Part 17

He threw away his cigarette and sat looking at the wandering paths paved with flat stones here and there, the little flowering herbs springing in the crevices; at the mountain where, altering the scale, you might wander and be lost for dreadful days in mighty gorges and ravines. The river swept round it in a rapid current possibly two feet wide and joined the Kogagawa in a lovely bay quite four feet across where a fairy fleet might have anchored after a prosperous voyage from Stratford on Avon in the dream of a midsummer night.

“Some day I will read you his paper, but not yet. I have reasons for delay. The spirit of our country is hovering over you but has not yet entered in and possessed you. People come to Japan in ship-loads and see the surface bright with colour and gaiety which we spread out before them. But they do not know. We do not mean they should. To be truthful—I do not think any foreigner can understand Japan unless he is a Buddhist at heart— As you are.”

“I?” I echoed in uttermost astonishment. “My good fellow, I am nothing. I haven’t the devil of a ghost of a notion what it all means.”

He looked at me with a quaint smile hiding in the deeps of his narrow eyes. It peered out like a wise gnome, as old as the hills and older.

“Your downstairs self knows very well. It has not passed it on yet to your honourable upstairs self. But the wireless begins to talk and the air is full of voices beating at your ears. What stories they will tell you! I should like to hear them.”

For the moment I could not be sure that he was in earnest. But I could ask, for it was an intimate hour.

The full moon was rounding up from behind the mountain of Naniwa where the monastery of the Thousand-Armed Kwannon, Spirit of Pity, looks out over a wide and wonderful landscape of woods and valleys. That day we had visited the house of the Abbot,—The House Built upon Clouds, they call it, and there, for a moment I had had an experience new and very difficult to describe.

Yet I must try. It began with a physical sensation like a strange intake of breath which I could not expel, and made my heart beat violently. That passed, but I thought it had affected my head for it seemed that my memory was disturbed. I could not remember my name, and my past life, as I recalled it from childhood, was gone, shrunk to an invisible point so small that I could look over it to something beyond. That something moved in cloudy shapes impossible to focus into clear vision. I saw as one sees when a telescope needs adjusting and another turn will clear all into intelligibility. But for a moment I had dropped my historic, racial sense like a garment, and the monk with his calm face like lined and weathered ivory seemed nearer to me than anyone I had ever known though it was not half an hour since we had met. I could remember his sonorous Japanese name. My own was gone. I must place the scene clearly. Arima was examining some ancient vessels of fine three-metal work from Tibet, and the Abbot and I stood by the window looking out over the vast drop of the valley from such a height that it was like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of the spiritual city. Suddenly I was aware that our eyes were fixed on each other, on my side with passionate, on his with searching intensity.

Again, what shall I say? I was conscious that something arresting had happened and could not tell myself what it was. But it was his eyes through which I looked, as through a window, with an overwhelming question.

Also, he was speaking in a clear low monotone like running water. It was as though he continued a conversation of which I had lost the beginning.

“But how can you expect to see without concord of mind? Yours is in the confusion of a tossing sea. It has no direction. The way you must follow is to repeat these words until you understand them perfectly.”

He paused and enunciated these strange words clearly:

“I have no parents. I make the heavens and the earth my parents. I have no magic. I make personality my magic. I have no strength. I make submission my strength. I have neither life nor death. I make the Self-Existent my life and death. I have no friends. I make my mind my friend. I have no armour. I make right-thinking and right-doing my armour. Can you remember this? It is the beginning.” Looking in his eyes I remembered and repeated it perfectly.

“Good!” he said with calm approval.—“And there is one clause more. An important one. ‘I have no sword. I make the sleep of the mind my sword.’ That signifies that the outer reasoning self, which is really nothing, must be lulled asleep and put off its guard before the inner self, which is All, can function.”

