the privacy of the Little Bus. For the Theravãdin Buddhists of South-East Asia it was even more reprehensible for a monk to wear civilian clothes than to let his hair grow beyond the regulation length. Indeed it was unthinkable. In their eyes a monk who wore civilian clothes, if only for a few hours, was no longer a monk. I did not share this view, any more than the majority of English Buddhists would have done, had they thought the matter worth bothering about. While not entirely agreeing with Christmas Humphreys that the true Buddhist was one who wore the yellow robe within, I certainly did not believe that it was wearing the yellow robe and shaving the head that made one a monk. I had not worn my robes for the whole two months of our tour, but I knew myself to have been no less a monk, and no less a Buddhist, when wearing civilian clothes and visiting Delphi and other ancient sites, than when wearing robes and giving lectures and leading classes in London. This did not mean that monastic robes did not have their place, or that changes that might upset people, or give rise to needless controversy, should be introduced without due preparation, and as we drove to London I was happy to get back into my own familiar robes.

The drive was both long and dreary. It was long on account of the heavy traffic and the frequent red lights, and dreary on account of the picture presented by much of the urban landscape, and I was glad when we reached central London and parked near Charing Cross Road. While I waited in the Little Bus, Terry went to Watkins and collected the copy of Wilhelm Reich's The Function of the Orgasm which he had ordered some months before, the works of the controversial Austrian psycho- analyst being then difficult to obtain. From central London we drove up to West Hampstead and to the Indo-Pak restaurant, where we had a meal and from where I telephoned Francoise at the Vihara to let her know we would soon be there. No doubt we could have eaten at the Vihara, but Terry and I were conscious that our tour was now definitely at an end, and we wanted to have a farewell meal together before we started picking up the threads of our former interests and activities. Not that we were really saying farewell. But for two months each had been the others sole company; we had shared many experiences; and although we would still be very much in contact the fact that I, in particular, would be very busy, now that we were back in London, would surely make a difference.

On our arrival at the Vihara we found Viriya and David Vial working in the little front garden. Francoise, at her desk as usual, was obviously very glad to see us, as was the ever-solicitous Thien Chau. After a cup of tea and a chat with everybody Terry and I unpacked and settled in, my friend having decided to base himself at the Vihara for a few days before going to stay with his parents in Ilford. I then telephoned Alf Vial and Mike Hookham, learned that Christmas Humphreys was away on holiday, and had a long talk with Owen Jenkins, to whom I had entrusted the leading of one of the weekly meditation classes. Things had gone well during my absence, he reported. Activities had continued as usual, exactly as I had planned they should, and although attendance at the Sunday lectures had fallen off this had not been the case with any of the classes. As if in confirmation of his words, people were now beginning to arrive and gather in the all-purpose shrine room downstairs, it being Fri- day, the day of the guided group meditation class. I did not take the class myself, but during the break I gave interviews to three or four people, one of them being Antoinette Willmott. The following day -- I saw and telephoned -- more people, all of whom were eager to hear about the tour. Ruth Walshe came in the afternoon with Phyllis, followed later by Maurice.

That evening I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, the informal organization I had set up as a means of providing support for my little monastery in Kalimpong while I was away in England. Alf Vial, Mike Hookham, and Jack Ireland the Vihara's Three Musketeers -- were all present, and after the meeting the four of us had what my diary describes as a good talk about the future activities of the (Hampstead) Vihara.

Thus within forty-eight hours of my return from Greece I was back in the midst of my responsibilities as incumbent of the Vihara and Head of the English Sangha. I was also being reminded, as I sat listening to Alf's report as Secretary of the Friends of the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, that Terry and I would soon be paying a visit to India and that the visit would be, for me, one of farewell.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-Two: Journey to India

I find it difficult to say just when I decided that my future lay in the West and not, as I had hitherto supposed, in India. Perhaps it was not so much a question of a decision taken at a particular point in time as of a realization that dawned on me gradually, after I had been at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara for a year or more. When I asked Terry, at our third or fourth meeting, whether he could drive me to India -- he having offered to drive me anywhere I liked -- the words that thus sprang unpremeditated to my lips, though they turned out to have been prophetic, were not seriously meant. At that time I had been in England for little more than six months, and though I was aware that I had already exceeded the length of time I had originally intended to stay, and though I still thought of myself as being based permanently in India, I had not yet fixed a date for my return to the subcontinent, nor decided how I should travel, whether overland or in any other way. Little by little, however, as my six months in England became a year, and my year eighteen months, my attitude had changed. I saw with increasing clarity that for the present, at least, I could work for the good of Buddhism more effectively in England than in India. By the time Terry and I left for Greece, therefore, I had decided that I would be returning to India only to pay my friends and teachers there a farewell visit, and to explain to them what my plans were. I would be leaving in mid-September, and be away for four months. Terry would be accompanying me, and we would go by air.

A number of factors contributed to my decision or gradual realization -- that my future lay in the West, and that I could work for the good of Buddhism more effectively there than in India, and I find it difficult to say which of them carried most weight with me. Before my arrival on the scene the differences that had arisen between the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association had widened into an open breach. I had sought to resolve those differences, to heal that breach, and had succeeded to an extent; but tensions still existed below the surface, and I knew that if the process of reconciliation was to continue I would have to remain in England. One of the ways in which I had sought to resolve the differences between the Buddhist Society and the Sangha Association was by making myself available to both organizations and giving lectures and leading meditation classes not only at the Hampstead Vihara but also at the Society's premises in Eccleston Square. The result was that some of the people attending those lectures and classes had come to regard themselves as my disciples, and to look tome for guidance in their study and practice of the Dharma, and I felt it would be irresponsible of me to abandon them. Considerations of a more personal nature also contributed to my decision that my future lay in England, though none of them was of sufficient weight actually to tip the scales. I wanted to engage more with Western culture; I wanted to see a little more of my parents (or rather, to enable them to see a little more of me); and I wanted to deepen my friendship with Terry though had I decided to return permanently to India he probably would have elected to accompany me, especially as there was now little possibility of his ever seeing his daughter again.

Not that there were no disadvantages attached to my being based in England rather than in India. As I had soon discovered, my busy life as incumbent of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara and Head of the English Sangha left me with little time for literary work, despite my having stipulated, in accepting the Trusts invitation, that my mornings should be my own. My only consolation was that The Three Jewels, the preface to which I had written the previous summer, was now in the press, and that while I was away on my travels Francoise had typed the manuscript of the work that was eventually published as The Eternal Legacy. There was also the fact that Hampstead, and even Biddulph, was no substitute for Kalimpong, and that the view I had from the window of my noisy up- stairs front room at the Vihara was very different from the one I had from the veranda of my peaceful hillside hermitage in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. In London there were no deep blue skies. There was no sudden vision of the snows of Mount Kanchenjunga as one turned a bend in the road. But the biggest disadvantage -- not to say deprivation -- attached to my being based in England was that I would no longer be in regular personal contact with my teachers, especially Dhardo Rimpoche and Kachu Rimpoche, or with my friends in Calcutta, Bombay, Nagpur, Poona, and other places I visited from time to time. My teachers, of course, did not need me, even if I still needed them, but the friends I had made among the followers of Dr B.R. Ambedkar who had converted to Buddhism did need me, and had my work among them not reached something of an impasse due to the politicization of the conversion movement after Ambedkar's untimely death I probably would not have left them. One of the biggest concentrations of the newly converted Buddhists was in Bombay, and it was to Bombay that Terry and I would be flying. There, I hoped, I would be able to make contact with some of my friends among them and explain that although in future I would be based in England I would continue to be concerned for their welfare and would help them in whatever way I could.

But it would be six weeks before Terry and I were in Bombay, and meanwhile there was much to be done. Between the time of my arrival back at the Vihara and my departure for the Buddhist Society's Summer School two weeks later I gave lectures and led classes, saw friends like Ruth, John Hipkin, and Toby, gave interviews, checked the typescript of The Eternal Legacy, wrote and dictated letters, spent time with Thien Chau and Viriya, and received a variety of visitors, from the Indian founder of the Asian Music Circle to a Vietnamese bhikshuni who wanted to start a world organization of Buddhist nuns. I also met, at the Sinhalese Vihara in Chiswick, the famous 'political monk' Walpola Rahula who, having made Ceylon too hot for himself, was now studying in Paris. We had a lengthy discussion, and according to my diary I found him 'very liberal-minded.' At that time I had not read his Bhikshuvage Urumaya or 'The Heritage of the Buddhist Monk', the notorious essay in which, on the basis of certain historical precedents, he had argued in favour of the full participation of Buddhist monks in the political life of the Sinhalese nation. Had I then been acquainted with the work, as I was to be some years later, I might have thought that Walpola Rahula carried his liberal-mindedness rather too far, for among the historical precedents he cited were those of the sixty monks who had attempted to assassinate the king, the 'large number' who in the' decisive battle for the liberation of Buddhism and the Sinhalese' accompanied the army and encouraged the warriors to fight, and the monks who in Ceylon's 1965 general election were again in the forefront on both sides.

While I was thus occupied Terry was busy seeing Vivien, Alan, and other friends and getting the photographs he had taken developed, for though he had gone to stay with his parents in Ilford he did not, it seemed, spend much time with them. Whenever he was in town he called in at the Vihara, and on two or three occasions we were able to go out together. Once we went to the Hampstead Public Library, where Terry selected books on Spinoza, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (my own reading at the time was principally Dean Inge's The Philosophy of Plotinus), and once to Kenwood where, since it was raining, we simply sat in the Little Bus and talked. Despite staying at Ilford my friend was not only looking very well; to my great relief, he was also in a much more positive frame of mind than he had been before our tour, which on the whole seemed to have had a tonic effect on him. He said nothing about his ex-wife or about his daughter, and I thought it best not to enquire. In the course of our tour he had more than once bought presents for Fiona, and I assumed he had found a way of getting them to her, perhaps through his mother, with whom Gillian had always got on well and with whom she was probably still in touch. My only cause for concern was Terry's increasing preoccupation with the subject of dãkinîs. 'Do you think I shall meet my dãkinî in India?' he one day wanted to know. Since it was from me that he had first heard about dãkinîs, in connection with my telling him about Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche and his dãkinî, I could hardly answer the question with a flat negative, as though dãkinîs did not exist and were therefore not to be met with, even in India. At the same time I did not want to encourage any unrealistic expectation that he would meet there that unique, magical person who, by galvanizing his dormant energies, would grant him that sense of ecstatic fulfilment which he had experienced when he saw the Pure White Light and which he so desperately wanted to recapture. I therefore replied to my friends question non-committally, saying it was not impossible that he should meet his dãkinî in India.

The Buddhist Society's Summer School began on Friday 26 August my forty-first birthday. In the morning I attended to various odd jobs, and in the afternoon, after lunching with Thien Chau and Viriya, I gave a long interview to a woman from the Observer weekend colour supplement. Terry came at four o'clock, and an hour later I left for Hoddesdon with him and Thien Chau, Viriya following with Mike Rogers, a cheerful mid-thirties bachelor who was among the more regular attenders at my lectures and meditation classes. It was my third Summer School, and as it followed much the same programme as the previous two, from Toby's opening address on the Friday evening to my own Buddhist Conversation with John Hipkin a week later, my impressions of it are even less vivid than are those of its immediate predecessors. At seven o'clock each morning, having drunk a cup of Chinese tea with Thien Chau, I went and called Terry, whose room was some distance from mine, and the two of us went for a walk in the grounds. After the walk came breakfast, and after breakfast began a continual round of devotional meetings, meditation classes, lectures, discussion groups, and personal interviews which more often than not kept me busy until quite late at night. The only intermissions were the two occasions when I went down to London for a few hours, once to give my usual Sunday afternoon lecture at the Vihara, and once, three days later, to lead the full moon day celebrations there.

