The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (10 page)

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 termina
tion
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 its 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.

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.