Suddenly as it had come the experience ended. I was released. I stood in the window, watching the softly floating clouds, the waving woods far, far beneath, the wheeling of a drove of swallows in blue air. The Abbot was speaking with Arima; they were handling the vessels, barbarically rich, and discussing them with interest. Had my experience been some wild momentary distortion of the brain? I shuddered as if with cold. My hands were shaking. Then all was normal.

But, clambering down the hundreds of beautiful broken steps overgrown with flowers and moss where so many generations have come and gone in pilgrimage, I said nothing to Arima. It had become impossible. Something called the war to my mind and I said something careless, but he waved that aside.

“We must speak of it no more. Why steep one’s soul in illusion? Much that we thought real and allowed to affect us was nothing, and the emotions it caused less than nothing. I have awaked. You are near the dawn.”

I thought this remark cruel, and said something heated about the dead who had paid with their lives for the illusion—the ignorant things one does say! He received it with his invulnerable Japanese courtesy.

“I went too fast. Pardon me. The Buddha alone can impart knowledge to the Buddha, and who am I that I should speak? The time and the master come together. Here, my friend,—you should drink of this running water. It comes from a beautiful spring in the mountain above. They call it ‘Light Eternal’ and say that to taste of it is to drink perfect health. If only it were as easy as that!”

By the mossy rock lay two little dippers of pure white wood. I was extremely English at that instant and nothing would have induced me to soil my lips with a cup used by strangers. I hooped my hands and drank,—he, from the dipper.

“You miss the sacrament,” he said, “but the water in any case is good.”

And so we went home, talking of the treasures of the monastery, wonders of art, famous throughout Japan.

But now, in the gathering night concentrating its radiance in a moon so glorious as to obscure the nearer stars, in the breathless silence made vocal by the ripple of the river on its eternal way, beneath the dropped veil of the willow influences were loosed which opened my heart, and I told Arima my experience of the afternoon. I asked whether he had been conscious of what had passed.

His face was a shadow beneath the boughs. I saw only the moonlight in his eyes as he replied.

“No. I knew nothing. The Abbot Gyōsen was speaking with me all the time. I thought you were absorbed in the view. It is most wonderful.”

That could not satisfy me.

“Impossible,” I said. “For how could that strange formula come into my mind? I never heard it before. I have not the faintest notion what it means.”

There was a brief silence, then he answered slowly.

“I scarcely think it my part to clear up the matter. Will you not ask the Abbot himself? Yet there are one or two things I could say if you wish.”

Seeing I was in earnest he continued.

“The Abbot Gyōsen is a remarkable man. In the first place seclusion in a mountain temple in devout contemplation purifies the heart, and then he is a deep student of Zen. Zen is the science of mental or spiritual concentration. In India they call it Yoga. A man who possesses this knowledge can do things which to the ignorant of its powers appear miracles. They are perfectly natural however. In his youth he had magnificent skill in jujutsu. No man could stand up against him. There was a reason for that.”

He was silent for a moment, and then added:

“His influence is enormous. You would scarcely credit the true stories I could tell of him.”

I listened in deep reflection, staring at the broken ripples of moonlight in the river. Again the weird intake of breath seized me, my heart beat rapidly with the consciousness that I was face to face with the Unknown; that it had eyes but I was blind, groping in the dark. Light, light: That was the cry within me.

“The formula?” I asked, when my breath steadied again.

I could not see even his eyes now. Arima was an invisible presence.

“In Japan,” he said, “in connection with jujutsu and otherwise we recognize a strange force which we call _kiai_, a very powerful dynamic. We consider it a manifestation of the primal energy. It lies all round us for the taking by anyone who will use the necessary means and in itself is neither good nor evil. The result depends on the person who uses it. What the Abbot Gyōsen passed into your mind was certain of the first rules of this knowledge. We call them the Rules of Detachment. He must have been conscious that you have reached the fit stage for instruction.”

“Then all I can say is that he was entirely mistaken. He could hardly choose a worse subject for any spiritual experiments than myself.”

Arima laughed slightly but kindly as one laughs at a child’s ignorant certitude.

