In all their friendship, Honda had never been more aware than he was now of the utter impossibility of seeing into Kiyoaki’s thoughts. He lay in front of him, but his spirit was off racing somewhere else. Sometimes he would deliriously call Satoko’s name, and his cheeks would flood with color. His face lost its haggard look and instead seemed more than normally healthy. His skin glowed as if it were fine ivory with a fire inside it. But Honda knew that there was no way for him to reach that essence. Here before him, he thought, was passion in its truest sense. The kind of thing that would never take possession of him. But more than that, he thought, wasn’t it true that no passion whatever would succeed in sweeping him away? For he realized that his nature seemed to be lacking in the quality that made this possible. It would never assent to such an invasion. His affection for his friend was deep, he was willing enough to weep when required—but as for feelings, he was lacking in something there. Why did he instinctively channel all his energies into the maintaining of a suitable inner and outer decorum? Why, unlike Kiyoaki, had he been somehow unable to open his soul to the four great inchoate elements of fire, wind, water, and earth?
His eyes returned to the notebook in front of him and his own neat, precise handwriting.
Aristotle’s formal logic dominated European thought until almost the end of the Middle Ages. This is divided into two periods, the first of which is called “Old Logic.” The works expounded were the “Theses” and the “Categories” from the Organon. The second is called “New Logic.” It may be said that this period received its initial impetus from the complete Latin translation of the Organon which was finished by the middle of the twelfth century . . .
He could not help thinking that these words, like inscriptions cut into stone exposed to the weather, would fall from his mind, flake by flake.
54
HONDA HAD HEARD that the convent day began early, so he shook himself out of a brief doze just as dawn was breaking. After a hasty breakfast, he told the maid to hire a rickshaw and got ready to leave.
Kiyoaki looked up at him from his bed, tears in his eyes. All he could manage was a look of entreaty as he lay with his head on the pillow, but it pierced Honda like a knife. Up until that moment, his intention had been to make a perfunctory visit to Gesshu and then get his gravely ill friend back to Tokyo as quickly as he could. But once he had seen the look in Kiyoaki’s eyes, he knew that whatever the cost, he had to make every effort to effect a meeting between his friend and Satoko.
Fortunately it was a warm springlike morning, perhaps a good omen. As his rickshaw approached the convent entrance, he noticed that a man who was sweeping there took one look at him from a distance, abruptly put down his broom and rushed inside. His school uniform, which was the same as Kiyoaki’s, must have put the man on guard, he thought, making him hurry in to sound the warning. The nun who appeared at the door had an expression of forbidding determination even before he could say who he was.
“Excuse me, Sister. My name is Honda. I am sorry to intrude, but I have come all the way from Tokyo because of this matter of Kiyoaki Matsugae. I would be extremely grateful if the Reverend Abbess would consent to see me.”
“Please wait for a few moments,” the nun replied.
He stood there for a long time on the front step, and then while he was involved in turning over in his mind the various counter-arguments to be used in the event of a refusal, the same nun surprised him by coming back and conducting him to a parlor inside. Hope, however faint, began to stir in him.
In the parlor he was again left to himself for a long time. The song of warblers came from the inner garden, though the sliding door was fully shut and he had no view. In the shadows he could just make out the intricate paper crest design of cloud-and-chrysanthemum on each door catch. The flower arrangement in the tokonoma alcove combined rape blossoms and peach buds. The bright yellow flowers seemed to pulse with the vigor of the spring countryside, and the dull bark and pale green leaves of the peach branch brought out the beauty of its swelling buds. The sliding doors were plain white, but he noticed a folding screen by the wall that seemed to be something precious, and he walked over to it.
He inspected it in detail. It was a screen depicting scenes of each of the twelve months of the year, done predominantly in the style of the Kano school, but enriched with the vivid colors that were traditionally Yamato.
