Dark clouds were gathering on the distant horizon. With correspondingly agitated steps, Herr Kuno Hinrichsen, managing director of the firm: General Charitable Works, ‘Wholesalers of fat, lard and oils’, paced up and down his princely study. His right hand, richly adorned with splendid rings, casually crumpled up a brochure he had been sent in his capacity of newly elected honorary president of the ‘non-profit-making philosophical association’ The Light of the East, which he had recently founded. He had quickly leafed through the brochure, while he was being driven home from the factory, in order to prepare himself for the banquet with a few catchwords and a clear opinion of his own about the view of life created by the ancient Indian philosophers, which he could casually drop into the conversation with the other guests at appropriate points. He seldom failed, whenever the opportunity presented itself, to expound his high-minded ideals, on the other hand he was unwilling to let slip any opportunity of emphasising his own firmly held convictions on all important questions, not to mention ones of a scientific, or even philosophical, nature, in order, as he put it, to remain ‘master of the situation’.
At times as he read the pamphlet, written by a specialist in the field, a superior smile had played about the managing director’s forceful lips and at the persistently repeated assertion that the world was not actually real but merely a delusion of the senses, sarcastic exclamations could be heard, such as, ‘Oh, come on,’ or ‘Nice chaps, those Indians, but no get-up-and-go.’ Finally, after his hand had automatically patted his wallet, he murmured, ‘Well, a bank account, that’s definitely real,’ thus freeing himself from the spell of theoretical ruminations and with one energetic gesture he made himself ‘master of the situation’ again by thrusting the brochure into his pocket.
Herr Hinrichsen had merely deigned to note — with a glassy eye, so to speak — the appendix to the leaflet, a story about an Indian penitent, or, as one might say, had graciously allowed it access to his subconscious, for a variety of more pleasant reflections had come to occupy his mind.
His eldest son, Fritz, had sent a telegram from Africa: ‘Shot my fiftieth pachyderm today,’ and, if that were not enough good news, a business communication from the South Australian branch of the General Charitable Works had arrived to say that they had succeeded in setting up a gigantic vat which could take 10,000 penguins at once and transform them into superb lubricating grease in a few hours.
This put the Honorary President in a most contented mood and, after he had regaled himself with a lavish dinner in his country retreat, he took out the pamphlet once more to read the comic passage about the unreality of the visible world to his lady wife, when he was suddenly called to the telephone and given the horrendous news that a junior clerk by the name of Meier had taken the sum of 3,50 marks from the petty cash, without providing sufficient documentation as to its use.
What incensed him even more than the fact itself was the outrageous attempt by the managing clerk to put in a good word for the embezzler by alluding to his desperate personal difficulties.
There was nothing that infuriated Herr Hinrichsen more — especially as he was on the committee of the Association for the Improvement of National Morality — as theft in any form. In this respect his conscience had become an objective symbol of unbesmirchability throughout the land.
No wonder, then, that when he heard the telephonic bad tidings he literally went pale and could scarcely utter the words, ‘The police! Meier must be locked up right away.’
Fiery snakes flashed across the black sky, the thunder was already rumbling menacingly and, with a correspondingly dark expression, the Honorary President emptied the fizzy drink his wife had prepared with her own hands and cajoled him into drinking, saying, ‘Please, please, Charitable Works,’ — tenderly addressing him by her pet name for him — ‘a little sip, just for my sake.’When this had calmed his tattered nerves, she gently pushed him down in the armchair, carefully closed the windows and lowered the richly embroidered blinds, so the lightning could not strike in the room, and tiptoed out.
Gradually the soothing drink had its effect and Morpheus took Herr Hinrichsen’s wounded heart in his arms.
Already the first heavy drops were falling and the harbingers of the approaching storm were howling and rattling at the costly rococo shutters, but the sleeper did not hear them.
Confused phrases from the pamphlet performed a disrespectful jig before his inner eye, carrying him off out of the dependable present and into the dubious realm of dreams. The story of the Indian penitent in the appendix to the brochure, that he had merely glanced over, hardly paying attention, was suddenly happening, right there inside his head. Herr Hinrichsen saw himself — not without some misgivings — transformed in the twinkling of an eye into an extremely scantily dressed, penniless Indian fakir, who he was, and then, on the other hand, was not.
