Gaurav Sagar’s Reviews > The Temple of the Golden Pavilion > Status Update

"Yes, that's it. Action is now simply a kind of superfluity for me. It has jutted out of life, it has jutted out of my own will, and now it stands before me, like a separate, cold steel mechanism, waiting to be put in motion.

It was hard for me to explain to myself why I wanted to go to this length in relying, as it were, on the Superior's strength. Why should I want to borrow this strength of his? Why should I allow my final decision to depend on being expelled by the Superior? For, as I have already said, I had for a long time been aware of the Superior's essential powerlessness.

Was one obliged to pay back one's debts in the face of a world catastrophe ?

I want to get away from all my surroundings. From the smell of powerlessness that everyone round me gives off so strongly.

A type of cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life. As in a corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to endless depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that I encountered for the first time, and I felt that I was being led by such resemblances into the inner recesses of the corridor, into some fathomless inner chamber.

How shall I put it?Beauty-yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one'tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence. Finally it gets so that one can't stand the pain and one goes to dentist to have the tooth extracted. Then, as one looks at at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one's hand, one's thoughts are likely to be as follows "Is this it?Is this all it was?"

In order for me not to lose face it was, in fact, essential that I become a flower thief.

I was there alone, and the Golden Temple- the absolute, positive Golden temple- had enveloped me. Did I possess the temple, or was I possessed by it ? Or would it not be more correct to say that a strange balance had come into being at that moment, a balance which allow me to be the Golden Temple and the Golden Temple to be me?

At the edge of the thicket stood a single late-blossoming cherry tree which had still not shed its blossoms. These were indeed late blossoms, and I wondered whether it wasn't because they had kept on stuttering when they first opened up that they were thus delayed.

It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.