Temple Of Dawn (21 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Temple Of Dawn
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“Yes, after Miss Satoko entered the orders, I left the Ayakura family, and since then I’ve only attended Lord Ayakura’s funeral. The Viscountess, I believe, is still alive, but after his lordship passed away she sold the house in Tokyo and went to relatives in Shishigatani in Kyoto. Her daughter . . .”
Honda felt a quivering in his heart and asked involuntarily: “Do you ever see Miss Satoko?”
“Yes, I’ve seen her three times in all after the funeral. She’s always so kind to me when I visit her. She even invites me to spend the night at the temple. So sweet and gracious . . .”
Tadeshina took off her clouded glasses, quickly removed a coarse tissue from her sleeve and held it over her eyes for some time. When she took it away there was a dark ring where the powder had come off.
“Miss Satoko’s well then?” said Honda again.
“She is, indeed. And—how shall I say?—she’s more beautiful, more pure than ever, and her beauty becomes more serene as she grows older. Please visit her some time, Mr. Honda. Do, she’ll be so pleased to see you.”
Honda abruptly recalled that midnight drive from Kamakura to Tokyo alone with Satoko.
She was another man’s woman, but she had been almost oppressively feminine then.
She had already had a foreboding of things to come ultimately and had expressed her readiness in preparing for them. Honda recalled, as vividly as though it had happened yesterday, that thrilling moment just before dawn when her profile had been framed by the car window with the foliage in the background flying past.
When he came back to reality, Tadeshina’s face had lost its pretense of deference and she was scrutinizing him. Wrinkles like the lines in tie-dyed silk surrounded her bowshaped lips, but now at either side her mouth was slightly pulled up in the semblance of a smile. Suddenly, in the two eyes—old wells in patches of snow—the pupils moved horizontally with a suggestion of the old coquetry.
“You were in love with her, weren’t you? I knew it.”
Honda flinched, more at the vestiges of Tadeshina’s coquetry than from displeasure at such a conjecture after so many years. To change the subject, he turned his thoughts to the gifts he had received from his client. It occurred to him that he might share a portion with her: a couple of eggs and a little chicken.
Tadeshina expressed her guileless joy and appreciation just as he had expected she would.
“Oh, my, eggs! How unusual to see eggs these days! I feel as if I haven’t seen one for years! Heavens, eggs!”
The meandering, complex thanks that followed made Honda realize that the old woman must be given scarcely any decent food. He was further surprised when she again took out the egg that she had put away in her shopping bag. Holding it up against the fading twilight sky, she said:
“Rather than taking this home—you must excuse my poor manners—I would rather just eat it here . . .”
As the old woman spoke, she looked regretfully at the egg against the darkening sky. It smoldered in her trembling old fingers as the fading light touched its delicate, cold shell.
For some time Tadeshina caressed the egg in her hand. The noise in the area had abated, and only the faint sound of her dry skin rubbing against it was audible.
Honda ignored her search for a sharp corner against which to crack the shell. He was reluctant to help her in an action which was somehow objectionable. Tadeshina broke the egg unexpectedly skillfully on the edge of the stone on which she was sitting. Carefully bringing it to her mouth in order to lose none of its content, she gradually lifted her face and poured it between her gleaming dentures gaping at the evening sky. The lustrous roundness of the yolk passing her lips was fleetingly visible, and her throat emitted an extremely healthy swallowing sound.
“My, this is the first nourishing food I’ve had in a long, long time. I feel revived. I feel as though the beauty of my youth has come back. You might not believe it, Mr. Honda, but I was a famous beauty in my day.”
Her tone had suddenly become frank.
There is a time of day immediately before dusk when the outline of every object becomes sharply delineated. It was just that moment. The lacerated edges of wooden beams in the wreckage, the freshness of the rents in the shredded trees, and the curled zinc sheets with their puddles of rain water—everything appeared almost unpleasantly vivid. In the extreme west only a horizontal line of scarlet was to be seen in the sky between two or three towering black burnedout buildings. Flecks of scarlet were also visible through the windows of the ruined structures. It was as if someone had turned on a red light in a deserted and uninhabited house.
“How can I thank you? You have always been such a tenderhearted man, and you are still so kind. I have nothing to give you, but at least . . .”
Like a blind woman, Tadeshina hunted through her bag. Before Honda could stop her, she had taken out a volume bound in the Japanese style and thrust it into his hand.
“At least I want to give you this book. I have always treasured it and carried it with me. It is an efficacious sutra given me by a priest to ward off harm and illness. I am so happy to have run into you and to have been able to talk about bygone times. You’ll probably be going out on air-raid days, and there are bad fevers about. But if you carry this sutra with you, you are sure to avoid any disaster. I should like you to keep it as a token of my appreciation.”
Honda held the book up reverently to show his thanks and looked at the title on the cover. It was barely legible in the evening light.
Mahamayurividyarajni
, “Sutra of the Great Golden Peacock Wisdom King.”
22
 
