136
details from our minds, devoting ourselves with diabolical determination and saintly simplicity to 
the search for a spiritual solution to the material muddle. Our sojourn, short as it was by worldly 
reckoning, proved to be pregnant with events of internal import. The tyrant time took his first 
wound in Kandy. 
{236} 
28 
Allan's adventures in Ceylon had been varied. His first idea had been to take the Yellow Robe; that 
is, to become a member of the Buddhist Sangha. These men are not priests or monks, as we 
understand the words; it is hard for European minds to understand the conditions of their life. They 
have renounced the world and live as mendicants; but it may be stated roughly that the rules of 
their Order, which are very complex and often seem irrational or frivolous, are all devised in the 
interest of a single idea. Each rule meets some probably contingency. But in every case the object is 
to enable the bhikkhu to carry out his programme of spiritual development. There are no 
superstitious terrors, no propitiatory practices; the while object is to enable a man to free himself 
from the fetters of desire which hamper his actions, and (incidentally) produce the phantasms 
which we call phenomena. In Buddhism, the universe is conceived as an illusion, created by ignorant 
cravings. It is, in fact, a dream as defined by Freud's hypothesis. 
Allan was already at heart a Buddhist. The more he studied the Tripitika, "the three baskets of the 
law" --- waste paper baskets I used to call them --- the more he was attracted, but he was fearfully 
disappointed by the degeneracy of the Singalese bhikkhus. With rate exceptions, they were 
ignorant, idle, immoral and dishonest. At Anuradhapura, the sacred ruined city, there conduct is so 
openly scandalous as to have given rise to a proverb: "A bhikkhu is made, not born --- except at 
Anuradhapura." Allan had been offered the post of treasurer to a famous monastery outside 
Colombo, for the avowed reason that they could not trust any one of themselves. Considering that a 
bhikkhu is not allowed to touch money at all, this was rather the limit. 
The Solicitor-Generral of Ceylon, the Hon. P. Ramanathan, engaged Allan as private tutor to his 
younger sons. This gentleman was a man of charming personality, wide culture and profound 
religious knowledge. He was eminent as a yogi of the Shaivite sect of Hindus (he was a Tamil of high 
caste) and had written commentaries on the gospels of Matthew and John, interpreting the sayings 
of Christ as instructions in Yoga. It is indeed a fact that one of the characters who have been pieced 
together to compose the figure of "Jesus" was a yogi. His injunctions to abandon family ties, to 
make no provision for the future, and so on, are typical. 
From this man, Allan learnt a great deal of the theory and practice of Yoga. When he was about 
eighteen, Allan had accidentally stumbled into 
{237} 
the trance called Shivadarshana, in which the universe, having been perceived in its totality as a 
single phenomenon, independent of space and time, is then annihilated. This experience had 
determined the whole course of his life. His one object was to get back into that state. Shri 
Parananda showed him a rational practical method of achieving his. Yet Allan was not wholly in 
sympathy with his teacher, who, despite his great spiritual experience, had not succeeded in 
snapping the shackles of dogma, and whose practice seem in some respects tat variance with his 
principles. Allan was almost puritanically strict. He had been offered a position as manager of a 
coconut plantation, but refused it on learning that his duties would involve giving orders for the 
destruction of vermin. He had not sufficient breadth of view to see that any kind of life implies 
acquiescence in, and therefore responsibility for, murder; by eating rice one becomes the 
accomplice of the agriculturist in destroying life. 
His health was vastly improved. In the Red Sea his asthma completely disappeared and he had 
thrown overboard his entire apparatus of drugs. But the enervating climate of Colombo sapped his