The Buddha's Return Read Online Free PDF

or another is a theoretical stance, not a fact on the basis of which it’s possible to prosecute a man.”
    “Even here, at a tribunal of the Central Government, you speak in a language whose every word echoes your crime. In the first instance, a representative of the state, particularlyan investigator, is, as far as you’re concerned, infallible, and no word of his may be termed either ‘absurd’ or ‘naive’. But that’s not all. Now, after what you’ve just said, there’s another point that further compounds your guilt: causing insult to a representative of the Central Government. You stand accused of high treason, of conspiracy to assassinate the head of state and, finally, of the death of Citizen Ertel, one of our finest representatives beyond these borders.”
    “Who is this Ertel?”
    “The man you killed. Don’t try to deny it: nothing escapes the knowledge of the Central Government. A full confession is your only option; it is what the state and the people expect of you.”
    “The only response I’m able to give concerns Ertel. That man was a hired assassin. I was in a position of lawful self-defence. Evidently until now Ertel never had to deal with people in the habit of defending their own life, and this blunder wrought his downfall. As far as the remaining accusations are concerned, they’re sheer nonsense, which speaks volumes for the intellectual capacity of the people who contrived them.”
    “You’ll sorely repent of those words.”
    “May I point out that the verb ‘to repent’ is inherently religious in its connotations? It seems strange to hear it on the lips of a representative of the Central Government.”
    “What will you say when confronted with your accomplices?”
    I shrugged.
    “Enough!” he said, firing the revolver: the bullet hit the wall about a metre and a half above my head. The door opened, and the soldiers who had brought me here entered the room.
    “Take the accused to his cell,” said the investigator.
    As I was returning to my cell, glancing from time to time at the portraits and statues, only then did it occur to me that I had acted wrongly, that I should never have answered the investigator as I had done. I simply had to prove to him that there was no way I could be the man for whom he had mistaken me. Rather than adopt this tactic, however, I had spoken to him as though I admitted the absurd legitimacy of his argument, and in disagreeing with it, as it were, dialectically, I was playing straight into his hands. Besides, it was obvious that I was a complete stranger to this world in which I now found myself. The faces of the soldiers who escorted me had displayed a complete absence of thought or emotion. These portraits looked like oleographs produced by a workman whose lack of artistry unwittingly provoked both pity and scorn; likewise the statues. The investigator’s words bore the mark of an equally grim intellectual poverty and, in the world I came from, any such man would have had no place in the machinery of justice.
    Back in my cell, I was just about to tell my companion about the interrogation, when immediately I was led off again, this time in a different direction; I landed in front ofa second investigator, who addressed me rather differently than the first had done.
    “We are aware,” he began, “that we are dealing with a relatively cultured man, and not just some mercenary from a hostile political organization. You must surely know that we are surrounded by enemies; this forces us to increase our vigilance and sometimes compels us to adopt measures that, although they may appear rather drastic, are not always avoidable. Such has been the case with you. We know, or at least we hope to establish, that your guilt is less severe than it may initially have seemed. Be candid with us; it is in your, and our, best interests.”
    Judging by the way he spoke, it was obvious that this man was much more dangerous than the first investigator. But I was almost