The Temple of Dawn

by Yukio Mishima

  A mountain range in the distant left rose in the haze, trailing its long skirt of spacious plains; the horizon on the opposite side dotted with clumps of trees disappeared in yellow dust, and instead of mountains, a line of trees rose to the right, through which peeked a yellow sky.

  Such was the background of the photograph. The center was occupied by a small altar covered with white cloth fluttering in the breeze, on which had been placed a bouquet of flowers and an unpainted wooden grave marker. Thousands of soldiers with bent heads surrounded it.

  Honda saw the image most vividly. Again the voices shouting banzai and the waving flags returned to his consciousness. The vision left an indescribable sorrow in his heart.

  13

  DURING THE WAR Honda used his spare time entirely for his own study of samsara and transmigration and found pleasure in hunting for old books on these subjects. As the quality of new publications gradually deteriorated, the dusty luxury of wartime secondhand bookshops increased. Only there were freely available the knowledge and the pursuit of a hobby that transcended the times. And compared to the increase in the cost of everything else, the price of both Japanese and Western books remained low.

  Honda gleaned considerable information from these tomes which expounded on Western theories concerning life cycles and reincarnation.

  One theory was attributed to Pythagoras, the Ionian philosopher of the fifth century B.C. But his ideas on life cycles had been influenced by the earlier Orphean mysteries that had swept all of Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries. Orphean religion had in turn evolved from the worship of Dionysus that had ignited fires of madness throughout the preceding two hundred years of war and instability. The fact that the god Dionysus had come from Asia and fused with the Earth Mother and agricultural rituals throughout Greece suggested that the two had really originated from one source. The Earth Mother’s vibrant figure still lived in the Kalighat in Calcutta that Honda had seen. Dionysus embodied the life cycle of nature that was manifest in the northern country of Thrace. He arrived with the beginning of winter, died at its height, and was resurrected with spring. No matter what lively, wanton figure he might simulate, Dionysus was the personification of young spirits of grain, of whom Adonis was one—beautiful youths who died prematurely. Just as Adonis indubitably had united with Aphrodite, Dionysus too unvaryingly united with the Earth Mother in mystic rituals observed in various lands. At Delphi, Dionysus was enshrined with the Earth Mother, and the chief deity in the mystic worship of Lerna was the holy ancestor of both.

  Dionysus had come from Asia. His worship, which brought frenzy, debauchery, cannibalism, and murder, had its roots in Asia and posed the all-important problem of the soul. The paroxysms of this religion permitted no transparency of reason and no firm, beautiful form for either man or god. It was a religion that attacked the fertility of Greek fields in their Apollonian beauty like a swarm of grasshoppers darkening sun and sky, ravaging them, consuming their harvests. Honda could not but compare this to his own experience in India.

  Everything abominable—debauchery, death, madness, pestilence, destruction . . . How was it that such things could so entice the heart and allure the soul outward. Why did souls have to “exist,” discarding easy, dark, and quiet dwellings? Why was it that the human heart rejected tranquil inertness?

  That was what happened in history and with individuals. If men did not do thus, it was because they surely felt that they could not touch the wholeness of the universe. Inebriated, disheveled, tearing their clothes, and exposing their genitals, blood dripping from the raw flesh in their mouths—by such actions, they must have felt they could scratch the surface of that wholeness.

  This was indeed the spiritual experience of enthusiasmus, being god-possessed, and extasis, exiting from self, which had eventually been refined and ritualized by the Orpheans.

  What had turned Greek thought to the concept of samsara and reincarnation was this extasis experience. The deepest psychologic source of reincarnation was “ecstasy.”

  According to Orphean mythology, Dionysus was called Dionysus Zagreus, Zagreus being the child born to Zeus and Persephone, daughter of the Earth Mother. He was the favorite of his father and destined to be his successor and the future universal ruler. It is said that when Zeus, Heaven, fell in love with Persephone, Earth, he transformed himself into a great serpent, betokening the essence of earth, in order to make love to her.

