A Fallen Idol

THE PROLOGUE In the cool of an early morning, more than a hundred years ago, an elderly priest was sitting under the pilastered portico of a little temple, just outside the village of Chandra-gurry, in Southern Mysore. It was the ordinary village of the place and period, fortified by a low mud wall, and consisting of lines of two-storied houses, gay with broad vertical stripes of red and white, and roofed with tile or ragged Palmyra leaves. On three sides it was surrounded by peepul and tamarind groves, and level plantations of rice, cotton, and millet, intersected by gleaming water-channels; on the other, the ground rose, by gradual slopes and plateaux, with stretches of velvety grass and stately trees, towards the rugged heights beyond. The temple stood on a knoll at the head of the first of these slopes — a graceful building, with its cluster of snow-white domes arranged in pyramid form, crowned by an elaborately carved pinnacle, upon which rose a pole, ending in a gilded ball. It was not an orthodox Hindu temple — that was down below, a great staring structure of red granite dominating the humble roofs of the village — it was the place of worship for such portion of the population as belonged to the sect of Jains. The Jains profess a perverted form of Buddhism, under which reverence is claimed for no less than seventy-two earthly Buddhas — namely, twenty-four of a past era, twenty-four of the present, and twenty-four who are still to come. These Buddhas they call “Jinas,” “Arhats,” or “Tirthankars;” they are saints who have lived on earth as mere mortals, but who have vanquished vice and virtue, and obtained nirvana, or emancipation from further existence on earth. The last saint of the present era was Mahâvîra, who was translated more than two thousand years ago. To him this particular temple had been dedicated, and his image consequently was the largest and the most luxuriously installed in the idol chamber, where each of the twenty-four was represented in effigy. The temple was the private property of the old priest, Acharya Chick, who, though subject to the supervision and control of the head guru of the Jains, was free in most respects to conduct his ministrations as he pleased. Chick, however, being a good and earnest old man, with the simplicity of a child, was strictly conscientious in the performance of his duties, took an honest pride in the appointments of his temple, and derived no more than a modest livelihood from his priestly calling. As he sat outside on the stone bench, where he was accustomed to collect his thoughts for the service which began the working day, he was troubled by doubts and perplexities which had only of late begun to assail his tranquil faith. Quite recently he had been called upon to include a new saint in his Pantheon, and to one of his conservative instincts, this was disturbing. It came about in this wise. Some twenty years or so before, a lad had run wild about the village bazaar; he was of unknown parentage, and adopted by one of the workers in brass who formed a section of the inhabitants and were Jains to a man. There was nothing, to an uninitiated eye, to distinguish him from other naked children, unless it was the superior force of will and ingenuity which procured him the leadership in all mischievous enterprises, until one day, when the guru from the Jain headquarters at Belligola came over on his periodical visit of inspection and made a startling discovery. It was two thousand years, as has been said, since the last tirthankar of the present era had passed away, and the first of the succeeding one was already considerably overdue. Now the guru had perceived that this expected tirthankar had actually taken up his mortal habitation in the body of this lad! There could be no possible mistake on this point, for the body bore every one of the mystic signs and marks which denoted his high mission. This revelation, as might be expected, made all the difference in the world to the youth’s prospects. For he could not be left to develop unaided — since he might conceivably fail, and then all the business of incarnating a tirthankar would have to be gone through over again; he must be trained, and trained carefully. So they put him under fit teachers, and the mystic name of Chalanka was conferred upon him, and he studied natural magic, in which he soon became a proficient, at the feet of an eminent yogi of great sanctity and uncleanliness. It was said, indeed, that Chalanka did not invariably make the highest use of his occult knowledge, and that his miracles, to the end of his days, rather resembled the more ill-natured kind of practical joke; but these miracles will have that tendency when the saint is enthusiastic and young Chalanka grew up strong, bold, by no means uncomely, and in time he passed his novitiate, becoming a yati or ascetic of the first class; he cut off his hair, wore robes of a tawny hue — which became much tawnier — and confined his personal luggage to a bundle of peacock’s feathers and an earthen pot. He devoted his energies to contemplating the abstract, which he did with perseverance and entire success; he overcame all human passions and infirmities for that was expected from him — and he trained himself to regard his body as a bubble, though it need hardly be said it was a bubble which had no connection whatever with soap. And from time to time he stalked through the Jain quarter of the village, blowing a chank [conch] shell to attract attention, and soliciting the alms of the charitable, and occasionally his wanderings led him unconsciously around the compound of the big Brahman temple, much to the annoyance of the priests and the amusement of the dancing girls. Years went on, and his wisdom was pronounced ripe for gathering; he had his remaining hairs plucked out by the roots; he unrobed at his simple meals, and disciples were told off to attend upon him, to hearken to his discourses