But still, he thought, this final frustration was a gentle, soothing one. A small, lacy frill, the wave’s last farewell, escaped from disintegration at the last moment before merging into the glistening wet sand as the wave itself withdrew, and vanished into the sea.
Starting a good way out in the offing at a point where the whitecaps thinned out, the incoming waves went through four or five stages, each of which was visible at any given moment—a swelling, a cresting, a breaking, the dissolution of its force and an ebbing—a constantly recurring process.
The breaking wave let out an angry roar as it showed its smooth, dark green belly. The roar tailed off to a cry and the cry to a whisper. The charging line of huge white stallions yielded place to a line of smaller ones until the furious horses gradually disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but those last imprints of pounding hooves on the beach.
Two remnants, streaming in from left and right, collided roughly, spread like a fan, and sank into the bright mirror of the sand’s surface. At that moment, the reflection in the mirror came to life, catching the next white-crested wave just as it was about to come crashing down, a sharp vertical image that sparkled like a row of icicles.
Beyond the ebb, where other waves kept rolling in one after the other, none of them formed smooth white crests. They charged at full power again and again, aiming for their goal with determination. But when Honda looked out to sea in the distance he could not escape the feeling that the apparent strength of these waves that beat upon the shore was really no more than a diluted, weakened, final dispersion.
The farther out one looked, the darker the color of the water, until it finally became a deep blue-green. It was as if the innocuous ingredients of the offshore water became more and more condensed by the increasing pressure of the water as it got deeper, its green intensified over and over again to produce an eternal blue-green substance, pure and impenetrable as fine jade, that extended to the horizon. Though the sea might seem vast and deep, this substance was the very stuff of the ocean. Something that was crystallized into blue beyond the shallow, frivolous overlapping of the waves—that was the sea.
∗
His staring and his thoughts were at length enough to tire both his eyes and his mind, and he turned to look at Kiyoaki, who was assuredly sound asleep by now. The light skin on his handsome graceful body seemed all the whiter in contrast to the red loincloth that was all he had on. Just above the loincloth, on his pale stomach that rose and fell lightly with his breathing, there had lodged some sand, now dry, and some tiny fragments of seashell. Since he had raised his left arm to put it behind his head, his left side, that ordinarily was hidden, lay revealed to Honda, and behind the left nipple, which made him think of a tiny cherry-blossom bud, a cluster of three small black moles caught his eyes. There was something odd about them, he felt. Why should Kiyoaki’s flesh be marked like that? Though they had been friends for so long, he had never seen them before, and now they embarrassed him too much for him to keep looking at them, as though Kiyoaki had abruptly confessed to a secret better left untold. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the three black moles come into focus against his eyelids, as clear as the shapes of three distant birds flying across the evening sky, so brilliantly lit up by the setting sun. In his imagination he saw them draw closer, turn into birds with flapping wings, and then pass overhead.
When he opened his eyes again, a light sound was coming from Kiyoaki’s well-formed nose, and his teeth glistened wet and pure white through his slightly parted lips. Despite himself, Honda’s eyes fell on the moles on Kiyoaki’s side again. This time he thought that they looked like some grains of sand that had embedded themselves in his white skin.
The dry area of the beach ended right at their feet, and here and there the waves had splashed up beyond their usual limit and left contracted patterns of wet sand behind them, a sort of bas-relief that preserved the trace of the wave. Stones, shells, and withered leaves were embedded here too, for all the world like ancient fossils, and the smallest pebble among them was backed by its own rivulet of wet sand to prove how it had fought the receding wave.
And there were more than stones, shells, and withered leaves. Tangles of brown algae, fragments of wood, pieces of straw, and even orange peelings had been cast up and lay fixed in the sand. He thought it possible that some fine wet grains might also have worked their way up into the white skin that stretched taut over Kiyoaki’s side.
Since he found this idea very disturbing, he tried to think of some way to brush the grains away without waking Kiyoaki. But as he continued to watch, he realized that the black marks were moving in such a free and natural way with the rise and fall of his chest that they could not be foreign matter. They were part of him and so could be nothing other than the black moles he had first taken them to be.
He felt that they were a kind of betrayal of Kiyoaki’s physical elegance.
Perhaps Kiyoaki sensed the intensity of his gaze, because he suddenly opened his eyes, catching Honda’s stare directly. And then he raised his head and began to speak abruptly, as if to prevent his flustered friend from escaping him.
“Would you do something for me?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t really come here to play nursemaid to the princes. That’s a good excuse, but actually I want to give everyone the impression that I’m not in Tokyo. Do you see what I mean?”
“I had guessed that you were thinking something of the sort.”
“What I want to do is to leave you and the princes here sometimes and go back there without anyone knowing. I can’t go for as much as three days without her. So it will be up to you to smooth things over with the princes while I’m gone and also to have a good story ready just on the off chance that someone telephones from Tokyo. Tonight I’m going to go third-class on the last train and I’ll be back on the first one tomorrow morning. So will you do it for me?”
“I’ll do it,” said Honda emphatically.
Delighted at his friend’s firm agreement, Kiyoaki reached up to shake his hand before he spoke again.