 E
VER SINCE THAT DAY
, Honda could scarcely contain his desire to see Satoko, but he knew that the urge came in part from Tadeshina’s remark that she was still beautiful. He was deathly afraid of seeing a “ruin of beauty” like the ruins of the city.
But the war situation was deteriorating daily, and it was difficult to obtain train tickets unless one had connections in the Army, and a pleasure trip was out of the question.
As the days passed, Honda opened the
Peacock King Sutra
that Tadeshina had given him. He had never had the opportunity of reading any Esoteric Buddhist sutras before.
The opening passages gave explanations and rules for use in small, almost illegible print.
To begin with, the Peacock Wisdom King occupied the sixth position from the southern end of the Susiddhi Court in the Womb Mandala. As he is attributed the power of begetting all Buddhas, he is also called the “Peacock King, Begetter of All Buddhas.”
When he consulted the Buddhist documents he had so far collected, Honda found that the deity had clearly originated in Hindu
shakti
worship. Since
shakti
rites were directed toward Kali, wife of Shiva, or toward Durga, the statue of the bloodthirsty goddess he had seen at the Kalighat in Calcutta was indeed the archetype of the Peacock Wisdom King.
When he discovered this, the sutra that had come into his possession by accident suddenly became of interest to him. Along with the use of
dharani
 
∗
and mantra in Esoteric Buddhist rites, the old deities of Hinduism had invaded the world of Buddhism by resorting to all sorts of transformations.
Originally the
Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King
was believed to have been an incantation spoken by the Buddha, and it was supposed to ward off snakes or cure poisoning from their bites.
According to the
Peacock Sutra:
When one Kissho, who had not been long ordained, was preparing kindling for the monks’ bath, a black snake came out from under a strange tree and bit his right toe. He fainted and fell to the ground, his eyes turned up, and he foamed at the mouth. Ananda went to where the Buddha was and said: “How can he be cured?” Where-upon the Buddha answered, saying: “If you hold the
Sutra of the Incantation of the Great Tathagata Peacock Wisdom King
, clasp the monk Kissho in your arms, and make the proper hand signs as you chant the mantra, the poison will be harmless. Neither sword nor cane will be able to inflict injury. It will fend off all calamities.”
Not only snake poison, but all fevers, all wounds, all pain and suffering were reputed abolished by this sutra. Simply chanting it was sufficient, and the mere thought of the Peacock Wisdom King did away with all fear, enemies, and calamities. Therefore, during the Heian period, only the Elder of the Toji and the Abbot of the Ninna Temple in the Imperial line were permitted to perform the Esoteric Buddhist rites of this sutra. During such ceremonies, fervent prayers were offered against all possible situations, from natural calamities to pestilence and childbirth.
The Peacock Wisdom King in the illustration was a gorgeous and sumptuous figure as though the personification of the peacock itself, so different from the bloody image of Kali, his prototype, with her protruding tongue and her necklace of severed heads.
His magic formula was said to imitate the cry of the peacock—
ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka
—and the mantra,
ma yu kitsu ra tei sha ka
, meant “Peacock fulfillment.” Even the special hand gesture, which was called the “sign of the Buddha Begetter, the Peacock Wisdom King,” and which was made by joining the two hands back to back, the two thumbs and the two little fingers pressed together, was both a description and imitation of the peacock’s majesty. The gesture represented the shape of the peacock, the little fingers being the tail and the thumbs the head, and the rest of the fingers the feathers. The way the middle six fingers moved as the incantation was chanted depicted a peacock dancing.
A blue Indian sky trailed behind the Wisdom King on his golden peacock mount. A tropical sky with its impressive clouds, its afternoon ennui, and its evening breezes, all necessary for spinning a gorgeous and colorful illusion.
The golden peacock was seen from the front, standing firmly on its two legs. It had opened its wings and was carrying the Wisdom King on its back, guarding him by spreading its magnificent fan tail which stood in place of a halo. The king was sitting in the lotus position on a white lotus flower placed on the back of the peacock. Of the king’s four arms, the first on the right held an open lotus; the second, the peach-shaped fruit of karma; the first hand on the left was held over the heart, its upturned palm supporting the fruit of good fortune; and the second, a peacock tail of thirty-five feathers.
The Wisdom King posed with compassionate countenance, and his body was extremely fair. The skin visible under silk gauze was enhanced by such magnificent jewelry as the crown on his head, the necklace around his neck, the earrings hanging from his ears, and the bracelets at his wrists. A cool weariness lingered on the heavy lids of the half-open eyes as though the deity had just awakened from an afternoon nap. Imparting boundless mercy and saving people without number might produce in one an emotion similar to the idle sleepiness that Honda had discovered in the bright, vast expanses of India.
In contrast to this absolutely white and serene image, the extended feathers of the peacock that acted as a halo were dazzlingly polychrome. Of the plumage of all birds, that of the peacock was closest in hue to the evening clouds. Like an Esoteric Buddhist mandala that rearranges a chaotic universe into an orderly one, the feathers presented the methodical organization of the riotous disorder of color seen in the evening clouds, their amorphousness, and the play of light upon them, in a geometric and patterned brocade. Gold, green, indigo, purple, brown—such dusky brilliance, however, indicated the end of the evening glow when the disk of the setting sun itself was no longer visible.
The tail feathers lacked only scarlet. If there were such a bird as a scarlet peacock, and if the Peacock Wisdom King had been seated upon it, tail fully open, he would be none other than the goddess Kali herself.
Honda believed that such a peacock must have appeared in the evening clouds in the sky above the ruins where he had encountered Tadeshina.
PART
2
23

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