THE LIVING DEAD.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3034, 3 November 1908, Page 3

THE LIVING DEAD.

Sven Hedin, the explorer who recently returned from Tibet, considers that the most wonderful thing in all that extraordinary world of Tibet is the mysticism of the lama. Religious austerity has two expressions, the active and the passive—the Hindu fakir revels in self-inflicted torture, the Tibetan saint selects simply a withdrawal from all human interests, an absolute separation irom the world, from fellow men, and the light -of the sun. There are degrees in this form of self mortification. One hermit who enjoyed a grotto on a perpendicular cliff over one hundred and sixty feet irom the ground, had already lived year.* without seeing a fellow human being, but his cave was open to the valley, and the sun shone Into it. A far more terrible picture is that of the lamas, who have chosen to be immured in underground caves. Six years ago one of these ascetics was brought in solemn procession to a grotto in -Linga-gunpa, and after due ceremonies had been gone'through, the narrow entrance was built in, not to be opened again till a new procession shall come to carry out his dead body. "He sat there alone and watched them fill up the opening with blocks of stone —the flight growing continually less, till finally only a tiny little hole was left. Through this lie took his last farewell o£ the sun, and when that too was closed up, he remained in complete and utter darkness." A stream flowing through the cave provides for drinking and ablutions. The one sign of communication with the outside world is by the daily meal. The head lama of the monastery hard by explains: —"The food which is passed in to him once a day by an underground passage is eaten up by the morning; but "should we find the dish untouched ■one morning, then we should understand that he had died." Cut off from all worldly temptations, undisturbed even by sounds or sunrays, i the recluse lives only to meditate on the riddle of life—and of death. \ The strange thing is that he may live long. Near another temple a lama had endured the dark imprisonment for sixty-nine years! Yet, with this possibility before him, a pilgrim barely twenty years old, met by Sven Hedin on the sacred hill, had resolved on the self-entomb-mjbnt. Ta the outer world by this time another sainc has died—died from the moment he was shut beyond sight and sound. "And yet he is still alive in there. Had not one man survived for sixty-nine years? He longs to be delivered from life, but must still sit and wait, decade after decade, it may be, until at last death ■comes and stretches torth both hands to him and leads him out of the dark amid 'a burst of psalm from the eternal choir.' "