Thus it was clear that what migrated in samsara and reincarnation, what passed from one life to the next was the vast flow of selflessness of the alaya consciousness.
19
BUT THE MORE Honda learned about Yuishiki theory, the more he had to know how alaya consciousness caused the phenomenal world to appear. For according to Yuishiki concepts, cause and effect dependent on alaya occurred simultaneously at a given instant, and yet alternately. For Honda, who could think of cause and effect only in terms of time sequence, this idea of simultaneous, yet alternating causes and effects of the alaya consciousness and the phenomenal world was exceedingly difficult to grasp. Yet it was clear that in this concept lay the basic difference between the interpretation of the universe by all of Mahayana (including the Yuishiki school) and that of Hinayana Buddhism.
The world of Theravada Buddhism was like the rainy season in Bangkok when the river, rice paddies, and fields presented an unbroken, limitless expanse. The monsoon floods now must have occurred in the past too and would occur in the future as well. The phoenix tree with its vermilion flowers blooming in the garden was there yesterday and therefore would doubtless be there tomorrow. If it was certain that existence went on, say, even after Honda’s death, similarly his past would certainly continue smoothly into the future in repeated reincarnations. Unquestioning acceptance of the world as it was, the natural tropical docility so like the land which accepted the floods, was characteristic of Theravadins. They teach that our existence continues from the past, through the present, to the future; past, present, and future resemble the vast brown waters of a river bordered by mangroves with their aerial roots, its flow heavy and Ianquid. The doctrine is called the theory of constant existence in past, present, and future.
Contrary to this, Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Yuishiki school, interpreted the world as a torrential and swift rapids or a great white cascade which never pauses. Since the world presented the form of a waterfall, both the basic cause of that world and the basis of man’s perception of it were waterfalls. It is a world that lives and dies at every moment. There is no definite proof of existence in either past or future, and only the present instant which one can touch with one’s hand and see with one’s eyes is real. Such a world concept is unique to Mahayana Buddhism; reality exists in the present only, there being no past or future.
But why should this be called “reality”?
If we can recognize a narcissus by seeing it with our eyes and touching it with our hands, at least the narcissus and its immediate environment exist at the moment of touching and seeing.
That much is confirmable.
But then, if we are asleep and if a narcissus is placed in a vase by our pillow during the night, can we prove the existence of the flower at every moment during our sleep?
Thus, if our eyes are gouged out, our ears, nose, and tongue cut off, if we depart our body and our consciousness is extinguished, does the world of the narcissus and its environment continue to exist?
But the world must exist!
The seventh consciousness, manas, may affirm or deny the world, depending on its attachment to self. Honda could say that since there was a self, that as long as that self continued to perceive, even after the loss of all five senses, there existed about him his fountain pen, vase, ink bottle, red glass pitcher and on it the white cross of the window frame forming a smooth curve reflecting the morning light, his copy of the Compendium of Laws, paperweight, desk, wall panel, framed pictures—his world which was a carefully arranged extension of these small objects. Or he might say that as long as self-consciousness (the self) existed and perceived, the world was nothing more than a phenomenal shadow, a reflection of the ego’s perceptions; the world was nothing and therefore nonexistent. Thus the ego would with arrogance and pride try to treat the world as its own, like a beautiful ball to kick about.
But the world must exist!
Yet in order for it to do so, there must be a consciousness that will produce it, make it exist, make the narcissus be, that will guarantee the existence of these things at every moment. This is the alaya consciousness, as constant as the North Star, which is awake at every moment during the long dark nights, making such nights exist in fact, incessantly guaranteeing reality and existence.
But the world must exist!
Even if all consciousnesses to the seventh should claim that the world were nonexistent, or even though the five senses were completely destroyed and death occurred, the world would exist as long as there was alaya. Everything exists through alaya, and since it does, all things are. But what if alaya were extinguished?
But the world must exist!
Therefore, alaya consciousness is never extinguished. As in a cascade, the water of every moment is different, yet the stream flows in torrential and constant movement.
Thus, alaya consciousness flows eternally in order to make the world exist.
For the world must at all costs exist!
But why?
Because only by the existence of the world—world of illusion—is man given the chance of enlightenment.
That the world must exist is thus the ultimate moral requisite. This is the supreme answer of the alaya consciousness as to why the world must be.
If the existence of the world—the world of illusion—is the ultimate moral requisite, alaya consciousness itself, which produces all phenomena, is the origin of that moral requisite. But the world and alaya consciousness, or alaya and the world of illusion that gives birth to phenomena must be said to be interdependent. For if alaya does not exist, the world does not come into being; but if the world is not, alaya is deprived of samsara and reincarnation in which alaya itself is the migrating essence, and the way to enlightenment will be forever closed.
Thus it is through this highest moral requisite that alaya and the world are mutually dependent; the existence of the alaya consciousness depends on the very necessity that the world exist.
