(What is told in this story of jujutsu or judo, the Japanese national
science of self-defence and attack, is from the point of view of an
expert, strange as it may appear.)
This is the true story of an experience which befell me in Japan. For
six years I have kept silence and I tell it now only because my own
knowledge assures me of the growing interest in matters relating to what
Oriental scholars call “the formless world”—that is to say the sphere
surrounding us which we now know to be independent of solidity and time
as we conceive them, a world not to be grasped by our fallible senses
yet apprehended by some of us in certain conditions not tracked and
charted definitely. Modern science, feeling after the mysterious, has
named this world which permeates ours and yet is invisible, the Fourth
Dimension because it is not subject to the three illusions of length,
breadth and height which imprison most of us from the cradle to the
grave. But why philosophize? Let me tell my story.
My name is Hay, and I am a middle-class Scotchman, a public school and
University man who, like others, took part in the War. I came through
whole and sound but it left its mark. For one thing, it knocked to
smithereens the average ideals of success and attainment, which, again
like others, had shaped my life, and from being a strictly average man
in that I followed the herd in all its decencies of convention the war
left me naked and unsheltered in the open without a rag of conviction to
hide me from the truth if it should happen to pass my way. But I had
ceased to believe in its existence outside the things we use in daily
intercourse.
Another effect also. My war experience was naval and chiefly in the
Mediterranean where men of all nationalities were coming and going, and
that constant contact wore thin the shell an Englishman inhabits—such
crustaceans as we are!—until I began to see in what different terms the
universe may be stated from the differing angles of race and
nationality. What helped me to this understanding was a friendship I
struck up with a Japanese naval officer—a remarkable fellow as I
thought then and know now. He spoke English perfectly and had not only
read but inwardly digested what he read, which is more than can be said
for most of us. I owed him two services besides. He taught me to speak
Japanese—I am quick at languages,—and being a great expert in the
national art of defence and attack which is known as jujutsu, he began
to give me lessons which were the beginning of much. His name was Arima,
his age the same as mine—thirty-four,—and for very different reasons
we both left our services when the war shut down.
Yet I knew our friendship would not end there, nor did it. One day while
I was dining alone in my club in London, wondering whether I should ever
again find anything which I honestly felt worth doing, a letter reached
me. I knew the almost mercantile precision of the hand before I opened
it and it sent a pleasurable thrill through nerves which had been
stagnant with exhaustion since I had been ashore.
“Hay sama,
“I think much of you and wonder if you ever free a thought to
cross the sea to my little house in Kyushu. That is our southern
island and since illness drove me from our navy I live there. I
need the sunshine of a friend’s company and if you feel the same
need come, I beg you, and make me a long visit. I live in a
beautiful valley run through by a river which will please you.
It flows by rocks and mountains, pine woods and prosperous
villages; a happy land. Not far from my house is a temple to
Hachiman, God of War. I do not pay my devotions there for
reasons which you will understand. But come, my friend. I have
learned many things since we met and no doubt it is the same
with you.”
That letter flung up a window in a stifling room. It meant escape from
the dull indifference besetting me and contact with those people who of
all in the world preserve the Stoic virtues which seemed to be the only
ones likely to extricate me from my Slough of Despond. I wrote my answer
within ten minutes and in two months I was in Japan.
I did not go at once to Arima, nor will I tell my first adventures on
landing and making myself at home in Tokyo. They are neither good
reading nor thinking. I had more than one reason to regret that Arima
had made me free of the country by giving me its tongue. Pretty well
worn out, with a stale taste of sour regrets in my mouth, I went down at
last to Kyushu, and in the garden of Arima’s delightful little house I
take up the story.
It was a true Japanese garden, a wide landscape seen through the
diminishing end of a telescope. There was a forest, a mountain which had
spilt its mighty boulders by the side of a running river with a Chinese
bridge thrown over it. True, one could have bestridden the mountain and
hopped the river, but what did that matter? The real river, the
Kogagawa, rippled beside the grass which ran down to where a great
willow dipped cool fingers in liquid crystal from the mountain heights,
and under that green veil of drooping boughs with eyes half closed it
was possible to dream that the little garden passed into the idea which
had filled its maker’s mind, and became grand and terrible, a place of
wild beauty and awe.
“It must be so,” said Arima smiling, “because he saw it so, and what a
man has once clearly seen is registered immortal and can be seen by
others when necessary.”
He sat under the willow, his fine bronzed face and throat bare to the
flitting shadows of trembling leaves.
“Who made it?” I asked. “He cannot have been a common man.”
