The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read online

  Please remember that years later, when Father's coffin was being carried out of the house, I was so busy looking at the dead face, that I did not shed a single tear. Please remember that with his death I was freed from the fetters of his hands, and that by looking intently at his face, I was able to confirm my own existence. To this extent did I remember to wreak my proper revenge on those hands, that is, on what the people of this world would call love; but so far as Mother was concerned, apart from the fact that I could not forgive her for that memory, I never once thought of avenging myself on her.

  It had been arranged that Mother would come to the Golden Temple on the day before the memorial service and that she could spend the night in the temple. The Superior had written to my school so that they might let me be absent on the day of the anniversary. Those of us who were liable for compulsory labor did not stay at our place of work, but would report there at the appointed time and would then return to wherever We happened to be living. On the day before the anniversary, I was reluctant to return to the temple.

  Tsurukawa, with his clear simple heart, was pleased for my sake that I was to see my mother again after such a long time, and my fellow acolytes were curious about her. But I hated to have such a poor and shabby mother. I was at a loss about how I should explain to the kind-hearted Tsurukawa why I did not want to see my mother.

  To make matters worse, as soon as we had finished our work at the factory, Tsurukawa seized my arm and said: ‘‘Come on, let's run back!"

  It would be an exaggeration to say that I did not want to see Mother in the slightest. It was not that I had no feeling for her. The fact was probably that I disliked being confronted with the straightforward expression of love that one receives from one's blood relatives, and that I was simply trying to rationalize this dislike in various ways. Therein lay my bad character. It was all right that I should try to justify my honest feelings by all sorts of rationalizations. But sometimes the multifarious motives that my brain spun out would force feelings on me that came as a shock even to myself; and those feelings were not originally my own.

  Only in my hatred was there something authentic. For I myself was a person who should be moved with hate.

  "There's no point running," I replied. “It only makes one tired. Let's take our time going back!”

  “I see," said Tsurukawa. "So you want to make up to your mother and get her sympathy by pretending to be too exhausted to walk fast."

  Thus Tsurukawa was invariably interpreting my behavior and was invariably mistaken about it. But he did not bother me in the slightest and had in fact become indispensable. For he was truly my well-intentioned interpreter-an irreplaceable friend who could translate my words for me into the language of the real world.

  Yes, Tsurukawa sometimes seemed to me like an alchemist who could transform tin into gold. I was the negative of the picture; he was the positive. How often had I not been amazed to see how my dark, turbid feelings could become clear and radiant by being filtered through Tsurukawa's heart! While I hesitated and stuttered, he would take my feelings in his hand, turn them round and transmit them to the outside world. What I learned from this amazing process was that so far as feelings were concerned, there was no discrepancy between the very finest feeling in this world and the very worst; that their effect was the same; that no visible difference existed between murderous intent and feelings of deep compassion. Tsurukawa could never have believed such a thing, even if I had been able to explain it in words, but for me it was a fearful discovery. If it had now come about that I did not mind Tsurukawa's taking me for a hypocrite, it was because hypocrisy had in my mind become merely a relative offense.

  In Kyoto I never experienced an air raid, but once when I was sent to the main factory in Osaka with some orders for spare parts for aircraft, there happened to be an attack and I saw one of the factory workers being carried out on a stretcher with his intestines exposed.

  What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when We see the insides of a human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are people so shocked at the sight of blood pouring out? Why are a man's intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as the beauty of youthful, glossy skin? What sort of a face would Tsurukawa make if I were to say that it was from him that I had learned this manner of thinking—a manner of thinking that transformed my own ugliness into nothingness? Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the inside of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun....

  Mother had already arrived and was talking to the Superior in his room. Tsurukawa and I knelt outside in the corridor in the early summer gloaming and announced our return.

  The Superior invited only me into the room. In front of Mother, he said something to the effect that I was doing very well at my temple duties. I kept my head bowed and hardly looked at Mother. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see the faded blue cotton of her baggy wartime trousers and the dirty fingers of her hands that lay on them.

  Father Dosen told us that we might retire to our quarters. We bowed repeatedly ana left the room. I lived in a tiny five-mat room, south of the small library and facing a courtyard. As soon as we were there by ourselves, Mother began to cry. Having anticipated this, I was able to remain quite unperturbed.

  “I am now under the care of the Rokuonji," I told her, “and I wish you would not visit me until I become a full-fledged priest."

  "I understand, I understand," said Mother.

  I was pleased that I had managed to receive my mother with such harsh words. But it annoyed me that, just as in the old days, she gave no sign of feeling or of resisting. At the same time, when I imagined the mere possibility that Mother might cross the threshold and penetrate my mind, I felt frightened.

  Looking at Mother's sunburned face, I saw her small, cunning, hollow eyes. Only her lips were red and shiny, as though they possessed a life all of their own; she had the strong, large teeth of a countrywoman. She was at an age when, if she had been a city-dweller, it would not have been strange to use heavy make-up. Mother had made her face look as ugly as possible. I was keenly aware that a fleshy quality remained somewhere in that face like a sediment; and I hated it.