“That is not possible. Men of his sort are not mistaken. But _you_ mistake. Certainly this force may be employed for a very high kind of spiritual adventure, but in itself it is neutral. It is only a force, and what he foresees for you I cannot tell. It is a sword. Now a sword may be employed by a god or a devil or any of the grades between.”

This idea was so new to me that I said nothing for a moment, revolving the thing inwardly.

“Can you mean that a force of tremendous possibility lies about us for anyone to use who will? That a man can handle the powers of miracle——”

He shook his head:

“There is no miracle. There is only Law and some of us understand it better than others. Knowledge is always power and the unscrupulous may know as well as the saints. But they will know from a different and disastrous angle. Does one always see power in worthy hands? You and I who have lived through the war know better than that. No, this force is applicable to small things as to great. It can mean success in money-grubbing or the open door to an apostleship. As I said—it is a sword. But it cannot be trifled with. It carries you to a stage where you perceive the danger too late and are seized with an indescribable horror. The wings melt in the sun’s flame, and then——”

He made an eloquent gesture with his hand which suggested a fall from some unimagined height.

“I won’t believe it,” I said resolutely. “That whatever rules the universe should trust it anywhere to clumsy or wicked interference— No, impossible!”

“Yet we see it daily,” Arima replied calmly. “But things always come right in the long run. This power of which I speak is only one gesture of the Supreme and there is much behind it. Illusions pass like clouds but the sun remains.”

“But—but,” I hesitated.

“It is this which explains the mystery of good and evil, as we call them. Think it out and you will see. Shall we go in now? I have a fancy that the processes of the night—even the river—like to be free of us intruders. If we are not in harmony with them——”

“Arima!” I said on an impulse, “have you this secret? I think—I know that in your hands it would be safe. What you have said makes me long for more. If the Abbot judged me fit for so much—and you say he must have known——”

He stretched his hand in the moonlight and grasped mine in a strong clasp. I had a sensation of something throbbing and beating from his wrist to mine. It flowed tingling along my veins until it was warm about my heart.

“It is day!” he said.

I heard no more. It was day. A fierce sun blazed upon me and I was alone in an unknown country. A mountain, in contour like the famous Fuji, loomed up majestic, snow spilt down its sides like the sticks of a half opened fan. I stood in a mighty gorge beside a fiercely running mountain river, the swift torrent forced back by its own speed among the rocks in curling white waves. Where two rocks craned forward to each other from opposing shores a noble Chinese bridge, huge stones gigantically moulded almost to a semi-circular spring, spanned and bridled the wild creature beneath, and on either shore was a willow tree.

Why was it familiar though so strange? But I stood bewildered. A moment ago I had been beside my friend in moonlight and quiet, now a great sun beat on tossing mountains and river, and I was alone.

Terribly alone. I stood ignorant which way to turn, helpless, baffled, in a place which might have been empty from the world’s beginning, but for the bridge. Would anyone ever come? Should I roam there imprisoned in vastness until I died? It was a nightmare of terror. I ran to the great willow as if for refuge in its tent of delicate shifting shade, and pushing aside the boughs I entered and sat down throwing my arm about the trunk, smooth, warm, as the flesh of a woman, that I might steady myself against something living and tangible.

There are Dryads in Japan, tree spirits, and especially do they haunt the willow. Beautiful, alarming, some of the stories, but always instinct with the life which lies just below our horizon. Now I was conscious of some presence beside me, not to be accosted until its own moment of choice. I put out my hand instinctively; it met nothing. I said a word aloud. No answer. And again most disabling fear submerged me. Then, clear and small, as if written, the Rules of Detachment rose in my mind, and hurrying, I repeated them under my breath, not knowing how they could help, but catching at anything.

“I have no parents. I make the heavens and the earth my parents. I have no strength. I make submission my strength.” And so to the end.

“I have no sword. I make the sleep of the mind my sword.”

