XI A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE THE room where I am writing-(a while ago the temple bell rang, "trembling in its thousand ages")-is twenty-four mats large, with a high ceiling, unusual to a common Japanese house. It is in a temple; the room is softened into a mellow silence, through which the lonely aspirant can enter into the real heart of Buddhism. The temple, by the way, is Zoroku An, or Tortoise Temple. That is quite a good name for a temple, since a tortoise, it is said, is a symbol of the six virtues of modesty or shyness. On the tokonoma of the room I see hanging a large scroll with the picture of Dharuma, the ancient Hindoo monk who established the Zen, this religion of silence. He is represented, as usual, in meditation, his large eyes opened, extremely solemn; it is said that he sat still against a wall for nine long years before he arose with his religion. I once wrote upon this picture of Dharuma: "Oh, magic of meditation, witchery of silence,— The room seems almost holy when I think that I can sit before the inextinguishable lamp of Faith, and seek the road of emancipation and poetry; it is here where, indeed, criticism vainly attempts to enter for arguing and denying. And I once wrote: "The silence is whole and perfect, and makes your wizard life powerless; your true friendship with the ghosts and the beautiful will soon be established. You have to abandon yourself to the beautiful only to create the absolute beauty and grandeur that makes this our human world look trifling, hardly worth troubling about; it is the magical house of Faith where the real echo of the oldest song still vibrates with the newest wonder, and even a simple little thought, once under the touch of imagination, grows more splendrous than art, more beautiful than life.” To get the real silence, means to make imagination swell to its full swing. Through imagination I wish to go back to the age of emotion and true love, when the reality of the external world ceases to be a standard, and you yourself will be a revelation, therefore a great art itself, of hope and passion which will never fail. You might look through the open doors of my room in this Tortoise Temple; you then would see facing you a great forest of Japanese cedars, by whose shadows the Zen monks young or old will now and then be seen as spirits moving on the road of mystery. On the monk I once wrote: "He is a pseudonym of the universal consciousness, A person lonesome from concentration. He is possessed of Nature's instinct, And burns white as a flame; For him mortality and accident of life No longer exist, But only the silence and the soul of prayer." With this entering into the Temple of Silence, I dare say, my third spiritual awakening was well begun. You might ask now, what was, then, my first awakening. It was when I left San Francisco, a year after my arrival in California, in my nineteenth year, and went to the home of Joaquin Miller, an eccentric American bard. There I stayed some three years. Seen and Unseen: Mono |