Golden Earth (9 page)

A
S FAR AS
the conventional sights went Mandalay was a town to be dealt with in summary fashion. Apart from a gaudy fantasy of a palace, a few monasteries and the Arakan Pagoda, it had never contained anything worth seeing; and now, after the passing of the bombers, the palace had vanished as completely as if it had never existed.

On the morning of the second day, Tok Galé took me to see the Arakan Pagoda. This was built to enshrine the great Mahamuni image which for so many centuries had been the palladium of the kingdom of Arakan, as well as the most important of the Buddhist sacred objects. The peculiar sanctity of this image lies in its acceptance by Buddhists as a contemporary likeness of the Master. It was cast in brass when the great teacher visited Arakan, at that time a remote Indian kingdom. The work was done supernaturally by none other than Sakra, the old Hindu Lord of Paradise, who had become converted to Buddhism. When completed, the portrait, which was indistinguishable from the original, was
embraced
by the Buddha, and thereafter emitted an unearthly refulgence, and actually spoke a few words. Naturally, its possession was coveted by many pious kings, in particular the greatest of Burmese historical figures, Anawrahta, who organised a large-scale raid into Arakan with the object of removing this along with sacred relics to his capital at Pagan. The king’s purpose was frustrated by the size and weight of the image: the white elephant which accompanied his army, and was regarded as the only suitable means of transport, could not carry it.

It was finally obtained in 1784 by Bodawpaya, who is declared, in an inscription at the pagoda, to have drawn the image to its present resting place by the charm of his piety. In fact an expeditionary corps of thirty
thousand men was involved, after elaborate precautions to deprive the image of its magic power had first been taken by Burmese wizards disguised as pilgrims.

I had been told that only in Mandalay would real Burmese works of art, woodcarvings, bronzes and ivories, be found; and that the colonnades of the Arakan Pagoda would be the most likely place in Mandalay itself. As in the Shwedagon at Rangoon, the roofed-over approaches were lined with stalls selling devotional objects; flowers, votive images and triangular gongs. Such carvings as there were among the trayfuls of toy jeeps and tanks and hideous Buddhas, seemed to me the crudest and most barbarously ugly objects I had ever seen. Burma is a land where art has never freed itself from the thraldom of religious or magic motives. The Burmese never grew up spiritually, as did the Chinese, nor allowed the philosophical content of their religion to free itself from its trappings of superstition. As a result their creative energy was diverted into the primitive and unrewarding channels of pagoda-building, from which they expected to derive not mere aesthetic pleasure, but a substantial spiritual reward. As a minor adjunct to this perpetual heaping up of piles of brickwork, there was some skill displayed in woodcarving and the application of lacquer; but when it came to the graphic arts no Burmese painter of monastery frescoes could approach the most primitive of the old Italians, just as no worker in ivory could compare with the least of China’s anonymous masters.

Notwithstanding the impressive attribution of the Mahamuni image, the result, regarded as a work of art, is negligible; a mere seated idol, in the lifeless convention which is still adhered to in most parts of the Buddhist world. An attempt at portraiture would probably have been sacrilegious. What we have here is not a divine teacher but the stylisation of a fat man, with heavy, inert features which have suffered further coarsening by the gold-leaf applied by the faithful.

The toleration of Buddhists – however debased their particular brand of the religion – is limitless. Anywhere in the Muslim world a
kafir
would have been chased by mouth-foaming fanatics from the precincts of so holy a place. But here, whatever the condition of one’s soul, one
spread no contamination. A permanent crowd was gathered before the railings of the shrine behind which the twelve feet high image brooded somnolently, but they were quite ready to make room for a not completely human foreigner to take a photograph. One sophisticate even questioned the feasibility of getting a result in so dim a religious light. Whatever one’s creed or colour the shrine attendants would accept a bouquet of flowers which could be bought at a nearby stall for a rupee. Gold-leaf was sold for five rupees a packet and the purchaser was entitled to apply it himself, clambering as reverently as possible up the sacred stomach to reach the face. Pilgrims of many races waited their turn to perform this illustrious task. Outstanding were a contingent of Tibetans of the kind that wander about Burma selling gems and hideous medicinal concoctions. There they stood in grimy purple togas; their faces unwashed, gentle, set in masks of beatitude, packets of gold-leaf gripped tightly in their hands. Laboriously they had trudged the roads of Burma, selling their rubies, their bezoars, their serpents’ tongues and bats’ blood. Now they would squander their gains in one unforgettable devotional spree.

