The Cult of Loving Kindness Read Online Free PDF

he hurried from that town, and from the next. He rented a donkey for a little while. And finally in November of the fourteenth phase of summer, 00016, he found himself at last in a wet jungle of almond trees, forty miles from the nearest human settlement, eight hundred miles west of Charn. This was the site of his master’s village.
    In those days it consisted of twenty-seven palm and bamboo houses raised on stilts above the forest floor. The novices had dammed the stream, and in the marshy ground below the village they grew taro root and rice. On drier ground above the stream they had burned the vegetation from a number of small hilltops, and after careful management they were able to grow soybeans, manioc, yams, and even occasionally cotton. These crops, harvested communally together with small plantations of bananas, mango trees, and pawpaw, gave to the villagers a richer diet than that of any other forest race. “Strength, which is the wisdom of the body, comes from the multitude of small experience,” the master said.
    His house was in the center of the village. All the others were arranged around it in concentric circles, according to the spiritual progress of the occupants. In theory all the houses were identical, for they had been built according to the master’s precepts. Inside they exemplified the same three principles of sparsity, simplicity, and emptiness, but outside there were differences—the novices, who themselves lived in the outermost ring, had worked hard on the inner houses. They had built elaborate roofs of banana leaf and almond wood, painted in bright colors, all oriented inward toward the master’s dwelling. These roofs served no purpose, except to shelter from the rain some of the open space between the houses. Spiritually, their implication was at best ambiguous, yet even so the master tolerated them. In those days he tolerated foolishness that would have once infuriated him, for he was old and close to death. Lately some people had even started to build altars in their homes, and decorate them with small carved images of the master sleeping, eating, talking. But if he knew of this he gave no sign.
     
    *
On November ninety-second of the fourteenth phase of summer, three travelers appeared on the outskirts of the village: two children and a middle-aged man. This was Mr. Sarnath, coming home after an absence of half his life. The journey from the customs house at Camran Head had taken more than three thousand days, for when the children were first born he had been obliged to find employment in a series of small towns.
     
    The children appeared first. They came running down the forest pathway, a big, golden-haired boy and his dark sister. The girl was laughing and running with her brother close behind; his face was twisted up with anger, and he was trying to crowd her off the path and down into the ditch. A quarter of a mile below the village they were running along the top of a raised embankment when the boy managed to trip her with his heel, so that she fell headlong down the dike and down into a swamp of mangrove trees. When the first novices arrived from the village she was lying on her back and laughing, ever though she was covered with mud and bleeding from cuts on both palms and both knees. The boy was standing on the path, and when the novices tried to restrain him he attacked them too. His skin was slippery with sweat; he slid inside their hands and started punching at their stomachs, which were as high as he could reach. Startled and confused, they fell back along the dike, which made the little girl laugh harder than ever. She was shrieking, almost choking with hilarity by the time Mr. Sarnath arrived at the bottom of the path.
    “Stop that, stop,” shouted the novices. “Stop that noise!” They fell back before the fury of the boy’s attack, but one of them, a small, thick-bodied man with big protruding ears, held up when he saw Mr. Sarnath. He grasped hold of a sapling that