And Arima’s words also. “There is no guide. There is only power.”
Power. That brought the Abbot to my mind—the Rules. Could it be that they could rescue me from this horrible country where evil hid like a snake behind every stone. O, to be out of it—free—forgetting! I remember I fell on my knees as if in prayer and with dreadful earnestness began to repeat the Rules, passionately desiring the garden of peace.
“I have no parents. I make the heaven and the earth my parents. I have no weapons—I make submission my strength.” Light broke in my brain. Submission? Then should I dictate—should I trust myself to my own choice of where I would be? Arima had warned me against return.
“If you had used what we call ‘extension’ and had gone on you would have been on the other side of the mountain.” If there were to be refuge for such as I it could only lie along the way of courage. I knew it—I knew it.
I changed my thought instantly. “Set me where I should be if it is in the gateway of hell.” And again. “Only free me of myself. Let me go forward. There is no sin like cowardice. Better lust and murder and the fight to the death with them than cowardice.”
Then, with an intensity that shook me like a leaf in storm I uttered the words of power, hiding my face in a very passion of belief.
Quiet. I lifted my face and looked about me for the terrible way I had accepted. I was lying on the broken steps ascending to the monastery and the House Built upon Clouds at Naniwa. And it was dawn.
The wonder of peace! The sun had not yet out-soared the eastern trees and every bough dropped dew to the glittering grass. A bird, its little clenching feet on a blossomed twig beside me, sang like all the bliss of heaven. In a pool at my feet the lotus, child of the clear cold stream, raised rosy chalices to the sky and from it ran a stream divinely clear and bright. The sun might have been the first that ever shone upon a perfected world untroubled by man, so clear and clean the water-gold of the morning.
I stood up and looked about me drawing deep breaths of purity. Above me beneath a great tree, lost in contemplation, sat the Abbot Gyōsen.
I stumbled towards him. I remember I said: “I have come,” and that he motioned with his hand to a place beside him. Together we watched the slow crescendo of the mighty music of the dawn.