At eight the novices said their prayers, in a sing-song monotonous tone, some of them smoking cheroots the while, and then I was left alone for the night. There was no door to the temple and the blue night entered and the images on their tables shone dimly. The floor was clean, swept by women to acquire merit, but there were thousands of ants, attracted I suppose by the rice brought in offering by the devout, and they made sleep difficult. After a while I gave it up as a bad job and got up. I went to the doorway and looked out at the night. The air was balmy. I saw someone moving about and presently discovered that it was Kyuzaw. He also could not sleep. I offered him a cheroot and we sat down on the steps of the temple. He was a trifle contemptuous of this Siamese Buddhism. The monks did not go out with their begging bowls, it appeared, as the Blessed One had directed, but let the faithful bring them their rice and food to the monastery. Kyuzaw, like most Shans, had at one time been a novice and he told me, not without complacency, that he had never failed to go out with the begging bowl. He gave a little chuckle.
"I always went to my own house first and got a well-cooked meal put in the bottom of my bowl. I covered it with a leaf and went on my round till the bowl was filled. Then I went back to the monastery, threw away to the dogs all that was above the leaf and ate my own good dinner."
I asked him if he liked the life. He shrugged his shoulders.
"There was nothing to do," he said. Two hours work in the morning and there were prayers at night, but the rest of the day nothing. I was glad when the time came for me to go home again."
I inveigled him to speak of transmigration.
"There was a man in a village near my home who remembered his old life. He had been dead eighteen years and he came to the village and he recognised his wife and he told her where they used to keep their money and he reminded her of things that she had long forgotten. He went into the house and said that one of the pots had been mended in the way he said. The woman cried and all the neighbours were amazed and people came to see him from all over the country. They wrote about it in the paper. They asked him questions and to every question he had an answer. He knew everything that had happened in the village during his previous existence and the people remembered that what he said was true. But it did not end well."
"Why, what happened?" I asked.
"Well, his sons were grown up and they had divided the land and the buffaloes. They did not want to give everything back again. They said he had had his time and now it was their turn. He said he would go to law and the mother said she would testify that what he said was true. You see, sir, she liked to have a fine young husband again, but the sons did not want to have a fine young father, so they took him aside and said that if he did not go away they would beat him till he died, so he took the money that was in the house and everything he could lay hands on and went away."
"Did he take his wife, too?"
"No, he did not take her. He did not tell her he was going. He just went away. She was very sorry. And of course she had nothing any more."
We talked till we had finished our cheroots and then Kyuzaw got me some paraffin and we put it on the legs of my bed to keep the ants away and I went back to bed and slept. But the door of the temple looked due East and the dawn woke me and I saw a huge expanse of rose and purple. Then a little novice came in with a platter on which were four or five cakes of rice. He went down on his heels, a tiny figure in yellow, with large black eye, and uttered a brief invocation and then left the platter before the images. He had hardly gone before a pariah dog, evidently on the watch, slipped in quickly, seized one of the cakes in his mouth and ran out again. The early sun caught the gold on the Buddha and gave it a richness not its own.
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