Chapter 13: Meeting Ravanna and Kahjian

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part Three–Adventurer
                                      

Ravanna took Jesus to India. it was a long trip, for India stretched beyond even the distant lands that Roman rulers in their wildest dreams imagined conquering. Among most people in Israel, little was known of India except that wonderful spices, precious woods, rare gems, and strange Magi came from there.

Many of the priests traveling with Ravanna’s caravan were unexcited by Jesus and the claims made for him by prophecies. But they weren’t critical, either. They wanted to wait and see, in the absence of immediate miracles and other proof, just what Jesus would be like when he was older. They easily accepted the fact that he was well-advanced intellectually, and also a very awakened young initiate of the Egyptian mysteries.

But as for the claims that Jesus was a son of a Jewish god, well, India was full of men who made similar claims. The last thing India needed, the priests knew, was yet another holy man, even if he could perform miracles. Indian fakirs performed miracles–mixtures of half-pretended and half-real tricks–that amazed everyone who saw them.

The priests preferred to take him for just what he appeared to be: an uncommonly bright student who wished to learn Indian ways.

Jesus found better company with Ravanna. The two men rode together at the front of the caravan, usually in a coach drawn by servants. The coach was on wheels, a present to the prince from a Burmese king who in turn had copied it from a similar coach used by China’s emperors. The coach was lined with fine red and blue silks, deep cushions and a two-foot-high stature of a seated Buddha lost in deep concentration of the mysteries of the universe.

Jesus enjoyed talking with the prince who often described his rich life in his palace, and with his harem. The prince offered Jesus the chance to choose a young lady for himself.

Jesus told him thank you, but no.

“Haven’t you heard the story of our Lord Krishna and the young ruler’s harem?” asked Ravanna. His eyes sparkled.

Jesus said he had not.

“As you know by now,” said Ravanna, “Lord Krishna was a real person long ago, a very holy man, who most of us in India believe was God who came to visit us. One day he got into an argument with a great and worthy ruler in India. They were arguing about whether the Lord Krishna knew everything. You do not know what the bottom of the sea is like, said the young ruler.

“Yes, I do,” replied Lord Krishna, for in a previous incarnation ages ago, I was a fish.

“Ah, then, said the ruler, you surely do not know why a fire burns.

“I know that, too, said Lord Krishna. He gave the young ruler a beautiful smile. For I am the God of all gods, an in my heavenly form as lord Fire, god of the flames, I am the essence of fire itself.”

Ravanna leaned toward Jesus. The prince’s eyes danced with pleasure. “The young ruler did not know what to say,” Ravanna continued. “Finally, he said to the great Lord Krishna, I know one thing that you do not, my lord. I am sure you have never known the physical passion that exists between two lovers.

“Well, Lord Krishna frowned at this. Finally he said, I am the God of gods. Before the world was formed, I was All-in-All. I was everything both male and female, and I existed in eternal passionate embrace with myself.

“The young ruler shook his head. That will not do for an answer, my lord. The passion a man, such as each of us, can experience in the arms of a woman is different, especially if the man is just one small part of creation.

“Krishna granted that this might be true. But there was no way to test this, he told the young ruler.

“I know a way, said the ruler. But first we must wager. If you win, oh heavenly lord, then I shall devote all of my great wealth and riches to helping the poor.

“Krishna nodded.

“But if I win, said the young ruler, you must come to my palace for a whole year and teach me how to become like you.

“Krishna accepted the challenge. Whether he lost or won, something good would come of it. But how do you propose that we test my knowledge of passion? he asked.

“The young ruler smiled. It is simple, he said. We need only exchange bodies for two weeks.

“Krishna rocked backward with surprise because he himself had not thought of this. So great was his hurry to prove himself master of the situation that instantly, without one more word being spoken, he made the switch.

“While the ruler, in Lord Krishna’s body, stayed with the Lord’s disciples, Lord Krishna in the ruler’s body went immediately to the palace.

“That night, the great Lord of All visited a harem for the first time in that earthly life. The harem wives, all of them the greatest and most beautiful women in the province, at first did not notice any change. All they saw was the body of their ruler. But soon they discovered an astonishing difference. In all things having to do with physical love, their ruler had become like a baby. They had to teach him everything that formerly he had known.”

Ravanna leaned back on his cushions, smiling. “As for Lord Krishna,” Ravanna continued, “he was a very surprised god. He had no idea before then that physical love could be so wonderful. After he got over his initial surprise, he enjoyed himself so thoroughly that his two weeks passed in what seemed like an instant.