Yet only the immediate present is reality, and if the ultimate authority that guarantees momentary existence is alaya, that alaya that brings about all worldly phenomena exists at the point where time and space intersect.
Honda was able to grasp, albeit with difficulty, that here was born the unique Yuishiki theory of cause and effect being at once simultaneous and alternate.
Now for Buddhist theory to be authentic, there must be textual proof that it is part of the teaching of Gautama Buddha, and the Yuishiki school found just that in the following gatha, the most difficult in Mahayana Abhidharma sutras.
All dharma are stored in consciousness,
And consciousness is stored in all dharma.
The two become mutual causes
And always mutual results.
Honda interpreted this passage as meaning that according to the law of continuous cause and effect characteristic of the alaya consciousness, the world observed at the momentary section of the present might be described as being sliced like a cucumber into momentary slices of present that are observable one after the other.
The world is born and dies at every instant, and on each momentary cross section appear three forms of endless births and deaths. One is “seeds producing the present world,” then “the present world ‘perfuming’ the seeds,” and last, “seeds producing seeds.” The first is the form in which the seed causes the present world to materialize, and naturally it includes momentum from the past. There is a trail from the past. The second shows the present world being “perfumed” by alaya seeds and becoming future phenomena. Naturally uneasiness over the future casts its shadow. But this does not mean that all seeds are “perfumed” by the present and produce present phenomena. Some seeds, even though being tainted, are merely succeeded by other seeds. These are the third kind of seed. And their causes and effects alone do not occur simultaneously, but follow a time sequence.
The world manifests itself through these three forms, and everything occurs in an instantaneous present.
But the first and
second seeds are born anew simultaneously, influence each other, and perish in the same instant. The momentary cross sections, inherited only by these seeds, are discarded as the seeds move from section to section. The structure of the human world is formed of thin slices of instants, infinite in number, pierced through by the skewer of the seeds of the alaya consciousness. And the thin slices representing so many instants are both pierced and discarded in each minute segment of time.
Samsara and reincarnation are not prepared during a lifetime, beginning only at death, but rather they renew the world at every instant by momentary re-creation and destruction.
Thus the seeds cause this gigantic flower of delusion called the world to bloom at every point in time, abandoning it at the same instant. But the succession of seeds producing seeds demands the help of karma seeds, as we have said. These karma seeds come from the “perfuming” of the momentary present.
The true meaning of Yuishiki is that the whole of the world manifests itself now in this very instant. Yet this instantaneous world already dies in the same moment and simultaneously a new one appears. The world which appears one moment is transformed in the following and thus continues on. Everything in the entire world is alaya consciousness.
20
WHEN HONDA’S THINKING had evolved this far, everything around him took on an unanticipated appearance.
This particular day, he happened to have been invited to a villa in Shoto in the Shibuya district concerning a prolonged lawsuit and was waiting in the second-floor reception room. No lodgings were available, and when the plaintiff came up to Tokyo on matters of litigation, he stayed at the house of some wealthy man from his home region. The owner had long since left Tokyo for Karuizawa to avoid the bombings.
The administrative suit was being conducted with a leisureliness that stood above time. It had, in fact, been initiated by a law promulgated in 1899, and the origin of the dispute itself went back to post-Restoration days several decades earlier. The accused in this case was the government, and even the defendant’s title had changed from Minister of Agriculture and Commerce to that of Agriculture and Forestry with the reorganization of the cabinet. Lawyers representing the plaintiff covered several generations, and now, if Honda, who had been entrusted with the case, won, according to the original agreement one third of the entire land accruing to the plaintiff would be his remuneration. However, he did not expect that the litigation would be over in his lifetime.
Thus he came to the Shibuya villa only to pass the time, using the work as a pretext. In reality he came in anticipation of the polished rice and chicken that his client usually brought as a gift from the country.
The client, who should have long since arrived, was not there yet. He was no doubt having difficulty with the trains.
The June afternoon was too warm for his civilian uniform and gaiters, so Honda opened the tall, oblong English window and stood by it to catch some air. Having had no military experience, he could not to this day manage his gaiters properly, and they tended to slip off his legs and to bunch around his calves, giving him the sensation of dragging a pilgrim’s bag around his legs when he walked. His wife Rié always feared that the loose gaiters might get caught in the crowded streetcars and trip him.
Perspiration seeped through the lumpy areas of the gaiters today. The vulgarly shiny summer uniform, made of some staple fiber, retained every crease, and Honda knew that the back of his jacket must be puckered into ugly wrinkles from sitting. But it was no use straightening it.
From the window, he could see all the way to the Shibuya Station area bathed in June light. The residential parts of the immediate vicinity had survived relatively intact, but the area from the foot of the plateau up to the station was freshly bombed ruins spotted with half-destroyed concrete buildings. The air raids that had razed the area had occurred only the week before, on the nights of May twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, 1945, during which a total of five hundred B-29s had fire-bombed various residential parts of Tokyo. The odor of the conflagration still remained, and the memory of the hellish scene still lingered in the light of day.
