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Out of this rugged, romantic, and lofty Himalayan journey laden
with symbols we come down to the urban milieu of Architect of
his Fate (epistolary in style) in Colombo. Nanda, the lover,
leaves his beloved Punna in the custody of his friend Kosiya
wondering: "Will my Kosiya in friendship and my Punna in
love thus persistently endure?" At first Kosiya almost
sounds like a braggart mouthing Buddhist propositions of a life
free from desire. He even warns Nanda of receiving "crooked
answers" from pestered Fate. Like John Donne, he can make
fine discourses on love, but in love he is himself reduced to
shambles. From "a despiser of love" he graduates to an
ardent, almost foolish admirer: "How moving she is! Her
coquetry is even more natural than the naturalness of
coquettes." He is startled at the change in himself:
"Now I continue just because I do know her!" He
apotheosised the woman and in the process devalues himself to
"Fool that I was!" The situation is hopeless in the
end: "I am as one mangled, crushed flat beneath the iron
wheels of Fate." Ironically, he falls a victim to his own
tautology: "The deceiver becomes a deceived deceiver, and
cannot find his way back again." Punna suffers an identical
fate. From a future husband’s "spy" Kosyia for her
becomes "a remarkable man." This leads to self-probing
and ultimate renunciation: "I cannot belong to you any more
than to any one else." This "dissolution of the
questioner" is the crooked answer that Nanda gets from
Fate. He realises that the world of love is a world of
"frailty" and "misery" where an
artificial/accidental "sudden flaring up" decides one’s
fate.
Love is also a
subject of exploration in the next story The Love of
Humanity. The credentials of the all-encompassing love of
Christian missionaries are questioned dramatically through the
ideological conflict between the father Revata, a devoted
Buddhist, and Silananda, the son who has turned a Christian
preacher. For Revata the only "sure road begins at the
personal I." Henrietta Stevenson becomes unwittingly the
source of the most stinging critique of Silananda: "No
amount of instruction, no Mission, can make a man of faith out
of a man void of faith." That is the problem with
Silananda. As a born Buddhist he cannot cultivate the Christian
faith and after a miserable experience with the natives in which
he only succeeds in making a fool of himself, he comes back to
his roots, relinquishing his Christian pretensions, perceiving
that Buddhist "passivity" and "egoism" are
not what he had derisively taken them to be in the past.
Besides judging
others, the theme of overcoming death through the renunciation
of even ‘I’ is taken up in the final story Renunciation. Maung
Hpay, the magistrate in the town of Akyab in Burma, encounters
his moment of crisis when a chip knocked off his tooth forces
him to reflect; "So passes away our body." But his
preparation for the eventuality by bestowing lavish gifts on the
pauper goes haywire when one of his gifts causes a murder. From
there the question arises: "Are men justified at all in
sitting in judgment upon others?" Abandon everything, even
one’s self, to possess all. His final reflection, at the
Monastery at Moulmein, is: "Thus I must be
annihilated." Only then he is able to cast an indifferent
eye on life and death and is able to sleep even with Tik
Polonga, the deadly snake, in his lap.
The stories
assemble Biblical adages and parables. Through an explication of
symbols there is an attempt to impart knowledge of the Buddhist
doctrine to the reader.
If one is to
select the best story in the given collection Architect of
his Fate would be our choice because it makes us reflect
upon the phenomenon of love.
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THE
present work, a set of five stories, is a reprint of the volume that
was first published in 1913. The stories unravel the Buddhist
reality that teaches one to overcome the perils of gold, fame, love,
gods, death, and even life. This is the central motif that forms the
basis of every story. Thus the issues tackled are essentially
doctrinal — the transformation of the self, the recognition and
cultivation of the ‘I’ (at the cost of ‘the other’), and in
the end the renunciation of even this ‘I’. In between the
grooming and shedding of this ‘I’ the ego confronts many
experiences — archetypal as well as mundane.