and store them up for future transmission. Unfortunately no records have been preserved of his doctrines, which seem to have been found too complicated or too advanced to be divulged at present. All that is known of him at this stage is that he inspired his disciples with a salutary fear. Another period elapsed, and Chalanka dismissed his grateful disciples, and established himself in a sort of hermitage up amongst the rocks, where he was to remain for years, silent, in self-centred contemplation. He was not often to be seen there by the curious, for he possessed the power of making himself invisible. Sometimes at night in the thicket near the Brahman temple a shadowy form was seen gliding and prowling, the projection from the holy hermit who sat like stone in the cell far above among the heights; sometimes, a fierce wild laugh rang out over the crags and cliffs, and those who heard knew then that Chalanka was in one of his holy frenzies, and would not have disturbed him for their lives. And then, in the most unforeseen way, he died. They found his corpse lying stiff and swollen at the foot of a precipice, which, had he been an ordinary person, it would have been said he had fallen over. Now nobody had expected him to die for years to come, still less to cease from existence with such an entire absence of parade; but he was the first of the new era, and consequently entitled to make his own precedents. He was obviously dead, and the only thing to be done was to burn his body and cast the ashes into water. Chalanka’s untimely end brought to the surface a question which many had secretly entertained in his lifetime. Was he, in sober truth, a tirthankar at all? Compared with his predecessors, he did not show to great advantage; his fame was limited, his supernatural feats were of a low and even pettifogging order, and he had enriched the faith with no fresh precepts of any value. And those, too, who had had opportunities of observing him (amongst whom was Acharya Chick himself) could not but see certain shortcomings — a disposition to arrogance, for instance, a hankering after admiration, traces of greed, unscrupulousness, cruelty, which, without being serious in themselves, were slightly inconsistent with a complete conquest of the flesh. Upon the whole, a dead man has perhaps a better chance of being canonised if the matter is postponed for a hundred years, as in the Roman Catholic faith, than when, as here, his claims must be settled at his decease; but none of Chalanka’s co-religionists chose to play the advocatus diaboli in this case, feeling that his admission amongst the Jain divinities would reflect distinction upon the village and temple, and not improbably have a stimulating effect upon the brass-founding trade, in which they were all largely interested. And the head guru, to whom the point was referred, not unnaturally backed his original opinion; Chalanka was a genuine arhat, the first of a new order, and, as such, he was entitled to the reverence of all devout Jains, and an image must consequently be set up in his honour, and assigned a niche in the temple of his native village. The guru’s decision was of course final, the idol-carver was set to work, and soon produced a small seated image, which was as faithful a representation of the real Chalanka as could be expected or desired. The new idol had only spent one night under the temple roof on the morning which witnessed Acharya Chick’s perplexity beneath the portico — a perplexity of which it was the unconscious cause. For the worthy Jain, though toy humble-minded to think of questioning, even to himself, the wisdom of his superior, could not consider his latest deity an acquisition, His little Pantheon had been quite large enough before; he was too old to relish having a new object of veneration thrust upon him in this way. And so, in apportioning the day’s offerings on the previous evening, he had, without perhaps any conscious intention, reserved the least tempting fruits and the more faded flowers as the share of the new comer; and now he was not quite certain whether he felt more self-reproach or repugnance as the time drew near when he must again enter the inner shrine. However, these unpleasant meditations of his were to receive as unpleasant an interruption. From his seat he could command a view of the winding path which led up the knoll from the village gates, and now he saw advancing a tall and stately figure, in which his eyes were keen enough to recognise his bitterest enemy, Ram Chunga, the Brahman who presided over the massive temple where Brahma, and Siva and Parvati, and Geneswara, their son, were worshipped. He was evidently coming to the Jains’ temple; he was almost at the palisade already, and Chick felt a certain flutter at the prospect of such a visitor, much as might a Dissenting minister of the old school on seeing a shovel hat and a pair of gaiters coming down his garden path. The minister feels he has as good a right to the title of “reverend” as the bishop; but then, he is only too well aware that the bishop is of a different opinion. So Acharya Chick claimed to be of the Brahman caste, and had an uncomfortable suspicion all the time that Ram Chunga would probably deny his right to any caste worth belonging to. He thought he could guess the other’s errand. It had come to Ram Chunga’s ears that the Jain temple contained, as such buildings frequently did, an exceedingly handsome image of Siva, and on one or two occasions when the rival priests had met in the bazaar the Brahman had made offers to purchase an idol which, as he urged, could be but out of place in an alien sanctuary. That Ram Chunga had any real wish to acquire the Siva was more than the Jain could believe; he was probably acting out of pure aggravation, or with a tyrannical desire to dictate and domineer, which Chick was determined to withstand, even while his mild and gentle nature shrank from the impending wrangle.