Yet although my impression of that year's Summer School are so lacking in vividness, and although, in recollection, only a few individual events stand out separate from the rest, like hilltops from the surrounding mist, I nonetheless remember feeling, when Terry and I left at the end of the week, that it had all been very worthwhile. It had been worth while, from my point of view, not so much on account of the different organized events in which I had taken part, as because of the opportunity it had given me of exchanging at least a few friendly words with so many English Buddhists, most of whom I already knew. Indeed, many people were eager to speak with me -- many more than in previous years. Such was the warmth by which I was surrounded, in fact, and so much did I feel myself to be now part of the English Buddhist scene, that my third Summer School was for me the most enjoyable. In Terry's case it was his first Summer School (it was also to be his last, as it was to be mine), and although he tended to feel uneasy in large gatherings he managed to get through the week without becoming depressed, largely because he already knew several people, especially John Hipkin and Viriya, and was able to spend time with them when not attending my lectures and classes. I was therefore thankful he had been able to cope, for it was more than likely that in India we would find ourselves in the midst of gatherings not of a hundred or so Buddhists, as at the Summer School, but of thousands.

India was in fact much in my thoughts, now that the day of our departure was so near, and it was therefore not surprising that my first Sunday lecture, after my return from the Summer School, should have been on Religion and Caste in India. Among those attending the lecture were a number of Indian Buddhist friends, all followers of Dr Ambedkar, and all colleagues of some of the friends I was hoping to meet in Bombay and elsewhere. On the following Sunday I spoke on Living Buddhism, and on the next, it being the eve of my departure, I led a question-and- answer meeting and a puja. Between whiles I attended to my usual work, visited the Brighton and Hastings Buddhist groups, spent an afternoon with my mother, had two sessions with a young Harley Street dentist I had met at the Summer School, recorded a talk on Self-Denial and Self-Affirmation for the BBC, the choice of subject being theirs, and wrote an editorial for the October issue of The Buddhist, which would be appearing shortly after my departure.

In this editorial I explained that I had decided to shift my working headquarters from India to England, that I would be in India until about 1 February, and that during my absence lectures and classes would continue as usual. Ven. Thien Chau, with the assistance of Samanera Viriya, would be looking after the Vihara, besides which he would be taking the Guided Group Meditation classes, his deputies being Ruth Walshe for the classes held at the Buddhist Society, and Ruth Walshe, Jack Ireland, and Owen Jenkins for those held at the Vihara. Maurice Walshe would be in charge of the Fortnightly Discussion Group (as the speakers class had become), which would continue to meet alternately at the Vihara and at the Buddhist Society. For the Sunday afternoon lectures I had secured the cooperation of a number of well-known speakers, the names of four or five of whom I proceeded to enumerate. The Buddhist would be the joint responsibility of Mike Hookham and Jack Ireland, assisted by Francoise Strachan.

All these arrangements had been discussed thoroughly with Thien Chau and Viriya, as well as with all the other people involved, including Toby, who was pleased I had decided to stay in England and who, no doubt remembering the way in which I had kept postponing my arrival two years earlier, urged me in the strongest terms to fix the date of my return well in advance and stick to it. There was no reason, I therefore felt I could assure my readers, why the Vihara should not only consolidate its position during the coming months but make fresh gains, and I appealed to them to extend their full cooperation to Thien Chau and Viriya and help to make this period one of the most successful in the history of the movement.

The last paragraph of my editorial struck a more personal note. After my return to England, I declared, I proposed to divide my time between London and Biddulph, spending the winter and spring at the Vihara for lectures and classes, and the summer and autumn at Old Hall for meditation courses, literary work, and contact with the Midland and Northern Buddhist groups. Though I may not have realized it at the time, this must have represented a determination on my part to create for myself in England a pattern of life and work similar to the one I had followed in India, where I spent half the year studying, meditating, and writing in Kalimpong, and half travelling and lecturing in the plains, especially among the newly converted Buddhists in central and western India. Not that study and meditation, at least, had been entirely neglected during my two years in England, even though this might have been the case so far as serious literary work was concerned. Even during the busy days that succeeded my return from the Summer School I found time, according to my diary, to dip into Plotinus, Suzuki, and Jaspers, as well as to read Alan Watts Psychotherapy East and West, Colin Wilsons Beyond the Outsider ('interesting, though rather shallow'), the anonymous classic of Russian spirituality The Way of the Pilgrim, with its sequel The Pilgrim Continues His Way, and the great fourteenth-century classic of English mysticism, also anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing. The last three titles suggest that despite my having so much to do my mind was turned as much inward as outward, and indeed my diary entry for Friday 9 September concludes, 'Spent rest of evening peacefully reading, meditating'.

On Saturday 17 September the Sangha Association held a reception at the Vihara, thus enabling members and friends to say farewell to me prior to my departure. About sixty people attended, with most of whom I managed to have at least a short conversation. Sunday was spent preparing for the morrows journey, giving final instructions to Viriya, visiting Claire Maison, and leading my last question and answer meeting and last puja, both of which were exceptionally well attended. Next morning Antoinette drove Terry and me to Victoria, where we boarded the coach for Heathrow, and where she, Thien Chau, and Viriya waved us goodbye. The plane left at ten o'clock. Two hours later, after a short stopover in Zurich, my friend and I were looking down on the Alps, through which we had driven six weeks ago. Stopovers in Rome and Cairo soon followed, after which the plane headed straight for Bombay.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-Three: A Letter from India

Frontier Mail,
7.10.66
Dear Members and Friends,

After a very smooth and pleasant flight by Air India, Terry Delamare and I reached Bombay on Tuesday 20 September, at 4.30 am local time, the whole journey having lasted only thirteen and a half hours. Bombay is more easily accessible from London than from Kalimpong, it seems! Within hours of our arrival my old friends the ex-Untouchable Buddhists were on our doorstep, and in an amazingly short time a programme of meetings and lectures was arranged. In fact, it began the very next evening, and in six days I gave eleven lectures on different aspects of Buddhism, including one on Buddhism in England. Most of these meetings were held late at night in the chawls or slum tenements under the conditions which I have described in my lecture on What Buddhism has done for the ex-Untouchables. Others were held at the Bahujana Vihara, Parel (a branch of the Maha Bodhi Society), at the Japanese Buddhist Temple, Worli, and at the Siddharth College. Everywhere we were given a very warm reception, and my Indian friends were delighted to see, in the person of Terry, yet another English Buddhist. (Terry is making, incidentally, a photographic record of our trip from which we hope to obtain, on our return to London, a series of colour slides with which to illustrate a few lectures.) We also found time, the day after our arrival, for a trip to the famous Kanheri Caves, dating from the early centuries of the Christian era, with their hundred or more cells and assembly halls cut out of the living rock and thirty-foot-high standing images of the Buddha. As no transport was available from the nearest railway station, thirty-five miles out of Bombay, to the Caves, we had to walk the five-mile distance both ways in the sweltering heat of the late monsoon season. Within minutes, we were drenched in perspiration. However, the sight of the Caves was sufficient reward for our trouble. In fact, had we not been expected back in London Terry and I might have been tempted to stay there indefinitely, and not return to civilization at all!

From Bombay we proceeded north to Delhi, stopping one night on the way at Ahmedabad, where the local Buddhists turned out in force to receive us at the railway station with flower-garlands and bouquets. In Delhi we spent two comparatively quiet days, staying at the Buddha Vihara (another branch of the Maha Bodhi Society), where I have often lectured, and visiting the Red Fort and other places of interest. We also explored the handicraft shops for ivory and sandalwood figures of the Buddha, but with a few exceptions did not find anything of much artistic value. From Delhi we travelled still further north to Pathankot, the railhead for both Dharamsala and Dalhousie, both of which are about a thousand miles from Bombay. We were now in the hills. All the time, in fact, the landscape had been changing, from the fertile fields of Gujerat, through the arid plains of Rajasthan to the green and pleasant land of the Punjab with its long tracts of snow-white elephant grass and stretches of water starred with myriads of tiny pink waterlilies.

The main purpose of our visit to Dharamsala, of course, was to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whom I had not seen for several years, though we had been in correspondence. We met him at his residence, Swargashram, on the second day after our arrival and had a long talk. In the course of conversation I told him about the progress of the Buddhist movement in England. He showed particular interest in the meditation classes and asked what methods of concentration we practised. I also told him about our Meditation Centre at Biddulph. He was very pleased, though genuinely astonished, that so many English lay Buddhists took such a serious interest in meditation and could, in the course of a weeks retreat, put in so many hours of practice. He also enquired after Mr Christmas Humphreys and was particularly glad to learn that the Buddhist Society and the Vihara were working in close collaboration. Perhaps with certain differences among his own people in mind, His Holiness emphatically declared that unity among Buddhists was absolutely essential. While in Dharamsala we also took the opportunity of meeting Ling Rimpoche, the Dalai Lamas Senior Tutor, whose mental alertness impressed us very much, and Radu Rimpoche, the head of His Holinesss personal ecclesiastical establishment, beside several old friends of mine from Kalimpong and Gangtok.

Dalhousie is not much more than a hundred miles by road from Dharamsala, but it took us the best part of a day to get there. Travelling by the ramshackle, bone-shaking public transport, we first came down to the plains to Pathankot, then climbed the 7,000 feet to Dalhousie up a dizzying succession of hairpin bends where awe-inspiring views were revealed at every turn. In Dalhousie our main objective was to meet Dorothy Carpenter, who came out last March to help the Tibetan refugees, and Keith Satterthwaite, who came out only three weeks ago. Before my departure from England eager, warm-hearted Dorothy had written several times saying that I must not think of coming to India without paying her a visit. So to Dalhousie we went. Dorothy was overjoyed to see us (our arrival took her completely by surprise), and we all had a very happy reunion. Keith, whom we had last seen at the Summer School, seemed to have learned to find his way about Dalhousie very quickly. With him for guide, we were able to make the best possible use of the one day at our disposal. Indeed, without him I do not know what we should have done, as the bungalows are scattered up and down the pine-clad mountainside at great distances from one another. Our first call was on Panggang Rimpoche, for seven years head of the Gyudto or Upper Tantric College and one of the greatest living authorities on the Vajrayãna. Next we visited the College itself, and saw Dorothy in action teaching her class consisting of about forty members of the College. By special permission of the Dalai Lama, she is the first person to teach English to this very select body of Tantric initiates a great honour for Dorothy. She also gives special lessons to Panggang Rimpoche. On my return to London I shall have much to say about Dorothy and her work (as well as slides to show, I hope). The remainder of our time was spent at the Four Sect Monastery at Kailash, originally the Young Lamas Home School, and the Mahãyãna Nunnery. There was even time, just before our bus left, for a few minutes with Khamtal Rimpoche, whom I had known quite well in Kalimpong. Everywhere in Dalhousie, in fact, I met Incarnate Lamas and monks whom I knew, or who knew me some from Kalimpong and Darjeeling, others from Gangtok. As I remarked to Terry, I felt as though I was back in Kalimpong already!