“I suppose your father will be attending the state funeral for Prince Arisugawa.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It was good of the Prince to die when he did. As I heard just yesterday, the Toinnomiyas have no choice but to postpone the betrothal ceremony for a while.”
This remark reminded Honda that Kiyoaki’s love for Satoko was inextricably bound up with the interests of the nation as a whole, and the danger of it sent a shiver through him.
At this point their conversation was interrupted by the two princes who came running over in such enthusiastic haste that they almost fell over each other. Kridsada spoke first, struggling both to regain his breath and to express himself in his scanty Japanese.
“Do you know what Chao P. and I were talking about just now?” he asked. “We were discussing the transmigration of souls.”
33
WHEN THEY HEARD THIS, the two young Japanese spontaneously glanced at each other, an instinctive reaction whose significance was lost on Kridsada, who was an impetuous sort, not given to gauging his listeners’ expressions. Chao P., on the other hand, had learned a great deal from six months of dealing with the tensions brought on by living in a foreign environment. And now, although his skin was too dark to betray anything as obvious as a blush, he was clearly hesitant about continuing such a conversation. Nevertheless, he did so, using his fluent English, perhaps because he wished to appear sophisticated.
“You see, when Kri and I were children, we used to hear all sorts of stories from the Jataka Sutra. Our nurses would tell us how even the Lord Buddha underwent many rebirths while he was still a bodhisattva—as a golden swan, a quail, a monkey, a great stag, and so on. So we were speculating just now as to what we might have been in our previous existences. However, I’m afraid that we didn’t agree at all. He maintained that he had been a deer and I a monkey. And I insisted that it was just the other way around: he was the m
onkey and I the deer. But what do you say? We’ll leave it to you.”
Whichever way they answered, they ran the risk of offending somebody, so they just smiled, hoping that would serve as a reply. Then Kiyoaki, wanting to turn the conversation to other matters, said that he knew nothing about the Jataka Sutra and he wondered if the princes would be kind enough to tell him and Honda one of the stories from it.
“We’d be glad to,” said Chao P. “There’s the one about the golden swan, for example. It took place when the Lord Gautama was a bodhisattva, during his second reincarnation. As you know, a bodhisattva is someone who voluntarily travels the road of mortification and suffering before entering into the full enlightenment of buddhahood. And in his previous existence the Lord Gautama himself was a bodhisattva. The austerities they practice are the works of paramita, one’s good deeds to others, by means of which one crosses from this sphere to the sphere of total enlightenment. As a bodhisattva, Buddha is said to have lavished abundant grace on mankind. He was reincarnated in many guises and there are all sorts of stories about the good works he performed.
“For example, in very ancient times, he was born to a Brahmin family. He married a woman of another Brahmin family and after having three daughters by her, he died, forcing his bereaved wife and daughters to make their home with strangers.
“But after his death as a Brahmin, the bodhisattva took on another life in the womb of a golden swan. And he carried within him the knowledge that would in due course make him fully aware of his previous existence. And so the bodhisattva grew into an adult swan, covered in gold feathers and unrivaled in beauty. When he glided over the water, he glowed like the rising full moon. And when he flew through the forest, the very leaves that he brushed looked like a golden basket. And when he rested on a branch, it seemed as though the tree had borne some fabulous golden fruit.
“The swan came to realize that he had been a man in his previous existence and also that his wife and children were compelled to live with strangers, eking out their existence by doing whatever work they could find.
“‘Any one of my feathers,’ he said to himself one day, ‘could be hammered out into a sheet of gold and sold. And so, from time to time, I’ll give a feather to my poor companions whom I’ve left behind to lead such hard lives in the world of men.’
“And so the swan appeared at the window of the house where his wife and daughters of times gone by were living. And when he saw how wretched their condition was, he was overcome with pity.
“Meanwhile, his wife and daughters were amazed at the sight of the glittering figure of the swan on their window ledge.
“‘What a beautiful bird!’ they cried. ‘Where have you come from?’
“‘I was once your husband and father. After I died, I came to life again in the womb of a golden swan. And now I have come to change your poor lives into ones of happiness and plenty.’
“So saying, the swan dropped one of its feathers and flew off. Afterwards he came back at regular intervals and left a feather in the same way, and soon life had greatly improved for the mother and her three daughters.
“One day, however, the mother spoke to the girls.
“‘We can’t trust that swan,’ she said to them. ‘Even if he’s really your father, who knows if he might stop coming here one day? So next time he comes, let’s pluck every one of his feathers.’
“‘Mother, how cruel!’ said the girls, very much opposed to this.
“Nevertheless, the next time the swan appeared at the window, the greedy woman pounced on him, took him in both hands, and plucked out every single one of his feathers. But strangely enough, each gold feather turned as white as a heron feather as she pulled it out. Still undaunted, his former wife then took the helpless swan and thrust him into a large empty container and fed him while she waited doggedly for his golden feathers to grow again. But when the feathers did appear, they were ordinary white ones. And once they had grown, he flew off and his shape grew smaller and smaller in the sky until it became a white dot lost in the clouds, never to be seen again.
“And that was one of the stories that our nurses used to tell us from the Jataka Sutra.”
