Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/258

the Buddha, regardless, if he prayed to him or not, if he memorized the sacred scriptures, if he burned sweet-scented Hunshuh incense-sticks before the gilt altar or not. For the Buddha, too, was tied firmly to the Wheel of Things. The Buddha, too, had to do his appointed task. Thus, Li Ping-Yeng had decided, prayers would be a waste of time, since they could not influence the Excellent One one way or the other.

How, then, could he acquire sufficient merit so as to reach his tao, beyond the good and the evil?

Of course, first of all, mainly, by tearing from his body and heart even the last root of the liana of desire, of love, of regret for his wife; by again and again denying, impugning, destroying the thought of her, though, again and again, it would rise to the nostrils of his remembrance, with a stalely sweet scent like the ghost of dead lotus-blossoms.

She was on the shadow side of the forever. Her soul, he would repeat to himself, incessantly, defiantly, belligerently, had leaped the dragon gate. Broken were the fetters that had held him a captive to the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of her jeweled ear-rings. A mere picture she was, painted on the screen of eternity, impersonal, immensely aloof, passed from the unrealities of the earth life to the realities of the further cosmos.He must banish the thought of her, must forget her.

And he did forget her, again and again, with the effort, the pain of forgetting choking his heart.

Sitting by the window, his subconscious mind centered on his tao, his salvation, the blessed destruction of his individual entity, "Reverential and Sedate" huddled in a fold of his loose sleeve, scrutinizing street and sky with unseeing eyes, he would forget her through the long, greasy days, while the reek of Pell