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

This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, of its power to serve, like Tsurukawa’s, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly, it deprived me of the feelings of life’s extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange, I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.

It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one’s own heart possesses neither form nor feature. Yet the power to see, which is capable of properly envisaging the absence of feature, must be exceedingly keen in resisting the charm of formal appearances.

How could I possibly stretch out my hands towards life when I was being thus enwrapped in beauty?Perhaps beauty also had the right to demand that I relinquish my earlier aim.For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand &life with the other.It seemed as though the temple had assumed the form of a single instant of time & had visited me here in this park so that I know how empty was my longing for life.

I had long since realized that in any form of knowledge, however gloomy, there lurked the intoxication of knowledge itself.

“What about sexual desire? Where does that fit in?
“Sexual desire? Well, that’s halfway between. It’s a matter of going round and round in a vicious circle from human beings to stone and back to human beings, like a game of blind man’s buff.”

“You’re damned Buddhist in your views, aren’t you?” I said.
“What’s it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?” said Kashiwagi. “Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic—the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn’t the Ryuan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art—it’s all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics.

“Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don’t leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imaginations of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this one which inevitably stir one’s imagination.

This temple, by just standing there as it did, was a controlling force, a regulating force. The more that the surrounding noise increased, the more the Golden Temple-that asymmetrical, delicate structure, with the Sosci on one side, and above it the Kukyocho, which abruptly tapered off at the top-acted like a filter that transforms muddy into clear water.

The people who cleared away the dead bodies after the air raids all had gentle, cheerful expressions. To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that We become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it’s on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel.

..what is known in this world as uneasiness could only strike me as child’s play.There could be no uneasiness in my case.That I existed in this form was a definite fact, as definite as that the sun and the earth existed,or that beautiful birds and ugly crocodiles existed.The world was immobile like a tombstone.
Not the slightest uneasiness,not the slightest foothold—therein lay the basis of my original way of living.