“I will continue for just one more two-week period, he told himself.

“At the end of the second two weeks, he decided to wait two weeks more. Gradually each day he was doing his meditations and godly business less. You see, he was so caught in the net of physical pleasure that he was slowly forgetting who he was. Son his godly nature was just a dim memory. He began to really believe he was the young ruler.”

Jesus leaned forward and listened carefully.

“After three months,” Ravanna continued, “Lord Krishna’s disciples began to worry about their master. Finally they sent one of their number to the palace. The disciple confronted his master and whispered in his ear, You are the Lord Most High and the incarnation of God. And he showed Krishna a lotus, our sacred flower.

“At that instant he heard these words and saw the flower, Lord Krishna remembered who he was. In a flash as fast as the first note of a thunderclap, he switched bodies again with the young ruler.”

“What happened then?” Jesus asked.

Ravanna smiled. “The next day Lord Krishna put his affairs in order and then went to the palace. He had lost his bet. The young ruler had been right. Not even a god can know what physical love is like, unless he tries it himself.

Ravanna gave Jesus a sidelong glance. “Perhaps,” he asked Jesus, “this story will convince you to change your mind? Will you accept my offer of a young woman?”

Jesus hid a smile. “Ravanna,” he said, “your story has disproved your point. If physical love can make even Krishna forget who he is, then surely a mere man like myself is in even more danger of losing his senses.”

Ravanna waved his arm.  “But you are a messiah!” he exclaimed.

“Then I should be even more careful,” Jesus said. His face grew serious. “I respect physical love. It is a wonderful thing. But I wish to save my energies for other activities. Your own Indian holy men say that men may rise to greater spiritual heights by conserving their sexual energies and substances.”

Ravanna bowed his head. “I am sorry, young master. I did not think.”

“Thank you for the story, Ravanna. I did enjoy it.”

Much later at a brief stop beside an oasis where everyone stretched their legs, Jesus heard Ravanna muttering quietly to himself. “A messiah should know everything!” Jesus heard him say.

The next day, and for many days after that, the prince began reciting the whole history of sexual love in India to Jesus. Ravanna started with the first division of God into male and female forms and eloquently worked his way through the gods’ many legendary love affairs. He finally ended with a thorough discussion of the practices and beliefs of recent sex-yoga schools that were beginning in those days.

Several times Jesus tried to change the subject, not out of any basic dislike for it but rather out of boredom. Endless hours of hearing about little else except physical love made the subject about as interesting as the endless deserts of Egypt.

“You must know these things through words, if through no other way,” Ravanna muttered each time.

By the time they reached India, Jesus did know. He was looking forward to getting away from the humid affairs of the gods, and back to his lessons.

They entered the great, wide country of the Hindu peoples by way of the Indus River valley. They took the northern route into India, up the Indus with its swarming hordes of Scythians, Persians, Hindus, and other races, many of whom were touched by a white-blood mixture from Alexander the Great’s soldiers three hundred years earlier. In the valley’s rich farming soils and busy merchant towns, all of the Far East mingled.

Halfway up the Indus, they took a branch northeastward leading to the Punjabi plains where oxen pulled the tillers’ plows across the wide fields. The Himalayas came into view. They looked like great blue clouds that rose suddenly in the northern distance, height after height, to towering, white-capped peaks.

Ravanna, Jesus, and their group traveled east and then southeast, paralleling the great mountains in the distance. Jesus finally understood why foreigners called Mount Carmel back home, that he had thought was huge, just a hill. Only ice-crowned Mount Hermon, far to the north of Galilee, could even begin to rival the great peaks he watched each day. Yet Hermon was only half as high, he estimated, as some of these majestic peaks that were so tall they seemed to hold up the sky.

They came upon the great river Ganges, far in the north of Ravanna’s homeland, near its head. The river at this early point was a strong, clear stream of liquid gold in the afternoon sun.

As they followed it south and then east, they went through the heart of northern India. Ravanna pointed out the fat cows that wandered freely through the marketplaces and even into people’s homes, eating freely from tables and counters. These cows, he explained t Jesus, were all sacred because Hindus believed some of their greatest leaders and artists were reborn for a new life as such cows.

Ravanna also pointed out the funeral of a nobleman. The flames of the log pyre reached the height of several people. The nobleman’s wife, who was being burned with him as custom dictated though she was still alive, gave a high, keening yowl. She was not tied to the flaming pyre. Yet even as Jesus watched, she willingly stayed in the white heat until, charred, she fell down.

