The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Page 9

  Father Nansen, who was watching all this, immediately caught the kitten by the scruff of its neck and, putting his sickle against it, said as follows: ‘‘If any of you can say a word, this kitten shall be saved; if you can not, it shall be killed.” No one was able to answer, and so Father Nansen killed the kitten and threw it away.

  When evening came, the chief disciple, Joshu, returned to the temple. Father Nansen told him what had happened and asked for his opinion. Joshu immediately removed his shoes, put them on his head, and left the room. At this, Father Nansen lamented sorely, saying: "Oh, if only you had been here today, the kitten's life could have been saved."

  This was the general outline of the story. The part in which Joshu puts his shoes on his head was known to present a particularly difficult problem. But according to the Superior's lecture, it was not all that difficult.

  The reason that Father Nansen had killed the cat was that he had cut away the illusion of self and had eradicated all irrelevant thoughts and fantasies from his mind. Putting his insensibility into practice, he had cut off the kitten's head and had thus cut off all contradiction, opposition, and discord between self and others. This was known as the Murdering Sword, whereas Joshu's action was called the Life-Giving Sword. By performing an action of such infinite magnanimity as wearing filthy and despised objects like shoes on his head, he had given a practical demonstration of the way of the Bod hisattva.

  Having explained the problem in this manner, the Superior came to the end of his lecture, without once having touched on the matter of Japan's defeat. We felt as though we had been bewitched by a fox. We had not the faintest idea why this particular Zen problem should have been chosen on the day of our country's defeat. As We walked along the corridor on our way back to our rooms, I expressed my doubts to Tsurukawa. He too was surprised and shook his head.

  “I don't understand," he said. “I don't think anyone could understand who hasn't lived his life as a priest. But I think that the real point of tonight's lecture was that on the day of our defeat, he should not have said a word about it and should have talked about killing a cat."

  I myself did not feel the slightest unhappiness about having lost the war, but the Superior's look of overflowing delight had made me uneasy. Respect for one's Superior is what normally preserves order in a temple. Yet during the past year in which I had been under the care of this temple, I had not come to feel any love or esteem for this Superior of ours. That in itself did not matter. But ever since Mother had lit the flame of ambition within me, I had begun on occasion to regard the Superior with all the critical sense of a seventeen-year-old boy.

  The Superior was fair and impartial. But it was a fairness and impartiality that J could easily imagine displaying myself if I were to become a Superior. This man lacked the characteristic sense of humor of a Zen priest. This was odd, since humor was usually an inseparable adjunct to people as fat as he.

  I had heard that the Superior had enjoyed himself to the full with women. When I actually imagined him indulging in these pleasures, I was amused, but at the same time uneasy. What would a woman really feci when she was embraced by a body that was like a pink bean-jam cake? She would probably feel as if that soft, pink flesh stretched to the very ends of the world, as if she were being buried in a grave of flesh.

  It struck me as strange that a Zen priest also should have flesh. The reason that the Superior had indulged himself so thoroughly with women could have been that he wished to show his scorn of the flesh by throwing it away from himself. But if that were so, it seemed strange that this flesh which he so despised should have absorbed ample nourishment and that it should be sleekly wrapping itself about his spirit. Docile, humble flesh like some well-trained domestic animal. Flesh that was exactly like a concubine for the Superior's spirit.

  I must state what the defeat really meant to me. It was not a liberation. No, it was by no means a liberation. It was nothing else than a return to the unchanging, eternal Buddhist routine, which merged into our daily life. This routine was now firmly re-established, and continued unaltered from the day after the Surrender: the “opening of the rules," morning tasks, gruel session, meditation, "medicine" or the evening meal, bathing, "opening of the pillow.” The Superior strictly forbade the use of black-market rice in the temple. As a result, the only rice that we acolytes would find floating in our meager bowls of gruel was what had been contributed by parishioners, or such small quantities as the deacon had bought on the black market. The deacon obtained the rice for us out of consideration for the fact that we acolytes were now at the age of our most rapid growth and needed nourishment; but he always pretended that this black-market rice was part of the contribution to the temple. Sometimes we would go out and buy ourselves sweet potatoes. It was not only at breakfast that we were given gruel; our lunch and dinner too, consisted of gruel and sweet potatoes, and as a result we were always hungry.

