My reflections on the Story of Kusa-Hibari (A Beautiful Cricket) by Lafcadio Hearn

Source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cricket_insect_on_flower.jpg

Who cares about an insect and who wants to keep it as a pet? And, how does it matter if an insect lives or dies? You will change your views about an insect drastically after reading this short story. Also, it’s interesting to learn that some cultures in Japan and China keep these insects as pets for their musical abilities.

I came across this beautiful and sad story about a cricket, while I was reading a book about mind mapping by Tony Buzan. The book introduces this story Kusa-Hibari, which the author uses for an exercise in learning how to read and memorize efficiently. For sometime, I forgot about the book and started reflecting on this story. It is truly a touching story and showed me various spiritual dimensions which I will highlight, as you go through the story. This story is about a pet insect Cricket (Possibly called Oecanthus rufescens)

The Story begins below...
(The actual story Font in Georgia and my thoughts in Italics).

His cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide: its tiny wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will scarcely admit the tip of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that cage - room to walk, and jump, and fly, for he is so small that you must look very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. I have always to turn the cage round and round, several times, in a good light, before I can discover his whereabouts, and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper corners - clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of gauze.

(We are all spiritual beings caged in this material body, entrapped in material existence and then, depending on what we are – we have our field of activity, which is different to different people. For, example a field of activity for a small child may be his home or back yard with some toys and field of activity for the President of a country could be much bigger extending whole of the nation or other nations. In Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna defines this as Kestra (the field or Body) and Kestra-jna (Knower of the field or body) Chapter Thirteen of Bhagavad-Gita: Nature, the Enjoyer and Consciousness).

Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito - with a pair of antennae much longer than his own body, and so fine that you can distinguish them only against the light. Kusa-Hibari, or 'Grass-Lark' is the Japanese name of him; and he is worth in the market exactly twelve cents: that is to say, very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!… By day he sleeps or meditates, except while occupied with the slice of fresh egg plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every morning… to keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome: could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of a creature so ridiculously small.

But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens: then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness - a thin, silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes sweeter - sometimes swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate with the elfish resonance - sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice. But loud or low, it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird… All night the atomy thus sings: he ceases only when the temple bell proclaims the hour of dawn.

Now this tiny song is a song of love - vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known, in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors, for many generations back, could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song.

(There is a small insect called Indra-gopa and there is King Indra – the demigod in charge of Heaven. Both of them are bound by Karma, enjoying or suffering the deeds, labour of their previous births. Further clearly explained in this Verse 5.54 of Brahma Samhita as below, (http://vedabase.com/en/bs/5/54)

Translation: I adore the primeval Lord Govinda, who burns up to their roots all fruitive activities of those who are imbued with devotion and impartially ordains for each the due enjoyment of the fruits of one's activities, of all those who walk in the path of work, in accordance with the chain of their previously performed works, no less in the case of the tiny insect that bears the name of indragopa than in that of Indra, king of the devas.

Purport:  God impartially induces the fallen souls to act in the way that is consequent on the deeds of their previous births and to enjoy the fruition of their labors but, out of His great mercy to His devotees, He purges out, by the fire of ordeal, the root of all karma, viz., nescience and evil desires. Karma, though without beginning, is still perishable. The karma of those, who work with the hope of enjoying the fruits of their labors, becomes everlasting and endless and is never destroyed. The function of sannyāsa is also a sort of karma befitting a āśrama and is not pleasant to Krishna when it aims at liberation, i.e., desire for emancipation. They also receive fruition of their karma and, even if it be disinterested, their karma ends in ātma-mamatā, i.e., self-pleasure; but those who are pure devotees always serve Krishna by gratifying His senses forsaking all attempts of karma and jñāna, and being free from all desires save that of serving Krishna. Krishna has fully destroyed the karma, its desires and nescience of those devotees. It is a great wonder that Krishna, being impartial, is fully partial to His devotees. )

They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant: and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung myriad years ago and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory - deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love - and death. He has forgotten all about death: but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now - for the bride that will never come.

