The Soul Of A People - free ebook by H. (Harold) Fielding

H. FIELDING

First Edition, 1898 Second Edition, 1898 Third Edition, 1899...

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DEDICATION TO SECOND EDITION

I dedicate this book to you about whom it is written. It has been made a reproach to me by the critics that I have only spoken well of you, that I have forgotten your faults and remembered only your virtues. If it is wrong to have done this, I must admit the wrong. I have written of you as a friend does of a friend. Where I could say kind things of you I have done so, where I could not I have been silent. You will find plenty of people who can see only your faults, and who like to tell you of th

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PREFACE

In most of the quotations from Burmese books containing the life of the Buddha I am indebted, if not for the exact words, yet for the sense, to Bishop Bigandet's translation. I do not think I am indebted to anyone else. I have, indeed, purposely avoided quoting from any other book and using material collected by anyone else. The story of Ma Pa Da has appeared often before, but my version is taken entirely from the Burmese song. It is, as I have said, known to nearly every Burman. I wanted to wri

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CHAPTER I

'The observance of the law alone entitles to the right of belonging to my religion.'— Saying of the Buddha. For the first few years of my stay in Burma my life was so full of excitement that I had little care or time for any thought but of to-day. There was, first of all, my few months in Upper Burma in the King's time before the war, months which were full of danger and the exhilaration of danger, when all the surroundings were too new and too curious to leave leisure for examination beneath th

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CHAPTER II

The life-story of Prince Theiddatha, who saw the light and became the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago, has been told in English many times. It has been told in translations from the Pali, from Burmese, and from Chinese, and now everyone has read it. The writers, too, of these books have been men of great attainments, of untiring industry in searching out all that can be known of this life, of gifts such as I cannot aspire to. There is now nothing new to learn of those long past days, nothing fr

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CHAPTER III

'He who never spake but good and wise words, he who was the light of the world, has found too soon the Peace.'— Lament on the death of the Buddha. The prince rode forth into the night, and as he went, even in the first flush of his resolve, temptation came to him. As the night closed behind he remembered all he was leaving: he remembered his father and his mother; his heart was full of his wife and child. 'Return!' said the devil to him. 'What seek you here? Return, and be a good son, a good hus

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CHAPTER IV

'Come to Me: I teach a doctrine which leads to deliverance from all the miseries of life.'— Saying of the Buddha. To understand the teaching of Buddhism, it must be remembered that to the Buddhist, as to the Brahmin, man's soul is eternal. In other faiths and other philosophies this is not so. There the soul is immortal; it cannot die, but each man's soul appeared newly on his birth. Its beginning is very recent. To the Buddhist the beginning as well as the end is out of our ken. Where we came f

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CHAPTER V

This is the Buddhist belief as I have understood it, and I have written so far in order to explain what follows. For my object is not to explain what the Buddha taught, but what the Burmese believe; and this is not quite the same thing, though in nearly every action of their life the influence of Buddhism is visible more or less strongly. Therefore I propose to describe shortly the ideas of the Burmese people upon the main objects of life; and to show how much or how little Buddhism has affected

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CHAPTER VI

'Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred. Hatred ceases by love.'— Dammapada. We were encamped at a little monastery in some fields by a village, with a river in front. Up in the monastery there was but room for the officers, so small was it, and the men were camped beneath it in little shelters. It was two o'clock, and very hot, and we were just about to take tiffin, when news came that a party of armed men had been seen passing a little north of us. It was supposed they were bound to a

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CHAPTER VII

'Fire, water, storms, robbers, rulers—these are the five great evils.'— Burmese saying. It would be difficult, I think, to imagine anything worse than the government of Upper Burma in its later days. I mean by 'government' the king and his counsellors and the greater officials of the empire. The management of foreign affairs, of the army, the suppression of greater crimes, the care of the means of communication, all those duties which fall to the central government, were badly done, if done at a

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CHAPTER VIII

Not very many years ago an officer in Rangoon lost some currency notes. He had placed them upon his table overnight, and in the morning they were gone. The amount was not large. It was, if I remember rightly, thirty rupees; but the loss annoyed him, and as all search and inquiry proved futile, he put the matter in the hands of the police. Before long—the very next day—the possession of the notes was traced to the officer's Burman servant, who looked after his clothes and attended on him at table

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CHAPTER IX

As I have said, there was this very remarkable fact in Burma—that when you left the king, you dropped at once to the villager. There were no intermediate classes. There were no nobles, hereditary officers, great landowners, wealthy bankers or merchants. Then there is no caste; there are no guilds of trade, or art, or science. If a man discovered a method of working silver, say, he never hid it, but made it common property. It is very curious how absolutely devoid Burma is of the exclusiveness of

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CHAPTER X

'Let his life be kindness, his conduct righteousness; then in the fulness of gladness he will make an end of grief.'— Dammapada. During his lifetime, that long lifetime that remained to him after he had found the light, Gaudama the Buddha gathered round him many disciples. They came to learn from his lips of that truth which he had found, and they remained near him to practise that life which alone can lead unto the Great Peace. From time to time, as occasion arose, the teacher laid down precept

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CHAPTER XI

'The restrained in hand, restrained in foot, restrained in speech, of the greatest self-control. He whose delight is inward, who is tranquil and happy when alone—him they call "mendicant."'— Acceptance into the Monkhood. Besides being the ideal of the Buddhists, the monk is more: he is the schoolmaster of all the boys. It must be remembered that this is a thing aside from his monkhood. A monk need not necessarily teach; the aim and object of the monkhood is, as I have written in the last chapter

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CHAPTER XII

Down below my house, in a grove of palms near the river, was a little rest-house. It was but a roof and a floor of teak boarding without any walls, and it was plainly built. It might have held, perhaps, twenty people; and here, as I strolled past in the evening when the sun was setting, I would see two or three old men sitting with beads in their hands. They were making their devotions, saying to themselves that the world was all trouble, all weariness, and that there was no rest anywhere except

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CHAPTER XIII

The three months of the rains, from the full moon of July to the full moon of October, is the Buddhist Lent. It was during these months that the Buddha would retire to some monastery and cease from travelling and teaching for a time. The custom was far older even than that—so old that we do not know how it arose. Its origin is lost in the mists of far-away time. But whatever the beginning may have been, it fits in very well with the habits of the people; for in the rains travelling is not easy.