  Tsurukawa requested his parents for sweets and occasionally they would send him pareels from Tokyo. Late at night he brought his supply of sweets to my room and we ate them together. Now and again the lightning flashed in the dark sky.

  I asked Tsurukawa why he stayed here when he had such a prosperous home and such affectionate parents.

  "This is all a sort of ascetic exercise for me," he explained. "In any case, when the time comes, I shall be inheriting Father's temple from him.”

  Nothing seemed to bother Tsurukawa. He fitted perfectly into the pattern of his life, like a chopstick in its box. I pursued the conversation by telling Tsurukawa that some new and quite unimaginable period might come to our country. I remembered the story that I had heard everyone discussing at school some days after the Surrender. It was about an officer who was in charge of some factory and who, immediately after the war ended, had piled up a truckload of goods and driven them to his own house, explaining quite openly: "From now on, I’m going into the black-market business.”

  I imagined this bold, cruel, sharp-eyed officer as he stood there, about to rush headlong towards evil. The path along which he was going to run in his half-length military boots revealed the precise quality of death in battle; it had a form of disorder that reminded me of the crimson glow at dawn. As he set off, his white silk scarf would be fluttering at his breast, and his cheeks would be exposed to the cold night wind that still lingered in the early morning. His back would be bent double with the weight of the stolen goods: he would wear himself out with magnificent speed. But more in the distance, more lightly, I could hear the bell of disorder ringing in the bell tower.

  I was separated from all such things. I had no money, no liberty, no emancipation. But it was certain that in my seventeen-year-old mind the phrase "a new period” involved a firm determination to pursue a certain course, even though it had not yet taken any concrete form,

  "If the people of this world," I thought, “are going to taste evil through their lives and their deeds, then I shall plunge as deep as I can into an inner world of evil.”

  But the type of evil that I envisaged for myself at first did not go any further than a plan to win the Superior's favor by my wiles and thus to take possession of the Golden Temple, or else an absurd dream like poisoning the Superior and supplanting him. These plans of mine even served to ease my conscicnce, once I had made sure that Tsurukawa did not entertain the same ambition.

  "Don't you have any worries or hopes about the future?” I asked him.

  "No, none at all. What good would it do if I did?"

  There was nothing gloomy in the way that he said this, nor did he speak haphazardly. Just then a flash of lightning lit up his narrow, gently sloping eyebrows, which were the only delicate part of his features. Tsurukawa evidently let the barber have his way in shaving the top and bottom of his eyebrows; as a result his already narrow eyebrows were made even narrower and one could see a faint blue shadow at the ends where the razor had passed.

  As I glanced at this blue, I was seized with uneasiness. The young boy who sat in fr
ont of me burned at the pure extremity of life. He was different from me. His future was so concealed that he was burning. The wick of his future was floating in cool, clear oil. Who in this world was obliged to foresee his own innocence and purity? That is, if only innocence and purity remained for him in the future.

  That evening after Tsurukawa had returned to his room, I could not sleep because of the steaming heat of the late summer. Apart from the temperature, my determination to resist indulging in my habit of masturbation robbed me of sleep...

  It happened sometimes while I slept that I had a pollution. This did not involve any concrete sexual image. For example, a black dog would be running down a dark street: I could sec its panting breath escaping like flames from its mouth, and my excitement grew with the ringing of the bell that hung from its neck; then, as the bell reached its loudest pitch, I would have an ejaculation.

  When I masturbated, my mind would be filled with demonic images, I could sec Uiko's breasts, then her thighs would appear before me. And meanwhile I had turned into an incomparably small, ugly insect.

