Lord Oda's Revenge (34 page)

They are real
, he thought.
They are real and the dragonflies must be real as well, and they were free to take human form again for
obon,
but now they must be crabs once more
. Suddenly he felt a pang of fear. The Heike were crabs again – all along the beach they were morphing into the creatures – and that meant his mother's ghost would be disappearing too.

He staggered up to the beach, and then to where the priest stood in front of the village people, declaiming a monotone mantra to the departing souls. Some of the children stood off to the side, laughing and singing one of the little
obon
songs.

Taro had been one of those children once – singing as the dead went on their way. The thought nauseated him.

‘Shut up!' he roared at the children, and the adults whirled to stare at him. The priest faltered in his recitation.

‘My mother is going, and I can't speak to her now!' he screamed. One of the women stepped towards him, her face radiant with sympathy, and he could bear that least of all so he turned on his heel and ran towards his hut, and his shelf of offerings. Perhaps his mother would be there – he could tell her how he hadn't heeded her warning, but the Princess had saved him anyway. He could tell her how he had lost the ball, which was his only chance of saving Hana, and how he wasn't sure it was truly magical anyway, how it had failed to work when the samurai on the ship used it. He would tell her all this, and maybe she would take him into her ghostly arms.

But when he reached the hut, it was empty. He sank down onto the floor. It was all real, all of it – ghosts, demons, goddesses.
But if all that was real, then what about the ball? He needed it to save Hana, he
needed
it – and it had turned out to be a useless lump of gold.

He drew in great sobbing gasps as he cried.

Then, from the door, came a soft tapping. Taro looked up, confused. Was this his mother? If so, would she knock so politely? He jumped to his feet.

‘Come in,' he said.

It wasn't his mother. It was the priest, and there was a look of sad kindness in his eyes. ‘She's gone,' he said.

Taro nodded. ‘Yes. I know.'

The priest brushed away one of Taro's tears. ‘I am sorry,' he said. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, out there in the bay?'

‘No.'

‘Then I am doubly sorry.' The priest sat down on the ground of the hut, and after a moment Taro sat beside him. ‘You love your mother very much, don't you?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘And she loved you, of course. It is no wonder she returned, to see you again.'

Taro smiled. ‘She was a good mother.'

‘What do you think she wanted?' said the priest.

‘I don't know. I think, maybe, to warn me. To tell me the bay was dangerous.'

‘I could have told you that. I did, I think.'

‘Yes.'

The priest closed his eyes as if thinking. ‘I wish I could help you,' he said. ‘To lose a mother is a terrible thing. Of course, that's what
obon
is all about – the death of a mother. It is meant for us to help the dead, but it seems to me that for many people it
is merely painful.'

‘The death of a mother?' said Taro. ‘
Obon
is when all the dead return. Not just mothers.'

The priest gave an indulgent smile. ‘Yes, yes. But originally it was something rather different. People don't seem to tell their children about the first
obon
any more,' he said wistfully.

‘The first
obon
?' said Taro. He didn't know much about anything, it seemed.

‘Yes, when Mokuren went to hell and spoke to his mother, and saved her soul.'

Taro sat up straighter. ‘He saw his mother again? After she'd died?' He dimly remembered the abbot saying something similar, about someone conquering death.

‘Yes, and not as a ghost, either. He actually entered the land of the dead.'

Taro's thoughts raced. If it was possible that crabs and dragonflies were ghosts, and that demons existed, then might it not be possible that this story – like the story of the Buddha ball – was in some sense true? If it was, then perhaps he could speak to his mother again. He could ask her about the ball – he was sure she'd hidden it in the wreck, so why had it not worked for the samurai? Did it require special words; the touch of a special person? Her shaking of her head had seemed to him a warning not to dive for it – what did that mean?

He
needed
that ball. He had to save Hana's life. Otherwise he was just a curse that brought death to people.

‘Tell me,' said Taro. ‘Tell me everything.'

 

M
OKUREN WAS THE
son of one of the emperor's many consorts, and because he was not a true heir, he could never hope to be emperor himself. Mokuren's mother, knowing that in her son lay her only remaining chance of social advancement, encouraged him day and night to devote himself to his studies. And when he came of age, at twelve, she indicated her desire for him to enter monastic service. Many years before, a serving girl had whispered to her during a Noh performance, ‘Flattering the emperor with your beauty will get you somewhere, but not everywhere. Better to have a son who reaches enlightenment. As a woman, you are barred from the Pure Land of paradise as firmly as you are barred from the most elevated positions. However, your son is not subject to these restrictions. Maybe, if he achieved enlightenment, he could even save you from whatever lowly realm you are reincarnated into.'

Soon after, a visiting monk had told her that the greatest merit lay in sending one's son into the Order – and it seemed to her that these two pieces of advice constituted more than a coincidence.

Mokuren was not sure he wanted to be a monk – he was a boy of naughty inclinations, who loved to play pranks on the guards
and pinch serving girls' bottoms. Nevertheless, to his dismay, the abbot from the great Tendai monastery at Mount Hiei had already been sent for.