Fakirs, smelling of myrrh, patchouli, and human sweat, carrying ropes and beds of nails under their arms–and in their hands, long, thin splinters for piercing parts of their bodies, entertained Jesus and Ravanna by night wherever the travelers stopped. They kept a constant patter going, a mix of religious chant and salesmanship, hoping for alms, especially from an obviously rich prince.

Thinking of burning couples and fakirs, Jesus said to Ravanna one night, “Your country is a violent one,” Jesus told Ravanna one night.

“Ah yes,” Ravanna nodded. “But we are much more tolerant of a man’s spiritual beliefs than you Hebrews. Don’t you stone each other to death?”

“On occasion,” Jesus said.

They traveled through Benares by night. It was a great city spreading out in pale whites and greys in the pools of moonlight. Hurrying merchants and people of the night ran quickly back and forth between small business huts. The odors of incense, hashish, and curry mingled in the dusky air.

From Benares they turned south and finally came into the great kingdom of Kalinga. Kalinga was one of India’s most powerful countries. It kept its own standing army and was always ready to thrust either west or east to protect other Hindu countries from invasions by the white and yellow races.

“Some storytellers say,” Ravanna told Jesus, “that our name, Kalinga, is a combination of two great words. One word is Kali. She is the fierce, destroying goddess some Hindus worship. The other word is lingam, our name for the strong, thrusting member which is only a man’s. Together, so the storytellers say, these two words make Kalinga a fierce and mighty nation that no one may destroy.”

Jesus nodded and, to his own delight, led Ravanna into a discussion of the meaning of many of India’s towns and names. It was the first purely scholarly talk they’d had. Ravanna was up to it, though he was hardly Jesus’ match.

“Enough!” the prince finally exclaimed, laughing. “Tomorrow we reach my palace. Then you will not think so much of these names and words!”

Ravanna was right. The first time Jesus saw Ravanna’s palace, his mouth dropped pen. As large as several of the Jerusalem Temple back home, it was an arching masterpiece of huge stone blocks and great, carved pillars. None of the blocks were mortared, so closely did they fit. As Ravanna led him inside with servants falling at their feet at every step, room after comfortable, airy room unfolded. Great woven carpets and silk drapes hung from the walls and doorways in deep blues, bright yellows, and a thousand other shades and colors. Brass, worked into bells, statues, beads, and many other ornaments, rested side by side with sheesham wood and ivory boxes and stands carved so intricately that their surfaces resembled fine spiders’ webs.

That night they dined on pheasant and a rice so delicately curried that it seemed to melt into a mist on Jesus’ tongue. Dancing girls–who would have appeared more clothed without their thin gauze veils than with them–entertained them with intricate steps to strange, floating music. Jesus slept on a rush bed so soft it rustled with each smallest movement.

The next day, Ravanna led Jesus through several small rooms with thick carpets on the floors and large rush couches in the corners to a wide, low-ceilinged room with many pillars and arches. The floors were soft and the walls bright with silken coverings. In the middle of the wide room was a fountain of water and stone benches around it for sitting and dangling one’s feet in the pool beneath it.

Ravanna sat, and Jesus with him. With a sly look at Jesus, Ravanna clapped his hands.

A dozen dark-haired, doe-eyed women, some young, some a little older, suddenly appeared from the four corners of the comfortable room. They were bare, except for gauze wrappings around their hips and the dusky scent of jasmine.

Ravanna grinned. “A little surprise I prepared for you, young master. My harem.”

Jesus looked at him and blushed. He tried to keep his eyes off of the girls’ bodies and on their faces. But when he nodded politely at one young woman, an especially dark-skinned beauty with proud, arching eyebrows and a full figure, immediately all the girs were around him and pressing against him.

“Ravanna!” he shouted. He flung out his arms.

The girls scattered like fish.

Jesus, blushing furiously, began scowling. “Would you tempt me when this is not what I have chosen!”

Ravanna paled and stepped back. “I am sorry, young master!”

Jesus sighed. “They are beautiful, Ravanna. The evidence is clearly before my eyes that these women are everything a man dreams of. But they are your wives. And I am committed to a different course. Ah, Ravanna, have you no mercy!”

You messiah, don’t leave!” Ravanna got down on his knees. “Be gone!” he shouted at his wives, waving them away with his hands. They disappeared quickly. “I only wished you to know the delights of earth, oh king. Do not be angry!”

“Rise, Ravanna,” Jesus told him. “I am not angry. But you see, I already have experienced the delights of which you speak, only not in the way you would have me do so. In the arms of the power looking over all of us, in the arms of the God whom you in India sometimes call Kali or the Goddess, I have felt this rapture. Passion is not just an experience of the earth or lust, Ravanna. It is also of the deepest inner places where we meet our God. It happened to me in Egypt when I was being tested, and it has happened since then. I wish to save my energies for this, prince of a thousand women.”