At the moment of writing we are in the Frontier Mail heading south via Delhi and Mathura for Baroda. We have already been in the train twenty-four hours and will be in it for another twelve. The weather is hot, though not very sultry, and the compartment is filled with clouds of fine dust which covers the seats, our clothes, books, and food, as well as the paper on which I am writing. From Baroda we have a two-hour journey to Ahmedabad, where our Buddhist friends are arranging a five-day lecture programme. After spending a night in Bombay, where I shall be speaking at Theosophy Hall, we shall go on to Poona for more lectures, travelling thence to Nagpur, in central India, in time for the Vijaya Dasami celebrations on 23 October. From Nagpur we shall be going up to Almora for a few days with Lama Govinda and Li Gotami and from there I hope to write my next letter.

Rather surprisingly, our tour has so far gone strictly according to schedule, and if things continue this way there is no reason why we should not be back in England punctually by the end of January. Yours in the Dharma,

(sgd.) Sangharakshita.

Such was the letter I wrote in the train and posted to Francoise in Ahmedabad, and which appeared a few weeks later in the November issue of The Buddhist. According to my diary I spent much of the day writing it, the same brief entry recording that Terry was very depressed, quite desperate, in fact, and that I felt very concerned for him.

This was not the first time since our arrival in India that my friend had felt depressed. On our journey from the airport to Victoria Terminus, through Bombay's extensive industrial suburbs, he had been shocked not only by what his own, short-lived diary terms the dirty and extremely low atmosphere but by the sight of hundreds of people sleeping on the pavements; and in the evening, when we took a stroll along Marine Drive, he had been no less shocked by the sight of much unpleasant poverty and twelve-year-old mothers begging.

In the course of my years in India I had grown accustomed to such sights, but though I deplored them I had preferred to direct my emotional energies to the task of giving practical help to the poor and oppressed, especially by putting my shoulder to the wheel of Dr Ambedkar's movement of mass conversion to Buddhism, rather than wasting them in sentimental lamentations over sufferings I was power- less to relieve. At the same time I could understand how the spectacle of so much poverty and degradation could shock the newcomer to India (it had shocked me twenty years earlier), especially if the newcomer was as sensitive as Terry and liable, as he was, to be upset and depressed by any concrete reminder of the essentially painful and unsatisfactory nature of the unenlightened human condition.

Terry had not only been shocked by the sight of hundreds of people sleeping on the pavements and twelve-year-old mothers begging. He had also been startled, on our arrival at the spacious Malabar Hill flat where we would be staying, by the unusual appearance of our host, Dr Dinshaw K. Mehta, for many years Mahatma Gandhis naturopathic physician. My old Parsee friend was then in his early sixties. Short and extremely corpulent, he was clad in flowing white garments and had a full white beard which reached almost to his waist and an abundance of white hair which fell to his shoulders and which, as I knew, he sometimes gathered up and twisted into a Buddha-like topknot. He was an impressive figure. For someone like Terry he was also an intimidating and even an alarming one. In the early fifties, shortly before I met him, he had founded an organization known as the Society of Servants of God. The activities of the Society were conducted in strict accordance with the guidance that he received in meditation. This guidance, Dr Mehta believed, came directly from God, so that it was to be accepted implicitly and acted upon to the letter. Not to accept the guidance that came for one through the Servant of Servants, as my friend styled himself, was to disobey God, and because one disobeyed God on account of the ego the ego had to be crushed. They must be made to obey! I had more than once heard him declare, when members or employees of the Society were unwilling to accept the guidance that had been given to them through him.

In the early days of my acquaintance with Dr Mehta such guidance had come for me, too; but I had declined to accept it, explaining that I was already being guided by the Buddha, through his teachings as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures, and had no need for any other guidance. Eventually, after a good deal of discussion, he had reluctantly conceded that this might be the case, and that I might indeed be guided in my own way, (on his lips a rather damning phrase), though he at the same time felt obliged to warn me that the guidance that came from scriptures was much less reliable than that which came directly from God through his chosen instrument, the Servant of Servants. Our respective positions having been thus clarified, something like a friendship developed between Dr Mehta and me. I often stayed with him when I was in Bombay, and at his invitation often lectured on Buddhism under the auspices of the Society of Servants of God. He was also warmly supportive of my work among the followers of Dr Ambedkar. His authoritative, even dictatorial ways with his disciples and dependants notwithstanding, he was fundamentally a very kind man, and over the years I had grown very fond of him. During the week that Terry and I spent as his guests the authoritarian side of his character was very much in evidence, and I soon realized that my sensitive friend was uncomfortable in Dr Mehta's presence. So uncomfortable was he, indeed, that he sometimes found meals at the flat rather an ordeal, and was glad whenever we were invited out to lunch or dinner by other, less intimidating friends of mine.

Fortunately Terry felt quite at home with the newly-converted Buddhists, some of whom were on our doorstep literally within hours of our arrival. The first to appear was Maheshkar, the sociable, enthusiastic, and hyperactive young Maharashtrian who for months together had been my travelling companion and faithful translator, and who, with his future wife, had organized scores, if not hundreds, of the lectures I gave in and around Poona in the late fifties and early sixties. The following night he was translating for me again. According to my diary there was a happy, friendly atmosphere at the meeting, which was held at Worli, in Chawl No. 86. What my diary does not record, and Terry's does, is that the meeting was held in the corridor of the chawl, and that he took many pictures and was garlanded. Terry's diary in fact shows that he was struck by much that was familiar to me and of which my own diary therefore makes no mention. Thus it records that most Bombay taxis were falling apart, and that at a meeting held in the open outside another chawl, about 150 people attended amongst chickens, pigeons and insects. At the Hampstead Vihara and the Buddhist Society I was accustomed to lecture under very different conditions: yet it was the same Dharma I was teaching. The entry for the following day speaks of our visiting a ramshackle vihara on the main road and being taken in procession to a chawl and given an elaborate lunch in badly smelling quarters dark and damp. Every doorway decorated with rice paste. Food eaten with hands. Cold rice and cold soup. 4 speeches mine included. Garland and flowers received. Entries for other days make mention of deformed beggars, red bananas, and cows that wandered on the platforms of suburban railway stations and in the streets. On our last day but one in Bombay I gave three lectures, two of them in the evening, and the difference between our respective diary entries illustrates the extent to which Terry was affected by sights which, while they were familiar to me, were totally unfamiliar to him. Two lectures worst conditions so far, his diary records. Moving through narrow alleys between shacks. My diary simply states: At 7.15 went to Worli. Gave lecture on Buddhist Meditation. Gathering slightly restless. Then to Pathan Chawl. Spoke on Five Spiritual Faculties. Good quiet audience.

In 1966 the term culture shock had not yet been invented, or at least was not yet in general circulation, but there is little doubt that during our week in Bombay, and even subsequently, Terry suffered from that feeling of disorientation experienced by a person suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture or way of life that the word signifies. His introduction to India was thus not an easy one, especially as he had to cope not only with culture shock but also with the anxiety he experienced in the presence of Dr Mehta. His diary for these days bears poignant witness to his struggles struggles of which I was not always cognizant. Bit brighter today, reads one entry. I really must make more intense effort and yet inwardly feel very reluctant and experience this void-like apathy. Sometimes he did manage to make that more intense effort, especially in connection with our meetings in the chawls, at which he was invariably called upon to 'say a few words'. Very much to his astonishment, he found it easier -- or at least less difficult -- to address a hundred or more poor, mostly illiterate Indian Buddhists than it had been for him, a year earlier, to make a farewell speech to his colleagues at the advertising agency. His speech was translated sentence by sentence (he soon learned to make a few notes on the back of an envelope beforehand), and at the end of each translated sentence there was a burst of applause that encouraged him to launch into the next. The experience of addressing a warmly appreciative audience did a lot to boost Terry's confidence, so that by the time we left Bombay for Dharamsala he was in a more positive emotional state -- at least for the time being -- than might otherwise have been the case.

The compound of Swargashram, the Dalai Lamas residence in Dharamsala, was surrounded by barbed wire, and there were soldiers on duty at the entrance, to whom we had to show our passports before being allowed inside. It was not altogether clear whether His Holiness was the honoured guest of the Government of India or its prisoner. At the time of our meeting the Tibetan hierarch was thirty-one, had lived in India as a refugee for seven years, and had not yet visited the West. It was not the first time we had met, meetings having taken place in both 1956 and 1957, when he and the Panchen Lama were in India for the 2,500th Buddha Jayanti celebrations, and subsequently, after his dramatic escape from Tibet in 1959, so that we were reasonably well acquainted already. Unfortunately my diary has no more to say about that Dharamsala meeting than does my letter from India, except that it lasted from 10.20 to 11.15 in the morning, and that besides meditation we discussed translation of Tibetan texts etc.. Afterwards Terry took photographs of us outside, and I noticed how uncomfortable the Dalai Lama was feeling in the brilliant sunshine while we posed together, how he kept mopping his brow with the corner of his thick maroon robe, and how impatient he was to get back into the cool of the bungalow.

If our diaries are to be believed, Terry was in good spirits during the five days that we spent in the two hill stations. I was all the more surprised, therefore, that for much of the thirty-six-hour journey from Pathankot to Baroda he should have been so very depressed. Perhaps he was unhappy that as the fine dust covering everything served to remind us we were on our way back to the filthy, poverty-stricken cities of the plain. Or perhaps he was disappointed that he had not met his dãkinî in the streets of the Dharamsala bazaar or among the shrines of Dalhousie, for, as I well knew, the hope of meeting that unique, miraculous being was never far from my friends thoughts.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-Four Among the New Buddhists

In the late fifties and early sixties my work among the new Buddhists -- as the followers of Dr Ambedkar who had converted to Buddhism were sometimes called -- had lain mainly in Bombay, Nagpur, Poona, Ahmedabad, and Jabalpur. The Ahmedabad Buddhist community was a comparatively small one, and of its adult members only a small proportion were actually practising the Dharma (as distinct from not practising Hinduism), while an even smaller number of them were attempting to extend the movement of conversion. Tiny though it was, this little band of youthful activists was divided into factions, and I was obliged to devote part of the time Terry and I spent in Ahmedabad, on our way to Delhi, to settling the various personal differences that had arisen since my last visit. Such differences, and the factionalism to which they so easily led, seemed to be endemic to the Ahmedabad Buddhist community. They had arisen more than once before, and if the activists and their friends did not take the teachings of the Buddha more to heart they would be sure to arise again.

During the five days that Terry and I spent in Ahmedabad on our way back to Bombay all was well, and everyone cooperated to make the visit a success. On our arrival from Baroda, at five-thirty in the morning, we were garlanded, given tea in the station restaurant, and shown the Gujerati handbill announcing my lectures, after which we were taken by taxi to the place where we were to stay. This was the home of Amritlal, a young unmarried railwayman who had once visited me in Kalimpong -- the only Gujerati Buddhist ever to do so. We were accommodated in a quiet and secluded, if rather stuffy, room, where I proceeded to write letters to friends in Bombay, Nagpur, and England and where we were visited, both before and after lunch, by many people. In the evening I gave my first lecture, when I addressed what my diary describes as a good gathering. After the meeting many people came to Amritlal's place to see me, but as I was suffering from a bad cold and a sore throat, and moreover had not had much sleep the previous night, I insisted, so my diary records, 'on sleeping early'. Terry's two-line diary entry for the day concludes, 'Mice in room. Dung floor'. The mice did not disturb me. As for the dung floor, this was a common feature of an Indian home of the traditional type, a thin layer of semi-liquid dung being smeared over the beaten earth and allowed to dry. I was well accustomed to this form of interior decoration, which sometimes extended to the walls, and in fact rather liked it, as it was both cool to the touch and soothing to the eye. To Terry, of course, a 'dung floor' was a novelty, and in his mind it probably had all sorts of unpleasant farmyard associations.