  His love for the maiden aroused the wrath of his jealous wife, Hera. She summoned the subterranean Titans, and they enticed the baby Zagreus with a toy. Once captured, he was murdered, dismembered, cooked, and eaten. Only his heart was offered to Zeus by Hera. In turn, Zeus gave it to Semele, and a new Dionysus was reborn.

  Meanwhile, Zeus was infuriated by the Titans’ act and he attacked them with thunder and lightning. When they were completely destroyed, man was born of their ashes.

  Thus, mankind was given the evil character of the Titans and at the same time possessed godlike elements transmitted by Zagreus’s flesh that the Titans had consumed. Accordingly, the Orpheans proclaimed that man must worship Dionysus by extasis and reestablish his holy origin by self-deification. The ritual of the sacred feast persists in the Christian sacrament of the holy eucharist.

  Orpheus the musician, murdered and dismembered by Thracian women, seems to reenact the death of Dionysus; and his death, rebirth, and the mysteries of Hades became significant Orphean doctrines.

  As wandering souls who left their bodies by extasis were thought to be able to make contact for a short time with the mysteries of Dionysus, men were clearly aware of the separation of body and soul. Their flesh was formed of the evil ashes of the Titans and their soul embraced the pure fragrance of Dionysus. Furthermore, the doctrine of Orpheus taught that earthly suffering did not end with corporeal death; the soul, having escaped its dead body, was obliged to spend some time in Hades before reappearing on earth and transmigrating into another human or animal body. Thus was it destined to traverse limitless “cycles of life.”

  The immortal soul, originally holy, must traverse such a dark passage because of the original sin of the flesh: namely, the Titans’ murder of Zagreus. Man’s earthly life added new sins, and they renewed themselves. Thus, mankind is eternally incapable of escaping from the suffering of this cycle of lives. A man is not necessarily reincarnated in human form, but depending upon the gravity of his sins, may be reborn as a horse, sheep, bird, dog, or cold snake fated to crawl in the dust.

  The Pythagoreans, who had been called the successors of the Orpheans and credited with developing their theories, held to the unique doctrines of samsaric reincarnation and Universal Breath.

  Honda could detect a trace of the latter principle in King Milinda’s concept of life and the soul; he had long meditated on Indian philosophy. It also bore a resemblance to the mysticism of ancient Shinto.

  Compared to the fairy-tale cheerfulness of the jataka, tales drawn from the various lives of the Buddha, in Theravada Buddhism, the Western theory of reincarnation, darkened by gloomy Ionic melancholy, depressed Honda in spite of the fact that both came from the same source. Consequently he tended to heed Heraclitus who had claimed that all things were in flux.

  Enthusiasmus and extasis merged in this philosophy of transitory unity, according to which one was all, one came from the all, and all from the one. In the area which transcended time and space, ego disappeared, unity with the universe was easily accomplished, and man was able to become through this divine experience every thing. There, man, nature, bird, animal, forests rustling in the breeze, streams sparkling with the scales of fish, cloud-capped mountains, blue seas dotted with islands—all were able to disengage themselves from their earth-bound existence and unite in harmony. It was such a world that Heraclitus talked about.

  The living and the dead,

  The awake and the sleeping,

  The young and the old are all one and the same.

  When the ones change, they become the others.
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  When those shift again, they become these.

  God is day and night.

  God is winter and summer.

  God is war and peace.

  God is fertility and famine.

  He transforms into many things.

  Day and night are one.

  Goodness and badness are one.

  The beginning and the end of a circle are one.

  These lines represent the sublimity of Heraclitian thought, and when Honda came into contact with it, was blinded by its brilliance, he experienced a certain liberation; but at the same time he was cautious lest he remove too hastily the hands with which he covered his dazzled eyes. For one thing, he was afraid of going blind; for another, he felt that he was still too immature in his sensitivity and ideas to accept such boundless illumination.

  14

  FOR THIS REASON Honda averted his eyes for a while and concentrated on his studies of the theories of samsara and reincarnation that had been revived in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy.