Honda and Kiyoaki were surprised to find that many of the fairy tales that had been told to them were very similar to the prince’s story. The conversation then turned into a discussion of reincarnation itself and whether or not it was credible as a doctrine.
Since Kiyoaki and Honda had never talked about anything like this before, they were naturally somewhat perplexed. Kiyoaki glanced at Honda with a questioning look in his eyes. Usually headstrong, he always began to look forlorn whenever abstract discussions took place. His look now urged Honda to do something, as if he were prodding him lightly with silver spurs.
“If there is such a thing as reincarnation,” Honda began, betraying a certain eagerness, “I’d be very much in favor of it if it were the kind in your story, with the man himself being aware of his previous existence. But if it’s a case of a man’s personality coming to an end and his self-awareness being lost so that there’s absolutely no trace of them in his next life, and if a completely new personality and a totally different self-awareness come into being, well, in that case I think that various reincarnations extending over a period of time are no more significantly linked to one another than the lives of all the individuals who happen to be alive at the same given moment. In other words, I feel that in such a case the concept of reincarnation would be practically meaningless. Something has to be passed on in transmigration, but I don’t see how we can take any number of separate and distinct existences, each with its own self-awareness, and bracket them together as one, claiming that a single consciousness unites them. Right now, each one of us has no memory at all of even a single previous existence. And so it’s obvious that it would be pointless to try to produce any proof of transmigration. There’s only one way that it could be proved: if we had a self-awareness so independent that it could stand aside from both this life and previous lives and view them objectively. But as it is, each man’s consciousness is limited to the past, the present, or the future of that single life. In the midst of the turmoil of history, each one of us builds his own little shelter of self-awareness and we can never leave it. Buddhism seems to hold out a middle way, but I have my doubts: is this middle way an organic concept which a human being is capable of grasping?
“But to go back just a bit. . . . Granted that all human concepts are mere illusion, in order to distinguish the various illusions arising from other reincarnations from the illusion of the present reincarnation of that same life, you must nevertheless be able to observe them all from a thoroughly independent viewpoint. It’s only when one stands aside in this way that the reality of reincarnation would be apparent. But when one is in the midst of a reincarnated existence oneself, the whole must remain an eternal riddle. Moreover, since this independent standpoint is probably what is called full enlightenment, only the man who has transcended reincarnation can grasp its reality. And wouldn’t it then be a case of finally understanding it at a time when it was no longer relevant?
“There is an abundance of death in our lives. We never lack reminders—funerals, cemeteries, withered commemorative bouquets, memories of the dead, deaths of friends, and then the anticipation of our own death. Who knows? Perhaps in their own way the dead make a great deal of life. Perhaps they’re always looking in our direction from their own land—at our towns, our schools, the smokestacks of our factories, at each of us who has passed one by one back from death into the land of the living.
“What I want to say is that perhaps reincarnation is nothing more than a concept that reverses the way that we, the living, ordinarily view death, a concept that expresses life as seen from the viewpoint of the dead. Do you see?”
“But how is it,” replied Chao P. quietly, “that certain thoughts and ideals are transmitted to the world after a man’s death?”
“That’s a different problem from reincarnation,” Hon
da said emphatically, with a trace of the impatience to which intelligent young men are susceptible showing in his voice.
“Why is it different?” asked Chao P. in the same gentle tone. “It seems that you are willing to admit that the same sense of self-awareness might inhabit various bodies successively over a period of time. Why then do you object so strongly to differing senses of self-awareness inhabiting the same body over a similar period of time?”
“The same body for a cat and a human being? According to what you said before, it was a matter of becoming a man, a swan, a quail, a deer, and so on.”
“Yes, according to the concept of reincarnation, the same body. Even though the flesh itself might differ. As long as the same illusion persists, there is no difficulty in calling it the same body. However, rather than do that, perhaps it would be better to call it the same vital current.
“I lost that emerald ring that was so rich in memories for me. It wasn’t a living thing, of course, and so it won’t be reborn. But still, the loss of something is significant, and I think that loss is the necessary source of a new manifestation. Some night I might see my emerald ring appear as a green star somewhere in the sky.”
The prince abruptly abandoned the problem, apparently overcome with sadness.
“Chao P., maybe the ring was actually a living thing that underwent a secret transformation,” Kridsada responded with earnest naïveté, “and then it ran off somewhere on legs of its own.”
“Then, round about now it might be reborn as someone as beautiful as Princess Chan,” Chao P. said, now completely absorbed in thinking about his loved one. “People keep telling me in their letters that she’s well, but why don’t I hear anything at all from her herself? Perhaps they’re all trying to protect me from something.”
Honda, meantime, had ignored the prince’s last words, as he was lost in thought about the strange paradox that Chao P. had brought up a few minutes earlier. One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static. Just as he had said, there was no difference between a single consciousness possessing various vital currents in succession, and a single vital current animating various consciousnesses in succession. For life and self-awareness would fuse into a whole. And if one were then to extrapolate this theory of the unity of life and self-awareness, the whole sea of life with its infinity of currents—the whole vast process of transmigration called Samsara in Sanskrit—would be possessed by a single consciousness.