In the course of the next few days I gave eleven lectures, in a variety of venues and to a variety of audiences. There were lectures in public halls and lectures at crossroads that had been closed to traffic for the occasion, lectures in chawls occupied by workers in the cotton mills, and lectures in the alleys between shacks, as well as lectures in a village outside Ahmedabad and a lecture at the University. The lectures were by no means attended only by Buddhists or potential Buddhists. At the Akhandanand Hall, for example, where I spoke on 'Buddhism and Humanism', there were many Jains in the audience. Like the lecture on 'Buddhism and the Modern World' that I gave at the University three days later, this was an 'English' lecture, that is, it was not accompanied by a running translation into Gujerati, the local language. All my other lectures were of necessity so accompanied, for a high percentage of those who came to hear me, especially the Buddhists, far from being English- educated, were not even literate in their own vernacular. My translator on these occasions was usually Yashodhara, an unmarried schoolteacher of mature years who had sometimes functioned for me in this capacity on my previous visits. She was a remarkable woman. A brahmin by birth, she had not only become a Buddhist but had thrown in her lot, spiritually speaking, with the youthful activists who were attempting to extend the movement of conversion in Ahmedabad and the surrounding area. Being an outsider, in that she came from another community indeed, from the opposite end of the caste spectrum she was sometimes able to exert a moderating influence on her faction-prone Ambedkarite colleagues.

Though we were staying at Amritlal's place we did not take our meals there, except for lunch on the day of our arrival. We did not even have breakfast there, arrangements having been made for us to take this meal, as well as our lunch and our afternoon tea, with a different family each day, so that in the course of our visit we saw the inside of more than a dozen Buddhist homes. This arrangement had the double advantage of spreading the expense (and the merit) of entertaining us more widely and of enabling us to have personal contact with as many people as possible. It did, however, mean that we spent a lot of time travelling from house to house. Ahmedabad, then the state capital, was a busy place. More often than not we found ourselves in the midst of a noisy, chaotic stream of motor cars, lorries, scooters, and carts, some of the carts being drawn by bullocks, some by camels, and some by sweating, half naked human beings. On one occasion we were stuck in a traffic jam immediately behind an elephant, and I have a vivid recollection of looking up from the cycle rickshaw in which we were travelling to see the wrinkled hindquarters of the great beast looming directly above me.

The fact that we took our meals in so many different places not only meant that we spent a lot of time travelling; it also meant that we spent a lot of time talking -- both to our host and his family and to the friends and neighbours who came to see us after we had eaten. Sometimes, if it seemed appropriate to do so, I delivered a short sermon of thanksgiving in the traditional manner. All this talking did my throat no good, especially as it was in addition to the lecturing I was doing and to the conversations in which I could not help engaging after each lecture, the 'English' ones in particular, when I would be quite overwhelmed by people wanting to speak to me. Nonetheless, I was glad we were able to have personal contact with so many people, and thus to learn something about them and about the difficulties they were having to face. Breakfast at Ganpatnagar, for example, was followed by a discussion with various residents of the locality, among them a Buddhist income tax inspector, in the course of which we had to listen to many complaints about the way in which the Scheduled Castes were discriminated against in matters of employment and education and how they lacked all manner of facilities. As I well knew, the complaints were fully justified, and would have been echoed by the millions of people who belonged to the Scheduled Castes or who had belonged to them prior to their conversion to Buddhism. At the same time I felt that the attitude of these particular complainants was more negative and defeatist, on the whole, than the situation really warranted. I therefore told them that they would have to stand on their own feet, and that they could expect no help from outside India, meaning by 'outside India' the Buddhist countries of Asia.

In between meetings and meals Terry and I managed to do a little sightseeing, most of it on our last day in Ahmedabad. On that day we visited the sixteenth-century Sidi Sayeed Mosque, where we admired the two windows of filigree marble work, the design of which has been described as 'an imitation of twining and interlaced branches, a marvel of delicacy and grace, and finer than anything of the kind to be found in Agra or Delhi'. A third such window had been removed in the days of the Raj and taken to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. From the Sidi Sayeed Mosque we went to the Sabarmati Ashram, whence Mahatma Gandhi had once directed the struggle for Indian independence ('surroundings in terribly slovenly condition', comments my diary), and from there, finally, to the nineteenth-century Hutheesingh Jain Temple, an extensive, rather magnificent structure, the white marble splendours of which testified to the wealth, and piety, of Ahmedabads sizeable Jain community. The previous day two Jain businessmen had taken us to see a famous Jain scholar-monk, the eighty-seven-year-old Acharya Prem Suri, who lived in a monastery with twelve or fourteen other white-robed monks, most of them small boys. The Acharya himself did not say anything (he may have been observing a vow of silence), but we had nearly an hour's discussion with two or three senior members of the community, one of whom seemed to have read something about Buddhism, including Zen. Before we left they showed us, with understandable pride, the first four volumes of their venerable masters magnum opus, a Sanskrit treatise on the Jain doctrine of karma.

Our arrival in Ahmedabad had been accompanied by a certain amount of publicity and it seemed that our departure would be similarly accompanied. On returning to Amritlal's place from the University, where my lecture on Buddhism and the Modern World had been followed by tea with the staff, we found waiting there a reporter from one of the local papers. While he interviewed me, Terry packed, after which we left for the station in rather a hurry, the interview having delayed us. Amritlal, Yashodhara, and other friends were there to see us off. The train left at six-fifty. Three hours later we had retired to our berths and were asleep.

As we had already spent a week in Bombay, and as I wanted to have at least a week in Poona, as well as to be in Nagpur by the twenty-third of the month, Terry and I passed only one night in the busy commercial capital of India. Having arrived at Bombay Central at 5.30 in the morning, we took a taxi to Dr Mehta's place. At ten o'clock, after I had spent a couple of hours with our host, and written letters and made telephone calls, we walked from Malabar Hill down to Chowpatty, and from there -- still following the great curve of the Back Bay -- to Marine Drive. It was a fine day, with a breeze blowing off the sea. The Taraporewalla Aquarium falling in our way, we spent half an hour admiring the tropical fish, some beautiful, some grotesque, then took a taxi to the grimy Gothic splendours of the Victoria Terminus. Here we had to queue for two hours before getting reservations on the Deccan Queen for the following afternoon. Relieved to have got them at least, we cashed some travellers cheques and had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant I knew, by which time my throat was feeling painfully sore and I was quite hoarse. On our arrival back at Dr Mehta's place we found Maheshkars friend Thorat waiting for us. He had come to take us to Worli, he announced. We were expected there for lunch. Though we knew nothing of this arrangement, owing to some misunderstanding on the part of the organizers as it later transpired -- Terry and I had no alternative but to accompany Thorat all the way to Worli. The result was that shortly after 3.30 we found ourselves sitting down to a traditional Maharashtrian meal in one of the chawls. Commenting on this episode, Terry wrote in his diary, T. just about coped. Evident that D. quite positive and determined. T. fearful, retiring, and resistant. The misunderstanding over lunch was not to be the only one of the day, as we discovered that evening after my lecture on Tibetan Buddhist Meditation. I gave this lecture at Theosophy Hall, the Indian headquarters of the United Lodge of Theosophists, speaking, with difficulty, for an hour and a half, after which my voice collapsed completely. It was then that we learned that two meetings had been arranged for us at Worli an arrangement about which, too, we knew nothing. We went nonetheless. I was unable to speak, but Terry spoke, briefly, as did Bhikkhu Shivalibodhi, an old friend of mine, who happened to be present.

The following morning we did very little, as I could speak only with difficulty and moreover had a slight temperature. By midday, however, I felt better, thanks to a short but refreshing sleep, and we went to have lunch with Hilla Petit, an elderly Parsee friend of mine who lived not far away, on the other side of the Malabar Hill peninsula. In the afternoon, after I had taken a dose of the homeopathic medicine Hilla had prepared for me, Terry and I took a taxi to Marine Drive and from there walked back along the front in the hope of finding something worth photographing. At 4.15 we left for the station, and less than an hour later, having been seen off by Thorat and a number of other friends, we were on our way to Poona. On my previous journeyings to Poona by the Deccan Queen I had invariably bumped into someone I knew, or who knew me, and this time it was no different. As we climbed up into the Western Ghats I was accosted by P.N. Rajbhoj, an opportunistic, publicity- hungry Buddhist mp who had once worked closely with Dr Ambedkar but who was now a member of the Congress Party.

At Poona station Terry and I were met by Maheshkar, his wife Karuna, Amrao, and other old friends of mine, who, as soon as the train stopped, all piled into the carriage and garlanded us. From the train we were taken to the station restaurant for tea, from the restaurant to the booking hall, where we were given a reception, with more garlands and many shouts of Jai! Victory!, and from the booking hall to the high school playground where I was to give my first lecture. As I still felt unwell, I spoke for only half an hour. Terry also spoke (quite well, in his own estimation), after which, the other speeches being over, we were escorted to the Nature Cure Clinic and Sanatorium in Tadiwalla Road, just behind the railway station, where we were to stay, and where, on our arrival at eleven o'clock, Terry and I were warmly welcomed by Dr Mehta's wife Gulbehn.

The Nature Cure Clinic and Sanatorium had been started by Dr Mehta in 1929,when he was in his mid-twenties, and over the years he had built up a clientele that eventually came to include Mahatma Gandhi and a number of other leading nationalist politicians. During the last three years of his life, in fact, the Mahatma had made the institution his home in Poona, staying with his entourage in the bungalow now occupied by Gulbehn, which had been named Bapu Kuti in his memory. Since 1953, the year in which he founded the Society of Servants of God, Dr Mehta had devoted less and less time to naturopathy, though he still saw some of his old patients, and occasionally sent them for rest and recuperation to the Poona institution. By the time I made his acquaintance he had been living in Bombay for some years, and the roomy, high-ceilinged old sanatorium building was virtually empty, so that he was happy for me to use the place as my headquarters whenever I visited Poona. Thus it was that on the occasion of this my latest visit to the city of the Peshwas I came to be staying there once again, this time with Terry, and thus it was that on our arrival at the Clinic that night my friend and I had been warmly welcomed by kind-hearted, hospitable Gulbehn, with whom, over the years, I had come to be quite well acquainted.

Since they had not seen me for two and a half years, my Buddhist friends were naturally anxious to make full use of me during my brief sojourn among them, and anxious, therefore, to arrange as many lectures and other engagements for me as possible. Though I was happy to be of use in this way, for the first three or four days that Terry and I spent among them I was unable to do as much as I would have wished, as I was still feverish and headachy, and felt generally unwell. During that time my friend and I stayed quietly in the big, cool sanatorium, having breakfast and lunch with Gulbehn over at Bapu Kuti, and going out only in the evening, when I gave my lectures. The first of these lectures was 'Buddhism in England'. I gave it in the lane next to Karunas -- or rather her fathers -- house, and it was accompanied by a running translation into Marathi by Maheshkar, as were all my other Poona lectures except the one I gave the following night at the Western India Club. This was a repeat performance, so to speak, of the one I had given in Ahmedabad on Buddhism and Humanism, and was likewise an 'English' lecture. In the course of the next two days I gave four more 'Marathi' lectures, one of them at Yerawada, a suburb of Poona, on 'Buddhism and Ambedkar.' According to my diary, this was a particularly well-organized and well-attended lecture, and my audience was delighted -- as Buddhist audiences always were -- to hear me speaking about their beloved leader, thanks to whose courage and vision they had been delivered from the hell of caste, as he once called it, and led to the feet of the Buddha.

