Victory City(33)
“What are you afraid of?” Yotshna asked. “Or should I say, whom?”
“It’s just a feeling,” Pampa Kampana said. “But I worry about your three half-brothers, and I worry about your three uncles, and there’s someone I worry about even more than I worry about the six of them.”
“Who’s that?” Yuktasri pressed her.
“Vidyasagar,” Pampa Kampana said. “He’s the danger man.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” Zerelda comforted her mother. She was the best fighter of the three daughters, and was confident of her mastery. “We’ll protect you against anyone and everyone. And,” she added, calling out to her teacher, “you’ll protect the queen too, won’t you, Grandmaster?”
Grandmaster Li approached and bowed. “With my life,” he agreed.
“Don’t make promises like that,” Pampa Kampana said.
* * *
—
“The world appears to be many,” the sage Vidyasagar liked to say, “but in truth many does not exist, and there is only one.” After he lost his prime ministerial appointment and completed his cave retreat, he had left Bisnaga for many years, traveling all the way to Kashi to meditate by the holy river and deepen his knowledge. Now he was back. Seated once again in his place of honor under the spreading banyan tree at the heart of the Mandana temple complex with his long white beard wound like a belt around his waist and with a devadasi behind him holding a simple umbrella over his bald head to protect it from the sun, he adopted the padmasana or lotus posture and remained still, with his eyes closed, for long hours every day. Crowds gathered around the returned holy man, hoping he would speak, which often he did not. The longer his silences lasted, the larger the crowds grew. Thus he increased his army of disciples without appearing to seek any kind of following at all, and his influence spread through the city and beyond it, even though he made no apparent attempt to influence anyone. When he spoke it was in riddles. “There is nothing,” he said. “Nothing exists. All is illusion.” A daring disciple tried to elicit from him a comment that could be interpreted as, well, political. “Does the banyan tree not exist? Or Mandana? Or Bisnaga itself? The whole empire?” Vidyasagar did not answer for a week. Then he said again, “There is nothing. There are only two things, which are the same thing.” This was unclear, and the disciple asked again, “What are the two things? And how can two things be one thing?” This time Vidyasagar did not answer for a month, during which time the crowd around him became immense. When he spoke he used a soft voice, so that his answer had to be repeated many times, the words rippling out across the multitude like waves on the surface of the sea. “There is Brahman,” he said, “who is the ultimate and only reality, who is both cause and effect, who does not change but in whom all change is contained. And there is atman, which is in everything that lives, which is the only true thing in everything that lives, which is in fact the only thing that lives, and which is one hundred and one percent the same as Brahman. Identical. Same to same. Everything else is illusion: space, time, power, love, place, home, music, beauty, prayer. Illusion. There are only the two, which are one.”
By the time these whispers had rippled through the crowd, being subtly altered by repetition as they moved, they sounded like a call to arms. What Vidyasagar was saying, the crowd understood, was that there were Two, and there should only be One. Only One could survive and the other must be—what?—absorbed? Or overthrown?
Bukka Raya I had insisted throughout his reign on the separation of the temple from the state, and Vidyasagar had not crossed that line. “If we did so,” he told his disciples, “a fire would rise up along the line and consume us.” Everyone understood this to be a reference to the magic protective line or rekha drawn by Lakshman the brother of Ram to defend Ram’s wife Sita while the brothers were away, a line that would erupt in flames if any demon tried to cross it. Thus people also understood, first, that Vidyasagar was staying within the realm of religion by using a Ramayana metaphor, and second, that he spoke in a spirit of modesty and even extreme self-deprecation by comparing himself and his followers to demons, rakshasas, which clearly, in reality—in that reality which was an illusion—he was not, and nor were they. But at another level his followers also understood that by this dictum he had created an us who were not them, an us who wanted to cross that line and secretly supported the intrusion of religion into every corner of life, political as well as spiritual, and a them who opposed such demonic ideas. So gradually two camps grew up in Bisnaga, the Vidyaites and the Bukkaists, although these camps were never named as such, and everyone went along, at least on the surface, with the idea that they were all One. But beneath the surface the illusion dissipated and it was clear that they were Two, and that the Two were getting harder and harder to reconcile. If the Vidyaites noticed that these developments went against the grain of Vidyasagar’s nondualism, his preaching of the identity of Brahman and atman, they did not mention it, focusing instead on the idea that the empire was a kind of illusion, and believing that the truth, which was religious faith, meaning their own true faith to the exclusion of all other false beliefs in hollow gods, would soon arise to take charge of everything that Was.
Meanwhile, in another corner of Bisnaga, Haleya Kote’s Remonstrance had undergone a remarkable change. In its pamphlets and wall graffiti it had abandoned its opposition to sodomy, war, and art, espousing, instead, free love, conquest, and creativity of all kinds; and as a result it had begun to gain followers, many of whom said that the leaders of the movement need no longer conceal themselves, but should come out and stand for the Bukkaist values which so many in Bisnaga supported—to take up their role, in fact, as leaders of the Bukkaist tendency against the Vidyaites. (Although, we repeat, the divisive words “Bukkaist” and “Vidyaite” were never openly used.) Haleya Kote heard these voices, but remained silent.