“I am ashamed,” Ravanna said. His head was bowed. “But not,” his eyes quickly flickered up, “because of what I offered you. Rather my shame comes from trying to trick you!”

“It is as well,” Jesus answered. “Come, rise. If your manner of experiencing the rapture of the God is by using earthly passion, I will not fault it. I hope your many partners discover this same rapture, too. In our country also, in older days, our men took more than one wife.”

“I am attentive to each, young messiah. With each I seek a true union.”

Jesus smiled and shook his head. “Then you are quite a man, Ravanna.”

The prince smiled delightedly. “I try,” he mumbled humbly.

Jesus stayed with Ravanna for several weeks, eating and sleeping in the greatest luxury he had ever known. His waist thickened slightly and his mind, he felt, was losing some of its edge. He asked Ravanna to hurry the arrangements for a teacher, so that his own mind and body could get back into shape again.

One day Ravanna came bounding into the small room where Jesus was slowly reading an ancient Hindu scripture.

“He is here!” Ravanna exclaimed. “I told you we would find only the best! He has heard of you and he consents to teach you. He is one of our country’s greatest living teachers!”

Jesus quietly stood up. He could see, behind Ravanna, a small, dark figure radiating an invisible aura of power. Ravanna stepped aside.

“Kahjian!” the prince announced.

The little old man locked his yes on Jesus’. Kahjian’s eyes were blue and stern. He had a short, pointed chin, and his skin was almost black from natural coloring and the sun. His white hairs were tightly wound in tiny curls, like those of the black people south of Egypt.

“You will come to Benares with me,” he told Jesus in a scratchy voice.

Jesus bowed his head once. “Are you a good teacher?” he asked.

“Are you a good pupil?” Kahjian answered.

They left for Benares that evening, after Jesus promised Ravanna he would return to Kalinga before leaving India.

Benares in daylight was full of bustle. People from hundreds of miles around were constantly coming and going, bringing all manner of produce and crafted goods for buying selling, and trading. Beggars, thieves, princes, and merchants rubbed shoulders on the narrow and brightly sunlit streets between the small thatched and earthen houses.

Kahjian led his and Jesus’ camels, which Ravanna had given them, directly to the large, sprawling stone temple where hundreds of Hindu priests and initiates lived. the temple poked its stone-brick arms into many blocks of that part of the city, forming a miniature city of its own.

After he had allowed Jesus a quick meal of plain rice and vegetables, and four hours of sleep on a thin mat, the little old teacher took Jesus directly to a medium-size room of reddish stone blocks with several long, vertical windows facing north. They sat on simple straw mats. Jesus realized, after shifting uncomfortably on his mat, that he had grown too used to Ravanna’s palace comforts. He tried to forget his soreness by concentrating on a small niche recessed into the bare wall across from him. The niche held an oblong rock standing on end. The rock was oval, smooth, and sand-colored with flashes of dark brown streaked through it.

Kahjian saw Jesus looking carefully at the rock. “That is a symbol of God at the beginning of creation,” the little teacher said. He stroked his pointed chin.

“Why the two colors, Master?”

Kahjian nodded his head as if pleased at the question. “The light color represents the male nature of God,” he said. “The brown represents God’s female nature, which is beginning to separate from the male. Once the two are completely apart, the man and woman aspects of the universe are ready to make the world.”

“Ancient Hebrew book rolls teach this, too,” Jesus said. “But why must the world be divided into male and female, Master?”

Kahjian stroked his chin. “It is not a matter of dividing the world, Jesus, but of discovering such divisions in ourselves.”

Jesus looked at him carefully. “You mean each of us is divided into male and female,” he asked.

“Have you never felt things the way a female feels them?” Kahjian asked.

“How can I know, since I am a man?” Jesus replied.

“How can you not know, when underneath your manhood you are a complete person,” Kahjian asked.

Jesus opened his mouth, then shut it. He was getting confused.

“Will you teach me what I am, underneath my manhood?” he finally asked.

Kahjian began breathing evenly and deeply.” “It is for you to teach me,” he said.

Jesus stared at him.

“What do you know you are?” Kahjian asked.

“I,” Jesus paused. “I am, they say I am the Messiah–”

“No, no!” Kahjian interrupted. “Who are you?”

Jesus recognized this question. It was the same one he had answered for his first degree in Egypt.