The feverishness and headache left me only on the fifth day of our visit, by which time I was already giving two lectures every evening and Terry and I had started going out a little during the day. One such excursion took us to Poonas leading English bookshop, where Terry bought a copy of the Pelican Schopenhauer, another to the Shaniwarwada or 'Saturday Market' square in front of the grim old fortress-palace of the Peshwas, of which there remained little more than the tower-flanked main entrance. The biggest excursion of our visit took us to Kirkhalwadi, a Buddhist village situated about thirty miles from Poona and consisting of a few dozen thatched huts, some of which were in a very tumbledown condition. We were not expected, and our arrival, with Maheshkar, occasioned a good deal of surprise and excitement. The men were working in the fields (it was mid-afternoon, and a fine day), but the colourfully clad women soon emerged from their dark doorways, many of them carrying children, and greeted us, once they had overcome their initial shyness, with evident delight. While Terry took photographs, Maheshkar and I spoke to a few of them, especially one toothless old woman in a green sari, nor were we allowed to leave until we had taken tea in three different huts. It was from villages such as this that tens of thousands of men, over the years, had migrated to the city, partly in order to better themselves economically, but partly, in the case of the then Untouchables, to escape from the virtual slavery of the caste system, which was particularly strong in rural areas.

That evening, shortly after our return from Kirkhalwadi, Gulbehn gave a tea party in our honour, concerning which my diary has the following entry:

Back to the bungalow [i.e. the sanatorium] by 5. Rested and read. At 6 o'clock tea party. Mother Fiske, Prof. Driver, Alu Driver, Mrs Watchmaker, Mr Rupawate, the Maheshkars, Father Mascarenhas and others. Quite friendly, but long and unnecessary discussion between Alu Driver and Father M. which everyone else found rather tiresome. Father, indeed, seems to have lost his mental grip. Mother Fiske looked rather startled.

Adele Fiske was an elderly Roman Catholic nun from the United States who was doing research into the religious beliefs of the newly-converted Indian Buddhists. She later published a number of useful papers. Of Professor Driver and his wife I do not have even the vaguest recollection. They must have been friends of Gulbehn, and like Mrs Watchmaker they must have been Parsees. (Quite a few Parsee families had adopted English, or English-sounding, surnames, some of them expressive of their ancestral callings.) Dada Saheb Rupawate, a plump, jovial man of about my own age, was a prominent local politician. A Buddhist, and a member of the Republican Party, the party founded by Dr Ambedkar's lieutenants after his death, he later became a member of the Maharashtra State Government, and he remained a friend and supporter of mine all his life. The Maheshkars, of course, were my faithful translator and his short, energetic wife Karuna. They were both only a few years younger than me, and both before and after their marriage, which I had attended and blessed, they had between them organized many of my lectures in and around Poona.

Father Mascarenhas, Goanese by birth and about sixty years of age, was a Roman Catholic priest whose enormous paunch threatened to burst the buttons of his white tropical soutane. I had known him for some years, through our common association with Dr Mehta and the Society of Servants of God, where he was the Christian representative, so to speak (I was the Buddhist representative). He was a learned man, with a penchant for theological speculation that had more than once brought him into conflict with the Church authorities and led, on one occasion, to his being suspended for awhile from the exercise of his clerical duties. Now he was in trouble of another kind. As I had learned from Dr Mehta, our old friend had become involved with a local woman, which was why he was currently in Poona and not in Bombay. At the time of Gulbehn's tea party he must have been undergoing considerable emotional stress, which perhaps accounted for the unnecessary discussion (I have forgotten what it was about) with Alu Driver and for the fact that he seemed to have lost his mental grip. He may even have been slightly tipsy, for according to Terry's laconic diary entry for the day there was sherry at the party and the good father may have imbibed a little too freely. No wonder Mother Fiske looked rather startled.

From the tea party Terry and I went straight to Camp for a name-giving ceremony, at which I gave names to more than twenty children of all ages. This engagement was followed by the two lectures of the evening, held at two different venues. My diary conveys something of the flavour of such meetings:

First meeting held at New Modikhana Vihara, where I presented and installed image 2-1/2 years ago. Spoke on Buddhism and Meditation. Good quiet gathering. Mother F. took photos, but did not stay long. Prof. Driver and Alu Driver stayed for lecture. Second meeting at Bhimpura. Very lively gathering. Religious songs. Spoke on Ten Duties. Good response. Back at bungalow by 11.30.

Despite its name, the New Modikhana Vihara was not a monastery but a simple, one-roomed temple-cum-meeting-place, and the image I had installed was a handsome brass image of the Buddha in bhûmisparša or 'earth-touching pose' which had been presented to me some years previously by a pious old Burmese couple. The 'Ten Duties' were the ten duties of the lay Buddhist, such as observing the precepts of morality, studying the Dharma, and going on pilgrimage to the sites associated with the four principal events of the Buddha's life.

On our last full day in Poona Terry and I did little, as I was again suffering from a sore throat. We had breakfast with Rupawate at his place, I read Plotinus, there was some discussion, in the evening, with the Maheshkars and half a dozen other visitors, and that was about all. For once we were able to retire early, though according to Terry's diary the rats made a lot of noise during the night.

In the morning, after I had seen a few people individually, including an importunate Rajbhoj, Terry and I went with Maheshkar and Karuna to look at a property in Tadiwalla Road which was for sale and which might, they thought, be suitable for a vihara. We then had lunch for the last time with Gulbehn, whom I was not to see again, and shortly after- wards set out for the station, where a few dozen people had gathered to garland us and see us off.

'Left for Nagpur at 8.30 [reads Terry's diary]. Tearful goodbye. Miserable journey. Met by chattering colleague of D. D had to get out of train until midnight. Poor sleep'.

The journey was miserable in that (according to my own diary) it was a hot and dusty one that evening and a hot and stuffy one the following morning. The chattering colleague was R.D. Pawar, like Rupawate a local politician, who joined us at Ahmednagar and travelled with us all the way to Nagpur. Plump and voluble, he was the kind of person who finds it difficult to stop talking even when he has nothing to say, and I could see that Terry found his presence in our compartment extremely trying. The reason for my having to get out of the train was that word of my being on it had travelled up the line and at every station there were new Buddhists waiting with garlands in their hands. At three or four stations, indeed, there were so many people that I was obliged not only to get down on to the platform but also to deliver a short speech. In this way I was kept busy until nearly twelve o'clock. The following morning, by contrast, the journey was very tedious. At 1.30 in the afternoon we reached Nagpur. There we were welcomed by my old lawyer friend Kulkarni and others and driven to Kulkarni's place at Dharampath, where we were to stay.

Nagpur occupied a special place in the history of the movement of mass conversion of Untouchables to Buddhism. It was there, on 14 October 1956, that Dr Ambedkar, himself an Untouchable by birth, had inaugurated that movement by reciting the time-honoured formula for going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, together with the Five Precepts, after a senior Buddhist monk, and then, a few minutes later, personally administering those same Refuges and Precepts to some 400,000 of his followers. Unfortunately, my invitation having failed to arrive in time, I had not been present at the ceremony, but the following month I met Ambedkar in Delhi (it was our third meeting) and although he was then a very sick man, and very tired, he insisted on speaking to me at length about his hopes and fears-- mostly fears -- for the future of the movement he had started. From Delhi I travelled to Bombay, and from Bombay to Nagpur, as I was eager to make the acquaintance of the new Buddhists, who in fact had invited me to spend a few days with them on my way back to Calcutta and give some lectures. An hour after my arrival in the city came the news of Ambedkar's death. He had died in Delhi, only six weeks after inaugurating the movement of mass conversion to Buddhism. In Nagpur, as in towns and villages throughout central, western, and north-western India, his followers were grief-stricken and, for the time being, completely demoralized. What would they do, now that their great leader was gone? From Nagpur thousands of them left immediately for Bombay, where the funeral was to be held. Those who remained in the city -- some 100,000 of them -- attended the hastily organized condolence meeting that I addressed that night. Dr Ambedkar was not dead but alive, I assured my sobbing and groaning audience. He lived on in them, and he lived on in them to the extent to which they were faithful to the ideals for which he had, quite literally, sacrificed his life. My words (I spoke for an hour or more) were not without effect. Ambedkar's stricken followers began to realize that it was not the end of the world, that there was a future for them even after their beloved leaders death, and that the future was not devoid of hope. During the next four days I visited practically all the Untouchable localities of Nagpur and made more than forty speeches, besides initiating about 30,000 people into Buddhism. Wherever I went I repeated, in one form or another, the message I had given at the condolence meeting: Ambedkar was not dead and his work -- the work of conversion -- must continue. By the time I left Nagpur I had addressed 200,000 people, and local Buddhist leaders assured me that my presence at such a critical juncture was a miracle and that I had saved Nagpur for Buddhism. Whether or not this was the case, in the course of those five memorable days I had certainly forged a permanent link with the Buddhists of Nagpur.

Nagpur thus occupied a special place in my life, and I was therefore glad to be back in the city again, glad to be there for the tenth anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion, and glad that Terry and I were staying in the outhouse Kulkarni had built for himself in the yard behind his brothers residence, where I had stayed on all my subsequent visits to Nagpur. On the day of our arrival we had no engagements, but the following day was a busy one. At nine o'clock we were taken to see the Diksha Bhumi or Initiation Ground, as the eighteen-acre site of the 1956 mass conversion was called. Thousands of people were already there, many of them having spent the night on the spot. From the Diksha Bhumi we were taken to the Nagpur Central Jail where, Kulkarni translating, I spoke for an hour to a very quiet and attentive audience of about 500 prisoners, many of them Buddhists. After the talk came tea, which was handed round by our escort of trusties (prisoners who were serving life sentences for murder), and there was what my diary describes as quite a grand reception. The rest of the morning was spent at the Diksha Bhumi, where Terry and I went round the area with Kulkarni and a few others, despite the intense heat, and where Terry photographed the huge bust of Ambedkar -- fifteen or more feet high with its pedestal -- which marked the spot where he had stood and recited the Refuges and Precepts, as well as taking shots of unhygienic-looking tea stalls, turbaned vendors of fried snacks, displays of garish oleographs of politicians, film stars, and Buddhas, and families resting in the shade of the bullock carts that had brought them in from the surrounding villages.

On returning to Kulkarni's place we found Dr M.B. Niyogi, a former Chief Justice of the Nagpur High Court, waiting for us. I had met him a number of times, and knew him quite well. Kulkarni had invited him and several other members and ex-members of the Nagpur bench and bar to lunch, and these very elderly and very distinguished gentlemen all interrupted one another so often, and talked at such cross purposes, that I felt like Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party and was not sorry when lunch was over and I could spend some time talking with Terry and making a few notes for the lecture I would be giving in a few hours' time.