  Tommaso Campanella, a monk living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, believed in the theory of the life cycle and reincarnation. This heretic and rebellious philosopher was welcomed in France after spending twenty-nine years in prison. There he was happy and much honored during the last years of his life. When Louis XIV was born, he dedicated to him an éloge in which he claimed that the royal birth was proof of his theory of reincarnation.

  Campanella learned the Brahman theory of samsara and transmigration from Botero and there discovered that the souls of the dead transmigrated even into monkeys, elephants, or cows. Borrowing the Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul and in reincarnation, he designated the inhabitants of his principal work, Città del sole, to be “wise men who had originally come from India to escape the pillage and atrocities of the Mogul.” “Pythagorean Brahmans,” he called them, yet he left their belief in samsara ambiguous. Campanella himself claimed that after death, the human soul did not go to hell, purgatory, or heaven.

  It is said that his Caucasian Sonnets vaguely suggest the theory of samsara. In these poems, he expressed his emotions of sorrow. “I cannot believe that my death will bring improvement to mankind; frequently, even if misfortune be averted, evil prospers more than ever. Human senses survive eternally after death; such senses simply forget the suffering endured during life in this world. If we cannot even know whether our former lives were spent in torture or in peace, how shall we know anything of the afterlife?”

  In contrast to the jubilation Honda had witnessed in Benares, the Europeans who discoursed on reincarnation were especially depressed by the adversity and sorrow of this life. Furthermore, they did not seek joy in a hereafter, but hoped merely for oblivion.

  On the other hand, the eighteenth-century philosopher Giovanni Batista Vico, a ferocious opponent of Descartes, advocated reincarnation and a return to eternity, and his bravery and militancy in his struggle made him a forerunner of Nietzsche, who held the same views. Honda read with pleasure one passage from Vico, in which he praised the Japanese as being heroic, even though he had but a vague knowledge of Japan. “The Japanese eulogize the heroic man as did the Romans at the time of the Punic Wars. They are fearless in military affairs and speak a language similar to Latin.”

  Vico interpreted history through his concept of recurrence. In short, he maintained that each civilization came to its final phase with “Premeditated Savagery,” which is far worse than the earlier “Natural Savagery.” The latter signifies a noble naïveté, but the former indicates cowardly cunning and insidious trickery. Thus the venomous “Premeditated Savagery” or “Civilized Savagery” must necessarily perish, after centuries of progress, by a renewal of “Natural Savagery.”

  Honda felt that an example was to be found in the brief history of modern Japan.

  Vico believed in the order of the universe as propounded by Catholicism; yet he was close to the theory of causation through karma. “God the creator,” he said agnostically, “and the created are separate entities. The raison d’être and essence of things are individual in each entity; therefore, the created is an entirely different entity from the godhead as far as its essence is concerned.”

  If one holds the created—that which appears to be an entity—to be dharma and atman and if one regards its raison d’être to be karma, then deliverance is simply attaining the entity of the creator on another dimension.

  Vico claimed in his theology that God’s creation changed “internally” into the created and “externally” into matter, and thus the world was created in time. He also said that the human spirit, being God’s reflection, was able to grasp the concept of infinity and eternity and was immortal. It is not confined by the body and consequently is not limited by time. But he did not provide an answer to the question why the limitless being was shackled by limited things, claiming this to be unknowable. But this is the very point at which the wisdom of the theory of samsara and reincarnation should begin.

  On reflection, it is surprising that Indian philosophy, persistently insisting on the power of knowledge, did not reject fantasy or dreams and never developed its own agnosticism.

  15

  WHEN HONDA DISCOVERED that a Western tradition of reincarnation had been feebly handed down by lone and solitary thinkers, he mused that it was only natural that King Milinda, who had ruled northwestern India in the second century B.C., seemed to have quite forgotten the Pythagorean philosophy of ancient Greece when he met the Elder, Nagasena, and plied him with questions. He was most interested in, and at the same time skeptical of, the more profound Buddhist theories of samsara and transmigration.

