1.07.19. Book 7: 19. A Fragment from the Day

19. A FRAGMENT FROM THE DAY

THERE are some men whose influence is like dawn on mountain crags, that, passing over them, brings into swift beauty shapes and colours that slept before. Ragland was such a man. And the joy of dawn was his; his life had its nights, but never night that has no dawn, and there is the feel of the morning in the record of those years on the plains with Meadows and Fenn and the Indian brothers he loved so much.

"It is not beyond the power of His grace to keep us, all three of us, in the most perfect con­cord and love; and to render us continual helpers of each other’s peace and joy and strength and fruitfulness," he had written to the two before he joined them in India. And passing guests could not help noticing the uncommon love that bound the band together. They were one’d.

"Had we only such men everywhere we should have no divisions among us; they would be impossible," wrote a friend, and he tells how Ragland delighted in the good work of the others, their free Tamil, readiness in answer (as compared with his own difficulty in the language, so surely his prayer had been splen­didly answered) and how he, the acknowledged leader, was servant of all. And the keen, dark eyes that watched the band every day and from all sides saw what pleased them well. The Tamil language scin­tillates with sayings about love and friendship. If love be, the impossible becomes possible. True friends are as flower and its scent, in­separable; as soul and body, as nail and flesh. They have caustic proverbs too, on the follies of silly friendships, and the perils of too close an intimacy where perfect affinity is not; never were clearer eyes than theirs. But they were satisfied now. These men lived as they talked. They were men of love.

It is not difficult for one who knows South India to walk through their day with them. There was the early start, always before star-­set, because only so can the villagers be reached before they leave home for their fields. So to get quiet alone it was needful to be up about three (2.45 was the usual rising hour during the journey south), and those of us who have had such an itinerating band staying with us well remember the sound of the little alarm clocks going off at three. Then came a cup of tea, and the regulation slices of toast, and plantains, and then at half-past four the start on foot or in bullock-carts or on ponies for the appointed villages. But one thing that matters has been missed. "In the morning, before setting out to preach, the brethren kneel together to ask for thoughts, words, fluency, skill, audiences not blasphemous or indifferent." So wrote one of those short-time guests.

Sunrise over the wide spaces of this land is always a wonder; but very soon to those out preaching the beauty seems to race into some­thing much less welcome, even pitiless, search­ing glare, and it is extraordinary how quickly this sun-glare sucks an Englishman’s strength; he may go on working, but the vigour in him is drained dry. Then, too, the people are engaged in their own affairs and, though there are always some who seem to have nothing to do, not a great deal can be effected out of doors after the morning has well set in. So by half-past ten the camp is at breakfast, the curry and rice of the country; then comes rest, and, if there is energy for it, study and talk with people who come to the tent, till the afternoon begins to think of cooling; then tea and off again, and back for supper at sunset. And all the time, in and out of the day, winds that curiously woven, many-coloured thread of Hindu life; a thread dyed in no two parts of its long length alike, and yet always one, and indivisible. Nothing in our superficial religious divisions can approach the varieties of creed that obtain in this land, where two Hindus walking together in amity can truth­fully describe each other as fundamentally opposite in faith. And now, how can one best show a fragment of Ragland’s day to the reader who does not know India? Generalities mislead, so does too minute a morsel from the mosaic. And yet perhaps one half-hour from Ragland’s certainly usual morning may show this India of our tale as clearly as anything can, and India at her best.

Morning by morning as the men walked through the open country, just before sunrise, in the twilight deified as one of the twin sons of the sky, the evening twilight being the other twin, they came upon the worship of the caste­-men, going on at that hour all over India. When first you come upon this worship, which is always performed by any convenient water, stream or pond, you withdraw hastily, feeling intrusive; but you soon learn that you might as well be a crow, for all the notice the worshipper takes of you; you are not in the least disturbing. So you get into the way of drawing near, and watching with a kind of longing, loving sym­pathy, and this is what you see and what Ragland saw uncounted numbers of times. A man sitting in a crouching position by the shallow water, murmuring an invocation to the Ganges, which for the moment this small water personates. He has bathed and is now begin­ning his ceremonies. And first he marks his forehead (and if he be a worshipper of Siva his breast and arms) with the signs which show not only his sect but his particular cult of that sect, and then he ties his long wisp of hair into a tight knot lest a stray hair, now regarded as unclean, should fall into the water.

Follows the sipping of water, poured from the right hand shaped like a cup into the mouth. This is for interior purification. He invokes his god as he sips, and thus cleansed from (cere­monial) impurity begins his worship proper. At first it is difficult to understand and follow the movements in the ritual called "The Regulation of the Breath." But it is never varied, and gradually becomes clear. The right nostril is pressed with the thumb, and the breath expelled through the left. Then the order is reversed. This movement is repeated with the forefinger. Then both thumb and forefinger are used, and the breath held. This fixes the wandering thoughts, and prepares the mind for prayer.