No rings on his fingers any more, not to mention a tie-pin, just a staff in his hand and, where previously the heavy, respect-inspiring gold watch-chain used to dangle down, nothing but a grubby loincloth.
And so he staggered off, tousled black hair hanging down to his shoulders, in a desolate, sun-scorched wilderness, scouring the landscape in vain for his 60 hp car. Tough dried grasses cut excruciatingly into his naked soles (the dreaming Herr Hinrichsen automatically pushed off his left ankle boot with his right foot) and with every step one more bit of his dignity as head of the General Charitable Works disappeared.
Instead, he was filled with a new, unknown and highly disreputable sensation: a positively perverse thirst, stored up during years of aimless wandering across lonely, dreary steppes, for spiritual enlightenment and the wondrous, mysterious goal of becoming one with the God Shiva, the destroyer of earthly life.
The businessman-fakir desperately tried to find his way back to his familiar waking consciousness as a major industrialist by concentrating his thoughts on the splendid vat with the 10,000 penguins but in vain. A merciless, invisible goad drove him on until he was nothing but an Indian penitent, in whose poor, unfruitful brain the burning desire for God and a weary lifetime of waiting for spiritual redemption had been turned into the act of blind wandering, aimlessly exchanging one place for another, which consumed his now empty time like a clock, so that the words of the sacred Veda might come true:
‘Make thy way alone, as the solitary rhinoceros roams.’
Hour after hour the businessman-fakir had struggled on towards a dazzlingly white point, which gradually grew bigger as he approached and eventually turned out to be a stone column surrounded by trees standing beside a babbling spring: one of those venerable lingams into which, it is said, the bodies of ascetics are transformed when their souls have reached the last stage of ecstasy and been sucked up by the breath of the universal spirit.
And when the businessman-fakir performed the sacrificial rites of the sannyasin and poured a few drops of water on the lingam, murmuring the mystical syllables ‘Bhur — Hamsa Bhur’ in his navel, heart, throat and forehead, letters of light appeared on the lingam, telling him that previously it had been the body of the great yoga teacher, Matsyendra Paramahamsa, whom the God Shiva himself had instructed from his own lips in the mysteries of ‘Tat tvam asi’ — of becoming one — and transformed from a mute fish into a human being.
And the lingam turned into a thatched hut, from which came a voice asking, ‘Who are you and what is your name?’
‘I seek the path to God, I am the penitent Lala Lajpat-Rai,’ the fakir replied, before Herr Hinrichsen had the chance to say, ‘Hello, General Charitable Works speaking.’
Nor, much to his chagrin, could Herr Hinrichsen prevent the penitent from throwing himself to the ground before the saint, as he came out, and begging him to be his guru, his spiritual guide, on the heartbreaking path to nirvana.
But with a smile the guru, Matsyendra, touched the fakir on the top of the head and said, ‘Thus I form the chain and give you the exercise: Thou shalt not steal,’ a commandment with which the businessman expressed his agreement by a grunt of approval.
The penitent probably thought to himself that he had never stolen anything in his whole life, but he went away obediently and only returned after many days of pondering and prayer.
And when the guru asked him what he had lived on during that time and he answered, ‘On the milk of a cow grazing in the valley,’ he was told that he had stolen because the cow belonged to a rich merchant.
Under normal conditions that would have been enough for Herr Hinrichsen to dissociate himself entirely from the fakir but unfortunately he was inescapably trapped in the net of the dream and bound to him.
After a long time the penitent, Lala Lajpat Rai, imagining himself free from the sin of stealing, once more went to his guru and reported that he had only drunk the foam that dripped down from the mouth of the calf as it suckled, but he was told he was still a thief, for he had reduced the food of the blind earthworms, which Vishnu, the great sustainer of all life, graciously accords them in the form of those drops.
So then, without complaining, the fakir ate only the sparse grass, like an animal, but even that the guru called theft, since it was the cow’s food, intended to be transformed in her stomach into nourishing milk for her helpless child.