  The first volume of The Questions of King Milinda, as it appears in the Japanese translation of the Buddhist canon, opens with the following description of the ruler’s capital:

  Thus I have heard: In one of the regions colonized by the Greeks, there is a city called Sagara. It is a great center for commerce and foreign trade and is marked by purple mountains and clear water, parks, woods, and fields, forming a pleasant, natural paradise on earth; and its inhabitants are devoutly religious. Furthermore, their enemies have all been driven away, so that they feel not the slightest insecurity or oppression. The king’s castle is surrounded by fortifications, a variety of ramparts, majestic, forbidding side gates, high white walls, deep moats, and the protection provided is complete. The city’s squares, crossroads, and marketplaces are most aptly designed: beautifully decorated stores are filled with countless invaluable merchandise. Several hundreds of charitable hospitals add dignity to the city, while several thousand mansions and high pavilions tower like the Himalayas high in the clouds. And in the city streets, throngs of people are visible, men like pines, women like flowers, priests, warriors, farmers and traders, serfs—people of all classes pass by in groups.

  All the citizenry welcomes scholars and teachers of various religions and doctrines. Thus, Sagara appears as a nest for elders and academicians of all persuasions. Also in the streets stand eave to eave both large and small dry goods merchants who handle goods woven in Benares called khotumbari and all other kinds of goods and fabrics. Lavish fragrance wafts from the flower and incense market, purifying the air of the city. Other shops handle wishing pearls and divers other gems and goods of gold, silver, copper, or stone. It is as though one has stepped into a dazzling mine of jewels. Then, as one turns in another direction, there are great stores for grain and ware-houses full of priceless merchandise, shops with all manner of food and drink and cakes; nothing is lacking. In short, Sagara rivals Uttarakuru in wealth, and its prosperity compares well with that of Arakamandar, the city of heaven.

  Extremely self-confident and excelling in elocution and debate, King Milinda was contemptuous of Indians as being intellectual chaff. And it was in the midst of this ravishing and glorious city that he met the Elder, Nagasena, for the first time, a sage superior in intellect to the King.

  “O Wise One, when I call you Nagasena, exactly who
is this Nagasena?” asked the King.

  The Elder answered with a question: “What do you think Nagasena is?”

  “O Wise One, I think Nagasena is what exists within a body, a life or soul which enters it as wind or breath.”

  The King’s reply reminded Honda of the Pythagorean theory of the Universal Breath. That is to say, psyche in Greek originally meant “breath,” and if human psyche was breath, man was sustained by air, and thus the whole universe was maintained by air and breath. Such was the Ionean theory of natural philosophy.

  The Elder further asked why it was that the breath of one who blows a conch, flute, or horn never returned once it was released, and yet the blower did not die. The King was unable to reply. Thereupon Nagasena made a statement which pointed up the fundamental difference between Greek and Buddhist philosophy.

  “The soul is not breath. Inhaled and exhaled, breath is merely the body’s latent energy or power.”

  Honda immediately felt he could anticipate the dialogue that would follow; it did in fact appear on the next page.

  The King asked, saying: “O Wise One, is anyone and everyone reborn after dying?”

  “Some people do, some do not.”

  “What sort of people would they be?”

  “Those who have committed sins will be reborn; those who are sinless and pure will not be reborn.”

  “Are you going to be reborn, O Wise One?”

  “When I die, if I am attached to life in my heart, I shall be reborn; but if not, I shall not be reborn.”

  “I understand.”

  From this point on, a zealous desire for learning was kindled in King Milinda’s heart, and pertinaciously he posed question upon question concerning samsara and transmigration. The King pursued the Elder with the spiral investigation of Greek dialogue, asking for proof of the “selflessness” of Buddhism and the question why men who possess no “self” go through samsara, and concerning the essence that is subject to the law of samsara. Because if samsara occurs through a sequence of causes and effects—a good cause producing by reward a good effect, a bad cause a bad one—there must be an eternal host substance responsible for causal actions. But atman, which was recognized in the days of the Upanishads, had been categorically denied in the Abhidharma teachings that characterized the school to which Nagasena belonged. Because of the doctrine and because of his ignorance of the elaborate system of the Consciousness Only school that developed later, Nagasena merely answered: “There is no samsaric subject as essence.”