Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [10]
There are two parallel but conflicting quests in the novel: Kim’s search for his father’s regiment, which leads to the Great Game, and the lama’s search for the sacred River of the Arrow, which leads to enlightenment. Kim must choose between them. The father-son relationship of the celibate monk and orphaned boy provides a moving contrast as well as a close bond. Kim is intelligent, resourceful, and adventurous; the lama is hopelessly impractical, dependent, and unworldly. The protean Kim constantly changes; the lama remains the same.
Kipling frequently states that the lama is deep in meditation, considering vast matters and illuminating knowledge with brilliant insight. The lama’s ascetic holiness inspires the respect of the native characters. But Kipling never reveals the insights of the intellectually limited lama, who (like many holy men) merely repeats the same old formulaic phrases. Instead of profound perceptions, he offers vague abstractions like Desire, Wheel, Way, Enlightenment, Search, and Cause of Things that emphasize his detachment from the world. One authority on Buddhism, skeptical of this superstitious tradition, defines “Primitive Lamaism... as a priestly mixture of Sivaite mysticism, magic and Indo-Tibetan demonolatry, overlaid by a thin varnish of Mahayana [search for salvation] Buddhism.”16
The lama seeks the River to free himself from the Wheel, and these two symbols also structure the book. He follows the endless flow of the Ganges as it runs parallel to the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Benares, and repeats the circular motion of the Wheel as he travels from the Himalayas to the flatland, returns to the mountains of Kashmir, and then circles down to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. When he finally finds the River he goes into a trance, nearly drowns himself in it, and has to be rescued by Hurree, who pulls him back into the real world. If the River of the Arrow really existed, it certainly would have been discovered during previous millennia and become a holy place for pilgrims. It’s worth noting that Colonel Creighton helps control India by surveying and cartography, while the lama finds the River by spiritual intuition and without the aid of a map.
The lama actually pays for Kim’s Western education at St. Xavier‘s, which separates them for most of three years and propels Kim into the Great Game. Despite his extensive discipleship, Kim learns nothing from the lama. What the lama calls Illusion is for Kim the only Reality. He even takes the unwitting lama away from his search for the River, which they know is on the plains, and into the mountains for counterespionage. When the Russian spy strikes the lama and tears his sacred chart, the lama—in a poignant scene—experiences the anguish of repentance for succumbing to the rage he thought he had transcended and the desire for retribution that defiles his entire existence: “ ‘I have come near to great evil, chela.... I was tempted to loose the bullet; and truly, in Tibet there would have been a heavy and a slow death for them’ ”(p.237)
At the end of the novel the lama finds salvation—“ ‘the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free’ ” (p. 277)—for both himself and for Kim. But as a nonpolitical foreigner the lama has no strong claim on Kim’s traditional fidelity to the Muslims of Lahore, and the chela can leave the guru without feeling he has also abandoned India. As the lama finally frees himself from the Wheel, Kim—expressing