Free S. by John Updike Page B

so graciously made available to the work of the ashram some few years ago. Our accounts fail to show that any fixed term was set for the return of these most precious and cherished funds, nor that any rate of interest was determined. Had interest been your aim, perhaps you should haveentrusted these funds to a federally insured bank, with its glass windows and fashionably attired tellers and total lack of spiritual benefits.
    But no, at such time by no means were you interested in the banks: you were interested in the peace that Brahman brings when reunited with your atman; you were interested in samadhi and casting off the sordid claims of our illusory material life. Your legal servants write that you now regret your months as a sannyasin with us and have re-embraced your forefathers’ creed of Presbyterianism—a Calvinist sect which presents earthly prosperity as a sign of divine election. We rejoice if you have thus purchased inner peace. Vishnu has many avatars.
    However: we have been carefully consulting your records and conclude that your ascent to samadhi was regrettably arrested at the third, or Manipura, chakra. As you will doubtless remember, this is the “gem center,” whose presiding deity is Rudra, whose lotus displays ten blue petals with an inverted red triangle, and whose subtle-body site is the solar plexus. We now believe that the burning you felt there, which we joyously took as a sign of ascent toward the fourth chakra, Anahata, located at the level of the heart, may have been merely psychic resistance or simple indigestion. Your practice (abhyasana) of the asanas and mudras was ever desultory, Madame Blithedale, and your attachment to the five counterproductive vrittis of the psychomental stream (ignorance, individuality, passion, disgust, will to live) was never—we now sorrowfully feel—disengaged. The cleansing fire of asceticism (tapas) encountered in you an ego (aham) sheathed, as it were, in asbestos. Your vasanas—your subconscious sensations and urges—have stubbornly retained phalatrishna: the egoistic “thirst for fruits.”
    Yet we cannot find it in our hearts to condemn you, to cast you out. Such is the lavish scale of our generosity that we would welcome you back. You would rejoice to behold the many practical improvements at Ashram Arhat made possible by the ocean of generosity of which your own constituted but a single small, though infinitely treasured, drop. Our work does not cease, that ocean must flow on! Even as I dictate this affectionate missive, the steel girders of our splendid mandir, our Hall of a Millionfold Joys, are rising and being thunderously riveted together! There is not time nor strength for the backward glance! Come and rejoin us and all accountings will be made anew! Your Presbyterian legal advisers merely cast doleful shadows upon your atman, which longs to be free. As the immortal Utterly Enlightened proclaimed in the blessed Dhammapada, “Sorrow cannot touch the man [or woman, the scribes assuredly meant to add] who is not in the bondage of anything, who owns nothing.”
    Your eternal servant,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat
    /spw
    May 26, 1986
    Dear Mr. Rogers:
    It filled me with sincere regret to hear of the loss of your two heads of prize cattle. However, your accusation of theft against the Ashram Arhat because the fence between us had its barbed wires snipped falls upon barren ground, for we are vegetarians at this place and have no need of rustling protein from you. So kindly look for your cattle elsewhere, amongyour other ranching friends, who are rumored to relish liquor and gambling to the extent of unhinging their better judgment.
    And no, we will not join you in the costs of repairing the fence and reinforcing the same. The fence is your affair, as all who are in our ashram wish to stay in and, unlike underfed steers living under sentence of death, they have no need of barbed wires.
    With neighborly affection and