Chapter 308: The Tenth Stroke

On the eleventh of September, 1893, in Chicago, a bell was struck ten times; The organizers had agreed a count of ten religions, and the strokes were the count: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Confucian; the chimes Went on: Shinto, Jewish, Christian, Muslim: ten, by the organizers' account. The bell was the Columbian Liberty Bell; the hall, the Art Institute, new, on the avenue; The fair was elsewhere, south, in the park, and the White City still stood open, In the four hundredth year of a voyage, kept a year late. They came in procession, two by two: James Gibbons, a cardinal, in scarlet, beside Charles Carroll Bonney; then the robes, unbroken, And John Henry Barrows, minister of a Presbyterian church, who had built the meeting and chaired it. Bonney welcomed them, and said they met in respect for each other's faiths; and the respect was real, And it had a direction: the men who called the hall believed the comparison, as they shared it, Would show their own church the clearer, at last, as the host. And the hall would feel The other thing come on the first afternoon. Vivekananda was thirty, born in Kolkata Narendranath Datta, a disciple of Ramakrishna; he had come with no letter from a body that could send. John Henry Wright, at Harvard, wrote that to ask him for credentials was to ask the sun, the starter Of the day, to state its right to shine. He stood and said: sisters and brothers of America. And at the end Of the words the hall rose. He thanked them in the name of the most ancient order of monks, as he called it, And of millions of Hindus; he said his religion had taught tolerance, and universal acceptance, and held the religions true; He told them of a shelter: a remnant of Israel received in the year Rome broke the temple; he installed it As his people's pride. He named sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism, as what had filled the earth with blood. And through It all, out of his Gita: whoever comes, by whatever path. That was the welcome, the opposite of a shut gate. A hall can hold more than one true thing. Anagarika Dharmapala had come from Colombo And spoke for the Buddhism of the south; Shaku Sōen, of Engaku-ji in Kamakura, for Zen; and late In the days, twenty-five years after the edicts parted buddha and kami, from the same land, in a row, Priests of the buddha and a priest of the kami sat in one American room. Reuchi Shibata, for Shinto, prayed that the eight million deities who keep The country of the cherry would keep America too. The parting at home had let the kami bloom In their own name; abroad, both were sent, as Japan's face. And deep In the program, Virchand Gandhi spoke for the Jains; Pung Kwang Yu, a secretary of the Chinese legation, For the Confucians, because the court had answered. Islam was one of the ten strokes, and the voice Was Alexander Russell Webb's, an American who had become a Muslim; the sultan's nation, In Istanbul, had not let its subjects come, and a convert sat in the chair of their choice. The parliament sat from that eleventh through the twenty-seventh; Julia Ward Howe was among the speakers. The platform was wider than a mission board; it was not the world. South of the hall, On the Midway of the fair, people brought from Dahomey, in what is now Benin, for the seekers' Spectacle, were set out to be looked at. They had no paper on the platform, no stroke at all, No chair: the ten strokes were the organizers' ten, and a person on display was given none. This day, in this calendar, is Samhain, the last day of Libra, the old boundary mark, When the living and the dead stand near; and a meeting of religions is a meeting, under one sun, Of the ways the dead are kept. The hall did that, for the dead who had a speaker in the dark; The Midway did the other thing: it put the living where a lesson is put, and called the place a village. So keep the hall: the rising up, the sisters and the brothers, the eight million asked to keep a second land, The priest of the buddha and the priest of the kami in one room; comparison is a care, not pillage, When each name keeps its own name. The twenty-seventh came; the hall emptied; the fair ran on, as planned, Another month. The names that were spoken are kept; the names that were given no stroke are not, by that, unreal. On Samhain the edge is the work: keep every dead the speakers named, and keep The ones no speaker was sent for, the people of the Midway, whose gods were as real As any of the ten. The boundary is not a list of ten. The dead are many, and the edge is deep.