"What clouds!" said Will. "And the light!"

"The light," Vijaya elaborated, "of the last hour before dusk. It's just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow."

"Deepens every shadow," Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the center of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, "Of what?" you found no answer. Will put the question into words.

"What do they mean?" Vijaya repeated. "They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that's why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudoreligious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent-some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that's why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room."

"Always landscapes?"

"Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who

they are."

"Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?"

Vijaya nodded. "It's the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a behaviorist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you're confronted with a landscape like this, it's psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You're almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you're practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing."

"Self-knowing?"

"Self-knowing," Vijaya insisted. "This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody's mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that's getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts." He pointed a finger at the picture. "The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapor above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those faraway peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance," he added parenthetically, "their ability to express the fact of distance-that's yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures."

"Because distance lends enchantment to the view?" "No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there's a lot more to the universe than just people-that there's even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space-it's the first and fundamental religious experience. 'O Death in life, the days that are no more'-and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not this place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights-all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man's capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind," Vijaya added, "the worst feature of your nonrepresentational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a colored object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rorschach inkblot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we're looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don't find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract nonob-jective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious- and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial."

"Do you come here often?" Will asked after a silence. "Whenever I feel like meditating in a group rather than alone."

"How often is that?"

"Once every week or so. But of course some people like to do it oftener-and some much more rarely, or even never. It depends on one's temperament. Take our friend Susila, for example-she needs big doses of solitude; so she hardly ever comes to the meditation room. Whereas Shanta (that's my wife) likes to look in here almost every day."

"So do I," said Mrs. Rao. "But that's only to be expected," she added with a laugh. "Fat people enjoy company-even when they're meditating."

"And do you meditate on this picture?" Will asked. "Not on it. From it, if you see what I mean. Or rather parallel with it. I look at it, and the other people look at it, and it reminds us all of who we are and what we aren't, and how what we aren't might turn into who we are."

"Is there any connection," Will asked, "between what you've been talking about and what I saw up there in the Shiva temple?" "Of course there is," she answered. "The moksha-medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation." "So why bother to meditate?"

"You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?" "But, according to you, the moksha-medicne is dinner." "It's a banquet," she said emphatically. "And that's precisely why there has to be meditation. You can't have banquets every day. They're too rich and they last too long. Besides, banquets are provided by a caterer; you don't have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The moksha-medicine comes as an occasional treat."

"In theological terms," said Vijaya, "the moksha-medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces-premystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces." "How?"

"By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations. By getting to know oneself to the point where one won't be compelled by one's unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing."