The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (18 page)

The transparent structure of the world in which he lived had always been a deep mystery for me, but now with his death the mystery became still more fearful. That truck had crushed his transparent world, just as though it had run into a sheet of glass that is invisible because it is transparent. The fact that Tsurukawa had not died of illness fitted in perfectly with this image. It was suitable that he, whose life had been so incomparably pure a structure, should suffer the pure death of an accident. In that collision, which had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and his life had merged with his death. A swift chemical action. Without doubt it was only by such a drastic method that this strange, shadowless young man could join both his shadow and his death.

The world that Tsurukawa had inhabited was overflowing with bright feelings and good intentions. Yet I can definitely affirm that it was not thanks to his misunderstandings or to his sweet, gentle judgments that he lived there. That bright heart of his, which did not belong to this world, was backed by a strength and by a powerful resiliency, and it was these that had come to regulate his actions. There was something superbly accurate about the way in which he had been able to translate each of my dark feelings into bright feelings. Sometimes I had suspected that Tsurukawa had actually experienced my own feelings, just because bis brightness corresponded so accurately to my darkness, because the contrast between our feelings was so perfect. But no, it was not so! The brightness of his world was both pure and one-sided. It had brought into being its own detailed system, and it possessed a precision which might also have approached the precision of evil. If that young man's bright, transparent world had not constantly been supported by his untiring bodily power, it might instantly have collapsed. He had been running forward full tilt. And the truck had run over that running body of his.

Tsurukawa's cheerful looks and carefree body, which were the source of the favorable impression that he made on others, led me, now that they had been lost to this world, to embark on mysterious reflections concerning the visible side of human beings. I thought of how strange it was that something, by simply existing and reaching our eyes, could exercise so bright a force. I thought of how much must be learned from the body in order that the spirit might possess so simple a sense of its own existence. It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one's own heart possesses neither form nor feature. Yet the power to sec, which is capable of properly envisaging the absence of feature, must be exceedingly keen in resisting the charm of formal appearances. How can a person who is unable to see forms or features with selfless keenness so vividly see and apprehend formlessness and featurelessness? Thus the clear form of a person like Tsurukawa who emitted brightness by the mere fact of his existence, of a person who could be reached by both hands and eyes, who could in fact be called life for life's sake, might, now that this person was dead, serve as the clearest possible metaphor to describe unclear formlessness; and his sense of his own existence might become the most real, existent model of formless nihility. It seemed, indeed, as though he himself might now have become nothing more than such a metaphor. For example, the aptness and suitability of the juxtaposition between Tsurukawa and May flowers was precisely the aptness and suitability of those flowers which, as a result of his sudden May death, had been thrown onto his coffin.

My own life possessed no such firm symbolism as Tsurukawa's. For this reason I needed him. And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, of its power to serve, like Tsurukawa's, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly, it deprived me of the feelings of life's extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange, I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.

Once again my solitude had started. I did not see the girl from the lodging-house again and my relations with Kashiwagi became less friendly than before. Kashiwagi's way of life still exerted a powerful fascination on me, but I felt that I would be carrying out my final service to Tsurukawa if I made some slight effort to resist this fascination and tried, however unwillingly, to keep my distance. I wrote my mother clearly that she should not come to visit me again until I had attained my independence. I had already told her this verbally, but I did not feel that I could rest easy until I had committed it to writing in the strongest terms. Her answer was couched in awkward phrases. She told me about how hard she was working at Uncle's farm and followed this by a few sentences that smacked of elementary admonitions. Then she had appended the following sentence: “I don't want to die until I have seen you with my own eyes as a priest in the Golden Temple.” I hated this part of the letter and for some days after it made me feel uneasy.

Even during the summer I did not once visit the place where Mother was making her home. Due to the poor food at the temple, the summer heat was a great strain on me. In the middle of September there was a report of a possible typhoon. Someone had to stand night watch and I volunteered for the job.

I think that it was about this rime that a delicate change started in my feelings concerning the Golden Temple. It was not hatred, but a premonition that at some time or other a situation would inevitably arise in which the thing that was slowly germinating within me would be utterly incompatible with the Golden Temple. This feeling had been emerging ever since that incident at Kameyama Park, but I had been afraid to put a name to it. Yet I was happy to know that during this one night's watch the temple would be entrusted to me and I did not conceal my pleasure.

I was given the key to the Kukyocho. This third story of the temple was regarded as especially valuable. A few feet above the floor an impressive tablet inscribed by the Emperor Go-Komatsu was hanging against one of the beams.

The wireless was reporting that the typhoon would be with us momentarily, but there was still not a sign of it. It had been raining intermittently during the afternoon, but now it had cleared up and a bright full moon appeared in the night sky. The various inmates of the temple had strolled into the garden and were examining the sky. I heard someone say that this was the quiet before the storm.

The temple fell asleep. Now I was alone in the Golden Temple. When I wandered into a part of the building where the light of the moon could not enter, I was entranced at the thought that the heavy, luxurious darkness of the temple was enveloping me. Slowly, deeply, I became immersed in this very real feeling, until it grew into a sort of hallucination. Suddenly I realized that I had now actually entered that vision which had separated me from life that afternoon in Kameyama Park.

I was there alone, and the Golden Temple—the absolute,
positive Golden Temple—had enveloped me. Did I possess
the temple, or was I possessed by it? Or would it not be more correct to say that a strange balance had come into being
at that moment, a balance which would allow me to be the Golden Temple and the Golden Temple to be me?

After about half past
eleven,
the wind grew stronger. I
switched on my flashlight and climbed the stairs of the temple. When I reached the top, I put my key to the door of the Kukyocho.

I was leaning against the railings of the Kukyocho. The wind came from the southeast. Yet so far the sky had remained unaltered. The moon was reflected on the water in the interstices between the duckweed. The air was full of the chirping of insects and the croaking of frogs.

When the powerful wind first struck me square on the check, an almost sensual shiver ran through my body. The wind grew stronger and stronger until it become a great gale. Now it seemed to be a sort of omen that I was to be destroyed together with the Golden Temple. My heart was within that temple and at the same time it rested on that wind. The Golden Temple, which prescribed the very structure of my world, had no curtains to shake in the wind, but stood there calmly bathing in the moonlight. Yet there was no doubt that the great wind, that evil intention of mine, would eventually shake the temple, awaken it and, at the moment of destruction, rob it of its arrogance.

That is how it was. I was enwrapped in beauty, I was certainly within that beauty; yet I doubt whether I was so consummately wrapped up in the beauty as not to be supported by the will of that ferocious wind, which was endlessly gathering force. Just as Kashiwagi had commanded me: "Stutter! Stutter!" so now I tried to spur on the wind by shouting the words with which one encourages a galloping horse: "Stronger, stronger I" I shouted. “Go faster! Put more strength into it!”

The forest started to rustic. The branches of the trees round the pond brushed against each other. The night sky had lost its usual indigo color and taken on a turbid hue of purple gray. The chirping of the insects had not abated and gave a lively air to the surrounding scene. From the distance the mysterious, flute-like sound of the wind approached; it seemed to be losing some of its earlier fury.

I watched the multitudinous clouds scudding across the moon. One after another they rose up from behind the hills in the south like great battalions. There were thick clouds. There were thin clouds. There were huge expanded clouds. There were countless little tufts of cloud. They all appeared from the south, crossed the surface of the moon, passed over the Golden Temple, and rushed off to the north as though they were hurrying to some important business. I seemed to hear the screech of the golden phoenix above my head.

Suddenly the wind died down; then it regained its strength. The forest responded sensitively to these changes: it became quiet, then it rustled wildly. The reflection of the moon on the pond also changed, becoming dark and light by turns; sometimes it would draw together its scattered beams of light and sweep swiftly across the water. The great cumuli of clouds stretched out tortuously beyond the hills, and extended like a huge hand across the sky. It was terrifying to sec how they squirmed arid jostled against each other as they approached. Occasionally a small clear area would appear in the sky through the clouds, but almost instantly it would be covered again. Now and then when a very thin cloud passed by, I could glimpse the moon through it, surrounded by a faint aureole.

Thus the sky moved during the entire night. There was no indication that the wind was going to grow any stronger. I slept by the railing. Early the next morning-a clear, bright morning—the sexton came and informed me that the typhoon had left the area, having fortunately missed Kyoto.

CHAPTER SIX

I
T WAS
almost a year now that I had been in mourning for Tsurukawa. Once my solitude had started, I realized anew that it was easy for me to become accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in fact one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to lire left me. Each dead day had its charm.

The university library was my one and only pleasure resort. I did not read books on Zen, but such translations of novels and philosophical works as happened to be on hand. I hesitate to mention the names of those writers and philosophers. I am aware of the influence that they had on me and also of the fact that it was they who inspired me to the deed that I committed; yet I like to believe that the deed itself was my own original creation; in particular, I do not want this deed to be explained away as having been actuated by some established philosophy.

As I have already explained, the fact of not being understood by others had been my sole source of pride since my early youth, and I had not the slightest impulse to express myself in such a way that I might be understood. When I did try to clarify my thoughts and actions, I did so with no consideration whatsoever. I do not know whether or not this was because I wanted to understand myself. Such a motive is in accord with a person's real character and comes automatically to form a bridge between himself and others. The intoxication that I derived from the Golden Temple served to make part of my personality opaque; and, because this intoxication deprived me of all other forms of intoxication, I was obliged to resist it by making a deliberate effort to preserve the clear parts of my personality. I do not know about others, but in my own case, the clarity itself was I and, conversely, it was not a case of my being the owner.

It was now the time of the spring holidays in 1948, my second year in the university. The Superior went out one evening. As I had no friends, the only way in which I could profit from his absence was by taking a walk by myself. I left the temple and walked out through the Somon Gate. Outside, the gate was bordered by a ditch, next to which stood a notice board. I had been seeing this old board for a long time, but now I stopped before it and idly began reading the characters, which were bathed in the moonlight:

NOTICE

1.
No alterations may be carried out on these premises without special permission.

2.
Nothing may be done that can in any way affect the preservation of these premises.

The attention of the public is directed to these regulations.

Any breach of these regulations will be puhished according to the law.

The notice clearly referred to the Golden Temple. Yet it was impossible to gather any definite allusion from the abstract words themselves. I could not help feeling that a notice board like this existed in an utterly different world from that inhabited by the immutable, indestructible temple. The notice itself anticipated some inscrutable or impossible deed. The man who had drafted these regulations and who had thus given a summary description of this sort of deed must have been someone who had hopelessly lost his bearings. For this was a deed that only a madman could plan; and how could one possibly scare a madman in advance by threatening to puhish his deed? What was probably needed was a special form of writing that could be understood only by madmen.

I was engaged in such empty thoughts when I noticed a form approaching along the wide road in front of the gate. At this hour there was not a trace of the crowds of sight-seers who came here during the day; only the moonlit pine trees and the glare of the headlights, as the cars passed to and fro along the highway beyond where I stood, filled the night.

All of a sudden I recognized the form as Kashiwagi's. I could tell it was he by the way he walked. Then and there I decided to end the estrangement between us that I had chosen during the entire past year, and thought only of my gratitude towards him for having cured me in the past. For he had indeed cured me at the time. From the first day that I had met him he had cured my crippled thoughts by means of his ungainly clubfeet, by his unreserved and wounding words, by his complete confession. I should by all rights have perceived what joy there lay for me in being able for the first time to hold a conversation with someone on an equal footing. I should have relished that joy (which was akin to committing an act of immorality) of immersing myself into the very depths of the firm knowledge that I was both a priest and a stutterer. Yet all this had been expunged because of my relations with Tsurukawa.

I greeted Kashiwagi with a smile. He wore his student uniform and carried a long, narrow bundle.

"Are you going somewhere?” he said.

"No."

"It's good that I met you,
”
he said. He sat down on some stone steps and unwrapped his bundle.

“You see," he said, showing me two dark, glossy tubes which formed a
shakuhachi
flute, "an uncle of mine in my home town died recently and left me this flute as a keepsake. But I still have the one he gave me long ago when he was teaching me how to play. This one seems to be a rather finer instrument, but I prefer the one that I'm used to and there's no point in my having two of these things. So I've brought this one along to give you.”

For someone like me who never received a present from anyone, it was a great joy to be given something, whatever it might be. I picked up the flute and examined it. There were four holes in front and one in back.

“I belong to the Kinko school of flute-playing," continued Kashiwagi. "Since there was a good moon tonight for a change, I thought I'd come along to the Golden Temple and play it here. At the same time I thought I might give you a lesson.”

"You've chosen a good time,
”
I said. "The Superior has gone out, you see. Besides, the lazy old caretaker hasn't finished his sweeping yet. They don't close the temple gates until the sweeping has been done.”

His appearance at the gate had been abrupt, and so, too, had been his suggestion that he wanted to play the flute in the temple because the moon was so beautiful that night. It all bespoke the Kashiwagi whom I knew. Besides, in my monotonous life the mere fact of being surprised was a pleasure. With my new flute in my hand, I led Kashiwagi to the Golden Temple.

I have no clear recollection about what we discussed that night. I don't believe that we talked about anything very substantial. Kashiwagi gave no sign of wanting to indulge in his usual eccentric philosophy and barbed paradoxes. Perhaps he had come on purpose to reveal a side of himself whose existence I had so far never suspected. And that night, indeed, this young man with his stinging tongue, who usually seemed interested in beauty only in so far as he could defile it, showed me a truly delicate aspect of his nature. He had a far, far more accurate theory about beauty than I did. He did not tell it to me in words, but with his gestures and his eyes, with the music that he played on his flute, and with that forehead of his which emerged in the moonlight.

We leaned against the railing of the second story of the Golden Temple, the Choondo. The corridor under the gently curving eaves was supported from below by eight brackets in the Tenjiku style and seemed to rise up from the surface of the pond, where the moon was lodged. First Kashiwagi played a short piece called the “Palace Carriage" I was amazed at his skill. I tried to copy him and put my lips to the mouthpiece, but I could produce no sound. He then carefully taught me how to hold the flute from above with my left hand and how to put my fingers to the proper openings; he also showed me the tricks of how to open one's mouth to hold the mouthpiece and of how to blow air in against the wide metal roil. Yet, though I tried again and again, no sound emerged. My cheeks and eyes were tense, and, although there was no wind, I had the feeling that the moon on the pond was shattering into a thousand fragments.

After a while I was exhausted, and for a moment I suspected that Kashiwagi might be imposing this penance on me purposely in order to make fun of my stuttering. The effort, however, of trying to force out a sound that would not come seemed to purify that usual mental energy of mine with which I tried my very best to avoid stuttering by pushing the first words smoothly out of my mouth. I felt as if those sounds that still would not emerge already actually existed somewhere in this quiet, moon-bathed world. I was quite content if only I could reach and awaken those sounds after various lengthy efforts.

How could I reach that sound-that mysterious sound like the one which Kashiwagi was
Dlowing
out of his flute? It was skill alone that made it possiole. Beauty was skill. A thought came to me and filled me with courage: just as Kashiwagi could attain such beautiful clear sounds despite his clubfeet, so I could attain beauty by means of skill. But I also recognized something else: Kashiwagi's playing of the "Palace Carriage" sounded so beautiful not only because of the lovely moonlit background, but because of his hideous clubfeet.

Later when I came to know Kashiwagi more intimately, I understood that he disliked lasting beauty. His likings were limited to things such as music, which vahished instantly, or flower arrangements, which faded in a matter of days; he loathed arehitecture and literature. Clearly he would never think of visiting the Golden Temple except on a moonlit night like this.

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period or time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such shortlived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music; yet, although the Golden Temple shared the same type of beauty, nothing could have been farther from the world and more scornful of it than the beauty of this building. As soon as Kashiwagi had finished playing the "Palace Carriage," music-that imaginary life-expired, and nothing was left there but his ugly body with its gloomy thoughts, all unscathed and unaltered.

It was certainly not consolation that Kashiwagi sought in beauty. I understood that much without the slightest discussion. What he loved was that, for a short while after his breath had brought beauty into existence in the air, his own clubfeet and gloomy thinking remained there, more clearly and more vividly than before. The uselessness of beauty, the fact that the beauty which had passed through his body left no mark there whatsoever, that it changed absolutely nothing—it was this that Kashiwagi loved. If beauty could be something like this for me too, how light would my life become!

I kept on trying time after time according to Kashiwagi's instructions. My face became red and my breath came in gasps. Then, just as if I had suddenly become a bird, and as if a bird's cry had escaped my throat, the flute emitted a single daring note.

"There you are!" shouted Kashiwagi with a laugh. It was certainly not a beautiful note, but the same sound emerged time after time. Then I fancied that this mysterious sound, which did not seem to emanate from me, was the voice of that golden copper phoenix above our heads.

Thereafter I used the instruction manual that Kashiwagi had given me and worked hard every evening to improve my playing. In time I was able to play tunes like the "Rising Sun Dyed Red on a White Background,
”
and my former feelings of friendship for Kashiwagi revived.

In May it occurred to me that I ought to give Kashiwagi something to show him my appreciation for the flute. But I had no money to buy him a present. I spoke to Kashiwagi frankly about my predicament. He told me that he didn't want anything that cost money. Then, screwing up his mouth in a strange way, he said: "Well, since you've gone out of your way to mention this matter, there actually is something that I'd like. I've been wanting to do some flower arrangement these days, but flowers are far too expensive for me. Now I believe this is just the time when the iris and sweet flag are in bloom at the Golden Temple. Do you think you could possibly bring me a few irises-one or two in bud, a couple that are just beginning to blossom, and a couple in full bloom? You could also let me have a few cattails. Tonight will be all right. What about bringing them to my lodging-house this evening?"

It was only after I had lightly agreed to his suggestion that I realized that he was actually putting me up to theft. In order for me not to lose face it was, in fact, essential that I become a flower thief.