“He was my great-great-grandfather and very far from a common man. I
have a paper in his own hand which tells why and how he made it and it
is a very strange story.”
He threw away his cigarette and sat looking at the wandering paths paved
with flat stones here and there, the little flowering herbs springing in
the crevices; at the mountain where, altering the scale, you might
wander and be lost for dreadful days in mighty gorges and ravines. The
river swept round it in a rapid current possibly two feet wide and
joined the Kogagawa in a lovely bay quite four feet across where a fairy
fleet might have anchored after a prosperous voyage from Stratford on
Avon in the dream of a midsummer night.
“Some day I will read you his paper, but not yet. I have reasons for
delay. The spirit of our country is hovering over you but has not yet
entered in and possessed you. People come to Japan in ship-loads and see
the surface bright with colour and gaiety which we spread out before
them. But they do not know. We do not mean they should. To be
truthful—I do not think any foreigner can understand Japan unless he is
a Buddhist at heart— As you are.”
“I?” I echoed in uttermost astonishment. “My good fellow, I am nothing.
I haven’t the devil of a ghost of a notion what it all means.”
He looked at me with a quaint smile hiding in the deeps of his narrow
eyes. It peered out like a wise gnome, as old as the hills and older.
“Your downstairs self knows very well. It has not passed it on yet to
your honourable upstairs self. But the wireless begins to talk and the
air is full of voices beating at your ears. What stories they will tell
you! I should like to hear them.”
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.
But, clambering down the hundreds of beautiful broken steps overgrown
with flowers and moss where so many generations have come and gone in
pilgrimage, I said nothing to Arima. It had become impossible. Something
called the war to my mind and I said something careless, but he waved
that aside.
“We must speak of it no more. Why steep one’s soul in illusion? Much
that we thought real and allowed to affect us was nothing, and the
emotions it caused less than nothing. I have awaked. You are near the
dawn.”
I thought this remark cruel, and said something heated about the dead
who had paid with their lives for the illusion—the ignorant things one
does say! He received it with his invulnerable Japanese courtesy.
“I went too fast. Pardon me. The Buddha alone can impart knowledge to
the Buddha, and who am I that I should speak? The time and the master
come together. Here, my friend,—you should drink of this running water.
It comes from a beautiful spring in the mountain above. They call it
‘Light Eternal’ and say that to taste of it is to drink perfect health.
If only it were as easy as that!”
By the mossy rock lay two little dippers of pure white wood. I was
extremely English at that instant and nothing would have induced me to
soil my lips with a cup used by strangers. I hooped my hands and
drank,—he, from the dipper.
“You miss the sacrament,” he said, “but the water in any case is good.”
And so we went home, talking of the treasures of the monastery, wonders
of art, famous throughout Japan.
But now, in the gathering night concentrating its radiance in a moon so
glorious as to obscure the nearer stars, in the breathless silence made
vocal by the ripple of the river on its eternal way, beneath the dropped
veil of the willow influences were loosed which opened my heart, and I
told Arima my experience of the afternoon. I asked whether he had been
conscious of what had passed.
His face was a shadow beneath the boughs. I saw only the moonlight in
his eyes as he replied.
“No. I knew nothing. The Abbot Gyōsen was speaking with me all the time.
I thought you were absorbed in the view. It is most wonderful.”
That could not satisfy me.
“Impossible,” I said. “For how could that strange formula come into my
mind? I never heard it before. I have not the faintest notion what it
means.”
There was a brief silence, then he answered slowly.
“I scarcely think it my part to clear up the matter. Will you not ask
the Abbot himself? Yet there are one or two things I could say if you
wish.”
Seeing I was in earnest he continued.
“The Abbot Gyōsen is a remarkable man. In the first place seclusion in a
mountain temple in devout contemplation purifies the heart, and then he
is a deep student of Zen. Zen is the science of mental or spiritual
concentration. In India they call it Yoga. A man who possesses this
knowledge can do things which to the ignorant of its powers appear
miracles. They are perfectly natural however. In his youth he had
magnificent skill in jujutsu. No man could stand up against him. There
was a reason for that.”
He was silent for a moment, and then added:
“His influence is enormous. You would scarcely credit the true stories I
could tell of him.”
I listened in deep reflection, staring at the broken ripples of
moonlight in the river. Again the weird intake of breath seized me, my
heart beat rapidly with the consciousness that I was face to face with
the Unknown; that it had eyes but I was blind, groping in the dark.
Light, light: That was the cry within me.
“The formula?” I asked, when my breath steadied again.