(The scorpion lays its eggs in piles of rice, and sometimes it is said that the scorpion is born out of rice. But the rice is not the cause of the scorpion. Actually, the eggs were laid by the mother. Similarly, material nature is not the cause of the birth of the living entities. The seed is given by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and they only seem to come out as products of material nature.

http://vedabase.com/en/bg/14/3  The total material substance, called Brahman, is the source of birth, and it is that Brahman that I impregnate, making possible the births of all living beings, O son of Bharata.)

So that his longing is unconsciously retrospective: he cries to the dust of the past - he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time… Human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing it. They call their illusion an Ideal: and their phantom of organic memory. The living present has very little to do with it… Perhaps this atom also has an ideal or at least the rudiment of an ideal; but, in any event, the tiny desire must utter its plaint in vain.

The fault is not altogether mine. I had been warned that if the creature were mated, he would cease to sing and would speedily die. But night after night, the plaintive, sweet, unanswered trilling touched me like a reproach - became at last an obsession, an affliction, a torment of conscience; and I tried to buy a female. It was too late in the season; there were no more kusa-hibari for sale, - either males or females. The insect-merchant laughed and said, 'He ought to have died about the twentieth day of the ninth month.' (It was already the second day of the tenth month.) But the insect-merchant did not know that I have a good stove in my study, and keep the temperature at above 75 degrees F. Wherefore my grass-lark still sings at the close of the eleventh month, and I hope to keep him alive until the Period of Greatest Cold. However, the rest of his generation are probably dead: neither for love nor money could I now find him a mate. And were I to set him free in order that he might make the search for himself, he could not possibly live through a single night, even if fortunate enough to escape by day the multitude of his natural enemies in the garden - ants, centipedes, and ghastly earth-spiders.

Last evening - the twenty-ninth of the eleventh month - an odd feeling came to me as I sat at my desk: a sense of emptiness in the room. Then I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his wont. I went to the silent cage, and found him lying dead beside a dried-up lump of egg-plant as gray and hard as a stone. Evidently he had not been fed for three or four days; but only the night before his death he had been singing wonderfully - so that I foolishly imagined him to be more than usually contented. My student, Aki, who loves insects, used to feed him; but Aki had gone into the country for a week's holiday, and the duty of caring for the grass-lark had devolved upon Hana, the housemaid. She is not sympathetic, Hana the housemaid. She says that she did not forget the mite - but there was no more eggplant, and she dutifully expressed contrition. But the fairy-music had stopped: and the stillness reproaches; and the room is cold, in spite of the stove.

(What is the difference between a dead and living? The body is still there but, something is missing. The consciousness and the life symptoms which are displayed because of the presence of Soul which is said to the size of the one- 10,000^th part of the tip of a hair. Smaller than a molecule but, just like Sunlight which can illuminate the whole universe, the Soul illuminates the whole body with consciousness. So, do crickets have Souls? Yes, from a small ant, a Whale, Elephant anything and everything that shows the symptoms of consciousness.)

Absurd!… I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley-grain! The quenching of that infinitesimal life troubled me more than I could have believed possible… Of course, the mere habit of thinking about a creature's wants - even the wants of a cricket - may create, by insensible degrees, an imaginative interest, an attachment of which one becomes conscious only when the relation is broken. Besides, I had felt so much, in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice - telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god - telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the Vast of being… And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams! How bravely, nevertheless, he sang on to the very end - an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!… May the gods forgive us all - especially Hana the housemaid!

(“the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one” – Bhagavad Gita – 2.17. That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul.

This verse more clearly explains the real nature of the soul, which is spread all over the body. Anyone can understand what is spread all over the body: it is consciousness. Everyone is conscious of the pains and pleasures of the body in part or as a whole. This spreading of consciousness is limited within one's own body. The pains and pleasures of one body are unknown to another. Therefore, each and every body is the embodiment of an individual soul, and the symptom of the soul's presence is perceived as individual consciousness. This soul is described as one ten-thousandth part of the upper portion of the hair point in size.)

Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing.

(http://www.bolingo.org/cricket/hearn.htm)