The flow of the seasons began with spring at the right-hand edge of the screen. Courtiers enjoyed themselves in a garden beneath pines and white plum trees. A mass of golden cloud hid all but a fraction of a pavilion surrounded by a cypress hedge. A little to the left, young colts of various colors frolicked about. The pond in the garden at some point became a paddy and here young girls were at work planting rice shoots. A small waterfall burst from the golden cloud and tumbled down in two stages into another pond. The green shade of the grass at the water’s edge bespoke the arrival of summer. Courtiers were hanging white paper pendants for the Midsummer Purification on the trees and bushes round the pond, with minor officials and crimson-robed servants in attendance. Deer were grazing contentedly in the garden of a shrine, and a white horse was being led out through its red torii gate. Imperial guards, bows slung over their shoulders, were busy making preparations for a festival procession. And the red maple leaves already reflected in the pond foretold the chill of winter that would soon take its toll. Then a bit farther on, still more courtiers were setting out on a day’s falconry in gold-tinted snow. The sky too was golden, shining through the snowy branches of a bamboo grove. A white dog was in baying pursuit of a partridge with a touch of red at its neck; it streaked through the dry reeds like an arrow and escaped up into the winter sky. The hawks at the courtiers’ wrists kept their arrogant eyes riveted on the fleeing partridge.
He returned to his place after a leisurely examination of the Tsukinami screen, but there was still no sign of the Abbess.
The nun returned, knelt down, and served him with tea and cake. She told him that the Abbess would be with him in just a few minutes, and asked him to make himself comfortable while he waited.
A small box decorated with a picture relief lay on the table. It must have been a product of the convent, and furthermore, there was something unskilled about its workmanship that made him wonder if Satoko’s inexperienced hand had been at work on it. The paper glued to the sides and the padded picture mounted on the lid were both highly colored after the taste of the old Imperial Court, lavish and oppressively gaudy. In the picture, a boy was chasing a butterfly. As he raced after the red-and-purple-winged insect, his face, his satiny white skin and his plump nakedness all suggested the sensuous grace of a court doll. After his ride through the dark, early spring fields and up the mountain through the still desolate woods, he felt that here in this shadowy parlor at Gesshu he had finally experienced the heavy, syrupy sweetness that was the essence of womanhood.
He heard the rustle of clothing, and then Her Reverence herself came in through the doorway, leaning on the arm of the senior nun. He stood up straight, but was unable to control the beating of his heart.
The Abbess must certainly have been advanced in years, but the small features in the clear-skinned face above the austere purple robe seemed to be carved out of fine yellow boxwood and showed no trace of age. They had a warm expression as she now sat down opposite him. The old nun took a seat to one side.
“So, they tell me that you have come all the way from Tokyo?”
“Yes, Your Reverence.” He had difficulty in getting his words out in front of her.
“This gentleman says that he is a school friend of Mr. Matsugae,” said the old nun by way of contribution.
“Ah yes!” said the Abbess. “To tell the truth, we have been feeling so sorry for the Marquis’s son. However . . .”
“Matsugae has a terrible fever. He’s in bed back at the inn. I received a telegram from him and I came down here as quickly as I could. Today I’ve come here in his place to make the request he asked me
to make.” At last Honda found himself able to talk freely.
This, he thought, was most probably the way a young lawyer felt when he stood before the court. Regardless of the mood of the judges, he must plunge ahead, wholly intent on his plea and concerned only with the vindication of his client.
He told the Abbess of his friendship with Kiyoaki, he described his illness, and made it clear to her that Kiyoaki was risking his life for the sake of even the briefest of meetings with Satoko. He did not hesitate to say that if all this came to a tragic end, Gesshu itself would not be free of cause for remorse. He grew hotter and hotter as his fervent words poured out, and although the room was rather cold, he felt his ears and forehead burning.
As might be expected, his speech seemed to move the Abbess and the senior nun but they both remained silent.
