The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read online

  With a respectful air Father now led me up to the open corridor of the Hosui-in. First I looked at the skillfully ex-ecuted model of the Golden Temple that rested in a glass case. This model pleased me. It was closer to the Golden Temple of my dreams. Observing this perfect little image of the Golden Temple within the great temple itself, I was reminded of the endless series of correspondences that arise when a small universe is placed in a large universe and a smaller one in turn placed inside the small universe. For the first time I could dream. Of the small, but perfect Golden Temple which was even smaller than this model; and of the Golden Temple wnich was infinitely greater than the real building-so great, indeed, that it almost enveloped the world.

  I did not, however, remain standing indefinitely before the model. Next Father led me to the wooden statue of Yoshimitsu, which was famous as a National Treasure. The statue was known as the Rokuoninden-Michiyoshi, after the name that Yoshimitsu adopted when he took the tonsure.

  This, too, struck me as being nothing but an odd, sooty image and I could sense no beauty in it. Next we went up to the Choondo on the second story and looked at the painting on the ceiling, attributed to Kano Masanobu, which depicted angels playing music. On the third story, the Kukyocho, I saw the pathetic remains of the gold leaf that had originally covered all the interior. I could find no beauty in any of this.

  I leaned against the slender railing and looked down absently at the pond, on which the evening sun was shining. The surface of the water looked like a mirror, like an ancient patinated copper mirror; and the shadow of the Golden Temple fell directly on this surface. The evening sky was reflected in the water, far beneath the water plants and the duckweed. This sky was different from the one above our heads. It was clear and filled with a serene light; from underneath and from within, it entirely swallowed up this earthly world of ours, and the Golden Temple sank into it like a great anchor of pure gold that has become entirely black with rust.

  Father Tayama Dosen, the Superior of the temple, had been a friend of Father's when they had studied at a certain Zen temple. They had both spent three years at the temple and during this time had lived together. The two young men had attended the special seminary at the Sokoku Temple (which also was constructed under the Shogun Yoshimitsu) and, after going through certain ancient procedures of the Zen sect, they had entered the priesthood. Apart from all this, I learned much later from Father Dosen, one day when he was talking to me in a good mood, that my father and he had not only shared rigorous days of training, but that on some evenings after bedtime they had climbed over the temple wall together and gone out to buy women and enjoy themselves.

  Father and I, having finished our tour of the temple, returned to the entrance of the Main Hall. We were ushered down a lengthy, spacious hall and shown into the office of the Superior, which was in the Great Library, overlooking the garden with its famous old pine tree.

  I sat there straight and stiff in my school uniform, but Father suddenly seemed to be at ease. Although my father and the Superior had been trained at the same Zen school, they could Hardly have been more different in appearance. Father was emaciated from his illness, he looked poor, and his skin had a dry, powdery quality. Father Dosen, on the other hand, looked just like a pink cake. On his desk lay piles of unopened pareels, magazines, books, and letters, which had been sent from various parts of the country, and which seemed to bespeak the prosperity of the temple. He picked up a pair of scissors with his plump fingers and adroitly opened one of the pareels.

  “It's a cake that someone's sent from Tokyo,” he explained. "You don't see such cakes very often these days. I'm told they don't distribute them to the shops any longer, but send them all to the forces or to government offices.”

  We drank delicate Japanese tea and ate a sort of dry Western cake that I had never tasted before. The more tense I became, the more the crumbs dropped from the cake onto my shiny, black-serge trousers.

  Father and the Superior were expressing their resentment at the fact that the army and the officials were only giving consideration to the Shinto shrines and were looking down on the Buddhist temples—not only looking down on them, in fact, but actually oppressing them; then they discussed how it would be best to handle the admihistration of the temples in the future.

  The Superior was a plump man. His face was wrinkled, to be sure, but each of the wrinkles looked as if it was thoroughly washed out. His face was round, but he had a long nose, which gave one the impression that the resin which flowed from it had somehow become solidified. Though his face looked easy-going enough, there was a stern air about his shaven head. It was as though all his energy was concentrated in that head: there was a terribly animal quality about it.

  The conversation of the two priests now turned to their days in the seminary. I was looking at the Sailboat Pine Tree in the garden. It had been formed by lowering the branches of a great pine and coiling them together in the shape of a boat, with the branches at the prow all trained at a higher level than the rest. A party of visitors had evidently arrived just before closing-time and I could hear a hum of voices from the direction of the Golden Temple on the other side of the wall. Their footsteps and voices were absorbed in the air of spring evening: the sound they made was soft and rounded, without any trace of sharpness. Then as their footsteps receded like the tide, they seemed to me to be truly the footsteps of human beings passing over the earth. I stared up at the phoenix on the summit of the Golden Temple; it was absorbing all that remained of the evening light.

  "Now this child, you see...” Hearing Father's words, I turned towards him. In the almost dark room, Father was about to entrust my future to Father Dosen.

