Night Hawks

by Charles Johnson

  Once he had breathed these words, my companions begged to become his disciples. Kodananna even went as far as to proclaim that if all the scriptures for a holy life were lost, we could reconstruct them from just this one devoted ascetic’s daily life. He had seduced them with his sincerity for truth seeking. I, Mahanama, decided to remain with my brothers, but, to be frank, I had great misgivings about this man. He came from the Kshatriya caste of royalty. Therefore he was, socially, one varna (or caste) above us, and I had never met a member of royalty who wasn’t smug and insensitive to others. Could only I see his imperfections and personal failures? How could he justify leaving his wife and son? I mean, he was not yet fifty, but he had forsaken his responsibilities as a householder. True enough, his family was well taken care of during his absence, because he was a pampered, upper-caste rich boy, someone who’d never missed a meal in his life but now was slumming among the poor, who could shave his waist-long beard, his wild hair, take a bath, and return to his father’s palace if one day the pain and rigor of our discipline became disagreeable. I, Mahanama, have never had an easy life. To achieve even the simplest things, I had to undergo a thousand troubles, to struggle and know disappointment. I think it was then, God help me, that I began to hate every little thing about him: the way he walked and talked and smiled, his polished, courtly gestures, his refined habits, his honeyed tongue, his upper-caste education, none of which he could hide. The long and short of it was that I was no longer myself. Although I consented to study with him, just to see what he knew, I longed, so help me, to see him fail. To slip or make a mistake. Just once, that’s all I was asking for.

  And I did get my wish, though not exactly as I’d expected.

  To do him justice, I must say our new teacher was dedicated, and more dangerous than anyone knew. He was determined to surpass all previous ascetics. I guess he was still a warrior of the Shakya tribe, but instead of vanquishing others all his efforts were aimed at conquering himself. Day after day he practiced burning thoughts of desire from his mind and tried to empty himself of all sensations. Night after night he prayed for a freedom that had no name, touching the eighty-six sandalwood beads on his mala for each mantra he whispered in the cold of night, or in rough, pouring rain. Seldom did he talk to us, believing that speech was the great-grandson of truth. Nevertheless, I spied on him, because at my age I was not sure any teacher could be trusted. None could meet our every expectation. None I had known was whole or perfect.

  Accordingly, I critically scrutinized everything he did and did not do. And what struck me most was this: it was as if he saw his body, which he had indulged with all the pleasures known to man, as an enemy, an obstacle to his realization of the highest truth, and so it must be punished and deprived. He slept on a bed of thorns. Often he held his breath for a great long time until the pain was so severe he fainted. Week after week he practiced these fanatical austerities, reducing himself to skin, bone, and fixed idea. My companions and I frequently collapsed from exhaustion and fell behind. But he kept on. Perhaps he was trying to achieve great merit, or atone for leaving his family, or for being a fool who threw away a tangible kingdom he could touch and see for an intangible fantasy of perfection that no one had ever seen. Many times throughout those months together we thought he was suicidal, particularly on the night he made us all sleep among the dead in the charnel grounds, where the air shook with insects, just outside Uruvela. During our first years with him he would eat a single jujube fruit, sesame seeds, and take a little rice on banana leaves. But as the years wore on, he—being radical, a revolutionary—rejected even that, sustaining himself on water and one grain of rice a day. Then he ate nothing at all.

  By the morning of December seventh, in our sixth year with him, he had fallen on evil days, made so weakened, so frail, so wretched he could barely walk without placing one skeletal hand on Bhadiya’s shoulder and the other on mine. At age thirty-five, his eyes resembled burnt holes in a blanket. Like a dog was how he smelled. His bones creaked, and his head looked chewed up by rats, the obsidian hair that once pooled round his face falling from his scalp in brittle patches.

  “Mahanama,” he said. There were tears standing in his eyes. “You and the others should not have followed me. Or believed so faithfully in what I was doing. My life in the palace was wrong. This is wrong too.”

  The hot blast of his death breath, rancid because his teeth had begun to decay, made me twist my head to one side. “There must be . . .” he closed his eyes to help his words along—“some Way between the extremes I have experienced.”

  I kept silent. He sounded vague, vaporish.

  And then he said, more to himself than to me, “Wisdom is caught, not taught.”

  Before I could answer he hobbled away, like an old, old man, to bathe, then sit by himself under a banyan tree. I believe he went that far away so we could not hear him weep. This tree, I should point out, was one the superstitious villagers believed possessed a deity. As luck would have it, the lovely Sujata, with her servant girl, came there often from the village to pray that she would one day find a husband belonging to her caste and have a son by him. From where we stood, my brothers and I could see her approaching, stepping gingerly to avoid deer pellets and bird droppings, and, if my eyes did not deceive me, she, not recognizing him in his fallen state, thought our teacher was the tree’s deity. Sujata placed before him a golden bowl of milk porridge. To my great delight, he hungrily ate it.

