supernatural beings are but the
magnified shadows of man cast by the light of his imagination upon the
mists of his ignorance.

Therefore, when you find that a people make their spirits beautiful and
fair, calm and even tempered, loving peace and the beauty of the trees
and rivers, shrinkingly averse from loud words, from noises, and from
the taking of life, it is because the people themselves think that these
are great qualities. If no stress be laid upon their courage, their
activity, their performance of great deeds, it is because the people who
imagine them care not for such things. There is no truer guide, I am
sure, to the heart of a young people than their superstitions; these
they make entirely for themselves, apart from their religion, which is,
to a certain extent, made for them. That is why I have written this
chapter on Nats: not because I think it affects Buddhism very much one
way or another, but because it seems to me to reveal the people
themselves, because it helps us to understand them better, to see more
with their eyes, to be in unison with their ideas--because it is a great
key to the soul of the people.

CHAPTER XXII

DEATH, THE DELIVERER

'The end of my life is near at hand; seven days hence, like a man
who rids himself of a heavy load, I shall be free from the burden
of my body.'--_Death of the Buddha._

There is a song well known to all the Burmese, the words of which are
taken from the sacred writings. It is called the story of Ma Pa Da, and
it was first told to me by a Burmese monk, long ago, when I was away on
the frontier.

It runs like this:

In the time of the Buddha, in the city of Thawatti, there was a certain
rich man, a merchant, who had many slaves. Slaves in those days, and,
indeed, generally throughout the East, were held very differently to
slaves in Europe. They were part of the family, and were not saleable
without good reason, and there was a law applicable to them. They were
not _hors de la loi_, like the slaves of which we have conception. There
are many cases quoted of sisters being slaves to sisters, and of
brothers to brothers, quoted not for the purpose of saying that this
was an uncommon occurrence, but merely of showing points of law in such
cases.

One day in the market the merchant bought another slave, a young man,
handsome and well mannered, and took him to his house, and kept him
there with his family and the other slaves. The young