The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read Free Page B

koan is also quoted by the clubfooted Kasniwagi to the inarticulate, stuttering Mizoguchi. This is a quotation from the famed master Rinzai (here given as Ivan Morris translates it from Mishima):"When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When ye meet the disciple of Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance. Only thus will ye escape the trammels of material things and become free." (This stern exhortation brings an echo of Christ's admonition: "He that loveth father or mother, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” and that a "man's foes” are "those of his own household. ”)
    The quotation from Rinzai rises to the surface of the acolyte's mind and, in his sick consciousness, seems to command him to commit his final unforgivable crime—this at the very last moment when the temple's compelling beauty in the nighttime garden is about to deprive him of his will to act. With his own nihilistic misinterpretation of the ancient saying about the drastic path one must follow to gain self-enlightenment, Mizoguchi seeks to rid himself of the paralyzing obsession with the Golden Temple that has haunted him since childhood. He sets a match to carefully placed bundles of straw. The Golden Temple is doomed!
    One closes the novel with the feeling that this sacred arehitectural relic from the days of Japan's rich, paradoxical, and turbulent past may well be the true protagohist in these pages, as the book's title suggests.
    Two passages from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion linger strongly in my mind; both of them, in a sense, profoundly Eastern and Buddhist-though not particularly Zen in tone.
    One of these passages occurs early, on the occasion of Mizoguchi's first visit to the temple with his dying father. He sees a skillfully executed model of the Golden Temple resting in a glass case in one of the rooms. "This model pleased me. It was closer to the Golden Temple of my dreams. Observing this perfect little image of the Golden Temple within the great temple itself, I was reminded of the endless series of correspondences that arise when a small universe is placea in a large universe and a smaller one is in turn placed inside the small universe. For the first time I could dream: of the small, but perfect Golden Temple which was even smaller than this model; and of the Golden Temple which was infinitely greater than the real building-so great, indeed, that it almost enveloped the world."
    The other passage occurs near the end, a part of the musings of the young acolyte just before he sets fire to the temple. "When the Golden Temple reflected the evening sun or shone in the moon, it was the light of the water [in the pond before it] that made the entire structure look as if it were mysteriously floating along and flapping its wings. The strong bonds of the temple's form were loosened by the reflection of the quivering water, and at such moments the Golden Temple seemed to be constructed of materials like wind and water and flame that are constantly in motion."
    To its invisible basic elements the mad young acolyte-in both fact and fiction—reduced the Golden Temple's gloriously visible form. The rooms in which Shogun Yoshimitsu once sat on a straw mat, drinking tea, listening to the flute, and composing poetry, went up in flames and disappeared in ashes. It is perhaps not irrelevant to state, however, that the Japanese have already rebuilt the Kinkakuji. True to the symbol of the eternally reborn phoenix that surmounts its rooftop, The National Treasure stands again in the famous Kyoto monastery grounds. Some even say it is "more beautiful and more golden than before."
    The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a novel which could only have been written by a Japanese and a member of a race whose cultural heritage is essentially Buddhist. This is