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Before embracing monkhood, however, he had eaten eggs and fish. His advice to students was to follow any simple diet which proved suited to one's constitution. Master ate little; often rice, colored with turmeric or juice of beets or spinach and lightly sprinkled with buffalo GHEE or melted butter. For dessert, mangoes or oranges with rice pudding, or jackfruit juice.
It must be remembered that this is a thing aside from his monkhood. A monk need not necessarily teach; the aim and object of the monkhood is, as I have written in the last chapter, purity and abstraction from the world. If the monk acts as schoolmaster, that is a thing apart. And yet all monasteries are schools.
Hence an opinion drawn up by him has this heading: "Advice how the deputies ought to treat, either with or without the deputies of Glarus, so that the monastery of St. Gall, its abbot and its monks may be surprised, overcome and put up at auction with their monkhood and lordship, and knocked down to the Four Cantons."
But a community that has lived through twenty-four centuries of change, and is now of the strength and vitality that the Buddhist monkhood is, can have nothing to fear from any such change. Schoolmasters, except religious and elementary, they may cease to be, perhaps; the pattern and ensample of purity and righteousness they will always remain.
In his later life under the influence of the gnawing regret which his monkhood and all the trouble he took to escape from it caused him the picture of all the events leading up to his entering the convent became distorted in his mind. Brother Peter, to whom he still wrote in a cordial vein from Steyn, became a worthless fellow, even his evil spirit, a Judas.
You could no more imagine grapes without a vine than a Buddhist monkhood that did not spring directly from, and depend entirely on, the people. It is the higher expression of their life. In writing this account of the Burmese and their religion, I have tried always to see with my own eyes, to write my own thoughts without any reference to what anyone else may have thought or written.
As regards the maid, too, it is true that I did heft her over the stream, she having on her hosen and shoon, whilst I had but my wooden sandals, which could take no hurt from the water. I should have thought shame upon my manhood, as well as my monkhood, if I had held back my hand from her." He glanced around as he spoke with the half-amused look which he had worn during the whole proceedings.
I have had, I have still, many friends among the monkhood; I have been beholden to them for many kindnesses; I have found them always, peasants as they are, courteous and well-mannered. Nay, there are greater things than these.
At any other period the nation would have received with gratitude and approved of such a measure of church reform since it was fully called for by circumstances, was conducive to the interests of religion, and absolutely indispensable for the moral reformation of the monkhood. Now the temper of the times saw in it nothing but a hateful change.
They are reverencing what they thoroughly understand; they have seen their monkhood from the inside; their reverence is the outcome of a very real knowledge. Of the internal management of the monkhood I have but little to say.
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