Now, as I said these words the meaning flashed upon me in light. Here was I—alone in a frightful solitude—so desolate that it might have been the Mountains of the Moon. What means of escape could I make for myself? What friends had I—what sword? The Rules assured me. The enemies—the mountains, the wild ways, were my slaves if I could believe it. In submission strength awaited me. In the surrender of the plotting reason, which can only break tangible material obstacles, my latent powers would function. And what were they?

Once more and confidently I repeated the words, knowing that they unloosed some hard-bound knot in my being. I willed to be in the garden of Arima. My one instinct was flight.

I was sitting beneath the willow tree— Yes, but in Arima’s garden, and he was beside me looking steadfastly at the river where moonlight flowed away with it to the ocean.

Impossible to describe the shock of relief. It never occurred to me to ask if I had been asleep—to think I had been hypnotized or anything of the kind. I knew the experience was real.

“Where have I been?” That was the only possible question. He replied:

“In the garden. Did you not recognize it? See—the mountain, the tumbled rocks, the river and bridge. _But_ in the garden as my ancestor first saw it. Some day you shall hear why.”

“But first—first— Was I long there? Time—I forgot time.”

“You are there now, only the blinkers are over your eyes again. And as to time—there is no such thing as time. There is only eternity. If I count in the way we measure when we wear our blinkers you had the sight for twenty-four hours. It was last night when it began. Now it is to-night. I have slept, have eaten, have walked to the village and written many letters and all the time you sat here. Time is really nothing but a dream—a necessity in the world of the Three Dimensions. As soon as you break the shell—it is nothing.”

Again I cannot describe the tumult of feeling in me, mingled with a passionate longing for something of my own lost and ravished from me. I had a sense of unutterable weakness and shame. He read my thought like speech and answered:

“But you threw it from yourself. You were frightened, forlorn, and you caught at the Rules and concentrated, and being power they acted as you wished, and transported you back into the blindness of the daily life that walls us in from the Lovely, the Utterly Desirable.”

“You mean,” I said slowly, “that one can ruin oneself as easily as save. And that I should not have come back at my own will?”

“Exactly. One must always go on. To come back is highly dangerous. If you had had patience and had concentrated upon what is called ‘extension’ you would have climbed the mountain and on the other side——”

“What? What?” I cried, for he paused.

“We call it the Shining Country. You would have—liked it! Also you would have met the One who Waits.”

I repeated in bewilderment;

“The One who Waits? But who?”

“I cannot tell. Different people probably for everyone. It might have been my great-great-grandfather for all I know. He is often in his garden. But it is the right one always. Don’t think I blame you though for using your scrap of power in a fright. That often happens at first. What man has mastered jujutsu at the first throw? Still, he may be badly hurt, and you are hurt and will pay for it. Later on, beware that you never use power to bring you back to the place you have left it. A man pays for that to the last farthing.”

“You mean—snatching at the wrong things?”

“Yes, in a way. The wrong things for you. There is no fixed way or rigid moral standard. There cannot be. All depends upon the man himself and the occasion, and—many a man has been saved by his sins. One learns the rules as one goes. Of course the rudiments of them govern every sort of society of men civilized or uncivilized. But you must be hungry. Come in.”

I shall never forget that meal. Nothing could be simpler. There were rice cakes, honey, eggs, and pale fragrant tea. But—I despair of words—the food had new meanings. I could feel the good of it, the life of nature, of living things, passing into my blood, so restorative that when it was eaten I felt like a tuned violin on the shoulder of a mighty master; not a sound or sight but drew harmonious answer from my spirit. The river flowed from the footstool of the Eternal. Each flower shouted its evangel and their chorus was that of the morning stars singing together. The dart of the swallows was the flight of arrows from the bow of Love. They dazzled in blue air. I daresay no more.

Arima came out in his cotton kimono and bare head. I saw new meanings in his face each moment, and the bronzed beauty of the man struck on a naked nerve, as though each sight of beauty awakened a longing for the next step beyond. He read my thought, and pausing in his work of training a fruit bough answered meditatively;

“Yes, even the first breath of air in that country is inspiration. It is full of dangers—a fighting country, sometimes a No Man’s Land. Some of its ways seem to lead horribly downward. And there is always hell.”

