‘And there is a Japanese idol at Kamakura.’

O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when ‘the heathen’ pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!

To Him the Way, the Law, apart,
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda’s Lord, the Bodhisat,
The Buddha of Kamakura.

For though He neither burns nor sees,
Nor hears ye thank your Deities,
Ye have not sinned with such as these,
His children at Kamakura,

Yet spare us still the Western joke
When joss-sticks turn to scented smoke
The little sins of little folk
That worship at Kamakura—

The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies
That flit beneath the Master’s eyes.
He is beyond the Mysteries
But loves them at Kamakura.

And whoso will, from Pride released,
Contemning neither creed nor priest,
May feel the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamakura.

Yea, every tale Ananda heard,
Of birth as fish or beast or bird,
While yet in lives the Master stirred,
The warm wind brings Kamakura.

Till drowsy eyelids seem to see
A-flower ’neath her golden htee
The Shwe-Dagon flare easterly
From Burma to Kamakura,

And down the loaded air there comes
The thunder of Thibetan drums,
And droned—‘Om mane padme hum’s’
A world’s-width from Kamakura.

Yet Brahmans rule Benares still,
Buddh-Gaya’s ruins pit the hill,
And beef-fed zealots threaten ill
To Buddha and Kamakura.

A tourist-show, a legend told,
A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,
So much, and scarce so much, ye hold
The meaning of Kamakura?

But when the morning prayer is prayed,
Think, ere ye pass to strife and trade,
Is God in human image made
No nearer than Kamakura?

Buddha At Kamakura is one of those poems of Rudyard Kipling which belie it that he was of the empire and was a singer of colonialism and the East-West divide. We may know many aspects of Kipling, but we know it not that he does the mazak in such a light vein. Casteism, fatalism, poverty, backwardness, religiosity, fanaticism, underdevelopment, exotic space, landscapic dissimilarity, climate, geography and diversity would have definitely frustrated him whenever he would have tried to understand India. The loot and plunder he would not have taken in a good sense. Brahminism he would not have appreciated it as for its high-handedness, forced segregation to some extent. What would it have repelled and irritated him most would have the heat and dust which is but not the same everywhere.

His English is one of the barrack-room English with the Tommies speaking in, conversing and chatting in variations to the best of their knowledge and understanding as far as they were able to grasp and when spoke they in their local tongues and varieties of the English speech. The other aspect too is this that the Hindustani military men too apart from their varied southern and northern speeches tried to share with broken English. And Kipling’s too is a journo but an instance of Hindustani pidgin-English considering his Indian birth and rearing.

What is good about him is that he is a jungle-book-writer. Folk narratives engage the space of his and he is a good storyteller. He is a poet of Bombay and Lahore. Buddha and Buddhism is his love which but know we not. What seemed to relegate to the backward he excavated that too. Kipling’s English is not an English sahib’s English, but an Anglo-Indian sahib’s.  He scripts the orderly’s gossips, the chowkidar’s fumbling, murmurings of the watercarrier’s, the durban’s, the punkah-puller’s. His is a communicative English, a foreigner ruler trying to converse with the native orderly.

To criticize, Kipling falls short of being a military man. He just anglicizes his Hindustani stuffs, an Anglo-Indian so nonplussed in the midst of the ethnic, racial population and divided in communities, but goes about hiding love for Buddha and Buddhism which we forgot it, Kipling forgot it not.

In a subdued tone he talks about the people and their approaches. What happened to viharas? How did Bodhagaya escape the onslaught and the trail of destruction?

The Buddhist lore the mediaevalist invaders could not understand it in their spate of ruthless attacks and raids as for to loot and plunder for the booty.

Kipling travelled to Japan in 1889 and 1892 and the poem appeared in his letters finally appended to be put into a whole. The pleasure lies hearing about Ananda’s teacher lying at Kamakura with a specialty of own. How have the myths and legends travelled? How the gospels of Buddha? How the followers of his? Pause you at least when perchance you the people praying to Buddha at Kamakura. Whatever your religion is, you try not to avert your gaze from.

The spirit of Buddha and his Buddhism can never be subdued. Whatever the Brahmins confute and contradict, the zealots and fanatics try to finish off will never as and when we see the Buddha at Kamakura.

The bronzed Great Amitabh Buddha is the focal point of discussion. The poem may be called a visitor’s dialogue with the Master at Kamakura and the casting of the statue dates back to the times of the Kamakura kings.

You may talk about your religions, faiths and beliefs however be the stock of yours but forget not have a look at the Buddha of Kamakura, the Japanese sculpture of the Amitabh Buddha which you may not again, if see you not.