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CHAPTER XIV

'Her cheek is more beautiful than the dawn, her eyes are deeper than the river pools; when she loosens her hair upon her shoulders, it is as night coming over the hills.'— Burmese Love-Song. If you were to ask a Burman 'What is the position of women in Burma?' he would reply that he did not know what you meant. Women have no position, no fixed relation towards men beyond that fixed by the fact that women are women and men are men. They differ a great deal in many ways, so a Burman would say; men

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CHAPTER XV

Marriage is not a religious ceremony among the Burmese. Religion has no part in it at all; as religion has refrained from interfering with Government, so does it in the relations of man and wife. Marriage is purely a worldly business, like entering into partnership; and religion, the Buddhist religion, has nothing to do with such things. Those who accept the teachings of the great teacher in all their fulness do not marry. Indeed, marriage is not a ceremony at all. It is strange to find that the

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CHAPTER XVI

'You know, thakin,' said a man to me, 'that we say sometimes that women cannot attain unto the great deliverance, that only men will come there. We think that a woman must be born again as a man before she can enter upon the way that leads to heaven.' 'Why should that be so?' I asked. 'I have looked at the life of the Buddha, I have read the sacred books, and I can find nothing about it. What makes you think that?' He explained it in this way: 'Before a soul can attain deliverance it must renoun

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CHAPTER XVII

'They are to each other as a burning poison falling into a man's eye.'— Burmese saying. I remember a night not so long ago; it was in the hot weather, and I was out in camp with my friend the police-officer. It was past sunset, and the air beneath the trees was full of luminous gloom, though overhead a flush still lingered on the cheek of the night. We were sitting in the veranda of a Government rest-house, enjoying the first coolness of the coming night, and talking in disjointed sentences of m

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CHAPTER XVIII

'The ignorant commit sins in consequence of drunkenness, and also make others drunk.'— Acceptance into the Monkhood. The Buddhist religion forbids the use of all stimulants, including opium and other drugs; and in the times of the Burmese rule this law was stringently kept. No one was allowed to make, to sell, or to consume, liquors of any description. That this law was kept as firmly as it was was due, not to the vigilance of the officials, but to the general feeling of the people. It was a law

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CHAPTER XIX

'Not where others fail, or do, or leave undone—the wise should notice what himself has done, or left undone.'— Dammapada. A remarkable trait of the Burmese character is their unwillingness to interfere in other people's affairs. Whether it arises from their religion of self-culture or no, I cannot say, but it is in full keeping with it. Every man's acts and thoughts are his own affair, think the Burmans; each man is free to go his own way, to think his own thoughts, to act his own acts, as long

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CHAPTER XX

'Sooner shall the cleft rock reunite so as to make a whole, than may he who kills any living being be admitted into our society.'— Acceptance into the Monkhood. It is very noticeable throughout the bazaars of Burma that all the beef butchers are natives of India. No Burman will kill a cow or a bullock, and no Burman will sell its meat. It is otherwise with pork and fowls. Burmans may sometimes be found selling these; and fish are almost invariably sold by the wives of the fishermen. During the k

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CHAPTER XXI

All romance has died out of our woods and hills in England, all our fairies are dead long ago. Knowledge so far has brought us only death. Later on it will bring us a new life. It is even now showing us how this may be, and is bringing us face to face again with Nature, and teaching us to know and understand the life that there is about us. Science is telling us again what we knew long ago and forgot, that our life is not apart from the life about us, but of it. Everything is akin to us, and whe

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CHAPTER XXII

'The end of my life is near at hand; seven days hence, like a man who rids himself of a heavy load, I shall be free from the burden of my body.'— Death of the Buddha. There is a song well known to all the Burmese, the words of which are taken from the sacred writings. It is called the story of Ma Pa Da, and it was first told to me by a Burmese monk, long ago, when I was away on the frontier. It runs like this: In the time of the Buddha, in the city of Thawatti, there was a certain rich man, a me

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CHAPTER XXIII

'Life is like a great whirlpool wherein we are dashed to and fro by our passions.'— Saying of the Buddha. It is a hard teaching, this of the Buddha about death. It is a teaching that may appeal to the reason, but not to the soul, that when life goes out, this thing which we call 'I' goes out with it, and that love and remembrance are dead for ever. It is so hard a teaching that in its purity the people cannot believe it. They accept it, but they have added on to it a belief which changes the who

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CHAPTER XXIV

'The gate of that forest was Death.' There was a great forest. It was full of giant trees that grew so high and were so thick overhead that the sunshine could not get down below. And there were huge creepers that ran from tree to tree climbing there, and throwing down great loops of rope. Under the trees, growing along the ground, were smaller creepers full of thorns, that tore the wayfarer and barred his progress. The forest, too, was full of snakes that crept along the ground, so like in their

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CHAPTER XXV

This is the end of my book. I have tried always as I wrote to remember the principles that I laid down for myself in the first chapter. Whether I have always done so I cannot say. It is so difficult, so very difficult, to understand a people—any people—to separate their beliefs from their assents, to discover the motives of their deeds, that I fear I must often have failed. My book is short. It would have been easy to make a book out of each chapter, to write volumes on each great subject that I

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