Dreams and delights

by L. Adams Beck

For the moment I could not be sure that he was in earnest. But I could ask, for it was an intimate hour.

The full moon was rounding up from behind the mountain of Naniwa where the monastery of the Thousand-Armed Kwannon, Spirit of Pity, looks out over a wide and wonderful landscape of woods and valleys. That day we had visited the house of the Abbot,—The House Built upon Clouds, they call it, and there, for a moment I had had an experience new and very difficult to describe.

Yet I must try. It began with a physical sensation like a strange intake of breath which I could not expel, and made my heart beat violently. That passed, but I thought it had affected my head for it seemed that my memory was disturbed. I could not remember my name, and my past life, as I recalled it from childhood, was gone, shrunk to an invisible point so small that I could look over it to something beyond. That something moved in cloudy shapes impossible to focus into clear vision. I saw as one sees when a telescope needs adjusting and another turn will clear all into intelligibility. But for a moment I had dropped my historic, racial sense like a garment, and the monk with his calm face like lined and weathered ivory seemed nearer to me than anyone I had ever known though it was not half an hour since we had met. I could remember his sonorous Japanese name. My own was gone. I must place the scene clearly. Arima was examining some ancient vessels of fine three-metal work from Tibet, and the Abbot and I stood by the window looking out over the vast drop of the valley from such a height that it was like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of the spiritual city. Suddenly I was aware that our eyes were fixed on each other, on my side with passionate, on his with searching intensity.

Again, what shall I say? I was conscious that something arresting had happened and could not tell myself what it was. But it was his eyes through which I looked, as through a window, with an overwhelming question.

Also, he was speaking in a clear low monotone like running water. It was as though he continued a conversation of which I had lost the beginning.

“But how can you expect to see without concord of mind? Yours is in the confusion of a tossing sea. It has no direction. The way you must follow is to repeat these words until you understand them perfectly.”

He paused and enunciated these strange words clearly:

“I have no parents. I make the heavens and the earth my parents. I have no magic. I make personality my magic. I have no strength. I make submission my strength. I have neither life nor death. I make the Self-Existent my life and death. I have no friends. I make my mind my friend. I have no armour. I make right-thinking and right-doing my armour. Can you remember this? It is the beginning.” Looking in his eyes I remembered and repeated it perfectly.

“Good!” he said with calm approval.—“And there is one clause more. An important one. ‘I have no sword. I make the sleep of the mind my sword.’ That signifies that the outer reasoning self, which is really nothing, must be lulled asleep and put off its guard before the inner self, which is All, can function.”

Suddenly as it had come the experience ended. I was released. I stood in the window, watching the softly floating clouds, the waving woods far, far beneath, the wheeling of a drove of swallows in blue air. The Abbot was speaking with Arima; they were handling the vessels, barbarically rich, and discussing them with interest. Had my experience been some wild momentary distortion of the brain? I shuddered as if with cold. My hands were shaking. Then all was normal.