The Buddha's Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

Opposite the building, separated by a distance of forty or fifty metres, was a solid wall.
    “Escape is impossible,” said my companion, who had been following my every move.
    I nodded. Then I told him that I refused to recognize the reasons for my being held here, that I was guilty of no crime and all this was utterly absurd. Next I asked him why he had been arrested and what lay in store for him. Then for the first time he smiled and replied that in his case there had been a clear misunderstanding and that he would personally face no punishment.
    “But what exactly happened to you?” he asked.
    I related to him in great detail the little-convincing facts that had led me here so unexpectedly. He asked me a few more pieces of information about my life and, having heard me out, said that he was entirely satisfied by my account and would advocate my release. Such a statement ought to have seemed at least a little strange coming from a prisoner in rags. However, I took him at his word; my analytical faculties had not yet returned to me.
    After a while the door to the cell opened, and two armed soldiers, one of whom barked out my surname, escorted me down a long corridor with pink walls and a multitude of turns. At each turn hung the same enormous portrait of some elderly, clean-shaven man, with a face that looked like a common workman’s, albeit with an unnaturally narrow forehead and minuscule eyes; he was wearing something between a jacket and a military tunic decked with medals, anchors and stars. The walls of thecorridor were lined with several statues and busts of the same man. Finally we arrived—in complete silence—at a door, through which I was shoved into a room, where an elderly man in glasses was sitting at a large table. He was dressed in some peculiar semi-military, semi-civilian uniform, similar in style to the one depicted in the portraits and on the statues.
    He began by extracting a massive revolver from a drawer and placing it beside a paperweight. Then, suddenly lifting his head and looking me straight in the eye, he said:
    “Naturally you’ll be aware that only a full and frank confession can save you?”
    After the long walk down the corridor—the soldiers had walked briskly and I had been obliged to keep pace with them—I felt as if the almost semi-unconscious state in which I had until now found myself had at last given way to something more normal. My body once again felt as it usually did, I could see what was before my eyes with perfect clarity, and now it became more apparent to me than ever that what had happened was obviously the result of some misunderstanding. At the same time, however, the prison setting and the prospect of an arbitrary interrogation rather vexed me. I looked at the seated figure in glasses and asked:
    “Forgive me, but who are you?”
    “There’ll be no questions here!” he answered sharply.
    “There appears to be some confusion,” I said. “I seem to recall hearing a distinctly interrogatory tone in your voice when you just addressed me.”
    “Try to understand that we’re dealing with your life here,” he said. “It’s too late now for dialectics. Though perhaps it would be beneficial to remind you that you stand accused of high treason.”
    “High treason, no less?”
    “No less indeed. You must have no illusions about it: it is a terrible charge. I repeat that only a full and frank confession can save you now.”
    “In what respect am I alleged to have committed high treason?”
    “You have the impertinence to ask? Very well, I’ll tell you. There is high treason in the very fact that you allow for the unlawful principle of there being any legitimacy in pseudo-governmental ideas that contradict the Great Theory of the Central State which has been devised by the foremost geniuses of mankind.”
    “What you’re saying is so absurd and naive that I’m at a loss to respond. I would like only to point out that the possible admission of one principle