“I and my Poppa are one,” he said. It was the same way he had answered at first in Egypt. He wanted Kahjian to be shocked at this strange way of putting it.

The yoga master didn’t blink an eye. “How do you know this?” he asked Jesus.

Jesus took a deep breath. “I felt it,” he told Kahjian. “I learned to concentrate here.” He tapped the center of his chest. “Then I saw it. We are one with God, inside of us, if we just go deep enough.”

Kahjian nodded. “Then you know everything important,” he told Jesus. “Why have you come to India?”

Jesus’ mouth dropped open. “But don’t you have anything to teach me?” he asked.

“What is it you want to know?” asked Kahjian. His eyes held an intense but comforting gleam.

Jesus stumbled around in his mind, trying to sort out his experiences and explain what he wanted.

“I wish to learn about love, Master,” he said. “And I wish to make myself an instrument of God’s will. And to get rid of needless thoughts and feelings.”

“Close your eyes,” said Kahjian. “Take three deep breaths and hold the last one. Let it out when your lungs complain. Now focus on that experience you say makes you one with God. I will sit and wait.”

Jesus did as he was told. It took him half an hour to rediscover the experience. He went so deep inside the experience that he didn’t know if he was able to speak out loud to Kahjian to let him know what was happening.

“I already know,” Kahjian said.

Jesus almost lost his concentration because of his surprise.

“Watch your own thoughts and feelings,” Kahjian told him. “Watch them stream in; watch them bubble up. Break the bubbles. Push the stream back. Hold it all back.”

Jesus struggled to do it.

“Good,” Kahjian said. “Now make your head totally empty. It must be like a hollow log.”

Jesus tried. Though he could totally empty his head for a second or two at a time, thoughts kept stealing in, and feelings, too, before he could realize they were there.

“Take three more breaths as before,” Kahjian told him. “Return your awareness to this room.”

Jesus did as he was told and opened his eyes. He felt like he was coming back from a faraway place.

“How did you know what I was thinking, Master?” he quietly asked.

Kahjian’s eyes glowed. He laid his hand high on his stomach, just under his breastbone. “I did not know, exactly,” he told Jesus. “But I could sense the larger shapes and paths of your energy.” He flicked a finger in the air. “After having so many students,” he said, “I have learned to know what those energy shapes mean as thoughts and feelings.”

Kahjian smiled. “Go to your room and practice what I have taught you for seven days,” he told Jesus. “Then return here. I will be waiting.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Jesus rose and stumbled out of the room, dizzy from so many questions and new experiences. Learning yoga, he decided, was not at all what he had expected.

Jesus learned many more things in the following days. Kahjian continued teaching him by asking questions, rather than giving answers. The weeks passed slowly, for Jesus felt each step of the way was difficult. But soon he knew a variety of yoga methods, for he learned these things much faster than most young men. He already was a master of the written Laws of the Hebrews. He now was becoming a master of the inner, unwritten laws that govern the soul each person has within oneself.

Kahjian wanted him to start working on other things as well. “Would you like to learn the physical disciplines of yoga?” Kahjian asked him. “We have taught you little more of these than simple breathing control and physical exercise, so far.”

Jesus asked why he needed more.

“The person who controls his body and self and knows them perfectly is the person of perfect healthy. If you wish to be a healer, you first must learn to heal yourself. Do you wish to be a healer?”
“Yes, master.”

Jesus spent many months on physical postures, breathing control, and learning from experience the effects of various foods and rinks on his physical and mental well-being. He also learned perfect control of his emotional feelings, how to project their energies outward, and how to withdraw them back into himself, for such control was necessary for being able to heal others as well as himself.

Kahjian also asked him to teach. “Teach!” Jesus exclaimed. He tapped his foot impatiently on the straw mat in their study room. “What could I teach?” he asked.

“You already know our language well enough,” Kahjian pointed out. “Are you not able to teach many things? It is expected of most of our students who have learned as much as you have. Do you not wish to help others?”

“But whom could I teach?” Jesus asked. “I am still a student myself.”

“Could you not teach the poor, the Trash as they are called? Since Buddha came five hundred years ago and made yoga available even to the Trash, it is traditional for our students to teach them. Since they are the untouchables, you as a priestly candidate may not touch them. But you may talk to them.”

Jesus slowly nodded.

The next morning he went out into the streets of Benares, near a busy market corner that was filled with farmers bringing their products to market, and many of the Trash who lived there. The Trash often ate, worked, and even slept in the streets during the drier months when monsoon rains were not washing everything with endless sheets of water.

