A Smile in the Mind's Eye Read Free Page A

Taoists … there was no distinguishing feature about them except, if you like, a certain look in the eye – a Taoist look! A look in the eye of the mind, so to speak! You could hardly persecute a mere Look!’ So saying, Chang gave me a Taoist look as a sample, and I saw at once what he meant. It was a great little look, full of mischievous impudence, of irony and laughter. It was a look of sardonic complicity – it shared an amused and slanting consciousness of how precious the Unspoken was. It was like the first link between human beings acknowledging their partnership in the whole of process. Diable! It was the damnedest look I have ever shared with a human being – leaving aside two women who seemed to be naturally endowed the whole time with such a look by the gods. I realized that I was looking into the eyes of Chuang Tzu, my favourite philosopher – the Groucho Marx of Taoist philosophy. It was the eye of the Great Paradox, so to speak. There is nothing to be said about this sort of thing – it is Taoism, and the minute you try to say something explicit about it you damage it, like clumsily trying to pick up a rare butterfly in your fingers. Here you are in the region of the Indian non-this-non-that business. What we made and shared as we talked thus was a magnificent meal – the amused, penetrating, conspiratorial Look seemed to have got into the very food and by now we had already begun to chaff each other, which is the best mark of friendship.
    Taoism is such a privileged brand of eastern philosophy that one would be right to regard it as an aesthetic view of the universe rather than a purely institutional one. A Taoist was the joker in the pack, the poet on the hearth. His angle of inclination depended upon a simple proposition, namely that the world was a Paradise, and one was under an obligation to realize it as fully as possible before being forced to quit it. The big imperative in the matter was that there should be no waste, not a drop, in the course of this great feast of innocent breath. In an obscure sort of way the concept of immortal human bonheur had crept into the Taoist mind. They chose to leave the grand question of supreme bliss, of perfect beatitude, to the higher grades of the religious hierarchy, and stick to the world as IS – or that is what they seemed to say. But how was this desirable state of immortality in this life to be brought about? One could not just guzzle the world away, for mental indigestion would soon supervene. The greatest delicacy of judgement, the greatest refinement of intention was to replace the brutish automatism with which most of us continue to exist, stuck like prehistoric animals in the sludge of our non-awareness.
    The realization comes at the point where the Taoist experiences inside himself a new state of pure heed – the notion that the whole eternity could be compromised by a careless word, by a mere inattention, by the untimely trembling of a leaf! We speak of people who have realized themselves because we know that Real things only happen to Real People, though it seems very unlucky. As for the perfect rapture – it was towards the poem (the ideogram of a perfected apprehension) that Taoism of this kind tended. That was why Chang was slightly irritated by the heavy conceptual lumber, the wearisome prolixity of Indian thought with its eternal accretion of detail, its overwhelming density. Such an apparatus often bred scholars not sages, pedants not poets. What the Chinese mind had brought to this over-elaborated marvel was precisely the resilient humour which it lacked. The difference lay not in the end but in the means. I could see that the Taoism of Chang was born of the smile of Kasyapa – the none too diligent student whom Buddha sent to the top of the form because, while he, the Master, was still in full discourse, he happened to catch the eye of this young man, and to surprise upon his face the Taoist smile!