Temple Of Dawn by Yukio Mishima Page B

joy! Honda was afraid of grasping such delight. But having witnessed the extremes he had, he knew that he should never recover from the shock. It was as though all of Benares were afflicted with a holy leprosy and that his very vision had been contaminated by this incurable disease.
    But his impression of having seen the ultimate was incomplete until the following moment arrived, one that struck Honda’s heart with a crystalline thrill of fright.
    It was the moment when the sacred cow turned toward him.
    In this crematorium there was a white cow, one of those sacred animals permitted anything anywhere in India. The sacred cow, accustomed to the fires, had been chased off by the cremator and stood just out of reach of the flames in front of the dark temple arcade. Inside was total blackness; and the white of the animal seemed awe-inspiring and full of sublime wisdom. The white belly reflecting the flickering flames appeared like cold Himalayan snow bathed in moonlight. It was a pure synthesis of impassible snow and sublime flesh in the body of an animal. The flames were smoke-logged; sometimes flashes of red dominated, again to be hidden by the swirling smoke.
    Just then the sacred cow turned its majestic white face to Honda through the vague smoke rising from the burning bodies and looked directly at him.
    That night, as soon as he finished dinner, Honda left word that he would be leaving before dawn the next morning, and fell asleep with the help of a nightcap.
    Legions of phantasmagoria cluttered his dreams. His dream fingers brushed a keyboard they had never touched before, producing strange sounds. They examined like an engineer all corners of the structured universe so far known to him. The limpid Mount Miwa suddenly appeared, then the Offing Rock, reclining rock of horror on the peak of which dwelt the gods; blood spouted from a crevice and the goddess Kali emerged, her red tongue protruding. A burned corpse rose in the form of a beautiful youth, his hair and loins covered with the brilliantly pure leaves of the sacred sakaki tree. Then the obscene scene at the temple instantly turned into the cool precincts of a Japanese shrine covered with clean pebbles. All ideas, all gods were jointly turning the handle of the gigantic wheel of samsara. The great disk like a spiral nebula was slowly turning, carrying masses of people who, unaware of the effects of samsara, were simply happy, angry, sad, or joyful, quite like those who lived their daily lives totally unaware of the rotation of the earth. It was like a ferris wheel at night all decorated with lights in the amusement park of the gods.
    Perhaps Indians knew all this. This fear had followed Honda into his very dreams. Just as the fact of the earth’s rotation is never detected through any of the human senses and is barely recognizable by scientific reasoning, samsara, karma, and reincarnation too were perhaps not discernible through ordinary perception and reason, but only through some supernatural power, some extremely accurate, systematic, intuitive super-logic. And perhaps this perception made the Indians appear so listless, so resistant to progress, and so devoid of all those human emotions—joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—that are common standards for measuring ordinary human beings.
    Of course, these were the rough impressions of a traveler who had barely scratched the surface of the land. Dreams often combine the highest level of symbols and the most vulgar of thoughts. Perhaps Honda was following in his dreams the old habit of his judgeship days: a cold, prosaic, speculative process had inadvertently put in its appearance. His professional habits and his character seemed like a cat’s tongue, too sensitive to hot food, forcing him to cool at once any warm, unidentified elements and to transform them into conceptually frozen food. He was probably using this same old automatic defense mechanism, exactly like so many others who are particularly cautious in