  I felt buoyant, and thought, Gotcha.

  Vappa’s mouth hung open in disbelief. Bhadiya’s mouth snapped shut. Kodananna rubbed his knuckles in his eyes. They all knew moral authority rested on moral consistency. Assajii shook his head and cried out, “This woman’s beauty, the delights of food, and the sensual cravings tormenting his heart are just too much for him to resist. Soon he will be drinking, lying, stealing, gambling, killing animals to satisfy his appetite, and sleeping with other men’s wives. Agh, he can teach us nothing.”

  Disgusted, we left, moving a short distance away from him in the forest, our intention being to travel the hundred miles to the spiritual center of Sarnath in search of a better guru. My brothers talked about him like he had a tail. And while I cackled and gloated for a time over the grand failure of our golden boy, saying, “See, I told you so,” that night I could not sleep for thinking about him. He was alone again, his flesh wasted away, his mind most likely splintered by madness. I pitied him. I pitied all of us, for now it was clear that no man or woman would ever truly be free from selfishness, anger, hatred, greed, and the chronic hypnosis that is the human condition. Shortly after midnight, beneath a day-old moon in a dark sky, I rose while the others slept and crept back to where we had left him.

  He was gone, no longer by the banyan tree. Up above, a thin, rain-threaded breeze loosed a whirlwind of dead leaves. It felt as if a storm was on its way, the sky swollen with pressure. And then, as I turned to leave, seeking shelter, I saw faintly a liminal figure seated on kusha grass at the eastern side of a bodhi tree, strengthened by the bowl of rice milk he had taken, and apparently determined not to rise ever again if freedom still eluded him. I felt my face stretch. I wondered if I had gone without food so long that I was hallucinating, for I sensed a peculiar density in the darkness, and the numinous air around him seemed to swirl with wispy phantoms. I heard a devilish voice—perhaps his own, disguised—demanding that he stop, which he would not do. Was he totally mad and talking to himself? I could not say. But for three watches of the night he sat, wind wheeling round his head, its sound in the trees like rushing water, and once I heard him murmur, “At last I have found and defeated you, ahumkara, I-Maker.”

  At daybreak, everything in the forest was quiet, the tree bark bloated by rain, and he sat, as if he’d just come from a chrysalis, in muted, early morning light, the air full of moisture. Cautiously, I approached him, the twenty-fifth Buddha, knowing that something new and marvelous had happened in the forest that night. Instead of going where the path might lead, he
had gone instead where there was no path and left a trail for all of us. I asked him:

  “Are you a god now?”

  Quietly, he made answer. “No.”

  “Well, are you an angel?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Awake.”I

  That much I could see. He had discovered his middle way. It made me laugh. These rich kids had all the luck. I knew my brothers and I would again become his disciples, but this time, after six long years, we’d finally be able to eat a decent meal.

  * * *

  I. These six lines of dialogue are from the spiritual teachings of the late, great Eknath Easwaran.

  The Cynic

  The ruler of the world is the

  Whirlwind, that has unseated Zeus.

  —Aristophanes, The Clouds

  If you listen to those who are wise, the people who defended my teacher at his trial before he was killed by the state, they will tell you that the golden days of our city were destroyed by the war. The Corinthians, who feared our expansionist policies and growing power, convinced the Spartans to make war against us. Our leader, Pericles, knew we were stronger at sea than on shore. So he had all the inhabitants of Athenian territory in Attica huddle inside the fortifications of the city, which left the lands of the rich to be ravished by our enemies. But Pericles believed that after this sacrifice of land to the bellicose Spartans, our swift and deadly ships, triremes outfitted with three banks of oars, would wear them down in a war of attrition. His plan, this gamble, might have worked. But at the outset of the Peloponnesian War, a plague fell upon Athens, laying waste to those crowded together in the city, and, if that was not bad enough, Pericles himself died the following year. With his death, power in the Assembly was seized by demagogues like the young general Alcibiades, who convinced the voters to abandon our defensive strategies and launch an attack on the city of Syracuse in faraway Sicily. This ill-advised invasion, this poorly planned military adventure, drained the manpower and treasure of the polis, our city-state. Within two years of the Sicilian expedition, “the hateful work of war,” as Homer might put it, had wiped out our ships and ground forces. However, this was just the beginning of the spell of chaos cast upon us by the goddess Eris.

  The war dragged on for another ten years, dividing the population, feeding our disenchantment with civic life. Just as the chorus in a Sophoclean drama is powerless to stop the events leading to tragedy, so, too, no one could stop the growing hatred of the poor for the rich, or the bitterness in those wealthy families who experienced catastrophe as they lost their crops year after year. The rich began to plot against the regime, against rule by the people, and against the Assembly, which had conducted the war like a dark comedy of miscalculations and decisions based on collective self-delusion.