  Having retired from Father Dosen's presence and having had a good cry, Mother now produced a towel, which she had brought from our home village, and began wiping her bare, sunburned breast. The towel was of the type that one received on the ration and was made of staple fiber. The material had an animalian gloss and when it was wet with perspiration, it became even more shiny.

  Then Mother took some rice out of her haversack. She said that she was going to offer it to the Superior. I did not say a word. Next she extracted Father's mortuary tablet, which had been carefully wrapped in a piece of old gray cloth, and placed it on my bookshelf.

  "I'm ever so pleased about all this," she said. "Father'll be real happy to know the Superior is saying Mass for him.”

  "Will you be going back to Nariu after the anniversary, Mother?" I asked.

  Her answer came as a surprise. It turned out that Mother had already handed over the rights of the Nariu temple to someone else and had sold the small plot of land. She had paid off all Father's medical expenses and had arranged to go and live by herself at an uncle's house in Kasagun near Kyoto. So the temple where I was to return was no longer ours! In that village on the lonely cape there was nothing left to greet me.

  I do not know how Mother interpreted the look of liberation that appeared on my face, but she bent close to me and said: “You sec, dear. You don't have a temple of your own any longer. The only thing for you now is to become the superior of the Golden Temple here. You must see that the Father really gets to like you, so that you can take his place when the time comes for him to leave. You understand, dear? That's all
your mother will be living for now.”

  I was astounded by this development and tried to stare back at Mother. But I was too alarmed to look at her properly.

  The little back room was already dark. My "fond mother” had put her mouth directly against my car when she was speaking to me and now the smell of her perspiration hovered before my nostrils. I recalled that Mother had been laughing then. Distant memories of being nursed, memories of a swarthy breast-the images raced unpleasantly round my brain. In the flames of the lowly field fires there existed some sort of physical force and it was this that seemed to frighten me. As Mother's frizzy locks touched my check, I noticed a dragonfly resting its wings on the moss-grown stone basin in the dusky courtyard. The evening sky was reflected on the surface of the small, round patch of water in the basin. There was not a sound to be heard and at this moment the Rokuonji seemed to be a deserted temple.

  Finally I was able to look directly into Mother's face. A smile played in the corner of her glossy lips and I could see her shining gold teeth.

  “Yes,” I answered stuttering violently, "but for all I know, m be called up and killed in battle."

  “You fool!” she said. "If they start taking stutterers like you into the Army, Japan is really finished!”

  I sat there tensely, filled with hatred for my mother. But the words that I stuttered out were a mere evasion. "The Golden Temple may be burned down in an air raid," I said.

  "The way things are going," said Mother, "there's not the faintest chance of an air raid on Kyoto. The Americans are leaving it alone.”

  I did not reply. The darkening courtyard had become the color of the sea bed. The stones sank in the gloom, and from their form one might have thought they had been struggling fiercely with each other. Mother stood up, disregarding my silence, and stared unceremoniously at the wooden door of my little room.

  "Isn't it time for the evening meal yet?” she said.

  When I looked back on it later, I realized that this visit of Mother's had a considerable influence on my thinking. It was on this occasion that I understood that Mother lived in an utterly different world from mine and it was also on this occasion that for the first time her manner of thinking began to affect me.

  Mother was by nature the sort of person who would have no interest in the beauty of the Golden Temple; instead, she possessed a realistic sense that was foreign to me. She had said that there was no fear of an air raid on Kyoto and, despite all my dreams, this was probably true. Ana it there was no chance that the Golden Temple would be attacked, then for the time being I had lost my purpose in living and the world in which I dwelt must fall to pieces.

  On the other hand, the ambition that Mother had pronounced so unexpectedly had captivated me, much as I loathed it. Father had never said a word about this matter, but perhaps he had entertained the same ambition as Mother when he had sent me to this temple. Father Dosen was a bachelor. Assuming that he himself had attained his present position on the recommendation of some predecessor who had pinned his expectations on him, there was no reason that I too, so long as I exerted myself properly, could not eventually succeed Father Dosen as Superior of the Rokuonji. If that were to happen, the Golden Temple would be mine!

  My thoughts became confused. When my second ambition became burdensome, I returned to my first dream (that the Golden Temple was going to be bombed), and when that dream was destroyed by the clear realism of Mother's judgment, I reverted to the second ambition, until in the end I wearied myself by constantly going back and forth in my thoughts and, as a result, a large red swelling appeared at the base of my neck.

  I left it alone. The swelling become firmly rooted and began to press on me from the back of my neck with a heavy, hot force. In my fitful sleep, I dreamed that a pure golden light was growing on my neck, surrounding the back of my head with a sort of elliptical halo and gradually expanding. But when I awoke, this turned out to have been merely the pain from my virulent swelling.