The meeting celebrating the tenth anniversary of Dr Ambedkar's historic conversion started at 7 o'clock, but it was not until 8.30 that I was called upon to speak. G.S. Talwatkar, of the People's Education society, translated for me, and I spoke for an hour. Afterwards I was told that 200,000 people were there that night, but as the only illumination came from the floodlights on the stage and the strings of feeble electric bulbs on the periphery of the vast gathering, I could see only a fraction of them. I have no recollection of what I said on the occasion, but I must have spoken about Ambedkar's achievements, about the significance of the movement of mass conversion inaugurated by him, about the importance of actually practising the Dharma, and about the need for unity, it being common knowledge that both the Republican Party and its religious counterpart the Buddhist Society of India had split into a variety of warring factions. Though I do not remember what I said that night, I have a vivid recollection of the vast blackness of the sky, of the faces of the thousands of men and women seated on the ground directly in front of me, and of the evident satisfaction with which my words were received.

The next two days were filled with interviews and visits, one of them to a nearby vihara, as well as two legal tea parties, and a little reading. On the morning of the third day (the fourth since our arrival in Nagpur) Terry and I were escorted to the bus by Kulkarni and a young monk of my acquaintance, and soon after 7 o'clock we were on our way to Jabalpur. The journey was a long and bumpy one, in the course of which our luxury coach (as Terry, in his diary, ironically terms the battered old vehicle in which we were travelling) stopped three times for tea and we saw monkeys, vultures, and a good deal of jungle. At 2.30 in the afternoon we reached Jabalpur, where we found a number of local Buddhists waiting at the bus station to receive us and where we spent two nights, one at a hotel and one with Taranath Bhagat and his family, with whom I had stayed once or twice before. During our short stay we were taken to see a vihara that was under construction and a small temple, both of which were picturesquely situated on hilltops on the outskirts of the town. The vihara was the scene of a small function, at which I made a speech, while at the temple I installed an image of the Buddha and gave a short address. Both at the hotel and at Bhagat's place we had many visitors, and though again suffering from a sore throat I was obliged to answer a host of questions. Most of the questions were quite inane, our visitors, with the exception of one bright young man, all being quite dull and unintelligent.

In the afternoon of our second day in Jabalpur Terry and I visited the Railway Hospital, where Bhagat now worked, and met Dr Chetty, the physician in charge, and an Indian Christian nurse married to a Chinese Buddhist. The nurse was evidently a woman of character. She had five children, she told us, and her husband worked in the circus. That evening she came to see us, and we talked with her and others until midnight. At 12.30 we left for the station, where she and Bhagat helped us get a two-berth compartment on the Kashi Express, when it at last arrived at 2.30.We slept until seven, and at 4.30 in the afternoon, after an uneventful journey, reached Varanasi. Half an hour later we were in Sarnath.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-Five: On Pilgrimage

According to the Mahãparinibbãna Sutta, the sutta of the Great Passing, the Buddha shortly before his death told Ãnanda, his disciple and constant companion, that there were four places the sight of which should arouse emotion in the faithful. These were the place where he was born, the place where he attained Supreme Enlightenment, the place where he set in motion the Wheel of Dharma or first taught the truth he had discovered, and the place where he finally passed beyond mundane existence. During my years in India I had visited all four sacred sites, now known, respectively, as Rummindei, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kusinara. The first and second I had visited twice, the third and fourth at least five or six times, so that my memories of both Sarnath and Bodh Gaya were of a composite nature and it was not always possible for me to tell what I had done, or whom I had met, on which visit.

In the case of Sarnath, however, blurred and blended though my memories of subsequent visits may have been, I had a vivid recollection of my first visit to the place a recollection that was all the more vivid for the experience itself having been, in one important respect, so painful. The year was 1949, the month Vaishakha (April-May), the hottest month in the Indian calendar. With my friend and companion Satyapriya (Robin Banerjee) I arrived in Sarnath one morning, the pair of us having walked all the way from Varanasi. The reason for our walking there, despite the intense heat, was that we were observing the rule of not handling money and therefore were not in a position to hire a taxi or cycle rickshaw. For the last two years we had been freelance wandering ascetics, living on alms, studying and meditating, and testing in various ways our readiness to take formal ordination as Buddhist monks. Convinced that we were, in fact, now ready, we had travelled from South India, via Bombay, to Sarnath. At Sarnath, we knew, there was a branch of the Maha Bodhi Society of India and a community of Theravãdin Buddhist monks, and from these monks we hoped to receive ordination. We were cruelly disappointed. On our arrival, footsore and weary, we were received in an unfriendly, even hostile manner, grudgingly accommodated and fed, and refused ordination with flimsy excuses which, we later discovered, were no better than lies. We were therefore forced to seek ordination elsewhere. But that is another story. During the next fifteen or sixteen years I visited Sarnath a number of times, and in this way came to know the Maha Bodhi Society monks reasonably well. There were five or six of them altogether, only one of whom was Indian, the rest being Sinhalese. Some of them later apologized for the way that they had treated Satyapriya and me. Hindus who only wanted to be financially supported were coming and asking for ordination all the time, they explained, and they could not be too careful. The first to apologize was the Venerable M. Sangharatana, the Maha Bodhi Society's bhikkhu-in-charge at Sarnath, who from the first had been less unfriendly than the other members of the little monastic community. Though impulsive to the point of rashness, and far too outspoken for his own good, he was a warm-hearted man, with a stronger feeling for the Dharma than most of his fellow monks, and over the years an increasingly cordial relation- ship had developed between us.

As it happened, the first person Terry and I met on emerging from the taxi that had brought us to Sarnath and to the door of the Maha Bodhi Society was none other than lean, excitable Sangharatana. He was glad to see me, and at once showed us to our room in the big pink sandstone rest-house where we were to stay. After we had settled in, and had taken a stroll in the pleasant, park-like area on the other side of the road, I went and paid my respects to the chief monk. This was the Venerable Sasanasiri, a corpulent, jovial, easy-going man of about sixty who occupied a room on the same floor of the building. I found him lying in bed. He was suffering from high blood pressure, he told me, and the doctor had ordered him to take complete rest. Though he spoke cheerfully, I noticed that his face had an ashen look, and that the monks who were caring for him seemed anxious. One of these monks was quiet, scholarly Dhammaratana, a colleague of mine on the editorial board of the Maha Bodhi Journal, who was usually to be found in Calcutta. From him I learned that the Venerable Jagdish Kashyap, with whom I had studied Pali, Abhidharma, and Logic, was now at Nalanda. This was good news, for I wanted not only to see my old teacher but also to tell him that I had decided that my future lay in the West. Nalanda, in any case, was one of the places Terry and I were planning to visit on our way to Calcutta and, eventually, Kalimpong, the little town in the eastern Himalayas where I had lived for fourteen years a third of my life.

Terry and I spent nine or ten days in Sarnath, dividing our time mainly between explorations of the extensive archaeological area and expeditions into Varanasi. The principal object of interest in the archaeological area was the still-standing portion of the monolithic column on which was inscribed, in Brahmi letters, the edict in which the emperor Ashoka warns the members of the monastic community against schism. We also circumambulated the massive Dhamekh Stupa, which marked the spot where the Buddha sat to give his first teaching, thus setting in motion of Wheel of Dharma, visited the Sarnath Museum, saw the room in the Burmese Temple where I had received my ordination as a bhikshu, and studied the Ajanta-style frescoes in the Mulagandhakuti Vihara, the pink sandstone temple built by Anagarika Dharmapala, the founder of the Maha Bodhi Society. In colourful, chaotic Varanasi there naturally was much more to see, though little or nothing of Buddhist interest or significance, the ancient city having long been a stronghold of orthodox Hinduism.

Like most visitors, we saw the Durga Temple, with its unfriendly mother monkeys, the beautiful, dazzlingly white marble mausoleum of Swami Bhaskarananda, a nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic, and the dusty, dilapidated Bharat Mata Mandir or Temple of Mother India, where the object of worship, so to speak, was a huge contour model of the subcontinent. On one occasion we hired a boat and spent a couple of hours being rowed slowly past the famous ghats or bathing places, on the crumbling steps of which brahmin priests sat performing rituals beneath huge, mushroom-like umbrellas, where dead bodies were being cremated, apparently with very little ceremony, where washermen were banging and slapping clothes and beggars soliciting alms, and from the safety of which pilgrims of all ages were taking their ceremonial dip in the sacred, sin-absolving waters. Wedged between the ghats were domed and pinnacled temples innumerable, some of them tilted at such a rakish angle, due to subsidence, that they looked as though they might slip or topple over into the Ganges at any minute. Once we stayed longer in the city than usual, so that by the time we left the moon had risen and we made the journey back to Sarnath by moonlight. It was a full moon, and so bright that Terry tried -- unsuccessfully-- to take a picture of it through the leaves of one of the wayside bodhi trees.

Most evenings I joined Sangharatana and the other monks for the six-thirty puja, as I was accustomed to do when staying at Sarnath. The puja took place in the sanctuary, as it might be termed, that occupied the far end of the Mulabandhakuti Viharas single nave and was on a slightly higher level. We sat in a row in front of the white marble image-table, cross-legged, and in order of seniority, with the more senior in ordination on the right and the more junior on the left. Over the years I had moved up along the row, and more often than not there would be more monks sitting on my left than on my right. The puja consisted of the chanting, in Pali, of the Three Refuges and the verses for offering flowers, lights, and incense, followed by the Maúgala, Karanîyamettã, and Ratana Suttas, and verses invoking the blessings of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, as well as of the devas or 'shining ones'. I always enjoyed the chanting, especially when Sangharatana was present, for despite his emaciated appearance, his narrow chest, and his ever-troublesome liver, he possessed a magnificent bass voice to which the temples acoustics did full justice.

The puja concluded with a short period of meditation, the length of which was determined, as was the chanting led, by the senior-most monk. We then sat quietly for a few minutes before dispersing. I always took the opportunity of gazing up at the great golden figure on the image-table, which except for the fact that it was gilded was an exact replica of a fifth-century sculpture in the Sarnath Museum. The Buddha was depicted seated, eyes half closed, and with hands exhibiting the mudra of setting in motion of Wheel of Dharma. He had set that sublime Wheel in motion had first taught the truth he had discovered here in Sarnath. It was at a spot only a few dozen yards away that he had addressed his first five disciples, who initially were unwilling to give him a hearing. These disciples, and the hundreds of others who became his disciples in the years that followed, passed on what they had learned to their disciples, they to theirs, and so on. In this way the Buddha's teaching had spread, first throughout the Indian subcontinent, then throughout the rest of Asia. Now, twenty-five centuries after the Buddha's parinirvãna, that same teaching was beginning to spread -- the Dharma-Wheel was beginning to roll -- from the East to the West. I was part of the process. Having spent twenty years in the East, fourteen of them working for the good of Buddhism in Kalimpong as directed by Kashyap-ji, I was about to return permanently to the West to work for the good of Buddhism there. What form that work would take I did not know. Little did I suspect, sitting there and gazing up at the golden Wheel-Turning Buddha, that there was even then in train a series of events that would have the effect, by the end of the year, of making clear to me what needed to be done.

