The Bengal Tiger and the Himalayan Yak

“I am more and more plagued by a single question,” said the yak from Nepal: “What is the meaning of it All?”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said the Bengal, “and sorry that you are not well.”

“Who said anything about being sick?”

“You did. I distinctly heard ‘plagued.'”

“It was just an expression, a figure of speech, a vague make-do word. You know.”

“Yes, I know. So—it just popped into your head, a sort of accident? Well, there are very few accidents in the ways of the mind. Everything is relevant. Furthermore, for your information, whenever somebody speaks in virtual capitals, saying ‘Life’ or, as you said, ‘All’, they are not empty locutions either but broad, urgent, fraught, and he is saying that he is already lost in some wide catch-all empyrean, an indefinable Every Place or No Place—actually annihilation—and probably for a long while already—gone, as they say. How far, we shall soon determine.”

“‘Gone?’ I’m insane?”

"I didn’t say that. Probably not.”

“But I’m not perfectly sane?”

“Probably not.”

“Is anyone?”

"What?”

“Perfectly sane?”

“You know the standard answer to that.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“Correct.”

“Anyway, if I’m gone, it’s just from Jhawān, my Indian home. Now I’m here, for consultation. You are a sage, a renowned guru, as well as medical man. I really came to confer.”

“One confers with equals. You are not my equal.”

“Sorry—excuse me. But it’s just that...I prefer to believe that my thinking such thoughts shows—not to boast—that I am, at least, on a higher plane than most, not lofty, just a little higher, and I need some guidance now. That’s all.”

“You’re on a higher plain, all right,” said Bengal, “where you come from, in the Himalayan foothills, where you have been privileged, don’t y’ know, just with the sight of those peaks up there. They should have been filling your eyes to the brim. Period. Full stop. No question mark. Do you understand? I am not giving a mere punctuation lesson here. Is that clear?”

“Yes. No. Yes and no. I am—I seem—a trifle confused.”

“You have been, for a long time now, well before our session. Listen to me: what you have been asking is a much abused query, not really wise, not answerable actually, not in true contact with reality, not what should be called meaningful at all.”

“Then what would be meaningful to ask?”

“Let’s say, for example, a tree branch breaks. Why, one might inquire, does it fall—that is, down instead of up or, for that matter, sideways. Why does it fall at all?”

“That—excuse me again—is just silly. All of a sudden our discussion isn’t serious.”

“Oh, it’s filled with gravity.” Bengal’s eyes glittered. He leaned closer to Yak, becoming fully earnest. “Back to basics,” he said: “If you really wish to know something, as it truly is, not in its ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’ sense (strange how ‘high’ and ‘deep’ are the same in philosophy), if you want to get at a thing’s essence, what physical, botanical, astronomical principles are involved, that’s what deserves attention. But if you seek, further or otherwise, some extrinsical over-arching ‘Meaning’ of that branch we mentioned, or of an apple or a planet or the ethereal stars, you are not actually asking a meaningful healthy question, full of real ascertainable hitherto hidden or stealthy truth. You are light-headed at the very instant you believe you have ascended into heavy thought; you are vague, general and airy, already contact-less, lost in never-never fairy land, actually indisposed, amiss just when you think you have come into a prime hale state.”

“I think,” said Yak, “that that state is intellectual, or spiritual, not what you say at all.”

“Who,” Bengal looked about the arbor space elaborately, “in fact, asked for your opinion? Be quiet. I think from now on you should try to confine yourself to absorbing what I say and not break in quite so much. Sit back. Subside. You actually are unusually intelligent and one of the most independent animals I know, and that’s a pleasure, but shut up. Do you know precisely who I am? I don’t like to puff myself, but all the same you need to fully know: I have a PH D degree—the most advanced degree at the University of Dehli—Particularly Honored Doctor, in Universal Temperament and Husbandry, as I hoped you knew, so don’t come over me with any fancy old philosophy, I’m past all that. Don’t, for one thing, continually raise objections or scurry around in your capacious head to uncover exceptions anymore. Just focus on this: all organisms have issues of physical illness; similarly they have phases of mental duress, imbalance and malaise. The human species, for instance, is especially prone. By the way, have you consorted with human beings at all, or were you off in the wilds on your own?”

“They eventually yoke most yaks and make us work in their fields. Actually, after freeing myself one night, I ran off in the dark.”

“I see. Now, tell me: when you were with or near them, did you ever hear or over-hear them?”

“Of course.”

“That’s it, then. That’s the source of your problem! Their questing condition is generally not prevalent in animals, but does, as you maintained, plague people. You are one of the rare beasts, though, who have sustained contagion. Sorry; I’ve been overbearing sometimes and too droll.”

“Much obliged. Maybe your guess is right. And yet I think it was something else began it, made for my sudden upset.”

