new.  They sell photographs of him with tourists standing on his thumb nail, and, apparently, any brute of any gender can scrawl his or its ignoble name over the inside of the massive bronze plates that build him up.  Think for a moment of the indignity and the insult!  Imagine the ancient, orderly gardens with their clipped trees, shorn turf, and silent ponds smoking in the mist that the hot sun soaks up after rain, and the green-bronze image of the Teacher of the Law wavering there as it half seems through incense clouds.  The earth is all one censer, and myriads of frogs are making the haze ring.  It is too warm to do more than to sit on a stone and watch the eyes that, having seen all things, see no more—­the down-dropped eyes, the forward droop of the head, and the colossal simplicity of the folds of the robe over arm and knee.  Thus, and in no other fashion, did Buddha sit in the-old days when Ananda asked questions and the dreamer began to dream of the lives that lay behind him ere the lips moved, and as the Chronicles say:  ’He told a tale.’  This would be the way he began, for dreamers in the East tell something the same sort of tales to-day:  ’Long ago when Devadatta was King of Benares, there lived a virtuous elephant, a reprobate ox, and a King without understanding.’  And the tale would end, after the moral had been drawn for Ananda’s benefit:  ’Now, the reprobate ox was such an one, and the King was such another, but the virtuous elephant was I, myself, Ananda.’  Thus, then, he told the tales in the bamboo grove, and the bamboo grove is there to-day.  Little blue and gray and slate robed figures pass under its shadow, buy two or three joss-sticks, disappear into the shrine, that is, the body of the god, come out smiling, and drift away through the shrubberies.  A fat carp in a pond sucks at a fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little worldly kiss.  Then the earth steams, and steams in silence, and a gorgeous butterfly, full six inches from wing to wing, cuts through the steam in a zigzag of colour and flickers up to the forehead of the god.  And Buddha said that a man must look on everything as illusion—­even light and colour—­the time-worn bronze of metal against blue-green of pine and pale emerald of bamboo—­the lemon sash of the girl in the cinnamon dress, with coral pins in her hair, leaning against a block of weather-bleached stone—­and, last, the spray of blood-red azalea that stands on the pale gold mats of the tea-house beneath the honey-coloured thatch.  To overcome desire and covetousness of mere gold, which is often very vilely designed, that is conceivable; but why must a man give up the delight of the eye, colour that rejoices, light that cheers, and line that satisfies the innermost deeps of the heart?  Ah, if the Bodhisat had only seen his own image!

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