And the Master now related how the King of Mathura, the horrible tyrant Kamsa, after he had invited Krishna to a prize contest at his court, secretly ordered his mahout to drive his wildest war elephant out of the stables upon the unsuspecting youth, and that, too, at the very entrance to the scene of the coming struggles. And how the latter slew the monster, and, to the terror of the king, entered the arena bespattered with blood, and with the tusk he had broken off in his hand.
“But upon the Master also,” he added, continuing his discourse, “enemies had hounded a savage elephant. And at the sight of the monster dashing down upon him, the Master was seized with pity. For blood streamed down the creature’s breast, and the wounds from the lances of his tormentors were many. But his pity deepened as he saw there before him, not merely a wounded, but a hapless, creature who had become the prey to a passion of blind rage—a creature dowered by nature with courage and enormous strength, but gifted with little understanding, and robbed of that little by the cruelty of base men, who had roused it to the condition of madness in which it was actually being brought to destroy a Buddha—a poor, wild, dazed brute, and not likely, save with great difficulty and after endlessly long wanderings, to attain a propitious human existence, and to enter the path that leads to salvation.
“Filled full of pity as he was, the Master could feel no fear; and no thought of his own danger arose within him. For he reasoned thus: ‘If I should succeed in casting even the faintest ray of light into this tempestuous darkness, such a spark of light would gradually grow; and when this creature, led by its glimmer, arrived at human existence, then it would find on earth the doctrine of the Master it had once killed, and this teaching would help it to salvation.’
“Possessed by this thought, the Master halted in the middle of the road, raised his hand with a calming gesture, looked lovingly at the raging creature, and uttered gentle words, the sound of which reached its savage heart. The giant beast stopped in his charge, rocked his mountain of a head irresolutely back and forth, and, instead of the thundering peal heard from him a moment before, gave vent to one or two almost timid trumpet-calls. At the same time he tossed his trunk into the air and swung it in every direction as if seeking something—like the wounded elephant in the forest when he has lost the spoor of his hidden enemy and hopes to scent it again—and, in very truth, he had been mistaken in his enemy. Finally, he came slowly to within a few paces of the Master and bent his knee, as he was accustomed to do before his owner when the latter wished to mount him. And, followed by the tamed elephant, the Master, to the confusion of his enemies, entered the park to which he had just been on the way.
“In this way,” so the Buddha ended his parallel, “does the Master take up Krishna’s battle with the elephant, spiritualise, refine, complete it.”
While I listened to this tale, how could I do other than think of Angulimala, the most savage of the savage, who but yesterday wished to destroy the Buddha, and had not only been tamed, but converted, by the irresistible might of the Buddha’s personality, so that I now saw him devoutly sitting opposite to me in the ranks of the monks—changed, even in his outward appearance, to another. And so it seemed that the words of the Master were most particularly addressed to me, as the only person—at all events, outside the circle of the monks—who knew of this matter, and could understand the significance of his speech.
The Master now went on to speak of Krishna as the “Sixteen-thousand-one-hundredfold Bridegroom,” for as such had our ancestors worshipped him here, and again I had a feeling as though secret reference were being made to me, for I remembered that, on the night of our last meeting, the hateful old witch had called the divine hero by this name, which I did not hear without a certain fluttering of the heart. With a gentle dash of humour the Master then related how Krishna took possession of all the treasures which he had carried off from the castle of the demon king, Naraka. “And on one auspicious day,” it is said, “he married all the virgins, and all at the same moment, appearing to each one individually as her husband. Sixteen thousand one hundred was the number of the women, and in just so many separate forms did the god incorporate himself, so that each maiden’s thought was, ‘Me only hath the Master chosen.’ ”
“And, in like fashion,” the Master continued, “when I declare the doctrine, and before me there sits an assembly of several hundred monks and nuns, and lay disciples of both sexes, listening, then each one of all these listeners thinks, ‘To me alone hath the ascetic Gautama declared this doctrine.’
“For upon the individual nature of each seeker after peace do I direct the power of my spirit; I calm it, fill it with harmony, make it to be at one with itself.
“This I do, always, and in this way I take the sixteen-thousand-one-hundredfold bridal state of Krishna, spiritualise it, refine it, complete it.”
Of course it