Out in the courtyard, stacked haphazardly against a wall, we found the six survivors of the thirty magic images of Ayuthia, captured by Bayinnaung when he went to Siam for white elephants, and took and sacked the Siamese capital. These potent bronze monsters, triple-headed elephants and snarling, armour-clad demons, were now, at least, put to a useful purpose by Burmese children who played hide-and-seek about their legs.

The brief, routine tour of the capital is incomplete without a visit to the leper asylum. We were received in a large, dim room in the ranch-like administrative building by one of the handful of Franciscan nuns who are left to conduct this work. The sister was a Maltese woman who one day, when she was a girl of eighteen, and living in her native village, had felt the vocation. The call to surrender her life to the hardest of all forms of service was no mere emotional whim. Her first step, on abandoning her family and the comfortable trivialities of her home existence, was to
go to Italy to train as a nurse. After qualifying, she came, with resolve unabated, straight out to Mandalay where she had been ever since.

One by one the other sisters came silently into the room. They were all from the Mediterranean countries. All seemed to move in an aura of extraordinary simplicity, of other-worldliness, of embalmed youth. One, who came from Santander, was delighted to be able to speak a few words of Spanish for the first time for years. And then she seemed ashamed of having felt pleasure at this reminder of the world she had renounced and, excusing herself, she left the room. The sisters’ lingua-franca was French. The oldest of them, a vigorous old lady, had been there for fifty-two years. None of them had ever been infected, although in Colombo two members of their order had died of leprosy. The years had passed quickly for them, filled with hard work. By dint of concentrated prayer their hospital had come unscathed through the war, although bombs had fallen all round. Even the Japanese had respected them, and given them what help they could. Now, of course, things were worse – worse than
they had ever been. Dacoits had taken to breaking in, and stole their equipment and even the medicines.

Later we passed in sombre procession through the buildings where the patients were housed; the rooms, empty but for the row of cheerless beds; the leper faces, often contorted by the disease into apparent fury; the whispers of
‘bonjour ma mère’
– or sometimes only a voiceless mouthing – as we passed each bed. The children’s wards were inevitably the most pathetic. Sometimes the wistful faces were smooth and clean, sometimes frightfully ravaged. ‘This one may recover,’ said the Maltese sister, in her cool, even voice … ‘this one will not.’ Thus we passed along the ranks, hearing, as each pair of childish eyes was raised to ours, the dispassionate verdict, ‘death very soon now’, or ‘here there is a small chance’. ‘Before the end comes,’ said the sister, ‘we remove them to a separate building, where they will not upset the others. The sight is depressing to those who are not accustomed to it.’ The disease seemed to progress in a series of leaps with intervals of quiescence, the sister explained, and it was only in the crisis that accompanied the entering upon a new stage that the patients really suffered … then, and in the final agony. Thirty-five years of contact with disease and death in its most appalling form seemed to have raised the sister above ordinary emotional sympathy. She had become what was necessary, an efficiently working, charitable machine.

The hardest part of these lepers’ condition seemed to me the cruel boredom they must have suffered. All day long they lay still, sat up, even walked a little, surrendering themselves without distraction to the slow disintegration. There was nothing to take their mind off this death meted out to them over the years, to be dreadfully consummated in most cases only after the loss of all five senses. Once they had been allowed to stage occasional plays, but these for some reason to do with the unsuitability of the subjects, had been given up. The cinema, even if possible from the point of view of cost, was unthinkable because of the wordliness of the films.