The market was filled with booths and walking vendors selling their goods. Because Benares was one of the richest and most important cities in the eastern part of India on the wide Ganges River, tens of thousands of shoppers gathered there weekly just to buy these goods. The sellers kept them busy.

Farmers wrestled with large wicker baskets of brown and white rices from the lush, fertile plains of Bengal further down the Ganges. Wool merchants all the way from Kashmir in the northwest brought their famous Kashmir wool, fine and soft to the touch, made from the special undercoat hairs of carefully bred goats. From dep in the south of India came hardy men and women bringing tropical fruits such as mangos and loquats, spices such as ginger and many other wonderful foods of the hot regions.

Jesus placed himself beside a fat and happy-looking seller of ready-made curry powders and sauces. The man was very dark-skinned and had tufts of hair growing out of his ears. His features were strangely Roman, his hair straight and with a reddish tinge much darker than Jesus’ red hair.

“Oh ho, Red!” he said to Jesus. “You are a foreigner! Can you speak our language?”

“Yes,” Jesus said in the man’s language, a common tongue in the streets of Benares. “I am a student at the temple..

“We redheads must stick together!” the man joked. “What are you? A Persian?”

“I am a Hebrew,” Jesus told him.

“A Babylonian?” the big man asked. “Beyond Persia is Babylon. I know that much!” The man waved his hands. “Babylon, Hebrew land, they are all the same to us Indians! All those countries are so far away that you foreigners all look the same. Except for that hair of yours, Red.” He winked at Jesus.

“Is this a good corner to teach?” Jesus asked.

“It is an excellent corner! Where is your straw mat?”

Jesus looked around him. “I didn’t know I would need one. So many people are standing.”

The wide merchant shook his head sadly. “A teacher must sit, for that is the way it always has been!”

He hurried behind his table with its large barrels and jars of curry. He reached into a small water-buffalo skin tent behind the table and jerked out a simple mat.

“Here.” He shoved it at Jesus.

“Do not teach anything too dangerous,” he cautioned Jesus. “This year the farmers and the Trash are in an angry mood. Last year’s famine made them suffer and many died. Now this year, with food in the bellies of the ones who survived, they would like to kill us merchants and the prests and princes and take all our wealth.”

The big man snorted and glanced over his curries. “They may take all my wealth. There is little enough as it is. At least I would still have my standing as a merchant. I could never become one of the Trash.”

He looked up at Jesus. “Did you know that, Red?” he asked. “In this country a man inherits his position. The Trash will always be Trash, no matter how educated they become. And I will never be more or less than a merchant, because I was born as one.”

“I know,” jesus softly said.

The big man jumped into action. “Here,” he said. “Sit right here. I place the mat for you just so. Hey, everybody!” He turned and bellowed out into the street intersection. “This Babylonian wishes to teach you spiritual ways! Come listen!”

A few curious farmers and better-fed Trash turned their heads and strolled over.

The big man leaned close to Jesus. He smelled strongly of sandalwood incense and curry. “There you go, Red. I’ve got you started. Good luck!”

Jesus sat down. Some of the curious watchers sat down with him. He asked them a few polite questions to discover what their interests were. Then he began talking to them. He tried talking about some of the things he had learned in the temple.

One man drifted away.

Another left, and another.

Jesus began to sweat profusely, and not just from the heat. He tried talking about some of the more interesting points of Hebrew law.

The few remaining people except for one got up and left.

The remaining man began to rise, too. He was a small, raggedy beggar.

Jesus reached out and touched his arm. “Stay,” he asked the man.

The little man looked in horror at the place where Jesus had touched him. Then he stared at Jesus. “You may not touch me, Master! He trembled. “I am Trash!”

Jesus shook his head gently. “Forgive me. I will not tell anyone. Please stay and listen.”

The little man looked all around in fear. No one seemed to have noticed them. He nervously turned back to Jesus and waited.

Jesus told him a story, about the time Joshua took over the place of Moses, who had just died, and helped the children of Israel destroy the walls of Jericho with huge trumpets.

It worked. The little man stayed. He even smiled and clapped his hands once when the story was done.

Jesus tried another story. And another. People began to gather around him, sitting cross-legged on mats and in the dust and listening.

The next morning he told more stories, and the morning after that. He learned to pause long enough between stories to answer his listeners’ questions. Only a few of the questions were about the subjects he had been learning, yoga and meditation, but at least such questions were a start. He learned to answer the people with short, practical answers that were clear, and then move immediately into another story.

He was, he felt, really becoming a teacher. People returned again and again to listen to him. He lost his self-consciousness around them. He started telling them stories about their own gods and wise sages.