Follows that part of the ritual about which so much has been written, the repetition of the sacred Syllable OM. (A. U. M., Agni, Vayu, Mitra. Fire, Wind, Sun; or Agni, Fire, Varuna, watery atmosphere, investing sky, and Marut, Wind.) Set in the blue sea at the Cape is a little old grey temple. From that temple, up through the plains of this mighty land, over the snow mountains, through Tibet to the Chinese frontiers, wherever Hindus or Buddhists be, that same Syllable rises from myriads and myriads this day, and will this night. It is a fact that lays hold upon the imagination, and among all the many byways of Indian knowledge none is more alluring than that which leads to the Aryan uplands where first that Syllable was created. After the repetition there is a pause.

I do not know anything more heart-moving than what follows. Turning to the eastern sky the man says solemnly;

"Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the Vivifying Sun, may he enlighten our understanding."

It is the prayer that has risen from countless hearts through the dawns of three thousand years. "If the light of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of that mighty One." This (a line from the Bhagavad-Gita) is the truth at the heart of the ceremony. Blessed be the word that says, "The Being, whom, without knowing Him, you revere, Him I now proclaim to you." For among those myriads did not some revere? And now the second part of the ritual is about to begin. First comes that daily self-­baptism, the sprinkling of water on the head, which accompanies a prayer for vigour and strength. There is one great Iine in this prayer: "We come to you (the waters) for cleansing from all guilt." And another is a petition to be preserved from sin and forgiven for it. Yet another prayer, called the Sin­-annihilation, follows, which prayer, repeated three times, is believed to remove all sin. But sin, as it is generally understood in India, is not what we mean by the word. At this point for a moment it is as if creation held her breath and watched. Colours kindle and spread, clouds that see the advancing sun flame suddenly, and he is here. Then, just as the keen, curved, flashing line appears above the horizon, there is a sparkle of water as the worshipper throws it three times into the air towards the east, an act of homage to the eternal miracle of day. The next part of his worship is less appealing to the Western mind; it is called the Imposition of Fingers, and stands upon a belief that each part and organ of the body is per­vaded by a separate essence of some divinity, the highest in order occupying the head. Still, nothing that concerns a fellow-man can be void of interest to his fellow, and so one watches the complicated ceremonial of the touching of various parts of the body with the fingers of the right hand, regarded as sacred to Vishnu, and listens to the great prayer to the sun again, and notes the hidden hand (for the act must not be seen) fumbling at the rosary keeping count of the 108 repetitions of that same prayer. As the man rises, stands facing the sun that streams in great waves of light to him, he uses the old, old name Daniel must have heard many a time, Mitra, the Mitra of Persian tales and Vedic hymns; he chants an invocation to him, and then, "Hail, brilliant Dawns," an invocation to the dawns of all time, and looking hack over his own short day, he names his forbears, and once more invoking the God of gods, "May the one Supreme Lord of the universe be pleased with this my morning Service," he ends by sipping water for the cleansing for the inward man. Can we ever grow accustomed to such a scene? The sunlight is shining over the earth, the little stream where it all happened, or the poor little pond if such it were, is like molten gold, and the whole world sings. And the man? India has her spiritual men, here and there one finds them. God has not left Him­self without witnesses among this people. There are those who "touch the fringes of the outer stars." But let no one be deceived by the beauty and, in parts, the simple dignity of worship such as this. Among the sins ex­plicitly mentioned in the prayer for forgiveness and preservation is one which is deified now and has been for very many centuries. It is round the temples, if anywhere in the land, that the old Dragon swings the scaly horror of his folded tail-a line that says all that need be said. The man who has just chanted words which, sin­cerely meant, would have led him straight to God, smiles indulgently at you as at one hardly accountable when you try to meet him on the ground of this prayer. And if hard pressed, he would say as a young ascetic who went through the ritual to-day said, when faced with the sin for which he had asked forgiveness but which he had not the least intention of forsaking, "Sin, what is sin? A word, a breath, mere maya, delusion." And he stretched himself, touching himself delicately with his right hand, "How can I sin, I not being I, but Brahma?"

Here, then, is a fragment of Ragland’s day. With such men he talked lovingly, his wise mind meeting them in sympathy; for no modern impression is more unjust than that which imagines the "old" missionary as inevitably ignorant and unsympathetic; but then, as now, very few of these to whom one might expect the appeal to come with most alluring force could bring themselves to believe that they needed anything. And with the uninstructed peasant whose foot would pollute the street where the other lived and whose horizon is bounded by the terrible horror of demons, he pleaded too, and here an invincible ignorance barred the way. But some­times the peasant believed and sometimes so did the scholar: the fruit was all hand-picked, and never made much show; for in this part of India there is very little true conversion in the mass, and Ragland was not out to pile numbers in reports, but to win souls for Jesus Christ. The day closed, the guest quoted before tells us, as we should have expected it would. "Can He fail to bless it who commanded it and encouraged us so to work? Will He not bless what has been done in Him and for Him? He does bless it; refreshes jaded spirits; gives energy, perseverance, hopefulness."