It seemed that if the leper wished to surrender himself to the efficient care of the Christians, with the accompanying faint hope of a cure, he had also to be ready to submit to that adamantine virtue, that saint-like abstraction from the world in which only duty and meditation were permissible. If the lepers wanted to live like ordinary sinful humanity, there was nothing to stop them from leaving the asylum; but then of course that last tenuous hope of recovery had to be abandoned. Perhaps the sisters secretly believed that the disease had been a blessing in disguise, the opportunity to save valuable souls at the expense of worthless bodies.

The Burmese, of course, are more human about such things – more human, and less responsible. There are forty-two thousand registered lepers in Burma, most of whom continue to live in their villages with their families. Nothing is done for them except by foreign missionaries; probably because at the bottom of the Burmese mind lies the conviction that in this cruel state they are no more than righting an adverse balance of merit accumulated in previous existences. In this attitude is to be found, from the Western viewpoint, the main criticism of Buddhist practice. The performance of acts of charity is praiseworthy, but not nearly so much so as the building, or repair, of a pagoda. There were no public funds available to supply essential medicines or amenities for Mandalay’s lepers although seven hundred thousand rupees could be spent a month before on the cremation of a saintly individual called U Khanti whose work of merit had consisted of adding new pagodas to the already congested Mandalay Hill. But for all their deficiencies the Burmese do not in any way segregate or persecute the lepers. No medicines or treatment are forthcoming, but neither are the unfortunate creatures’ last years made miserable by an enforced monastic way of life.

Before we left, the sister showed us a remarkable piece of religious architecture. It seemed that when the bombings were taking place the nuns vowed, if the hospital were spared, to construct a miniature Lourdes. Shortly afterwards the war ended. There had been a prisoner of war camp in the neighbourhood, and the commanding officer, when approached, had lent them a number of Japanese prisoners to carry out the project. The Japanese had set to work with traditional vigour and
produced a miniature mountain of rocks and concrete, as steeply pinnacled as one in a Hiroshige woodcut. After that, with mounting enthusiasm, they had added a willow-pattern river with an appropriate bridge. The Japanese captain himself had undertaken to carve the statue of the Virgin, and it had been lovingly done, with just the faintest suggestion about it of a smiling, slant-eyed Kwannon, the Japanese goddess of mercy. From where we stood Mandalay Hill could be seen, frosted with its innumerable shrines. Few of them, surely, had been erected in more curious circumstances than this.

Of the citadel of Mandalay and its palace – the Centre of the Universe – nothing remained but the walls and moat. And it was here by the water’s edge, before the heat of the day had gathered, that, of all places in Mandalay, it was most agreeable to saunter. The gilded royal barges had gone and the moat was grown over with lotuses, and spangled with flowering aquatic plants. Children fished with bent pins from ruined causeways and girls came down continually with their petrol cans for water. Hoopoes popped in and out of holes in the willows, and
fishing-hawks
made occasional sallies over the water. Hundreds of small wading birds were emitting cheerful, chuckling cries as they stepped daintily from lotus leaf to lotus leaf. The deeply castellated red walls that formed the background to this genial scene, were no more forbidding than the barbican of a Highland hunting lodge; and the gatehouses and
defence-towers
, with their joss-house architecture and frantic profusion of carving, seemed hardly more serious in purpose than the battlemented Chinese bridge erected in St James’s Park in celebration of the Glorious Peace of 1814.

When in 1858 the foundations of the wall were laid, three carefully selected persons had been buried alive under each gatehouse, and one at each corner of the wall. Four more were entombed under the Lion Throne, and yet others at strategic points, scattered throughout the fortress. The grand total was fifty-two, a figure considered by the Board of Astrologers to err on the side of parsimony. They were taken from
all walks of life, and included the pregnant woman, indispensable to the composition of a satisfactory foundation-sacrifice. While this was happening, King Mindon, a kind of Burmese Edward the Confessor, was probably splitting hairs with his theologians over obscure scriptural passages. There was a comfortable dualism about the state religion as interpreted by the Burmese kings. The population was enjoined to follow the tenets of the purest form of Buddhism, which forbade the destruction of even the most noxious forms of life, but in matters of state policy the king fell back on his Court Brahmins, Indian specialists in statecraft and occult matters, who were always ready to agree that the means were justified by the end.