The Earth Is All One Censer, And Myriads
Of Frogs Are Making The Haze Ring.
It is too warm to do more than to sit
on a stone and watch the eyes that, having seen all things, see no
more - the down-dropped eyes, the forward droop of the head, and the
colossal simplicity of the folds of the robe over arm and knee.
Thus,
and in no other fashion, did Buddha sit in the-old days when Ananda
asked questions and the dreamer began to dream of the lives that lay
behind him ere the lips moved, and as the Chronicles say: 'He told a
tale.' This would be the way he began, for dreamers in the East tell
something the same sort of tales to-day: 'Long ago when Devadatta was
King of Benares, there lived a virtuous elephant, a reprobate ox, and a
King without understanding.' And the tale would end, after the moral had
been drawn for Ananda's benefit: 'Now, the reprobate ox was such an one,
and the King was such another, but the virtuous elephant was I, myself,
Ananda.' Thus, then, he told the tales in the bamboo grove, and the
bamboo grove is there to-day. Little blue and gray and slate robed
figures pass under its shadow, buy two or three joss-sticks, disappear
into the shrine, that is, the body of the god, come out smiling, and
drift away through the shrubberies. A fat carp in a pond sucks at a
fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little worldly kiss.
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