Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/309



in a banquet hall, when all the torches and lamps are extinguished, one little lamp is left burning before a sacred picture in a corner, so Kamanita was left behind, alone, in universal night.

For just as his body was enfolded by the astral substance of that Buddha likeness, so his soul was completely absorbed by the Buddha thought; and that was the oil which fed the flame of this little lamp.

The whole conversation he had had with the Master in the outer hall of the potter's house at Rajagriha rose up before him from beginning to end, sentence by sentence, word by word. But after he had gone quite through it, he began again at the beginning. And every sentence was to him like a gate that stood at the head of the way to new avenues of thought which, in their turn, led to others. And he explored them all with measured step, and there was nothing which remained dark to him.

And while his spirit, in such fashion, wove the Buddha thought into its own fabric until its last strand was exhausted, his body absorbed ever more of the astral matter which surrounded it, until what remained at last became transparent. And the darkness of universal night began to appear as a delicate blue that became ever darker.

Whereupon Kamanita thought—

"Out there reigns the vast darkness of universal night. 299