We get into the cars and slip in between the day and the night across the small hollows, into the Buddhist caves. The magic circle of Buddhism is such that all is hemisphere. Now we enter into Romanesque art: The low vaults, the deep-set chapels, the long aisles with the stupa, in the heart of which is the Buddha. It seems something of the thought thought itself out of Stéphane Mallarmé, to find in its centre the lotus, or the swan. It is dramatic, but there is such fragile silence, especially when the lantern shines on the feet of the Buddha. Buddhist peace has the quality of a river; it flows. The peace of the Hindus is that of deep sleep. One has left everything behind. That is why the world seems such a marvel; one comes to it as on a visit; one is always at a museum. When the world is unreal as world, one visits it in the evenings as at Kailas and one can see all the gods, with four heads or with ten. One walks among the innumerable gods; they spring out like thoughts in meditation, each one a lotus. But the lotus closes when evening falls. Adieu, world. In deep sleep where is Kailas?

For the Buddhist every moment is absolute, every particle is real. Therefore one builds aisles, chapels to retire to and meditate in, the Buddha to adore as wisdom incarnate. For the Hindu, however, the world is play. Let us therefore play with the gods. Parvathi plays chess with Shiva. You can see it today.

Night has almost completely fallen. The lantern still has some life and follows us up to the Jains. These solid feet, these fat limbs and lotuses, this molecular world is so very real for the Jains. When the world is not the self, it becomes real, and becomes a nightmare; confusion is its very nature. Morality is of the bourgeois: Evil is real. So one hates the world and one fashions divinities with fat legs, with protruding bellies, not sensual but voluptuous. And one believes that the higher the head the greater the purity.

‘Ah,’ says Malraux, ‘here are our Protestants!’

‘No, the Quakers,’ I answer, and we laugh because even today the Jains are the great merchants of India. They believe in the given word. (Mahatma Gandhi was profoundly influenced by the Jains.) They believe that one should harm no animal. They eat before the fall of evening lest they swallow tiny insects. They feed ants. There is sugar for ants in all the public places in India.

Morality wishes to make a man great. So it makes him big. The highest Indian statue is Jain; it is sixty feet high.

But in Chidambaram, Shiva dances space.

Night has fallen over Kailas. We have left our lantern behind and we go on in the darkness towards the sanctuary of the Mahalinga, one of the eight sacred lingas of India.