The Pilgrim Kamanita/Chapter 24
Kamanita followed them long with his eyes and wandered. And then he wondered at his wonder.
"How does it happen that everything here seems so strange to me? If I belong to this place, why does not everything appear perfectly natural? But every new thing I see is a puzzle and fills me with astonishment. For example, this odour that now floats past me so suddenly? How absolutely different it is from all other flower scents here—much fuller and more powerful, attracting and disquieting at the same time. Where can it come from? But where do I myself come from? It seems to me as though I had been, but a short time ago, a mere nothing. Or did I have an existence? Only not here? If so, where? And how have I come here?"
While he revolved these questions in his mind his body had risen up, without his perceiving it, from the meadow, and he was already floating onward—though not in a direction taken by any of the others. He made his way upwards towards a depression in the crest of the hill. As he passed over it he was greeted by a yet more powerful breath of that new and strange perfume.
Kamanita, however, flew onward.
Beyond the hill the neighbourhood lost something of its charm. The show of flowers was scantier, the shrubbery darker, the groves more deer, the rocks more forbidding and higher. Herds of gazelles grazed there, but only in a few solitary instances was one of the Blest to be seen.
The valley became narrower and ended in a cleft, and here the perfume grew yet stronger. Ever more rapid became his flight, ever more naked, steeper, and higher did the rocky walls close around him till an opening was no longer to be seen.
Then the ravine made a couple of sharp turns and opened suddenly.
Round about Kamanita extended a deep, pit-like valley shut in by towering malachite rocks which seemed to reach the heavens. In the midst of the valley stood the wonder-tree. Trunk and branches were of smooth, red coral, slightly more yellow the red of the crisp foliage, amid which blossoms of a deep crimson glowed and burned.
Over the pinnacles of the rocks and the summit of the tree rose the deep blue sky in which not a single cloud was to be seen. Nor did the music of the genii penetrate in any appreciable degree to this spot—what still trembled in the air seemed to be but a memory of melodies heard in the long past.
There were but three colours to be seen in the valley; the ultramarine blue of the heavens, the malachite green of the rocks, the coral red of the tree. And only one perfume—that mysterious odour, so unlike all others, of the crimson flowers which had led Kamanita thither.
Almost immediately the wonderful nature of that perfume began to show itself.
As Kamanita inhaled it here, in the dense form in which it filled the whole basin, his consciousness became suddenly quickened. It overflowed and broke through the barriers which had been raised about him from the time of his awakening in the pond till the present.
His past life lay open before him.
He saw the hall of the potter where he had sat in conversation with that foolish Buddhistic monk; he saw the little lane in Rajagriha through which he had hurried and the cow tearing towards him—then the horrified faces round about and the yellow-clad monks. And he saw the forests and the country roads of his pilgrimage, his palace, and his two wives, the courtesans of Ujjeni, the robbers, the grove of Krishna, and the Terrace of the Sorrowless with Vasitthi, his father's house, and the children's room.
And behind that he saw another life, and yet another, and still another, and ever others, as one sees the line of trees on a country road till the trees become points and the points blend into one strip of shadow.
At this, his brain began to reel.
And at once he found himself in the cleft again like a leaf that is driven by the wind. For, the first time, no one can bear the perfume of the Coral Tree for long, and the instinct of self-preservation bears every one thence at the first sign of dizziness.
As he, by and by, moved more quietly through the open valley, Kamanita pondered: "Now I understand why the white robe said she imagined I had not yet been to the Coral Tree. For I certainly could not imagine then what they meant by 'dream-pictures'; but now I know, for in that other life I have seen such. And I also know now why I am here. I wanted to visit the Buddha in the Mango Grove beside Rajagriha. Of course that intention was frustrated by my sudden and violent death, but my good intentions have been looked on favourably, and so I have reached this place of bliss as though I had sat at his feet and had died in his blessed doctrine. So my pilgrimage has not been in vain."
Very soon Kamanita reached the pond again, where he let himself down upon his red lotus flower like a bird that returns to its nest.