  Finally I came down with a temperature and had to go to bed. The Superior sent me to sec a surgeon. The surgeon, who was dressed in a national uniform with gaiters, diagnosed my swelling by the simple name of Flunkel. Not wanting to use any alcohol, he disinfected his knife by holding it over a flame and then applied it to my neck. I groaned. The hot, burdensome world burst open in the back of my head, and I felt it shriveling up and collapsing.

  The war ended. All that I was thinking about, as I listened in the factory to the Imperial Rescript announcing the termination of hostilities, was the Golden Temple.

  As soon as I returned from the factory, I naturally hurried to the front of the Golden Temple. On the path that was used by visitors to the temple, the pebbles were baking in the midsummer sun, and one after another stuck to the rough rubber soles of my gym shoes.

  In Tokyo, after people had heard the Rescript, they probably went and stood in front of the Imperial Palace; here great numbers went and wept before the gates of the uninhabited Kyoto Palace. Kyoto is full of shrines and temples where people can go and cry on occasions like this. The priests must all have done rather well that day. Yet despite the great role of the Golden Temple, no one came to visit it that day.

  Thus it was that only my shadow could be seen on the baking pebbles. To describe the situation properly, I should say that I was standing on one side and the Golden Temple on the other. And from the moment that I set eyes on the temple that day, I could feel that “our" relationship had already undergone a change. When it came to such things as the shock of defeat or national grief, the Golden Temple was in its element; at such times it was transcendent, or at least pretended to be transcendent. Until today, the Golden Temple had not been like this. Without doubt, the fact that it had in the end escaped being burned down in an air raid and was now out of danger had served to restore its earlier expression, an expression that said: "I have been here since olden times and I shall remain here forever.”

  It sat there in utter silence, like some elegant but useless piece of furniture, with the antique gold foil or its interior perfectly protected by the lacquer of the summer sun that doubled the outer walls. Great, empty display shelves placed before the burning green of the forest. What ornamental objects could one put on such shelves? Nothing would fit their measurements but something like a fantastically large incense burner, or an absolutely colossal nihility. But the Golden Temple had entirely lost such things; it had suddenly washed away its essence and now displayed a strangely empty form, l he most peculiar thing was that of all the various times when the Golden Temple had shown me its beauty, this time was the most beautiful of all. Never had the temple displayed so hard a beauty—a beauty that transcended my own image, yes, that transcended the entire world of reality, a beauty that bore no relation to any form of evanescence! Never before had its beauty shone like this, rejecting every sort of meaning.

  It is no exaggeration to say that as I gazed at the temple, my legs trembled and my forehead was covered with cold beads of perspiration. On a former occasion when I had returned to the country after seeing the temple, its various parts and its whole structure had resounded with a sort of musical harmony. But what I heard this time was complete silence, complete noisclessncss. Nothing flowed there, nothing changed. The Golden Temple stood before me, towered before me, like some terrirying pause in a piece of music, like some resonant silence.

  "The bond between the Golden Temple and myself has been cut," I thought. "Now my vision that the Golden Temple and I were living in the same world has broken down. Now I shall return to my previous condition, but it will be even more hopeless than before. A condition in which I exist on one side and beauty on the other. A condition that will never improve so long as this world endures."

  The country's defeat was for me just such an experience of despair. Even now I can see before me the flame-like summer light of that day of defeat, August 15. People said that all values had collapsed; but within myself, on the contrary, eternity awoke, was resuscitated, and asserted i
ts rights. The eternity which told me that the Golden Temple was to remain there forever. The eternity that descended from heaven, sticking to our cheeks, our hands, our stomachs, ana finally burying us. How cursed a thing it was! Yes, in the cries of the cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in the golden plaster.

  During the sutra recitation that evening before retiring to bed, We recited especially long prayers for the peace of His Imperial Majesty and to console the spirits of those who had died in the war. Ever since the war started, it had become customary in the various sects to use simple vestments, but tonight the Superior was wearing the scarlet priest's robe which he had kept stored away for years. That plump, immaculate face of his, which looked as though even its wrinkles had been washed out, had a ruddy air of good health about it today and seemed to be brimming over with satisfaction about something. In the hot night, the cool rustling of his robes sounded clearly in the temple.

  After the sutra recitation, everyone in the temple was called to the Superior's room to hear a lecture. The catachetic Zen problem that he had chosen was "Nansen Kills a Cat” from the Fourteenth Case of the Mumonkan. "Nansen Kills a Cat" (which also appears in the Sixty-Third Case of the Hekiganroku under the title "Nansen Kills a Kitten" and in the Sixty-Fourth Case under the title "Joshu Wears a Pair of Sandals on His Head") has been noted since ancient times as one of the most difficult Zen problems.

  In the T'ang period there was a famous Ch’an priest, P'u Yüan, who lived on Mount Nan Ch'üan, and who was named Nan Ch'üan (Nansen, according to the Japanese reading) after the mountain. One day, when all the monks had gone out to cut the grass, a little kitten appeared in the peaceful mountain temple. Everyone was curious about this kitten. They chased the little animal and caught it. Then it became an object of dispute between the East Hall and the West Hall of the temple. The two groups quarreled about who should keep the kitten as their pet.