  ...I jumped out of bed and sneaked out of the building by the back door of the small library. Behind the Rokuonji and cast of the Yukatei stands a mountain called Fudosan. It was thickly covered with red pines, and interspersed among the thick bamboo grass, which stretched out between the trees, grew deutzia, azaleas, and other plants. I was so familiar with this mountain that I could climb it even at night without stumbling. From the top one could see upper Kyoto and central Kyoto, and in the distance the mountains of Eizan and Daimonjiyama.

  I climbed the slope. I climbed to the sound of the birds who flapped their wings in fear as I passed; I did not look to the side and managed to avoid all the tree stumps. I felt that I had been instantly cured by climbing like this without a thought in my head. When I reached the top, a cool night wind blew on my perspiring body.

  I was surprised by the sight before me. The black-out had long since been suspended, and now a sea of lights stretched into the distance. This struck me almost as a miracle, since I had not once come up to this place at night since the end of the war.

  The lights formed one solid body. They were scattered over the entire flat surface, giving no impression of being cither near or far; what rose before me in the night was a huge, transparent structure composed entirely of lights, which seemed to be spreading out its winged tower and to have grown complicated horns. Here, indeed, was a city. Only the forest round the Imperial Palace was unlighted, and it looked like a great black cave. Now and then in the direction of Eizan Mountain the lightning would flash in the dark sky.

  “This," I thought, "is the mundane world. Now that the war has ended, people are being driven about under that light by evil thoughts. Innumerable couples are gazing at each other under that light, and in their nostrils is the smell of the deed that is like death, which already is pressing directly on them. At the thought that these countless lights are all obstructive lights, my heart is comforted. Please let the evil that is in my heart increase and multiply indefinitely, so that it may correspond in every particular with that vast light before my eyes! Let the darkness of my heart, in which that evil is enclosed, equal the darkness of the night, which encloses those countless lights!"

  There was a great increase in the number of visitors to the Golden Temple. The Superior applied to the municipality and was allowed to raise the admission fee so as to keep pace with inflation.

  The scattered visitors whom I had seen until now were modest folk dressed in uniforms, work clothes or baggy wartime trousers. But now Occupation troops arrived, and soon the licentious customs of the mundane world began to flourish about the Golden Temple. The changes were not entirely for the worse, however; for the custom of tea-dedication was revived, and many of the women visitors now came to the temple in gay, colorful clothes that they had stored away during the war years. We priests in our dark vestments now began to stand out by contrast; it was just as though we were acting the part of clericals for fun, or as though we were the inhabitants of some district who took special pains to preserve strange old customs for the benefit of tourists who came to observe them. The American soldiers were particularly struck by us: They used to pull the sleeves of our robes without any reserve, and laughed at us. Sometimes they would offer us money so that We would let them wear our robes; thus attired, they would have photographs taken of themselves as souvenirs. This was the sort of thing that happened when Tsurukawa or I had been routed out to use our broken English on foreign visitors, in place of the regular guides, who knew no English at all.

  It was the first winter after the war. On Friday evening it had begun snowing and it continued snowing on Saturday. While I was at school in the morning, I was looking forward to returning at noon and seeing the Golden Temple under snow.

  In the afternoon, too, it was snowing. I left the visitors' path and, wearing my rubber boots and with my school satchel slung over my shoulders, I walked to the edge of the Kyoto Pond. The snow was coming down with a sort of fluent rapidity. When I was a child, I had often turned my head up to the snow with my mouth wide open. I did so now, and the snowflakes touched my teeth, making a noise as if they were striking a very thin piece of tin foil. I felt that the snow was scattering throughout the warm cavity of my mouth and melting as it reached the red surface of the flesh. At that instant I imagined the mouth of the phoenix on top of the Kukyocho. The hot, smooth mouth of that mysterious and golden-colored bird.

  Snow gives all of us a youthful feeling. And would it be quite untrue to say that I, who still had not reached my eighteenth birthday, now felt some youthful stirring within me?

