The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read Free Page A

warn Mizoguchi against the crippled student's friendship. All the last letters written from Tokyo before his suicide had been written to Kashiwagi, Mizoguchi, the old companion, received none. Is this another expression of life's spiral riddle; a further subtle Eastern emphasis on the error of seeing "opposites"? Are the only definable qualities of human existence illusion and evanescence? Mizoguchi muses, at one point: "It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all feature, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one's heart possesses neither face nor feature."
    The character of the Superior in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is another example of the subtle mystifications that are presented to the Western reader in the pages of Mishima, novel. The Superior is a figure of utmost significance to the young acolyte, Mizoguchi, yet he remains throughout as baffling (deliberately baffling?) to the reader as he is to the novel's hero. This particular Zen Master is hardly, by anyone's standards, a disciplined “holy” man, with his fleshly pursuits, his open enjoyment of the good things of life-fine food, cigarettes, saké-his secret adventures with geishas. Yet there is a scene in which the young acolyte discovers this head priest crouched alone in an isolated room within the temple grounds, bent over ‘‘to the utmost possiole extent... with his head between his knees and his face covered with his long sleeves." An altogether new and different note is lightly struck for a moment; a note of deepened mystery. Here is the Superior in a pose of supplication and abasement quite unlike his usual calm, poised, and powerful self. The plump, self-indulgent, omhiscient Master of the temple has been abruptly transformed into a broken figure of suffering humility, kneeling alone in The Tower of the North Star. But the note of mystery is only briefly sounded; indeed it hardly registers, drowned out by the onrolling development of Mizoguchi's pathology. For to Mizoeucni, the Master's crouching figure was only "utterly devoid of pride and dignity. There was something ignoble about it, like the figure of a sleeping animal."
    As for the deliberate introduction into the story of the use of Zen koans, those aphoristic problems or "riddles" by which Zen aspirants seek to pierce through into the reality of "self-enlightenment—they too are presented in various interpretations as though allowing the reader to reach his own conclusions. One of the most absorbing and mystifying scenes takes place in the Zen temple the day the war was officially declared lost. To the amazement of all the young acolytes, the Superior appeared at evening services in his most splendid robes, “the scarlet priest's robe which he had kept stored away for years." There was about him a "ruddy air of good health,” even a "look of overflowing delight.” Without so much as speaking about the war or its tragic conclusion, the Superior, after the sutra recitation, gives a lecture on a classic Zen catachetic problem: Nansen Kills a Cat, or as it is sometimes called: Shoshu Wears a Pair of Sandals on his Head. The Superior offers an interpretation of this classic koan which appears to his young audience in no way to relate to the shameful disgrace of the loss of the war. The boys walk away deeply puzzled. "We felt as though we had been bewitched by a fox. We had not the faintest idea why this particular Zen problem should have been chosen on the day of our country's defeat.” Tsurukawa's explanation is: “I think that the real point of tonight's lecture was that on the day of our defeat he [the Superior j should not have said a word about it and should have talked about killing a cat."
    This same koan reappears later in the book during Kashi-wagi's flower-arranging scene, where it is given a twisted interpretation characteristic of the clubfooted student's twisted mind. At this same time an even more fateful