  When our defeat finally came, after a demoralizing twenty-seven years of conflict, everyone knew this was the end of the empire, that we had unleashed the furies, and entered a time of dangerous extremes, a long-prophesied Iron Age. Crime, fraud, and violence increased. Many Hellenes started to feel that the gods like Zeus and Athena were mere fictions, or were helpless to affect our lives, and that the gossamer-thin foundation of laws and traditions our fathers and forebears had lived by (especially our devotion to sophrosyne, or moderation) were arbitrary. The faith in a moral order that unified us during our Golden Age was no longer possible. It seemed that overnight loyalty to our sea-girt city-state reverted back to family, tribe, and clan, and a new breed of citizen was born. These were cold, calculating, and egotistical men like the character Jason that Euripides created in Medea. They were devoted not to civic duty but instead to the immediate pleasures of food, drink, sex, and, most important of all, power. These new men, who believed might was right, like Thrasymachus, saw “justice,” “honesty,” and “loyalty” as ideas created by and for the weak. Not too surprisingly, a new level of nastiness, incivility, and litigation entered our lives. Of these new men, Thucydides said,

  The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies and feeling the capacities of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech and whose subtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly at once.

  Now, such new men needed new teachers, those who were very different from the wonderful man who taught me. These teachers, foreigners, sprang up like Athena from the head of Zeus, came from places like Corinth and Ceos, were called Sophists, and for a nice purse of drachmae, they instructed the children of the rich in clever, honey-tongued rhetoric and perfumed lies aimed at appealing to the mob and swaying the members of the factious Assembly—prostitutes, my teacher called them, because he charged no fee. The most famous of these men was Protagoras, who argued that everyone knew things not as they are but only as they are in the moment of perception for him. “Man,” he said, “is the measure of all things,” and by this popular saying he meant nothing was objective, all we could have were opinions, and so each citizen was now his own lawgiver. (And, as you know, opinions are like assholes—everybody has one.) In my youth, then, at this hour in history, in the wreckage of a spiritually damaged society, it came to pass that common, shared values had all but vanished, truth was seen as relative to each man, if not solipsistic, and nothing was universal anymore.

  But the greatest, most unforgivable crime of my countrymen was, if you ask me, the killing of my teacher over his refusal to conform to the positions taken by different political parties. His accusers—Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon—called him an atheist, a traitor, and a corrupter of youth. Then they brought him to trial, and I shall remember for all my days what he said in his defense:

  Gentlemen, I am your grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you . . . I shall go on saying, in my usual way, my good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city that is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?

  He could have fled the city, escaping injustice with the help of his students. Instead, and because he could not imagine living anywhere but Athens, he chose to drink the chill draft of hemlock.

  To this very day, I regret that I could not be at my teacher’s side when he died. That evening I was sick. But since his death, which wounded us all, I have done everything I can to honor him. Being one of his younger students, never his equal, I always feel like a son whose father has died too soon. Right when I was on the verge of maybe being mature enough to actually say something that might interest him. Sometimes I would see or hear something I wanted to share with him, only to realize he was gone for the rest of my life. For years now I’ve carried on dialogues with him in my head, talking late at night into the darkness, saying aloud—perhaps too loud—all the things I wanted to tell him, apologizing for things I failed to say, often taking his part in our imaginary conversations until my five slaves, who are like family to me, started looking my way strangely. I didn’t want anyone to think I had wandered in my wits, so I began quietly writing down these dialogues to free myself from the voices and questions in my head, adding more speakers in our fictitious conversations, where his character is always the voice of wisdom, which is how I want to remember him. Yet and still, his death left a scar on my soul, and a question that haunts me day and night: How can good men, like Socrates, survive in a broken, corrupt society?

  There was one man who seemed as bedeviled by this dilemma as I was, but his response was so different from mine. I can’t say we were on the same friendly terms as Damon and Pythias, though sometimes he did feel like a brother, but one who infuriated me because he said my lectures a
t the Academy were long-winded and a waste of time. He was not, I confess, my only critic. My teacher’s other students think my theories are all lunacy and error. They see my philosophy about eternal Ideas existing beyond the imperfections of this shadowy world as being nothing more than my cobbling together the positions of Heraclitus, who saw only difference in the world and denied identity, and Parmenides, who saw identity and denied the existence of change. In their opinion, I’ve betrayed everything Socrates stood for. They positively hate my political view that only philosopher-kings should rule. Antisthenes has always been especially harsh toward me, treating me as if I was as cabbage-headed as one of the residents of Boeotia, perhaps because he, and not I, was present at Socrates’ side when he passed away. Years ago, he had his own school before joining ours. In his teachings he rejected government, property, marriage, religion, and pure philosophy or metaphysics, such as I was trying to do. Rather, he preached that plain, ordinary people could know all that was worth knowing, that an ordinary, everyday mind was enough. He taught in a building that served as a cemetery for dogs. Therefore, his pupils were called cynics (in other words, “doglike”), and among the most earthy, flamboyant, and, I must say, scatological of his disciples was the ascetic Diogenes.