Yukio Tamura walked down the slope under the
ragged line of pine trees. Beneath the trees were the tattered remains of a
collapsed stone wall. The grass was long and green and was caught by the golden
light of the Sun just above the westward hills.
Maybe on those distant hills some peasants
were returning with their buffaloes from the paddies, but here Yukio Tamura was
entirely alone.
Accepting, accidental, alone,
ambiguous, anonymous, artless, austere, blurry, broken, calm, cheerless, chill,
clean, coarse, comfortable, compact, contradictory, corroded, crude, dark,
deep, degraded, delicate, desiccated, desolate, dim, discouraged, dispirited,
earthy, egalitarian, elusive, enveloping.
The bark of the tree was rough and gnarled
and patterned with deep fissures and, across the outer planes of its surface,
the trunk was painted with a pale blue-green lichen. Yukio Tamura sat and leaned
his back against the trunk, adjusted his robe and began to chant his sutras as
the sky billowed with ochre, vermillion, heron blue, soft owl grey.
His devotions done, Yukio Tamura pulled from
his bag a roasted beni-imo. With some hijiki seaweed and dried daikon it
made a meal and the swampy pool nearby provided a drink flavoured with earth
and decay.
Ephemeral, faint, fragile,
fragmented, hidden, homely, humble, idiosyncratic, imperfect, impermanent,
incomplete, inconspicuous, indigenous, indistinguishable, intuitive, invisible,
inward, irregular, lean, lowly, melancholy, minor, miserable, misshapen,
modest, mournful, murky, natural, obscure, organic, overlooked, private.
There were, no doubt,
theologians who held that a monk should not possess a hare-fur blanket but
they, no doubt, slept soundly at night on soft tatami matting under piles of
brocade, beside a warm hibachi and
beneath a waterproof roof.
Beyond the pool, the
damp ground was thick with tall rushes. Yukio Tamura crawled – in the growing gloom –
between the plants and found a long, decaying leaf. Standing, he took the tops
of the rushes he could reach and tied the tops of the tall leaves together with
his impromptu rope. He crawled into his ‘grass hut’ and wrapped his hare-fur
blanket around him.
Quiet, restrained, rough,
rusted, rustic, sad, secluded, simple, small, soft, subdued, tarnished, tender,
tentative, tranquil, ugly, unassuming, unconventional, understated,
unencumbered, unprepossessing, unpretentious, unrefined, unsophisticated,
unstudied, vague, withered, womb-like.
After morning devotions, the sky was a pale
eggshell blue trailing to yellow oxide. Mist clung to the hollows, and all the
grass and weeds were hung with spiders’ webs tricked out in a billion fine
water drops. A single black butterfly rowed its way up into the sky.
Yukio Tamura untied the strand of rush from
the top of his ‘house’ and the house disappeared as the rushes returned to
their former position.
As
he walked away through the damp grass, Yukio Tamura left a trail of green
through the silvered sward where his passage shook the thick dew from the grass.
But already that trail was fading as the grass dried beneath the strengthening
Sun.Dhiraja
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