  “I don,t think I shall live much longer," Father said. “I want to ask you to look after this child when the time comes.“

  Priest though he was and accustomed to comforting people at times like these, Father Dosen had no soothing words for this occasion, but simply answered: ‘‘Very well, I'll look after him.”

  What really astohished me was that they then embarked merrily on an exchange of anecdotes about the deaths of various famous priests. One of them had died saying: "Oh, I don't want to did” Another had ended his life with Goethe's own words: “More light!” Still another famous priest had evidently been counting the temple money until the very moment that he died.

  We were offered an evening meal, known to Buddhists as "medicine," and it was arranged that We should spend that night in the temple. After dinner I persuaded Father to come and have another look at the Golden Temple. For the moon had come out.

  Father had been overstimulated by meeting the Superior again after so many years and he was quite exhausted; but when he heard me speak of the Golden Temple, he came out with me, breathing heavily and leaning on my shoulder.

  The moon rose from the edge of Mount Fudo. The back of the Golden Temple received its light. The building seemed to fold up its dark, complicated shadow and to subside quietly; only the frames of the Kato windows in the Kukyocho allowed the smooth shadows of the moon to slip into the building. The Kukyocho had no proper walls, and so it seemed that this was where the faint moonlight had its dwelling.

  From Ashiwara Island came the cry of the night birds as they flew off into the distance. I was conscious of the weight of Father's emaciated hands on my shoulders. When I glanced at my shoulder, I saw that in the moonlight Father's hand had turned into that of a skeleton.

  After my return to Yasuoka, the Golden Temple, which had disappointed me so greatly at first sight, began to revivify its beauty within me day after day, until in the end it became a more beautiful Golden Temple than it had been before I saw it. I could not say wherein this beauty lay. It seemed that what had been nurtured in my dreams had become real and could now, in turn, serve as an impulse for further dreams.

  Now I no longer pursued the illusion of a Golden Temple in nature and in the objects that surrounded me. Gradually the Golden Temple came to exist more deeply and more solidly within
me. Each of its pillars, its Kato windows, its roof, the phoenix at the top, floated clearly before my eyes, as though I could touch them with my hands. The minutest part of the temple was in perfect accord with the entire complex structure. It was like hearing a few notes of music and having the entire composition flow through one's mind: whichever part of the Golden Temple I might pick out, the entire building echoed within me.

  "It was true when you told me that the Golden Temple was the most beautiful thing in this world.” So I wrote for the first time in a letter to Father. After taking me back to my uncle's house, Father had immediately returned to his temple on the remote cape. As if in reply to my letter, a telegram came from my mother saying that Father had suffered a terrible hemorrhage and was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  OWING TO Father's death, my real period of boyhood came to an end. I had always been astohished at the fact that my boyhood was so utterly lacking in what may be called human concern. When I came to realize that I felt not the slightest sorrow over Father's death, this astohishment turned into a certain powerless emotion that no longer belonged to the category of surprise.

  I hurried over to Father's village and, when I arrived, he was already lying in his coffin. I had walked as far as Uchiura and from there gone by boat along the bay to Nariu, which had taken a whole day. It was a hot time of the year just before the rainy season, and the sun blazed down day after day. Immediately after I had seen Father's body, the coffin was taken to the crematory on the deserted cape to be cremated by the seashore.

  The death of the priest in a country temple is a peculiar business. It is peculiar because it is too pertinent. The priest has been, so to say, the spiritual center of the district, the guardian of his parishioners' lives, the man to whom their posthumous existence has been entrusted. And that very person has died in his temple. It is as though he has acquitted himself too faithfully of his duty; as though the man who went about teaching others how to die has given a public demonstration of the act and by some sort of mistake has actually died himself.

  Father's coffin appeared, in fact, to have been placed in too appropriate a place, in which every single preparation had already been made to receive it. My mother, the young priest, and the parishioners were standing in front of the coffin weeping. The young priest recited the sutras in a faltering tone, almost as if he were still depending on directions from Father, who lay before him in his coffin.

  Father's face was buried in early summer flowers. There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface. A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists. This was the first time that I had been confronted by a situation like this in which a spirit is transformed by death into mere physical substance; and now I felt that I was gradually beginning to understand why it was that spring flowers, the sun, my desk, the schoolhouse, pencils-all physical substance, indeed-had always seemed so cold to me, had always seemed to exist so far away from myself.

  Mother and the various parishioners were now watching me as I had my last meeting with Father. My stubborn heart, however, would not accept the analogy with the land of the living that the word "meeting" implied. For this was not at all like a meeting; I was merely looking at Father's dead face.

  The corpse was just being looked at. I was just looking. To know that looking (the act, that is, of looking at someone, as one ordinarily does, without any special awareness) was such a proof of the rights of those who are alive, and that this looking could also be an expression of cruelty-all this came to me now as a vivid experience. Thus did the young boy, who never sang loudly, who never ran about shouting at the top of his lungs, ascertain the facts of his own existence.

