Temple Of Dawn by Yukio Mishima Page A

ghat offered the ultimate in purification: it was the outdoor, public crematorium in which all was out in the open in Indian fashion. Yet it was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all things deemed sacred and pure in Benares. Beyond question this location marked the end of the world.
    A corpse wrapped in red cloth was propped against an easy slope of steps adjoining the grotto of Shiva and Sati. It had been soaked in the waters of the Ganges and now awaited its turn for cremation. The red wrapping around the human form showed that the body was that of a woman. White cloth was reserved for men. Relatives waited with tonsured priests under the tent in order to fulfill their duty by throwing butter and incense upon the corpse after the pyre was lit. Just then another white-swathed corpse arrived, borne on a bamboo litter and surrounded by chanting priests and all the relatives. Several children and a black dog chased each other around their feet. As observable in any Indian town, the living were all very much alive and making considerable noise.
    It was six o’clock. Flames suddenly rose in four or five places. As the smoke was blown away in the direction of the temple, the offensive odor did not reach Honda in the boat, but he could see everything clearly.
    To the extreme right all the ashes were gathered together and left to soak in the river water. Individual characteristics that had so obstinately clung to each body were no longer, and the ashes of all, conjoined and finally dissolved in the holy water of the Ganges, thus returned to their four elemental constituents and the vast Universe. The under part of the ash mound was inextricably mixed with the damp earth of the area before being soaked in the Ganges. The Hindus do not build tombs. Honda suddenly recalled the shudder that had gone through him at the Aoyama Cemetery when he had visited Kiyoaki’s grave, the horror he had felt that Kiyoaki was quite definitely not under the gravestone.
    The corpses were laid on the fire one after the other. As the binding cords burned away and the red and white shrouds were consumed in the fire, a black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep. The corpses that had been placed on the pyre first turned a dark gray. Sizzling sounds, like those of a pot boiling over, could be heard across the water. The skulls did not burn easily, and a cremator constantly walked about, poking a bamboo pole through the ones that were still smoldering well after the bodies had been reduced to ash. The sinews in his strong black arms that powerfully drove the pole through the skulls reflected the flames, while the crunching sounds he made reverberated against the temple walls.
    The slow progress of purification of the human body, returning its parts to its four elemental constituents . . . the resistant human flesh and its useless odor lingering after death . . . something red opening in the flames, something shiny writhing, black powdery particles dancing up with the fiery sparks. There was a flashing animation in the flames, as though something were being created. From time to time, when suddenly the firewood noisily collapsed and part of the fire disappeared, the cremator would pile on more wood; and from time to time unexpectedly lofty flames would leap upward, almost licking at the temple balcony.
    There was no sadness. What seemed heartlessness was actually pure joy. Not only were samsara and reincarnation basic belief, but they were actually accepted as a part of nature, constantly renewing itself before one’s eyes, the rice paddy and its growing plants, the trees bringing forth their fruit. Some assistance from human hands was necessary, just as harvest and cultivation required human intervention; people were born to take their turns in this natural progression.
    In India the source of everything that seemed heartless was connected with a hidden, gigantic, awesome