Temple Of Dawn Read Online Free Page A

measurements, and he could foretell the outcome of most situations. Actually, except for natural calamities, historical events occurred, no matter how unexpected they might seem, only after long maturation. History is as hesitant as a young maiden before a romantic proposal. For Honda there was always a hint of the artificial in any event that corresponded precisely to his own wishes and that approached at a pleasing speed. Therefore, if he wanted to entrust his actions to the laws of history it was always best for him to adopt a reserved attitude toward everything. He had seen too many instances where one could get nothing one wanted and where determination had ultimately been quite futile. Even things which one should have been able to obtain if one had not craved them managed to slip away simply because they had been coveted too much. Suicide seemed so completely dependent on one’s own desire and resolve, yet Isao had had to spend a whole year in prison in order to carry it out successfully.
    However, on reflection, Isao’s act of assassination and his suicide seemed like brilliant evening stars, harbingers, in a night filled with glittering constellations, that led the way to the February Twenty-Sixth Incident. To be sure, the assassins had hoped for dawn, but what materialized was night. And now, be the times what they may, that night was almost spent, and an uneasy, stifling morning had settled in, one that none of those activists would have imagined.
    The treaty drawn up by Japan, Germany, and Italy had angered a segment of the nationalists and those who were pro-French and pro-English; but the great majority of those who liked Europe and the West and even the old-fashioned proponents of a pan-Asia were pleased about it. Japan was to be married, not to Hitler, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West.
    Honda, of course, had never submitted to such romantic prejudice, but he sensed that the times were somehow tremulously ripening and it was clear that some dream was forming. And now that he was here, away from Tokyo, the sudden rest and leisure resulted curiously in fatigue, and he could do nothing to prevent this plunge into reminiscing about things past.
    He had not abandoned his idea, the one he had stressed long, long ago when talking with the nineteen-year-old Kiyoaki: the will to engage oneself in history is the essence of human purpose. Yet the instinctive fear that a nineteen-year-old boy has about his own character turns out, at times, to be extremely prophetic. While proclaiming such a concept, Honda at the time was in reality expressing despair in his own makeup. This despondency increased as he grew older and finally became a chronic ailment. But his personality had never changed in the slightest. He recalled a most terrifying passage from the chapter on the Three Recompenses
     
∗ in the Treatise on the Establishment of Reality , which was among the two or three Buddhist texts recommended by the Abbess of the Gesshu Temple:
    That one takes pleasure in doing evil
    Is because that evil is not ripe.
    Thus, Honda took a listless, tropical pleasure in the gracious reception he had met in Bangkok, in what he heard and saw, and even in what he ate and drank. But that was not really proof that he had been guiltless of evil acts in the nearly fifty years of his life. His evil was surely not yet so ripe as the fragrant fruit ready to fall of itself from the branch.
    In Thai Theravada Buddhism with the artless concept of causality found in the Southern Buddhist Canon, Honda recognized the causality of the Laws of Manu that had impressed him so deeply in his youth. Throughout, Hindu deities show their grotesque faces. The sacred naga -serpent, the mythical garuda , half giant, half eagle with golden body, white face, and red wings, which adorn the eaves