The laity did not take part in the puja. They sat on the marble floor of the nave listening to the chanting of the monks or, with hands clasped together as though in prayer, recited verses of their own under their breath. Some prostrated themselves from time to time; others chatted quietly, or allowed their eyes to wander to the frescoes depicting episodes in the life of the Buddha that decorated the side walls. Most were pilgrims from the Buddhist countries of South-East Asia, and they came in family groups and accompanied by their own yellow-robed or brown-robed monks who, if there were not too many of them, were sometimes invited to join the resident monks in the sanctuary. More than once, in the course of the week, I was asked to give a talk for their benefit immediately after the puja, which I did in the traditional manner, that is, seated (on a higher level than my auditors), and concluding with the customary blessings. Terry did not always attend the evening puja. He had little interest in ritual, and in any case, during our stay in Sarnath he was often depressed, sometimes quite badly, and did not feel like seeing much of other people.

One evening only one or two of the resident monks turned up for the puja. All the others were with Venerable Sasanasiri, who was seriously ill. The following morning, on returning to the rest-house from the deserted refectory, I learned that he had died the previous night, on the way to hospital, his very high blood pressure having resulted in a heart attack. The funeral procession left from the rest-house at nine-thirty, exactly twelve hours after the chief monks death. Before it left, I went along to his room to pay my last respects, and Terry, at Sangharatana's request, took photographs of the body for dispatch to the Sri Lankan papers, afterwards commenting in his diary Interesting but macabre. Several hundred people took part in the procession, which was a colourful affair, including as it did not only the yellow-robed monks on and around the decorated vehicle carrying the corpse but also a number of red-robed Tibetan monks with their drums and other musical instruments, Sinhalese and Burmese pilgrims holding five-coloured Buddhist flags, and students from the Maha Bodhi High School. The cremation took place on a hillock near Sarnath railway station. Soon the flames were leaping up from the pyre and within minutes the heat was so intense that everyone had to withdraw to a distance of a dozen or more yards, especially as it was now midday, and to the heat of the flames there was added the scorching heat of the sun, which blazed down upon the scene from a sky of cloudless blue.

In the afternoon Terry and I went into Varanasi, where we walked along the riverside for a while, bought six rosaries of black seeds, and made up for having had no breakfast and only a very small lunch by treating ourselves to a meal at the Kwality Restaurant.

Besides exploring the archaeological area and going on expeditions into Varanasi, during our stay in Sarnath Terry and I visited the Tibetan gompa and the Ladakhi rest-house, neither of which had been there a few years ago. Indeed, since the time of my earliest visits to the place a kind of cantonment had sprung up between the end of the road on which stood the Maha Bodhi Society's rest-house and the new railway station. At the Ladakhi rest-house I had a pleasant talk with the young monk-in-charge, who turned out to be a relation of Kusho Bakula, the incarnate lama who was present at my bhikshu ordination in 1959. I also met some of the Ladakhi boys who had once spent their summer holidays with me in Kalimpong, having been brought there by Lama Lobzang, their then mentor, another relation of Kusho Bakulas, and who now attended the Maha Bodhi High School. The Tibetan gompa and the Ladakhi rest-house were not the only recent additions to the attractions and amenities of Sarnath. There was also a open-air tea shop. Terry and I patronized it more than once, sitting at one of the little tables, sipping our strong, sweet Indian tea, and contemplating the passing scene. At other tables sat Buddhist pilgrims of different nationalities, middle-class Hindu day trippers from Varanasi and, occasionally, a Western tourist or two. Once we saw four or five American hippies, one of them a woman with a baby. Long-haired, emaciated, and half naked, and seemingly under the influence of drugs, they moved mechanically from table to table soliciting alms. Some of the Indians they approached were evidently shocked to see white people begging, and gave, when they did give, as much out of embarrassment as generosity. For my part, I felt sorry for the poor hippies, the first I had seen. They did not look very happy, and though I could understand their rejection of conventional values, a rejection soon to become widespread among young people in the West, I also saw that because of their inability to replace those values by real ones they had lost their way and were simply drifting.

Though there was much for us to do and to see at Sarnath, Terry and I did not forget our friends in England. Many letters and postcards had been sent from Ahmedabad and other places along the way, and in Sarnath we wrote more of them then ever. Terry wrote to his parents, and to Vivien, Alan, Viriya, and other friends. I wrote to Thien Chau, Viriya, and Francoise, to my mother, to Maurice and Ruth Walshe, to each of the Three Musketeers, to Christmas Humphreys, and to sundry other members of the Sangha Association and the Buddhist Society. I also wrote to our hosts and other friends in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Poona, and Nagpur, thanking them for their hospitality and cooperation, as well as to friends I was expecting to meet in Bodh Gaya, Calcutta, and Kalimpong, alerting them to my impending arrival with Terry. Among those in Kalimpong to whom I wrote was Sramanera Thubden, one of the two young Tibetans whom I had left in charge of the Triyana Vardhana Vihara. He was of a very serviceable disposition, and as soon as he heard I was in Sarnath he came and joined me there in order to be of assistance, arriving from Calcutta two days before Terry and I were due to leave for Bodh Gaya.

The following day there was a ceremonial food-offering to the Monastic Order in memory of Venerable Sasanasiri. About thirty Theravãdin bhikkhus were duly fed, and about fifty Tibetan monks, including Thubden. Among the bhikkhus who happened to be in Sarnath that day there were several from Thailand. One of them, Sukitti by name, was known tome, and after the meal I invited him and his companions to my room, where we talked for a while about the progress of Buddhism in the West.

On the morning of our last day in Sarnath Terry took a few pictures, we had our last cup of tea at the open-air tea shop, and I had a long talk with Sangharatana and Dharmarakshita, the only Indian member of the Sarnath monastic community. Both men were very worried, especially Sangharatana. For the last year or more the Varanasi-based Hindi press had been conducting against the Maha Bodhi Society monks, and against Sangharatana in particular, a campaign of systematic abuse and vilification. Hardly a day passed without allegations being made by one or other of the numerous Hindu-owned and Hindu-edited dailies and weeklies. What those allegations were Sangharatana did not say, but knowing the depths to which the vernacular press was capable of sinking I did not need to ask. In recent weeks the campaign had reached such a pitch that the Maha Bodhi Society's governing body in Calcutta, fearing that the organizations reputation and standing were being jeopardized, had started putting pressure on Sangharatana to leave Sarnath. He did not want to leave Sarnath, he told me passionately, almost in tears, but it was beginning to look as though he would be forced to do so. When I left for Bodh Gaya that afternoon, with Terry and Thubden, it was therefore with a feeling of sadness on Sangharatana's account and with the reflection that, now as in the Buddha's day, in their efforts to retard or roll back the Wheel of Dharma Mara and his agents would stop at nothing.

In Bodh Gaya we stayed at the rather splendid Thai temple, built by the Thai government in traditional style a few years earlier. I had stayed there once or twice before, and was acquainted with several of the resident monks. Though I had not visited Bodh Gaya so often as Sarnath, my memories of the former, too, were of a composite nature, and I had a distinct recollection of only two visits. Naturally my first visit, which took place in the winter of 1949-50 in the company of Venerable Sangharatana, was one of these. On that occasion I had been deeply moved, and felt like bursting into a paean in celebration of the beauties of the great pilgrimage centre, as I actually did long afterwards when writing about the visit. The other visit of which I have a distinct recollection took place about ten years later. I was travelling with Bhikkhu Vivekananda, my closest friend among the Thai monks, and we had taken a cycle rickshaw from Gaya station to Bodh Gaya. We did not reach our destination until after midnight and found the place completely deserted. Even the roadside boutiques were closed and a profound silence reigned. As we neared the Maha Bodhi Temple, the central tower of which was silhouetted against the starry sky, to our astonishment we saw that in every niche of the great building, as well as on the numerous votive stupas by which it was surrounded, a little oil lamp was burning. There must have been thousands of lamps. So tranquil was the scene that it was not difficult to believe they had been placed there in worship of the Buddha not by any human agency but by the invisible hands of devas.

At the Thai temple a stricter discipline prevailed than at the Maha Bodhi Monastery in Sarnath. Bhikkhus, novices, and laymen were all rigidly separated. They were accommodated separately, and ate separately. This meant that Terry and I did not see each other at meals or in the evening. The rest of the day we passed together as usual, circumambulating the temple and paying our respects to the Bodhi Tree, to the Vajrasana or Diamond Throne on which the Buddha gained Enlightenment, and to the life-sized image of the Master that dominated the gloomy, candlelit inner shrine. As it was winter, and the pilgrimage and tourist season was in full swing, the sacred site was a crowded and sometimes noisy place. Indeed, it was much noisier and more crowded than I remembered it as having been on any of my previous visits. Not only were there hundreds more pilgrims and tourists but in the interval many more boutiques and stalls had sprung up. During the two days that we were in Bodh Gaya Terry and I therefore spent less time in and around the Maha Bodhi Temple than on the shores of a nearby lake in which there grew many water-lilies. While Terry took photographs I contemplated the pink blossoms that rose, here and there, from among the dark green leaves. According to the scriptures the Buddha, shortly after his Enlightenment, had seen such a lake not, indeed, of pink water-lilies but of blue, red, or white lotuses. Some of the lotuses he saw throve in the water without coming out of it, some rested on the surface of the water, and some, coming right up out of the water, stood clear of the water, unwetted by it. So seeing, the scriptures relate, he saw beings with little dust on their eyes and with much dust on their eyes, with keen faculties and dull faculties, with good qualities and bad qualities, easy to teach and hard to teach, and some who dwelt seeing fear in the other world and blame as well. Thus seeing, he decided not to remain silent, as hitherto he had been inclined to do, but rather to communicate the truth he had discovered. The Doors of the Deathless were now wide open, and those who heard him had only to put forth their faith. Perhaps it was while he was walking or sitting on the shores of this very lake that the Buddha had decided to teach.

The Thai temple was not the only new building in Bodh Gaya. Besides the Maha Bodhi Society's modest rest-house several other temples and monasteries had been erected there in recent times, that is to say since the restoration of the site by a British archaeologist towards the end of the nineteenth century. One of these was the Tibetan gompa, the horizontal lines of which were in striking contrast to the more vertical lines of its colourful Thai neighbour. Here we met a lama who happened to know me, and were amused to see that in front of one of the images in the main chapel there had been placed for the enlightenment of tourists a sign which read 'God Buddha'. We also visited the Samanvaya ashram built ten years earlier by Vinoba Bhave, the veteran follower of Mahatma Gandhi, in order to increase the importance of Bodh Gaya in the eyes of the world. At this institution we met Munindra Barua, a practitioner of 'insight meditation', whom I had known since 1949 and with whom I had had more than one lively discussion about the merits of this controversial new Burmese technique. With him there were two Western novices, Yasa and Sariputta by name, the one German, the other Swiss. The pair had come to see me in Bombay and told me on that occasion that they had spent seven years in the East and that the experience had proved a disappointing one. Since then they had visited Kalimpong and were now, apparently, on pilgrimage in Bodh Gaya before finally returning to Europe.

Back at the Thai temple I talked about meditation with my room-mate and had a long discussion with the Lord Abbot, as he was styled, about the progress of Buddhism in England. I must have mentioned that many English Buddhists were vegetarians, for in the course of our exchange it transpired that the Lord Abbot was a decided opponent of vegetarianism, both the principle and practice of which he clearly regarded as being very unbuddhistic. His attitude did not really surprise me, for I knew that the vast majority of Thai monks were inveterate meat-eaters, and would go to any lengths of rationalization to justify their fondness for pork and chicken. At the Thai temple itself even the simplest dishes were mixed with meat, so that whether at breakfast or at lunch both Ekkapanno -- the temples sole resident vegetarian -- and I found it difficult to get enough to eat. Since the Lord Abbot was senior to me in ordination, and I was moreover a guest, I made no attempt to defend the cause of vegetarianism, especially as I knew that in any case few Thai monks were open to conviction on the subject.