“And then I do wish you would be kind enough to try to understand my own position. I lent my friend money because he told me he needed it. And that’s what he used to come down here. Now he’s fallen ill. I feel responsible to his parents for all this. And furthermore, as you must be thinking yourselves, the proper thing for me to do is obviously to get him back to Tokyo as soon as possible. I also realize that it’s the only sensible solution. But I haven’t done it. Instead, without even daring to contemplate how upset his parents are going to be with me, I’ve come to you now like this to beg you to grant Matsugae’s request. I’m doing it because after seeing the look of desperate hope in his eyes, I do not feel that I have any other choice. If Your Reverence could only see that look, I’m sure that you too would be moved. As for me, I can’t help but believe that it’s far more important now to grant him what he wants than to worry about his illness. It’s a frightening thing to say, but I somehow feel that he’s not going to recover. So I am really giving you his dying request. Would letting him see Satoko for just a moment or two be quite outside the scope of the Lord Buddha’s compassion? Won’t you please permit it?”
Her Reverence still did not answer. Although he was completely wrought up, he stopped there, afraid that if he said anything further his words would only make it less likely that the Abbess would change her mind. The chilly room was hushed. The light that filtered through the pure white paper of the latticework doors made Honda think of a thin mist.
At that moment he thought he heard something. It was not by any means so close as to be in the next room, but close enough, coming perhaps from a corner of the hallway or from the next room but one. It sounded like a muffled laugh, as faint as the opening of a plum blossom. But then after a moment’s reflection, he was sure that unless his ears had deceived him, the sound that had carried to him through the chill convent atmosphere on this spring morning was not a muffled laugh, as he had thought, but a young woman’s stifled sob. It did not have the weight of a woman fighting down her tears. What he had heard, as dark and faint as the sound of a cut bowstring, was the trailing echo of a hidden sob. But then he began to wonder if it was no more than a momentary quirk of his imagination.
“Ah,” said the Abbess, breaking her silence at last, “no doubt you think me unduly severe. You may feel that I am the one who is using every means to keep these two apart. However, surely it may well be that some superhuman agency is at work here. It began when Satoko herself made a vow before the Lord Buddha. She swore never to meet this man again in this world. I therefore think that the Lord Buddha in his wisdom is making sure that she does not. But for the young master, what a tragedy it is.”
“Despite everything then, Your Reverence will not give permission?”
“No.”
Her voice had an inexpressible dignity, and he felt quite powerless to answer her. The simple no seemed powerful enough to tear apart the very sky like fragile silk.
After that, seeing his deep distress, the Abbess’s beautiful voice began to direct an exalted monologue at him. Although he was by no means eager to leave and have to face Kiyoaki’s dejection, his distress prevented him from paying more than half-hearted attention to what she was saying.
The Abbess referred to the net of Indra. Indra was an Indian God, and once he cast his net, every man, every living thing without exception was inextricably caught in its meshes. And so it was that all creatures in existence were inescapably bound by it.
Indra’s net symbolized the Chain of Causation or, in Sanskrit, pratitya-samutpada. Yuishiki (Vijñaptimãtrata or Consciousness), the fundamental doctrine of the Hosso Sect, to which Gesshu belonged, was celebrated in The Thirty Verses of Yuishiki, the canonical text attributed to Vasubandhu, whom the sect regarded as its founder. According to the Verses, Alaya is the origin of the Chain of Causation. This was a Sanskrit word that denoted a storehouse. For within the Alaya were contained the karmic “seeds” that held the consequential effects of all deeds, both good and evil.
Deeper within man than the first six forms of consciousness—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, with which sentient beings are endowed—there was a seventh called Mana or self-awareness. But Alaya, the ultimate form of consciousness lay deeper yet.
Just as The Thirty Verses expressed it, “Like unto a violent torrent, ever flowing, ever changing,” this eighth form of awareness, like a raging river, changed incessantly, never ceasing to flow onward. In constant flux, Alaya is the source of all sentient beings and the sum of all effects on them.
