The Jewel Trader Of Pegu by Jeffrey Hantover Page B

our youthful errors? If not, you are doomed. No marble crypt on the Lido for you: I am afraid, exhausted by your flirting and amorous indiscretions, you too may end up a louse—your home the unwashed hair of some aging courtesan. Or even worse, you will be reborn a woman who will have to ward off the lecherous advances of callow youths.
    —
Could not,
I asked Win,
this poor fellow have seen the error of his
ways, repented, and through good deeds tipped the scales of your faith’s divine justice?
    —Oh, yes, we can harvest good deeds like a hardworking farmer his
rice, and they may change the present fate our past deeds have earned. But
we can never erase completely the punishment our bad deeds deserve. We
cannot escape the next life our many deeds merit.
    Win shook his head. —
Massimo’s god frightens me. To be banished
to the Lower Depths of the House of Smoke forever for what you have done
in only one life. That is so cruel. That Buddha would have spent forever in
the Lower Depths for one sin in an earthly life is beyond my understanding.
    Why is Massimo’s god so unforgiving? Has his god no heart? What good is shame if you have no chance to make up for your sins? Forever—that is
very difficult for my small mind to comprehend.
    —Massimo’s god is not mine. My people do not think so much about
your House of Smoke. Our God has given us the laws to obey. It is our
sacred duty to live our lives according to His laws.

    Win smiled. —
Your people are wise to think that way. Let me show
you something
.
    He went to a chest in the corner of the room and returned with a long ledger of palm leaves. He calls it his merit ledger. I can’t decipher this script—all curves and semicircles, like scraps of spaghetti left on a plate. Here he keeps track of his good deeds, like a clerk. His accounts are more detailed than a pawnbroker his pledges. All his giving, down to the last coin—how much, how often, the pleasures he has forgone to make his gifts. I thought he might need another several entries to offset the pride with which he presented his ledger.
    I cannot say where his pride dwelled most, with the ledger or with the actions it so thoroughly documents. Where is the anonymous giver? Where is the purity of faith, the goodness of heart?
    Win told me of a man who claims to be the father of his own wife, but Win has no recollection of his own past lives. But he must think that he has lived lives of sufficient generosity and merit to have been reborn in finest Cambay cloth and not rags, to go to sleep with a full belly, and not scrounge for roots in the forest, or worse, be born a mongrel scratching fleas and howling at the moon.
    Who am I to mark the angels among us, to rank men of goodness? Though it seems odd that merit for Win and the others of his faith is nothing but giving, and then only to monks with begging bowls, to gild already grand monasteries and pagodas, or to fund holiday feasts for holy men. Win thinks it better to feed a plump monk than a starving woman and her suckling child. Better to build a new monastery or, even better, a pagoda, though the streets glitter with them, than a lean-to of cane and palms for the homeless streaming into the city. It seems all a show. This religion is like these pagodas, all gold and ornamentation but nothing inside.

    Joseph, one human life is enough for me, given the losses I have suffered. Those who follow the Buddha believe to be born an animal is to be reborn in a state of woe, one realm below the demons. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, granted me another life before resurrection, I would not think it punishment to be reborn a seagull floating on eddies of air or, since you say I look like one with my gangly gait, a crane snapping up fish in the muddy shoals of the Lagoon.
    Freed from worldly woe, left alone—that seems a quiet life, more reward than punishment.
    The more I listen to Win speak of his belief in the Buddha, intently as my mind is able, the more I