This delighted them even more, for they were able to request old legends and histories that they had first listened to as children sitting around campfires in the little villages and homes where they grew up. The stories were especially interesting because this foreigner, the red-haired Babylonian, as he was called, gave the old stories a fresh twist. He made them sound new.

Jesus was rather pleased with his results. Though he made many mistakes at first, he had no serious blunders until on a busy market morning, about six months after he had begun teaching. It started when one of the Trash asked him an especially difficult question.

“Teacher,” the wiry little man asked, “why is it that you preach equality under God when I am not even worthy enough to have a priest spit on me?” The eyes of the man, as he watched jesus, were challenging.

“Do you resent your low position in society?” Jesus asked.

The man nodded fiercely.

“Don’t,” said Jesus. He sensed the kindness lying under the surface in the man. “You are a better person than some kings I have met.”

The crowd opened their eyes in surprise and began to murmur.

“Come here,” Jesus said.

The man strode forward.

“Kneel before me,” Jesus told him.

The man went down on his knees.

Jesus put his hand on the man’s head.

“You can’t do that!” a man shouted.

“He has broken the cast laws!” a woman yelled.

The little man under Jesus’ hand paled, but stayed where he was.

Several others in the crowd shouted out angrily. A few–men and women who were Trash like the man being touched–had a look of mixed fear and awe on their faces. One woman began pushing forward.

“Be quiet, you angry ones!” Jesus exclaimed. “Has not your own Buddha, the man who many among you say was God who returned in the flesh, said these words? ‘I do not call a man a priest of upper-class standing, just because he was born of an upper-class mother. The man who has no worldly belongs and is not bound to his worldly connections, that man I call a priest of the upper class.’”

Jesus looked over the crowd sternly. “If this man whom I touch may be a priest in Buddha’s eyes, who can refuse to touch him?”

“Buddha didn’t say we had to touch everyone!” a man shouted.

The crowd shifted uneasily. More people, sensing the danger and excitement, were gathering on the edge of the crowd each minute.

The woman who had been pushing forward reached Jesus. “Touch me, Master,” she said.

“Don’t!” a man with a deep voice yelled. “She is Trash even among the Trash, a streetwalker who sells herself for a bowl of rice.”

Jesus looked down at the woman kneeling beside the man he had already touched. Her clothes were ragged and smelly and her face dirty from living on the streets.

“And you, my lady,” he quietly asked, “have you possessions or bindings in this world?”

The woman looked up. Her face was so dusty that her age was impossible to tell. Tears were making tracks down through the dirt on her cheeks.

“I have nothing and no one, Master,” she answered, “for yesterday I lost everything in a fire, including my young son who was my life.”

The crowd became silent and tense.

“Then I declare you a priest and a Lady of high birth,” Jesus quietly said.

He put out his hand and laid it on her head.

“Go now,” he told her, “and set your life in order. You are free.”

The crowd burst outward in all directions.

“Come, come and listen!” people shouted to others passing by. many people were running to get friends and relatives to hear this strange foreigner who taught freedom from class.

Those in the crowd who were Trash, except for a few who were too afraid, pushed forward to be touched by this holy man who offered them everything.

Jesus touched each of them and talked with each one briefly, offering each a hope they had only dreamed of.

The crowd around him was swelling to many hundreds when suddenly a shout rang out from the edge of it. “You there! What in the name of Brahma do you think you are doing!”

A tall, wide-shouldered priest in yellow robes began to push his way toward Jesus. “You cannot touch that scum!” he shouted. “Do you want to ruin everything for all of us priests? The rulers and high priests will have our necks. Stop it, do you hear!”

The crowd closed around the priest. Though no one of the Trash touched him, several large farmers grabbed the priest and threw him outside the edge of the crowd. The priest stumbled up and ruan away limping.

“Enough of these white-skinned princes and priests!” one of the farmers yelled. The lower classes usually were the darker-skinned people. “They take the food out of our mouths in a famine!”

Jesus nervously stopped talking with the people before him. “Do not become violent,” he yelled over everyone’s heads. “Buddha did not say that violence will release you from suffering.”

“Lord Krishna did!” shouted a dark-skinned merchant. “Haven’t you read our Song of God, foreigner?”

Jesus had read it. It was one of the most popular stories in India. In it Lord Krishna counseled a warrior prince to fight the prince’s own kinsmen because it served the purpose of good.

Jesus did not know what to answer.

“Come on!” yelled a farmer little older than a boy. “Where are those priests!” He raised a long stick of wood in his hand like a little boy and waved it through the air.

