Island - Aldous Huxley [102]
“But one has to run the risk, one has to make a beginning. And luckily no one’s immortal. The people who’ve been conditioned to swindling and bullying and bitterness will all be dead in a few years. Dead, and replaced by men and women brought up in the new way. It happened with us; it can happen with you.”
“It can happen,” he agreed. “But in the context of H-bombs and nationalism and fifty million more people every single year, it almost certainly won’t.”
“You can’t tell till you try.”
“And we shan’t try as long as the world is in its present state. And, of course, it will remain in its present state until we do try. Try and, what’s more, succeed at least as well as you’ve succeeded. Which brings me back to my original question. What happens when good, good, good discovers that, even in Pala, there’s a lot of bad, bad, bad? Don’t the children get some pretty unpleasant shocks?”
“We try to inoculate them against those shocks.”
“How? By making things unpleasant for them while they’re still young?”
“Not unpleasant. Let’s say real. We teach them love and confidence, but we expose them to reality, reality in all its aspects. And then give them responsibilities. They’re made to understand that Pala isn’t Eden or the Land of Cockaigne. It’s a nice place all right. But it will remain nice only if everybody works and behaves decently. And meanwhile the facts of life are the facts of life. Even here.”
“What about the facts of life in those bloodcurdling snakes I met halfway up the precipice? You can say ‘good, good, good’ as much as you like; but snakes will still bite.”
“You mean, they still can bite. But will they in fact make use of their ability?”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“Look over there,” said Shanta. He turned his head and saw that what she was pointing at was a niche in the wall behind him. Within the niche was a stone Buddha, about half life-size, seated upon a curiously grooved cylindrical pedestal and surmounted by a kind of lead-shaped canopy that tapered down behind him into a broad pillar. “It’s a small replica,” she went on, “of the Buddha in the Station Compound—you know, the huge figure by the lotus pool.”
“Which is a magnificent piece of sculpture,” he said. “And the smile really gives one an inkling of what the Beatific Vision must be like. But what has it got to do with snakes?”
“Look again.”
He looked. “I don’t see anything specially significant.”
“Look harder.”
The seconds passed. Then, with a shock of surprise, he noticed something strange and even disquieting. What he had taken for an oddly ornamented cylindrical pedestal had suddenly revealed itself as a huge coiled snake. And that downward tapering canopy under which the Buddha was sitting was the expanded hood, with the flattened head at the center of its leading edge, of a giant cobra.
“My God!” he said. “I hadn’t noticed. How unobservant can one be?”
“Is this the first time you’ve seen the Buddha in this context?”
“The first time. Is there some legend?”
She nodded. “One of my favorites. You know about the Bodhi Tree, of course?”
“Yes, I know about the Bodhi Tree.”
“Well, that wasn’t the only tree that Gautama sat under at the time of his Enlightenment. After the Bodhi Tree, he sat for seven days under a banyan, called the Tree of the Goatherd. And after that he moved on to the Tree of Muchalinda.”
“Who was Muchalinda?”
“Muchalinda was the King of the Snakes and, being a god, he knew what was happening. So when the Buddha sat down under his tree, the Snake King crawled out of his hole, yards and yards of him, to pay Nature’s homage to Wisdom. Then a great storm blew up from the west. The divine cobra wrapped its coils round the more than divine man’s body, spread its hood over his head and, for the seven days his contemplation lasted, sheltered the Tathagata from the wind and rain. So there he sits to this day, with cobra beneath him, cobra above him, conscious simultaneously of cobra and the Clear Light and their ultimate identity.”
“How very different,” said Will, “from our view of snakes!”
“And