Asanga, the co-founder along with Vasubandhu of the Yuishiki school, in a doctrinal work called The Providence of the Greater Vehicle, evolved, on the basis of the eternally mutative nature of Alaya, a unique theory of the Chain of Causation in terms of time. It dealt with the interaction of the Alaya consciousness and the Law of Defilement that gave rise to what was termed “the ever-recurring cycle of annihilation and renewal of causality.” According to the doctrine of Yuishiki, “awareness only,” each of the various dharmas, which were actually nothing other than consciousness, far from enjoying permanence, existed purely for the moment. And once the instant was past, they were annihilated. At the present moment, the Alaya consciousness and the Law of Defilement exist simultaneously, and their interaction gives rise to the causality of the present moment. Once this moment is past, both Alaya and the Law of Defilement are annihilated, but with the next moment, both are reborn, and both once again interact to give rise to a new causality. Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.
∗
As the minutes passed, Honda gradually found himself being drawn into the Abbess’s profound doctrinal exposition. But his present circumstances prevented any stirring of his instinctive spirit of rational inquiry. The sudden burst of complex Buddhist terminology put him off, and then there were many difficult points over which he had doubts. Karma, he thought, should operate eternally, a process without beginning, that by its nature contained within itself elements of time. It seemed contradictory to him that, on the contrary, time was to be understood as arising from the dissolution and regeneration of each present moment’s causality.
His various misgivings thus prevented him from giving wholeheartedly respectful attention to Her Reverence’s learned discourse. The old nun also irritated him with her interjections. At appropriate intervals, she would chime in with “How very true!” . . . “Indeed, just so!” . . . “How could it be otherwise?” and the like. So he contented himself by memorizing the titles of The Thirty Verses and The Providence of the Greater Vehicle and thought that he could look into them when he had the leisure and then come back here to ask questions. Given his present mood, then, he did not realize from what perspective and with what clarity the Abbess’s words were illuminating Kiyoaki’s fate as well as his own, though on the face of it they might seem remote and irrelevant. It was just the same way that the moon, at its zenith, subtly lights up the dark waters of a lake.
He murmured a polite farewell and took his leave of Gesshu as quic
kly as he could.
55
DURING THE TRAIN RIDE back to Tokyo, Kiyoaki’s all too evident pain was a constant source of distress to Honda. He put aside his books entirely, his sole concern now to get his friend home as soon as possible. As he looked down at Kiyoaki lying gravely ill on his berth, being carried back to Tokyo without having achieved the meeting he had so desired, he felt a gnawing regret. He was now wondering if it had really been the act of a friend to give him that money.
Kiyoaki had fallen into a doze. Honda, on the other hand, was more alert than ever, despite having gone without sleep for so long. He allowed a multitude of thoughts to come and go unchecked. Among these, the memory of the Abbess’s sermons on two occasions came to him, each with an entirely different effect. In the autumn of the previous year, he had heard his first sermon from her, the parable of drinking the water from the skull. He had taken that principle and made a parable of his own from it, one dealing with human love. And he had concluded by thinking that it would unquestionably be wonderful if a man could really make the substance of the world truly conform to that of his innermost heart. Later, in the course of his legal studies, he had given considerable thought to the doctrine of reincarnation as expressed in the Laws of Manu. And this morning, he had heard the Abbess speak again. He now felt as though the only key to the riddle that had been vexing him had dangled momentarily on a cord before his eyes, swinging back and forth with so many confusing jumps and twists that the riddle itself seemed to have become all the more complex.
The train was due at Shimbashi Station at six in the morning. The night was already well advanced. The heavy breathing of the passengers mingled with the rumble of the wheels. He would stay awake until dawn, watching Kiyoaki in the lower berth directly opposite him. He had left the curtains open so that he would know at once if there was any change at all in Kiyoaki’s condition, and now he stared out of the window at the fields clothed in darkness.