My most interesting encounter was with Venerable Dhammajoti, one of the Maha Bodhi Society monks who had been so unwilling to ordain Satyapriya and me all those years ago. Terry and I came across him in the course of one of our circumambulations. He was performing a puja beneath the Bodhi Tree, and had with him a small Sinhalese boy. The boy was a medium, Dhammajoti explained, and the late Anagarika Dharmapala, who had been reborn in one of the higher, heavenly worlds, spoke through him. Anagarika Dharmapala was, of course, the founder of the Maha Bodhi Society, and he had spent much of his life trying to wrest ownership of the Bodh Gaya temple from the mercenary Hindu mahant whose predecessors had gained possession of the site after it was sacked by the Muslim invaders. Though he may indeed have been reborn as a deva, and though I did not altogether disbelieve in the possibility of mediumship, the idea of the Anagarika communicating with his disciples in such a manner was somehow distasteful tome and I found it difficult to accept Dhammajoti's claim.

During our stay in Bodh Gaya Terry was consistently cheerful, and he remained cheerful at least for the next two or three days, in the course of which we concluded our pilgrimage to the sacred sites by visiting Rajgir and Nalanda. At Rajgir we saw the caves associated, respectively, with Mahãkašyapa, the most ascetic of the Buddha's disciples, and with the so-called First Council.We also climbed to the top of the Vultures Peak, where according to tradition the Buddha had revealed the White Lotus Sûtra, one of the most important Mahãyãna scriptures. At Nalanda we explored the extensive and immense remains of the great Buddhist monastic university, visited the museum, and talked with the students and professors of the university's modest modern successor, the Nalanda Pali Institute, founded by Venerable Kashyap in the previous decade. Kashyap-ji himself was not at the Institute when Terry and I arrived, but he came some hours later, and that evening and the following morning my old teacher and I had a long talk. In the course of the talk he gave his blessing to my plan of returning permanently to the West and working for Buddhism there. He gave it all the more readily for his being very disappointed with conditions in India, where little remained of the idealism that had inspired the Independence movement, and for his being pessimistic about the future of the Dharma in the land of its birth. For my own part, I was glad to have seen Kashyap-ji again, and glad to have received his blessing as I entered upon the next stage of my life and work as a Buddhist.

Thirty-six hours later, having returned to Bodh Gaya for the night, my friend and I, accompanied by Thubden, left Gaya for Calcutta at 8.30 in the evening by the Dun Express. Our little party reached Howrah station on the morning of 13 November, exactly twelve hours after leaving Gaya. Soon we were in a taxi and on our way to the Maha Bodhi Society's headquarters in College Square, where we were welcomed by my old acquaintance Venerable Jinaratana who, like Sarnath-based Sangharatana, was one of the society's two joint secretaries.

[admin]

Chapter Forty-Six: Editorial Interlude

Anagarika Dharmapala had started the Maha Bodhi Journal in 1892, a year after founding the Maha Bodhi Society. I was invited to join the Editorial Board in 1953, and since then had been virtually in charge of the magazine. Normally I edited it from my hermitage in Kalimpong, the Society having agreed to this arrangement, though I had to bring out some issues in the course of my increasingly lengthy lecture tours among the new Buddhists. I also went down to Calcutta each year in order to edit the special Vaishakha number of the Journal, which was three or four times bigger than the average monthly number and contained, more often than not, articles by such distinguished Buddhist authors as Lama Govinda and Dr Conze. This visit invariably took place during April and May, that is, at the height of the hot season, when Calcutta could indeed be termed the City of Dreadful Heat, as well as the City of Dreadful Noise. Many were the days I had spent proof-reading in my room on the second floor of the headquarters building, with the perspiration trickling down my body and falling in great drops from my forehead on to the galleys spread out on the table before me. This time, however, I was visiting the city not at the height of the hot season but in the middle of the so-called cold season. Though the weather was still hot by English standards at least during the day, it was not uncomfortably so, and Terry and I were able to get out and about without experiencing any discomfort on account of the heat.

My acquaintance with Calcutta went back to 1945, when I was still in the Army, and when a friendly Hindu monk had taken me on a tour of some of the city's religious and cultural institutions, including the Maha Bodhi Society's headquarters in College Square. Since then I had visited the sprawling former metropolis many times, especially after taking on the editorship of the Maha Bodhi Journal, and had come to be familiar with the place. Indeed, I had grown quite fond of it, despite the heat and noise and congestion, and even had a few favourite haunts to which I was now soon taking Terry. Prominent among these favourite haunts of mine were the well-stocked English language bookshops in College Street, Chowringhee, and Park Street, all of which my friend and I visited more than once in the course of our ten days in Calcutta. We also spent more than one pleasant half hour poring over the contents of the second-hand bookstalls on the other side of the Square, where in past years I had picked up more than one bargain. Naturally I made several purchases. For Terry I bought Adlers Understanding Human Nature and Husserl's Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, and for myself David Lacks Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, Julian Huxley's The Living Thoughts of Darwin, and George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah sequence, the lengthy Preface to which has been described as the wittiest summary of the Darwinian controversy ever written. The reason for my wanting to read up on the subject of evolution was that earlier in the year I had given a lecture on 'Evolution -- Lower and Higher', in which I sought to situate the Buddhist spiritual path within a broader, 'evolutionary context', and this line of thought I wanted to pursue further. In 1969, indeed, two years after my return to England, I was to give a series of eight lectures under the title 'The Higher Evolution of Man'.

While Terry and I were getting out and about in the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes taking advantage of the crowded two-car trams, the little printing press round the corner was hard at work on the joint September-October number of the Maha Bodhi Journal, with the result that from the fourth or fifth day after our arrival I was spending time correcting page proofs. 'Many mistakes', my diary comments tersely. I also became drawn into some of the activities that were taking place at the headquarters building, as well as in the Sri Dharmarajika Vihara, immediately behind which the building was situated. Besides attending, in my editorial capacity, a meeting of the Finance Committee, I gave a lecture on 'Buddhism in England,' spoke at the reception given in honour of the Crown Prince of Laos, and took part in the kaìhina or 'difficult' ceremony that was held in the shrine room of the Vihara. The kaìhina or difficult ceremony (there were various explanations of why it was so called) was the ceremony at which the laity offered fresh robes to those monks who had observed the vassãvãsa or rains residence, and despite the fact that I had not observed it that year I, too, was given robes. As the lay people offering the robes were all from Calcutta's rather Hinduized Bengali Buddhist community, and as the gathering contained a large number of women and children, the ceremony was a noisy, disorganized affair, and my diary, with its customary succinctness, characterizes it as having been' a shambles'.

Venerable Jinaratana attended the kaìhina ceremony as well as the Crown Princes reception, but otherwise I saw little of him. As usual he was busy, but I noticed not only that he seemed pleased with himself but also that he was much friendlier than before. I thought I knew the reason for this. An ambitious man, he had long hoped to succeed Devapriya Valisinha as General Secretary of the Society, even plotting and intriguing to this end, and it now appeared that his hopes were about to be fulfilled. Amiable, contentious Devapriya-ji was lying in hospital, a stroke having left him paralysed, and Jinaratana had been appointed Acting General Secretary by the Society's governing body. Jinaratanas only rival for the General Secretaryship was Sangharatana, who like Devapriya-ji was a personal disciple of Anagarika Dharmapala; but my impulsive, warm-hearted friend was under a cloud and was soon to be banished to one of the Society's smaller, more remote centres. Four or five days after my arrival Devapriya-ji was brought back home from the hospital to his room on the second floor of the headquarters building. He was a pitiable sight, able to make only a few inarticulate noises, and I could do no more than sit with him in silent sympathy. His eyes had a tragic, haunted look, and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking and feeling as he lay there. On the day I left he was a little better, and while Terry finished packing I was able to talk with him and say good- bye. Nevertheless it was evident that he did not have long to live and that Jinaratana would soon be occupying the position he had coveted ever since I knew him. 'Within two years I shall be General Secretary of the Society,' he had assured Satyapriya and me back in 1947. In the event it had taken him not two years but twenty to reach his goal, but at last his hour had come, or was about to come, and it was not surprising that he should look pleased with himself.

There were few visitors to the headquarters building during our stay, and fewer still to the room Terry and I occupied on the second floor. Our first visitor was from the CID. He came to see my passport but for some reason did not ask to see Terry's. Two days later came another reminder that my arrival in Calcutta had not gone unnoticed by the authorities. It came in the form of a visit from a certain Mr Gupta, a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Bureau whom I had met once or twice and who in Indian terms was therefore a friend. Presumably to indicate that the visit was a purely social one, he came not alone but with his wife and child, though I knew that a man in his position was never really off duty. 'A rather inconclusive, desultory talk', my diary records. Told him about Veronica's letter to Jinaratana. Veronica had left for India at the beginning of June, shortly before Terry and I left for Greece. She was now in Kalimpong and her letter told a strange story. A man from what she called the military court had not only accused her of being an American spy but had questioned her repeatedly about me, saying that I had been asked to leave Kalimpong and was unwelcome there, as were all foreigners! I had not been asked to leave Kalimpong, as Gupta was certainly aware, and he promised to investigate and let me know who was responsible for spreading the rumour. The following morning I received a letter from the little witch myself. It contained the disquieting news that she had been so shamefully treated in Kalimpong -- apparently by the authorities -- that she was leaving for New Delhi and would be contacting the UK High Commission. I therefore rang Gupta, who came to see the letter the following day this time on his own.

Veronica's letter was not the only letter I received in Calcutta, nor was it the only one to contain disquieting news. Though in the course of our journey across the subcontinent I had not heard from any of our friends in England, on our arrival in Calcutta Terry and I found a small pile of letters waiting for us, and others soon followed. Among them there were letters from Viriya and Francoise. Maurice Walshe and George Goulstone were trying to prevent my return to the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, they both informed me. The news was not only disquieting but surprising, and all the more disquieting for being surprising. Neither Walshe nor Goulstone had given me the least reason to think that they were dissatisfied with my teaching or that they no longer wanted me to be the incumbent of the Vihara. Maurice had been present at the reception at which members and friends of the Sangha Association had said farewell to me on the eve of my departure. Like them, he had not only wished me a safe journey and a happy reunion with my teachers and friends in India, but had also made it clear that he looked forward to seeing me again in four months' time. What had induced him and Goulstone to change their minds if they indeed had changed them in the way that Viriya and Francoise believed and were not simply giving expression to a passing discontent with the way I had been running the Vihara? As I well knew, Maurice was subject to irrational outbursts in which he said things he afterwards regretted, while under the influence of his morning tipple Goulstone sometimes talked rather loosely. Whatever the explanation might be, a cloud had appeared on the horizon. It was a small cloud, but as Terry and I prepared to leave for Kalimpong we wondered what further news awaited us there.

Before we could actually leave we were obliged to have one more contact with officialdom, though this time we went to it rather than having it come to us. The previous day Terry had gone to the security control with Thubden to collect the permit that would allow him to cross the Inner Line and stay in Kalimpong for a week (my own residential permit was still valid), but owing to a confusion about the dates it had not been given to him. On our way to Sealdah Station, therefore, we called at the office and the permit was issued immediately. Only then were the three of us free to leave for our destination in the foothills of the Himalayas.