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rebuked myself for my prudishness: what business was it of mine, andwhat difference did it make? Did I want Simon to be a saint? I also made due allowance for the source of the information. It came from Manuela, who retailed gossip with such style that one was hardly conscious that that was what it was.
    Simon, Coral, Pete, Dao. And Alex. I looked at Alex. She was sitting cross-legged against the pine chest in which we kept Wellington boots, of which there were always an inexplicable number. She sat, small, neat and upright, smiling at her folded hands. It was obvious that in a period of heightened emotion I had greatly overestimated her problems: there could be nothing seriously wrong if that look of peace was on her face.
    Simon, Dao, Pete, Coral, Alex and me. Quietly, by doing almost nothing, we were going to change the world.
    The world was crooked. The world was corrupt. The world was cruel. These things we took as axiomatic. However, unlike most groups which have taken it upon themselves to judge the moral standards of their contemporaries, we did not assume that the evil could only be eradicated by divine intervention. We believed, as do Buddhists, that evil is suffering and can be avoided, and that the natural inclination of man is towards good, which is happiness. We would withdraw initially from the world, not because we feared defilement, but in order to resolve our own problems, the better to help the world.
    â€˜It’s like dropping a pebble into a pond,’ said Simon on the first evening. ‘The ripples spread out. Every action sends out ripples. Thought sends out ripples. When I drop a pebble, I have no idea where those ripples will go. Bad thought, bad action, where the ripples start, and ten thousand miles away the ripples end with human beings setting fire to other human beings’ children.’
    If the people who rule the world could listen to this man, I thought, there could not be a Vietnam.
    â€˜So my thought, my action, must be pure,’ continued Simon. ‘If I do the right thing, the straight thing, there are no harmful ripples. In a sense I have not “done” anything: I have simplymade an appropriate response. Now, a group of people consistently behaving in that way would create, in this chaotic and crooked world, a little pocket of stillness and sanity, an area where, in the best sense, nothing happened. And perhaps the ripples of that stillness would spread. And in time, perhaps, the world itself would be changed.’
    I stared at my feet, too moved, too dazzled by his vision to meet another person’s eyes. There was silence in the room for a long time.
    â€˜Doing nothing’ turned out, in the tradition of all the best paradoxes, to be very hard work. This was only to be expected, since it entailed breaking the habit of a lifetime. It involved, for a start, a transparent honesty in one’s dealings with other people. Honesty not merely in telling the truth, but in refraining from the minor manipulations, evasions and insincerities that constitute probably nine-tenths of ordinary social intercourse. I found it at first a constant struggle to anticipate and repress these verbal manoeuvres which had become so natural to me that often I was not conscious of the deviousness of what I was saying until some time after I had said it. But gradually it became easier, and the direct replaced the indirect response as a habit. My self-awareness sharpened until I could spot, not just the false response before it was uttered, but the impulse to the response, and beyond that the tawdry chain of mental cause and effect that gave rise to it.
    Stripping away in this manner all superfluous utterance, we often found ourselves with little to say to each other, and would sit for long periods in a contented silence that communed far more deeply than words. ‘Silence is good,’ remarked Simon one day. ‘Whatever breaks that silence should be better than the silence it