“Perhaps. But listen to me. There is an underlying simplicity that will stand you in good stead, and it has to do with my emphasis on what one can ‘see’. You remember that, in popular parlance, to ‘see’ is to ‘understand’, as when we say ‘I see’ for ‘I get it’ or ‘It has finally entered my head’, or ‘I comprehend now’. The literal and the figurative have the same direct self-sufficient meaning here, and so it is for living: it is its own occasion. Life is itself, that’s all—and good enough, completely adequate and whole, in itself, in the very experience of its being—again, exactly like seeing—they’re an equation—both of them intense miracles needing no other goal. Now, you: have you sometimes lain on an escarpment and wondrously gazed at the stupendous scenery there before you?”

“I suppose: times when I wasn’t in harness.”

“Ah. An unenthusiastic yes. You were not what you should have been then, in the main: rousingly elated, or inwardly quietly amazed—lifted up, out of your ordinary self, there on a crag, a platform, a mountain shelf, feeling totally, sheerly alive—I am getting carried away—but it’s enough to say, experiencing aliveness. That’s the point, that’s enough.

“Let me tell you something else. It’s about songbirds,” said the Bengal tiger, “who sing not just for mating purposes but from the utter joy they take in mountain or other far-flung vistas—they have told me so—and there are even, among sordid human beings, some who feel a comparable natural high sometimes and express it. But we felines and oxen are too meager, too withholding in the exercise of our senses and the feel of life, not quite so eager to reveal.”

“How about hearing?”

What??”

“Hearing, added to seeing?

Whatever do you mean?”

“Ah,” said Yak, “that word again. Listen, my good doctor and friend: one day, not long ago, I saw a mountain fox nab a Himalayan rabbit—no, it was a hare, bigger even than that mountain fox, but nabbed just the same, and coming to his sudden end there, among the high rocks, just as fair game. That creature screamed its thin pitiful piercing cry, and it seemed to me just like an uncomprehending pained infant’s, with such unimaginable child’s fear, suffering from being eaten alive. And you ask of such a witness as I was, and still am, to thrive since then (did that start my malaise?) and to un-hear that cry, to regain sensible joy, casual ease?” Tears roiled out of Yak’s great round eyes and channeled down about his damp muzzle.

There, there,” said Bengal, in meditative state. “My own ancestors were ritually hunted by rajahs high up on elephants, with hundreds of beaters frightening my relations out of the woods and tall grasses—and not even for basic food but—” Bengal sighed despite himself—“for trophy heads hung on palace walls, heightening the interior decoration. That’s what passed for human civilization.”

“And does the memory swell your tiger heart with cheer?”

“Oh, please stop. You think that, in some sudden burst of professional surrender I will give up my point of view, that I haven’t thought such thoughts before, rehearsed all the tawdry tragic turns and twists that come due in living?...That hare in your fable—“

“It was no fable. It was the truth.”

“The truth is just as much a fable as a fable is the truth. Now, that hare, the forlorn creature pleading for what the fox is incapable of giving, miraculous mercy, had probably reproduced by then, many proverbial times, and thus had succeeded in life, because survival and reproduction are why all of us are still around. As for fulfillment, she must have had her moments: the habit of slipping under a fence (that fable) and munching stolen lettuce in someone else’s hard-worked garden, or just having one of her reproductive episodes turn orgasmic or, finding herself in the shade of a bush or fern, contemplating something or other on the ground, or in the air, or anywhere, in the direct line of her wondrous vision. Both she and the fox—and you, who graze on living grasses—and I, who feast on the stag deer in this national reserve I now inhabit—all of us, prey and predator, betwixt and between and among, if we survive and go on living in our young, and healthily enjoy the moments I have spoken of, we have had our time and purpose and need no other token of.”

“Yes, but still—“

"Still me no stills. Go back to Jhawán, and take an aspen leaf every morning until you feel quite—”

“—normal again? cured? unknowing?”

“—simple again. There is no cure, only management. Simply go on living, in this splendid, appalling place. Enjoy your sight, enjoy the light and any moments of grace that come your way.”

“Still, I never fully get all you say. It leaves me in a sort of limbo-land.”

“Don’t worry about it. Remember: just be grateful you’re not blind. Eat a daily stalk of sugar cane, as I have indicated on this receipt, do not skip whole—or even partial—grains, and I repeat, take your daily aspen without fail. And let me say with a degree of certitude, if you are on the run from involuntary servitude, reality will help keep un-reality at bay. All this will take time, follow your regime and rations and—excuse me—be patient.”

After Yak left, Bengal rang a vine for his nurse, a little pert yearling from Hazaridine. “Make me a chamomille of you-know-what leaves and serve it in my study, please. And then I can entertain another visitor.”

Seeing no one else in his office lair—neither flamingo, elephant, nor bat, wild pig, crocodile, kangaroo, zebra, nor parrot, koala, tapir, giraffe, turtle, nor octopus, lion, caribou, panda, nor walrus, she asked, “Who might that be?”

“Why,” said our Bengal, “me, of course.”

Moral: Practice religion according to your light, and in science always do what’s right. Or the other way around.