“Hell? A state of mind?”

“Yes, and of body too—they sometimes involve each other. But it braces one. There is much more to it than you can know yet. Only remember—one has got to break into that country somehow unless one is content to be the prisoner of the senses for a whole wasted lifetime.”

I shuddered slightly.

“At the present moment I don’t feel that I ever want to see it again.”

“Natural enough. Let us have a bout of jujutsu now.”

We stripped, and he threw me as he always did, but all the same I was learning. I got a new lock that day and, more important, made an advance in pliability. I stooped and yielded and released myself when I thought he had got me for good. He shouted with pleasure.

“Right! You will be a shodan one day. That is our lowest teaching grade. Now rest.”

He came up to me an hour later:

“You are wishing to go to the Kwannon monastery to see the Abbot. He will receive you. Before you start would you like to hear the story of my ancestor and the garden? It is very short.”

Strange. I had not thought of the Abbot, but I knew now that to see him was my inmost wish. That had been the meaning of my joy. I nodded, and Arima led the way to the willow. I did not then know why but the magic of the garden centred in that willow, thrilled in every leaf of it.

We sat down in its shade; I, on the grass with my arms clasped about my knees.

“My ancestor was a handsome young man, and the only son of a rich and noble family who owned much land about here. Nearly all ran through his fingers in his extravagance and flowed away from the family like river-water, until only a few acres just here were left. I need not tell you all his life—you can imagine the story of a rich, reckless, sensuous fellow without bit or bridle. But he was a fine soldier, a fine poet—we think much of that in Japan—and he wrote the story of his life later with such fire and drama and such strange hidden things, that if it could be printed—but it never could. People would not believe it. Some day you shall read.”

A strange change came over the garden while he spoke. It extended itself before my eyes—flowing outward softly. The flowering bushes which had been within a few feet were now vague in the distance. The mountain flung a cone of shadow over leagues. Even as I saw this, we were in the land of True Sight—yes, that was its name—and Arima was telling his story under the willow of my terror.

“He had broken his own wife’s heart. He coveted the love of the wife of a man of good birth—a samurai named Satoro, and taking her by force made her his own. The husband, unarmed, met him here in what is now this garden, and when he drew his sword to attack him, by the power of the most skilful jujutsu dashed the sword from his hand and himself to the ground, breaking his jaw and blinding him with blood. He had to endure the disgrace. Terrible humiliation for a nobleman! No help— Look about you and see how lonely!”

“Awful and vast the mountains stretched away into snowy silences with the muted roar of a distant avalanche. Cold, shudderingly cold the river, frozen in the pools with a bitter glaze of ice. No life, no death, but arrested petrifaction, with the moon stranded on a peak in a dead world.

“And the sword! A sword worn by his ancestors in knightly fashion, pure steel and gold—the very spirit of the house. Satoro picked it up and stood leaning on it over the prostrate man as he lay on the rocks writhing like a crushed snake to hide his ruined face.

“‘This place is your own heart,’ he said; ‘cold, empty and dead. You will come back to it times out of mind. Kimi san, my wife, is on the other side of the mountain. You never possessed her; she is mine. But what I have to say is this. Your sword also is mine. I have a lien on you. You are my slave. I tell you now to begin at the beginning. You shall learn jujutsu. What it will teach you is to defend yourself from yourself. And when you have learnt that— Then I shall give you fresh orders.’

“The man raved and swore and spat blood, all unintelligibly as a beast. He was humiliated in all that a Japanese noble most values, and his only thought at the moment was revenge and suicide. The other stood, looking down upon him with calm. ‘I will return the sword to my lord when he knows its use. A good sword scorns an ignorant wearer. Now I leave you, but we shall meet in this place.’

“He went off, walking lightly and strongly. The fallen man dragged himself together. To lose his sword— Do Westerners understand that bitterness? I cannot tell.