Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/251

 fact of his existence, accessory to the suffering of the world, I should now be obliged—or so it seemed to me—if I had been spared pain, to feel myself doubly guilty, and to be filled with a desire to bear my part also.

I was no longer able to bewail my own lot; on the contrary, as I listened to the Master's words, the thought awoke in me, "Oh, that all created beings were no longer obliged to suffer! that this holy man might so succeed in his work of salvation, that all—all—purified from sin and enlightened, might reach the end of all suffering."

And the Master spoke also of this end of suffering and of the world, of the overcoming of every form of existence, of salvation in an even state of mind void of all desire, of the blotting out of all delusion, of Nirvana—strange, wonderful words telling of the only island in all this troubled sea of birth on whose rocky shore the breakers of death dash in impotent foam, and over to which the doctrine of the Perfect One sailed like a trusty ship. And he spoke of that blessed place of peace, not as one speaks who relates to us what he has heard from others—from priests—and also not as a song maker who lets his fancy rove, but like one who communicates what he has himself experienced and seen.

Much he said, it is true, in the course of it, which I, untaught woman, did not understand, and which would not have been easily understood by even the most learned of men.

Many things I was not able to reconcile; for here existence and non-existence were, at one and the same time, not life, and yet still less lifelessness. But I felt in heart