Mokuren loved his mother more than anything. More, even, than poetry and dancing and young women, all of which he loved very much indeed. As a result, when his mother told him she wished for him to be a monk, he accepted it with a glad heart. So it was that when the abbot arrived, Mokuren prepared for his departure. There was not a dry eye in the palace – all the serving girls loved Mokuren, though they looked forward to being able to turn their backs without fear of him pinching their bottoms.

As Mokuren walked out of the door, his mother came running out after him in tears. Until now, he had never once left the confines of the palace's jewelled doors; he had never once been seen by anyone of importance except through his mother's screens. Mokuren didn't want to leave either, but he knew that any show of weakness might dissolve his mother's resolve. ‘Although I shall be far away on Mount Hiei,' he said, ‘in the end I will come back and show myself to you, wearing the robe of liberation. Since it is my fate to follow the path of Buddhist practice, let it at least be a blessing for my future and my family.'

All the guards and serving girls admired Mokuren's composure, but his mother was not impressed. ‘Mokuren,' she chided, ‘please hear me. Although the pain of parting is hard to bear, you must not show weakness of the heart. Once you have left this place with the abbot, you must forget about the palace entirely and work to sever any attachment you feel to me. Throw your heart into your scholarship as you have always done, and accumulate merit for yourself through an ascetic life. Become a monk and then come back and show yourself to me, wearing your
gedatsu no koromo
, your robe of liberation. To become a monk in name alone, while remaining illiterate and ignorant, is a grave sin, as you know. If this is what happens to you, never return here again. I will consider us mother and son no more. But if you apply yourself and attain enlightenment, come back and visit your mother who will miss you so. I say all this not to hurt you but to strengthen your ties to Buddha's teaching and to weaken the apron strings that tie you to me.'

With that, she presented Mokuren with a simple under-robe. ‘Let this robe, with its lack of ostentation, guide you in your studies.'

At Mount Hiei, Mokuren showed himself quickly to be a true prodigy, becoming famous at court for the depth of his learning. One day he was invited to participate in a
hokke hakk
, a series of lectures on the Lotus Sutra to be held at the Imperial Palace. The Empress Mother herself requested his presence. When it came time for Mokuren to return to the monastery, the Empress Mother piled gifts on his horse. Ever the loving son, Mokuren sent a portion of the gifts to his mother. However, a disapproving letter soon arrived:

Son, I received the gifts you sent. But while I am boundlessly happy with the gift you have shown for scholarship, I am displeased with the worldly gifts you have attained as a result. When I sent you off to the temple, I had no intention that you should participate in such lectures at the court, which are no better than theatrical productions. When I sent you off, I thought, ‘I have no daughters, only a son. I will send my son to become a great monk, so that he might be revered as a saint and save me in the hereafter.' It was not my intention that you should become one of those monks who
is tantamount to a lord, and who travels around in grand style to the palace and back.

At the end of the letter was a sort of religious poem:

In this revolving triple world
there is no end of loving indebtedness to parents.
To cast away indebtedness and enter the unconditioned,
that is true devotion.

Mokuren understood that he should cut off his attachment to his mother if he wished to attain enlightenment. He wrote her an apologetic letter, and then remained isolated on the mountain for many years, atoning for his sin through solitude and meditation. Always he read the sutras, remembering his mother's admonition about ignorance and illiteracy. In winter he piled up snow next to his bed so that it would reflect the moonlight and enable him to read late into the night; in summer he captured fireflies and hung them from the eaves.

Meanwhile, Mokuren's mother did her own part for his success: she prayed nightly that the other monks at the temple would die, so that there would be no one to eclipse her own son's reputation.

One day, many years later, Mokuren had a premonition that his mother was going to die, and so he set off immediately for the capital to read the
nenbutsu
rites with her. But when he arrived she had already died. ‘For what purpose, now, was all my studying?' he asked. ‘The one person in this world I love has gone.' After holding the appropriate ceremonies and burying his mother, he returned to the mountain. From then on, he wore only the robe she had given him –
calling it his
katami no koromo
, his memento robe. Even when he achieved enlightenment, in the eyes of the other monks, and was given the robe of liberation, he continued to wear the robe his mother had given him underneath it, to remind him of her. She was constantly in his thoughts – he heard from people that it was right to let the dead go, but he found that he could not accept his mother's death.

Soon after, Mokuren's mother began to appear to him when he was alone in his cabin, reading the sutras or meditating. She spoke to him, but the shape of her lips as she spoke did not fit to any words he knew, and he found himself going slowly mad, as he tried to understand what she wanted to tell him.

But he never could learn what she was saying. Meanwhile, he was growing weaker and weaker, his skin paler and paler. When he looked in the mirror, he saw that he himself was beginning to resemble a ghost.

Mokuren was dying, but he knew too that his mother was suffering, and he couldn't bear it. Soon, though he didn't know it, his enlightenment had fallen away from him as the leaves fall from trees at the first hint of winter's hard frost. He thought only of his love for his mother, and how he could not bear for her to be in pain. He was not detached and at one with
dharma
– he was linked to his dead mother, as if by an umbilical cord that stretched from this world to hell.