‘Great!’ Herr Hinrichsen murmured as he stretched into a more comfortable position in his armchair. The penitent, however, huddled up silently outside the stone lingam, his heart filled with unutterable sadness, because he was unable to free himself from the sin of stealing and appear pure while a living man before the exalted saint.
Staring straight ahead from morning to evening, from evening to morning, he quietly repeated one word, ‘Hari’ — the sacred name of Shiva, the god of death — like a boundless, humble prayer to take away his body, his eternally thirsty, hungry, ravening body.
And the consuming fire in his entrails, his despair and his torment at being a man, all that he compressed into the word ‘Hari’ until his whole body, his blood and his bones were saying it with him, so that it grew into a single, uninterrupted cry for deliverance, seeming to fill the invisible universe.
When, on the fortieth day, the sun once more stood blood-red in the sky, the fakir sensed from the thunder in his heart and the storm that was beginning to rage in his brain, that the end had come.
His tongue grew hard and could no longer speak the name ‘Hari’ and his eyes took on the terrible look of one in the throes of death; his body began to sway and was about to fall forward, when there suddenly appeared before him, as immense as the cosmos, with a thousand faces, Matsyendra, the saint, the perfected one, and the Milky Way of the firmament was but a white hair at his temple.
And regaled him with heavenly bread and wine. Bread for his body and wine for his spirit.
And entered into him and became — himself.
And he spoke to the penitent with the penitent’s lips: ‘Henceforth you cannot steal, even if you wanted to. Everything you see inside yourself and outside yourself: “Tat tvam asi” — you are all that yourself. The world has become your body: “Tat tvam asi” — you are all that. And if you kill your parents and eat the flesh of your own children, you are not a murderer: “Tat tvam asi” — you are they. How can anyone murder and steal who has become Tat tvam asi? His body has become the world.’
Gently roused from his sleep by his wife, who handed him a telegram, Herr Hinrichsen woke. He quickly felt his neck and brow and established that he was perspiring excessively.
Outside flurries of hail were rattling the windows and the apartment was plunged in deep darkness that was only occasionally lit by sulphurous yellow flashes of lighting.
Herr Hinrichsen opened the telegram, full of expectation, but hardly had he glanced at it than the colour drained from his forceful features and an unarticulated groan rising from his chest indicated that he had only just escaped a fainting fit which, given his imposing corpulence, could easily have had fatal consequences.
A terrible clap of thunder shook the magnificent villa to its foundations and ‘bankrupt’ was the single, pregnant word that escaped Herr Hinrichsen’s lips. The telegram said that a panic on the stock exchange had wiped out almost his whole assets in a few minutes.
Unable to move a muscle, even less to think, Herr Hinrichsen stared into space, but then a miracle! There suddenly appeared a shining hand, clearly belonging to his soul, which wrote — as did the one that appeared to Belshazzar, the erstwhile king of Babylon — in letters of fire on the wall: ‘ “Tat tvam asi”: you are everything. Does that tell you anything, General Charitable Works?’ and disappeared.
At a stroke Herr Hinrichsen was overcome with immense enlightenment.
He had for years had sole charge, with unlimited power of attorney, of the administration of significant funds belonging to orphans and of the investments of trusting widowed relatives, whose financial protection had become second nature to him. All it needed, therefore, was for a few transactions to be backdated a little, a harmless bookkeeping operation, and the whole loss would be theirs.
‘Of course! It’s so clear a blind man could see it. “Tat tvam asi!” I’m the whole lot of ’em!’ Herr Hinrichsen exclaimed jubilantly again and again. ‘And the world isn’t real, anyway. I’d never’ve thought there was so much in this Indian philosophy,’ he added, rubbing his hands, ‘’specially that trick with the “Tat tvam asi” Capital! Capital!’
The horrible storm outside had passed as quickly as it had come, the cheerful golden face of the sun pierced the last veil of cloud, and a luminous rainbow adorned a world refreshed as a jaunty Herr Hinrichsen commanded the servant, who had come rushing in, ‘Put a magnum of champagne on ice for a toast to old Matsyendra.’
From then on Herr Kuno Hinrichsen, businessman, was ‘master’ of even the most difficult situations and a convinced follower of the Indian doctrine of the Vedanta to the end of his days.