LOTUS AND LILAC.

Otago Witness, Issue 3467, 24 August 1920, Page 55

LOTUS AND LILAC.

By Jessie Mackay.

The beauty of the lotus stirs an Indian memory older than the rose, and the late-found glory "of the lilac clings about the fallen majesty of Persia. In an hour •when the destinies of India and Persia loom lowering and fitful in the Middle East, the student turns 'gladly from political intrigue and commercial exploitation to forgotten pages of the. -world's literature -when light from the East shamed the savage darkness of Europe. In this tiny booklet lying before me, "Lotus Bloom from a Sanscrit Lake," are gathered the flower-like thoughts of ancient Indian sages. That they stand here nameless and unfathered, a collection from the forgotten groves of a philosophy very old and very young, making the book a companion to the Wisdom-rhapsodies of our own Book of Proverbs, is owing to the pathetic manner of their presentment to the readers of the West. They are the posthumous fragments of translation found in the study of Benjamin Robinson, a rare and gifted Methodist missionary, who passed beyond the veil seven years ago. Unlike the creed-proud zealots who are wilfully blind to every gleam of divinity in the faiths and philosophies they come to supersede, Benjamin Robin son was a learner as well as a teacher, and won his missionary triumphs by assimilating not only the culture of the ancient Orient, but the outer ways of life and dress that brought him into living touch with the people. The collection was made and published in 1913, the year in which the revered translator laid down his pen for ever, and naturally the notes and names which are looked for in ordinary authologies are not set forth. But the singular grace and purity of , these Sanscrit poems and texts remains, and points us back to an age perhaps coeval with our own Hebrew prophets. Like them, the Sanscrit teacher seized upon familiar emblems to point or grace his meaning: To whom is the society of the truly great not uplifting? Water standing on a lotus leaf bears the brilliance of a pearl. A homely thrust. of irony is pointed here:'"■■"* .-'"*"'

The dust of tramping goats is feared; and that from sweeping is avoided, so men fear and avoid the "poor. What a tragic commentary on a broken world to-day .lies in these two passages: The irresolute man who, ignorant of his own and his enemy's strength, goes to war, goes to ruin, as the gnat into the flame. Where the unworthy are worshipped and the worthy are dishonoured, there famine, death, and fear make their home.

We have an .equally simple eqiiivalent for this: ,

Where there is no "wise man the man of little -wit is praised. In a treeless land the castor-oil plant passes for a.,tree. And Holy Writ contains the Hebrew counterpart of this: Common glass is set in a crown and a pearl in a toe-ring. There is no fault in the pearl; he who" wears it lacks sense. Plain truths find us in the following: He who loiters over urgent matters will doubtless find the gods.frustrate his fancied plans. The 'indolence dwelling within man's self is the great foe. A gracious symbolism brings home a self-evident truth in this: The Lord of Day makes N the lotus lake abloom; the moon unfolds the circle of white night • lilies : the clouds unasked pour down life-giving rain; the true of their own free will exert themselves for others' good.

Turning from these sweet and simple crumbs of Sanscrit, a contrast to the mazy involutions of that other body of Indian thought, "The Song Celestial," let us glance at the sister literature of the Aryan Persia-n. Here, too, amid wild songs -of love and wassail, we find hymns afire with the love of God—a later body of poetry than that enshrined in the sacred dead language of Hindostan, bnt poured forth when our own devotional flower of Saxon, poesy was almost torn from its stem by the storms of mediaeval violence. A stern purity flames through some of these early rhapsodies of the Divine, melting to & pleading softness both in aspiration and in teaching. A rosary of Persian devotion is this other delicate anthology, "Light in the East," comoiled by May Byron, and ranging from Mohammed to Bafiz, that meteor of Oriental poetry, who, as Emerson tells us in effect, was an audacious mixture of Pindar, Horace, Anacreon, and Burns, and yet a mystic behind his wildest flights of'rebellion'and erotics—a mystic who could address his own soul thus: They are calling to thee from the pinnacles of the throne of God; I know not what hath befallen thee in this dust heap. ,'..", The strength of these Iranian singers leaps out in the brief, pithy verses in which they delighted—the masculine counterparts of the delicate verselets of Japan. Such a one is this of Akhlaq iJalali: v Life is a pledge of friendship from our Maker: Give roe the Friend and take the pledge who will. An anonymous writer gives us this shrewd saying: *^? H» who from love to God neglects the human Goes into darkness with a glass to see his face. Sadi of Shiraz, who lived in the reign of Edward I, fa probably, with Hafiz, the best-known name in Persian poetry, leav-

ing out the Omar Khayyam boom which Fitzgerald's translation of the "Rubaiyat" started in England. Sadi is represented here, in brief, sententious exhortations: Drape your souls in the dress of patience. And this gentle clarity of kindness: Wherever bubbles up a spring of water sweet, There man and bird and insect assuredly will meet. The sublimest mystic of all would seem to be the long-age Sufi poet, Jalaluddin, who shakes off the angry dust of the unquiet age he lived in and soars into the upper glory: He, the door of whose breast has been opened, from every atom sees the sun reflected. A shrewd monition is conveyed in this verse by an unknown writer: He who is only for his "neighbours wise, "While his own soul in sad confusion lies, Is like those men who builded Noah's ark, But sank themselves beneath the waters dark. A Persian proverb dclares : He that seeks a faultless friend dies without a friend.

It is again Jalaluddin Rumi, living on the fringe of the Dark Ages, who can draw this strong, clear picture, of the soul bathed in sleep, with which this tiny impression of Oriental poetry may close:

Every night God frees the host of spirits— Makes them, clear as tablets smooth and spotless— Frees them every night from fleshly prison. Then the soul is neither slave nor master. Nothing knows the bond man of his bondage, Nothing knows the lord'of all his lordship. Gone from such a night, is eating sorrow, Gone the thoughts that question good and evil, Then, without distraction or division, In the One iho spirit sinks and slumbers.