The odor, like that of a crematorium, was mixed with more ordinary smells such as those from kitchens or bonfires, commingling with the pungent tang of chemicals as in a pharmaceutical factory or machinery. The smell of burntout ruins was already familiar to Honda. Fortunately his house in Hongo had not yet been touched.
In the continuous metallic whine of bombs drilling through the night sky above, followed by a series of explosions and the release of fire bombs, he could always hear something inhuman, something like the voices of women cheering somewhere in the sky. Honda realized later that these were the cries of the damned.
In the burnt-out ruins, the debris had turned rusty, and the crushed roofs had remained untouched. Pillars of various heights stood everywhere like blackened pickets, and ashes crumbled from them to dance in the faint breeze.
Here and there something glittered brightly—for the most part, the remains of shattered panes of glass, glass surfaces burned and warped, pieces of broken bottles that reflected the sun. These little fragments harvested all the June light they could gather to them. Honda beheld for the first time the brilliance of the rubble.
The concrete foundations of houses were clearly limned under the crumbled walls. High and low, each was lit by the afternoon sun. For this reason, the entire ruin had the appearance of a type mold for a sheet of newsprint. But the predominant shade was the light reddish brown of a flowerpot, not the gloomy gray unevenness of a newspaper mold.
There was little greenery, for the area had been mostly commercial. Some half-burned trees were still standing along the streets.
Many shattered office buildings had paneless windows on this side, through which one could see the light reflecting in the glass on the far side, and the window frames were blackened, probably by the soot that had been deposited by the shooting flames.
It was a sloping area with a complex mesh of back streets on different levels. The concrete stairs and steps that remained led expectantly to nothing. Nothing remained either above or below them. In the field of rubble too there was no starting point, no destination; only the stairways adhered to direction.
All was quiet, but there were faint stirrings and things would rise softly. When he looked, it seemed like some hallucination, in which blackened corpses ravaged by countless vermin began to stir. They were ashes caught in the breeze, rising everywhere. There were white ashes and black ashes. Some floating ash adhered to a crumbling wall and rested there. Ashes of straw, ashes of books, ashes from a second-hand bookstall, ashes from a quilt maker’s shop, floating about individually, commingling indiscriminately, moving, shifting over the face of the devastation.
An area of asphalt road gleamed blackly with water spurting from a ruptured main.
The sky was strangely spacious and the summer clouds immaculately white.
This was the world presented to Honda’s five senses at this very moment. His plentiful savings had enabled him to accept only those legal cases that suited him during the war, and the study of samsara and reincarnation which entirely filled his leisure time seemed designed for the purpose of making this devastation manifest. The destroyer was Honda himself.
The vast panorama of devastation before his eyes, resembling the end of the world, was not the end itself, nor was it the beginning. It was a world that imperturbably regenerated itself from instant to instant. Alaya consciousness, perturbed by nothing, accepted this expanse of reddish ruin as one world, relinquishing it the next moment, accepting in the same way other worlds in which the color of destruction deepened with every day, with every month.
Honda felt no emotion as he compared this sight with the city as it had been. Only when his eyes caught the bright reflections of the fragments of broken glass in the ruins and he was momentarily blinded did he understand, with the sureness of his senses that the glass, the whole ruin would disappear the next instant to make way for another.
He would resist catastrophe with catastrophe, and he would deal with the infinite disintegration and desolation with ever more gigantic and all-inclusive instantaneously repeated devastation. Yes, he must grasp with his mind the instant-by-instant, inevitable total destruction and prepare for the carnage of an uncertain future. He was elated to the point of trembling with these refreshing ideas that he had gleaned from Yuishiki doctrine.
21
WHEN HIS TALK with the client was over, Honda took his gifts and started out for Shibuya Station. There had been reports of a large-scale bombing of Osaka by B-29s. Of late, rumors were frequently heard that western Japan was now the main target. Tokyo seemed to be having a momentary respite.
Honda thought of walking a little further as long as it was light. At the top of Dogen Hill was located the former estate of Marquis Matsugae.
As far as Honda knew, the Matsugae family had sold eighty acres of its total land-holding of one hundred and ten to Hakoné Real Estate, Ltd., in the early twenties. But half of the money obtained at that time was lost in short order when the fifteen banks it had been placed in collapsed. The adopted heir of the family, a profligate, quickly disposed of the remaining thirty acres, and the present Matsugae house was reputed to be an ordinary place built on something less than an acre. He had driven by the gate, but had not entered now that he had completely lost touch with the family. Honda was vaguely curious to know whether the house had disappeared in the air raid last week.
Temple Of Dawn Page 13