  The Golden Temple was incomparably beautiful as it stood there enveloped in snow. There was something refreshing about the bare skin of that draughty building, with its slender pillars rising close to each other, and with the snow blowing freely into its interior.

  "Why doesn't the snow stutter?" I wondered. Sometimes, when the snow brushed against the leaves of the yatsudé, it fell to the ground as if it were in fact stuttering. But when I felt myself bathed in the snow as it descended mildly from the sky without any interruption, I forgot the kinks in my heart and seemed to return to some more gentle spiritual rhythm, as if I were being bathed in music.

  Thanks to the snow, the three-dimensional Golden Temple had truly become a plane figure, a figure within a picture, and no longer did it bid defiance to what existed outside itself. The bare branches of the maple trees that stretched out on cither side of the pond were hardly able to support any snow, and the forest looked more naked than usual. Here and there the snow was piled magnificently on the pines. The snow also lay thick on the icy surface of the pond; but curiously, there were places where there was no snow at all, and where the pond was boldly daubed with great, white patches that looked like the clouds in an ornamental painting. Kyusanhakkai Rock and Awaji Island were joined to the snow on the icy surface of the pond, and the small pines that grew there looked exactly as if they had sprung up by chance from the midst of a plain of ice and snow.

  Three parts of the Golden Temple were strikingly white-the roofs of the Kukyocho and the Choondo and the little roof of the Sosei. The rest of the uninhabited building was dark, and there was rather something fresh about the blackness of the complicated, wooden structure that stood out in relief against the snow. Just as when one looks at a castle nestling among the mountains in some painting of the Southern School, and brings one's face closer to the canvas to see whether someone may not be living behind those walls, so the fascination of that ancient black wood before me made me feel that I should like to find out whether the temple tower was not, in fact, inhabited. But even if I were to bring my face closer to the Golden Temple, I should only bump into the cold silk canvas of the snow; nearer than that I could not approach.

  Today, too, the doors of the Kukyocho had been opened to the snowy sky. As I gazed up at it, I observed minutely how the falling snowflakes whirled round in the small space wher
e there was nothing of the Kukyocho, and how, then, they settled on the old, tarhished gold-foil of its walls and stayed there until they had formed small patches of golden dew.

  The next day was Sunday. In the morning the old guide came to fetch me. Evidently a foreign soldier had arrived to look at the temple before the normal opening-hour. The guide had used sign language to ask the soldier to wait, and had come to fetch me because, as he said, I knew English. Surprisingly enough, my English was better than Tsurukawa's and I never stuttered when I spoke it.

  A jeep was standing by the entrance. A dead-drunk American soldier was leaning against one of the pillars. When I appeared, he looked down at me and laughed scornfully.

  The front garden was dazzling from the recent snowfall. Against this dazzling background, the young soldier's face with its fleshy folds blew white clouds of steam towards me, mixed with the fumes of whisky. As usual, I felt uneasy as I tried to imagine what feelings must move within a person who differed so enormously in size from myself.

  As I made it a habit not to oppose people, I now agreed to show him round the temple, even though it was before opening-time. I asked for the entrance fee and the guide's fee. Rather to my surprise, the great drunken fellow made no trouble about paying. Then he looked into the jeep and said something to the effect of "Get out!”

  Because of the dazzling snow, I had so far not been able to see into the dark interior of the jeep, but now I noticed that something white was moving behind the window in the hood. I felt as though a rabbit were moving about in there.

  A foot shod in a slender high-heeled shoe was planted on the step of the jeep. I was surprised that despite the cold it was not covered in a stocking. I could tell at a glance that the girl was a prostitute who catered to foreign soldiers: for she wore a flaming-red overcoat and her fingernails and toenails were painted the same flaming color. When the bot-torn of her overcoat opened, I noticed that underneath she was wearing a soiled nightgown made of towel cloth. The girl, too, was fearfully drunk and her eyes were set. The man was properly dressed in his uniform; but she had merely thrown an overcoat and scarf over her nightgown, having evidently come directly from bed.