The crowd divided. Though most of it stayed around Jesus, a small part of it broke away to follow the young farmer. Many others milled around in the streets near Jesus’ corner, waiting to see what would happen. Jesus noticed from the corner of his eye that the curry seller beside him was no longer in front of his tent stand and had closed it tight.

Suddenly from the street opposite the one the angry farmers had taken, a group of almost two dozen priests in brown, yellow, and red-banded robes marched toward the corner where Jesus and the crowd around him stood. In their hands, they carried whips made of leather straps connected to short metal handles.

“There he is!” shouted the priest who had been thrown over the heads of the crowd. “The foreigner!”

The priests marched through the crowd, some of whom resisted sullenly and were whipped until they moved.

The Trash right in front of Jesus scattered as fast as they could. If they were caught, it would have been their death.

“You!” said the leader of the priests. He stood in a perfectly tailored purple robe, in front of Jesus. “You come from what temple?” he asked Jesus.

Jesus met his look. The priest was tall, but Jesus was slightly taller. “I am a student in the main temple here in town,” he told the priest.

“Our temple!” The priest looked furious. “However did we spawn such a devil as you? Leave! We have worked for hundreds of years to keep a careful balance among the Trash, the farmers, the merchants, and princes and priests. Then a hotheaded fool like you comes along and destroys everything! What do you want, our blood?”

Jesus flexed his fingers to make them stop trembling. “You are scared,” he told the priest.

The priest immediately raised his whip and brought it down on Jesus. The other priests leaped forward and joined their leader.

Jesus automatically turned and raised his arm to protect himself even as shock blossomed within him. He had gone from giving to being killed in a matter of minutes. He had heard of the effects of whippings. He knew he must escape soon or die.

He stumbled into the open-mouthed crowd still pressing close to watch his punishment. The crowd tried to part but couldn’t really move well because it was so packed. Jesus pushed and stumbled between people when suddenly he felt a hand firmly grab the collar of his robe.

“This way, Red. Hurry.” Jesus looked up into the face of the fat, red-haired curry seller. He let himself be half-dragged and he half-ran through the crowd to the back of the curry seller’s stand and tent.

“You young fool!” the big man exclaimed. “Don’t you know the authorities are afraid the people will rise up against them? You must leave!”

Jesus nodded. He was beginning to deeply feel the burning pain of the whipping. He saw welts rising on his hand and arm.

The curry seller drew him down one alley and then another. Soon they were deep inside the poor section of the city, where houses were little more than water-buffalo skins strung over poles, and mud bricks. People looked at the two red-haired men curiously, but no one stopped them.

Jesus held up his good hand. “Wait,” he gasped. “This is far enough.”

The big man paused.

“Your tent and your goods,” Jesus said. “You must go back to them.”

“They are already packed and gone, except for the tent,” the man told him. “When I saw what you were doing, I took my curries down and stored them with a nearby friend.”

“Thank you for helping,” Jesus said.

The big man shook his head and grumbled. “I’ve done more than you realize, young teacher. I must leave Benares tonight and not come back for at least a year.”

“I am sorry,” Jesus said. He stood straight and tried to catch his breath. A rat hurried past his feet and behind a pile of garbage. The garbage tipped over into the open ditch of sewage it sat in.

“Escape with me,” the big man said. Suddenly he grinned. His eyes were fierce. “Any man who can practice what Buddha taught is man enough for me!”

Jesus shook his head. “I must return to my own master in the temple and ask him what I should do.”

“The temple!” yelped the big man. “You want to return there after what the priests did to you? Your own master, whoever he is, probably will have you killed!”

“No,” jesus said. “I don’t think so. If I am any judge of people at all, I would say he is far advanced beyond the selfishness of those priests back there.”

The eyes of the big man glowed. “It is amazing, isn’t it, young master, what men who call themselves priests can do?”

Jesus nodded. “I had heard of such men. Now I know they really exist.”

The big man leaned forward. “Go now, young master. Go to your own priest. There is little time for either of us. Tomorrow morning they will be searching.”

Jesus put his hands, even the painful one, on the curry seller’s shoulders and embraced him. “If ever you need help for doing good as you have done tonight,” Jesus said, “go to my master, Kahjian, in the temple.”

“If I hear you are alive and well,” said the curry merchant, “then I will trust your Kahjian. Otherwise I will avoid him at all costs, as I do most priests.”

The two men embraced once more, then parted.

Slowly and carefully, wincing from his wounds, Jesus found his way back to the temple and Kahjian.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.