Sitting silent in this quiet world
I sense a faint light deep within me.
The human world is thronged with busyness
Yet how could one forget such peace?
By chance I gain a day’s serenity
and learn how hectic is the life of man.
Where might I place this deep expansive calm?
It belongs only to the realms of eternal sky.
I read it through from the beginning. It is not without merit, but it seems rather too dry and dul to real y convey the exalted state I’ve just been in.
While I’m at it, I decide to try another poem. Gripping my pencil, my eyes stray unconsciously toward the doorway—and at this moment the door is slid open, and I catch a sudden glimpse of a beautiful shape beyond, slipping quickly across the three feet or so of open space. Good heavens!
By the time my eyes have ful y turned to take this in, the door is open and the figure is disappearing. The movement is over almost before my eyes can catch it, and the shape passes and disappears in an instant. My gaze is now riveted on the doorway, al thoughts of poetry abandoned.
Within a minute the figure re-emerges across the way. Silent and serene, the woman walks along the second-floor balcony opposite me, clad magnificently in a long-sleeved formal kimono. The pencil fal s from my hand. I stare across the twelve yards or so of courtyard garden, breath held, while the lone figure appears and disappears, parading graceful y to and fro at the balcony railing as the evening spring sky, already freighted with cloud, grows gradual y heavier with the promise of rain.
The woman has said not a word, nor sent so much as a glance in my direction. She walks so softly that even the sound of her own silk hem trailing behind her would not reach her ears. She is too distant for me to distinguish the details of the dyed colors in the lower half of the kimono; al I can make out is the transition, where the kimono’s basic color merges into the design below, a delicate shading reminiscent of the boundary between night and day, that boundary that she too treads.
I know not how many times this figure in her trailing kimono walks up and down the long balcony corridor nor how long she has performed this strange perambulation in her astonishing clothes. Nor have I the least idea what her intention might be. It’s a weird feeling, to watch her endlessly repeating her ritual, coming and going, appearing and disappearing in the frame of my doorway, so decorously and so silently, for reasons beyond my ken. If her action is some lament for the passing spring, why should it take such an insouciant form? And why should this nonchalant pose choose to clad itself in such finery?
Is it perhaps gold brocade that makes the obi at her waist so startle the eye as this spectral shape, this hue of the dying spring, for an instant entrancingly brightens the doorway’s dark depths? Moment by moment the gaudy brocade comes and goes, swal owed now into the blue depths of evening, into unpeopled remoteness, now returning hither through those far reaches of space. The sight is redolent of the twinkling stars of spring that sink at dawn into depths of violet sky.
At last the heavens are on the verge of opening to swal ow this bright shape into the realm of darkness. There is something supernatural about the scene, the figure dressed in clothing appropriate to a vibrant life surrounded by golden screens and silver candelabras, “each instant of spring’s evening worth a wealth of gold,†wil ingly fading without fear or resistance from the visible world. As I gaze at her through the swiftly gathering darkness, she seems to linger serenely in one place, then tread with the one measured step, without haste, without bewilderment. If she indeed has no knowledge of the impending peril of the darkness, she is the height of innocence.
If she knows but does not feel it as a danger, she is uncanny. Loitering thus, so serene and poised, between the realms of being and nonbeing, her original dwel ing must surely be that blackness, and this temporary phantom is now in the act of returning into the obscure darkness of its true home.
The real nature of this figure is suggested by her kimono, whose bewildering pattern inexorably melts and disappears into inky black.
Another image: when a beautiful woman fal s into lovely slumber and in the midst of this sleep draws her last breath in this world, we who watch by her pil ow are stricken with grief. But if to the given pains of existence a thousand pains are added in dying, the woman herself, weary of pointless living, would feel with those who watch over her that relief from her suffering would be nothing but merciful. But how does a young child who dies easily in his sleep deserve his fate? A child drawn down to the realms of the dead in sleep has lived its precious life in a blind moment, with no preparation for death. If someone must be kil ed, let him first feel the absolute karmic inevitability of the fact, resign himself, and die with a prayer on his lips. If before your eyes is only the vivid fact of death, without the conditions that natural y lead to death, then you long not to chant the last rites over the dying but to cry out and summon back those feet that have already stepped halfway into the other world. Perhaps she who is slipping unaware from her mortal into her immortal sleep suffers by being cal ed back like this, being dragged unwil ingly by the chains of existence that she was in the act of severing. Be merciful, she may think, and do not cal me, but let me quietly sleep. And yet we long to cal .
When the woman appears once more beyond the doorway, I have just such an urge, to cal her back and save her from the depths of unreality—but when her dreamlike form glides across the three-foot-wide space before my eyes, I find myself speechless. The next time, I decide, but then once more she slips past. Why can’t I speak? I wonder, and as I wonder she passes again. She passes without the least show of awareness that someone might be watching, or might be gripped by anxiety for her. She passes in seeming indifference to the likes of me, neither burdened by my fears nor pitying me for them. As I watch, summoning myself again and again to cal , the clouds at last began to spil the moisture they have so long withheld, and soft threads of rain close their melancholy curtain about that distant form.
CHAPTER 7
It’s cold. Towel in hand, I set off down to the bathhouse.
After disrobing in the little changing room, I descend the four steps that bring me into the large bathroom. There seems to be no dearth of local stone. The bathroom floor is paved with granite; in the middle a bathtub the size of a substantial tofu sel er’s vat has been sunk about four feet into the ground, and unlike a normal tub, it too is lined with stone. The place has a name as a hot spring, so presumably the water contains a variety of mineral elements, but it is perfectly clear and thus a pleasure to step into. Lying here in the tub, I even take an occasional experimental sip, but it has no particular taste or odor. The water is reputed to have medicinal qualities, but as I haven’t bothered to ask, I have no idea what ailments it cures. I suffer from no particular il ness, so it hasn’t occurred to me to wonder what the water’s practical value might be. The only thing that comes into my head as I lower myself into the tub are the lines from Po Chu-i’s poem, “Softly the warm spring waters / bathed the white beauty’s skin.†Whenever I hear the words “hot spring,†I taste again the deep pleasure that these lines evoke, and indeed it seems to me that no hot spring is of the least value unless it can produce in me precisely the sensation summed up in these lines. My sole requirement for a hot spring, you might say, is that it fulfil this ideal.