  Although in many respects I was lacking in moral courage, I did not feel the slightest shame now in turning a bright, tearless face towards the mourners. The temple was on a cliff facing the sea. Behind the funeral guests, the summer clouds coiled themselves over the open waters of the Japan Sea and blocked my view.

  The priest had now begun to chant the spccial Zen sutra that accompanied the removal of the body, and I joined in. The main hall of the temple was dark. The banner that was suspended between the pillars, the flower decorations in the sanctuary, the incense burner and the vases-everything sparkled brilliantly with the reflected light of the sacred taper. Now and then a sea breeze blew into the temple, puffing up the sleeves of my clerical robe. As I recited the sutras, I was constantly aware of the posture of the summer clouds as they cast a strong glare into the corner of my eyes.

  An intense light poured constantly from outside the temple onto one side of my face. How brightly it shone—that insult!

  When the funeral procession was only a couple of hundred yards from the crematorium, we ran into a shower. Fortunately we were just in front of the house of a well-disposed parishioner and were able to take shelter together with our coffin. The rain did not look like stopping. The procession had to continue. We were, therefore, all given raingear and, having covered the coffin with a piece of oilcloth, we continued our journey to the crematorium.

  It was situated on the small stony beach of a cape that projected into the sea southeast of the village, This place had evidently been used since ancient times for cremations, because the smoke did not spread from here towards the houses.

  The sea was especially rough off this point. As the great waves rolled forward, swelling and breaking, the uneasy surface was constantly pricked by the raindrops. In its obscurity, the rain calmly went on piercing the surface of the water, unaware of its extraordinary state of commotion. But now and again a gust of wind would suddenly blow the rain against the desolate rocks. Then the white rocks became as black as if a great spray of ink had been blown against them.

  We went through a tunnel and reached the place. While the workmen prepared for the cremation, we stood in the tunnel to keep out of the rain.

  I could not catch a glimpse of the sea itself. There was nothing but the waves and the wet, black stones, and the rain. As they poured oil over the light wood of the coffin, the rain beat down on it.

  They set fire to it. Oil was rationed, but since this was the funeral of a priest, they had managed to obtain a good supply, and now the flames fought against the rain and rose into the air with the sound of a whip being cracked. Although it was daylight, the pellucid form of the flames stood out distinctly amid the dense smoke. The smoke billowed up plumply and drifted little by little towards the cliffs; then at a certain moment, the flames rose gracefully by themselves amid the rain.

  Suddenly there was a horrible sound of something being torn. The lid of the coffin had sprung open.

  I looked at Mother, who was standing next to me. There she stood, holding her rosary in both hands. Her face was terribly stiff; it looked so small and congealed that one felt one could put it in the palm of one's hand.

  According to Father's wishes, I went to Kyoto and became an acolyte at the Golden Temple. At this time I was ordained to the priesthood under the Father Superior. He provided me with my school expenses; in return, I attended him and did his housework. My position was equivalent in lay terms to that of a student dependent.

  I realized as soon as I took service in the temple that the only people left, after our severe dormitory prefect had been called into the armed forces, were old men and extremely young ones. In more ways than one it was a great relief for me to be here. No longer was I teased for being the son of a priest as I had been by the lay students at middle school; for here everyone was in the same position. The only points of difference were that I was a stutt
erer and that I was a trifle uglier than the others.

  My course at the East Maizuru Middle School had been interrupted before I graduated, and with the help of Father Tayama Dosen it was now arranged that I should continue my studies at the middle school of the Rinzai Academy. I was to start there in the autumn term, which began in less than a month. I knew, however, that as soon as I had started at my new school I would be mobilized for compulsory labor in some factory. I was now faced with a new set of circumstances in my life. I still had a few weeks of summer holidays left. Summer holidays during my mourning period; curiously subdued summer holidays during the last phase of the war in 1944. My life as an acolyte passed smoothly and, as I think back on it, I feel that this was the last absolute holiday in my life. I can still vividly hear the cry of the cicada.

  The Golden Temple, which I now saw again after a period of several months, rested peacefully in the light of the late summer clays. Having just entered the priesthood, I had a freshly shaven head. I felt that the air fitted tightly on my head; I had a strangely dangerous feeling that the thoughts which existed within my head were kept in contact with the phenomena of the outer world by a single membrane of their sensitive, fragile skin. When I looked up at the Golden Temple with this new head of mine, I felt that the building was penetrating me, not only through my eyes, but through my head also. Just as when my head responded to the sun by becoming hot and to the evening breeze by suddenly becoming cool.

  "Finally I have come to live beside you, Golden Temple!” I whispered in my heart, and for a while I stopped sweeping the leaves. “It doesn't have to be at once, but please make friends with me sometime and reveal your secret to me. I feel that your beauty is something that I am very close to seeing and yet; cannot see. Please let me see the real Golden Temple more clearly than I see the image of you in my mind. And furthermore, if you are indeed so beautiful that nothing in this world can compare with you, please tell me why you are so beautiful, why it is necessary for you to be beautiful"