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Kathmandu,Sunday April 16, 2000 Baishakh 04, 2057.
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Ekai Kawaguchi : The enigmatic
trespasser
By D B Gurung
What are we to make of Ekai Kawaguchi? A
Meiji-sponsored spy? A poet-monk? An illegal trespasser? A spiritual drifter? These
questions are already an answer in themselves, for as Heidegger put it, "The essence
of man has the form of a question." But one fact is far above all the speculations
surrounding the mystery of his identity, that he was an enigmatic adventurous Japanese. It
is difficult to believe that he was not a spy from the point of view of his command of
several languages, including Sanskrit which he mastered like any Vedic pundit; he was
successful in masquerading himself with a false identification as Serai Amchi, a Chinese
monk when he sneaked into Tibet at a period when foreigners were not allowed in; he
created a healthy rapport with poet Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Das, a
British-sponsored Tibetan scholar/spy, who taught Ekai Tibetan, and met with Nepali King
Prithvi Bikram Shah and Premier Chandra Shamsher Rana. Of all the Kawaguchi scholars,
Prof. Musashi Tachikawa uncompromisingly believes that Kawaguchi was a spy and had
contributed nothing to Buddhist studies in Japan, however, acknowledges his travels. To
him Kawaguchi’s clandestine dispatch to China and Tibet was the euphoria of the Meiji
government, and a symbolic expression of modernization, revelation and expansion of Japan.
Prof Tachikawa further makes this standpoint:
I would have revered him as a true monk if he had
revealed his identity in Lhasa and died to save the lives of all those people who had
helped and protected him. But he did not do so. Instead he escaped.
Almost throughout the book, Prof Abhi Subedi
passionately and undauntedly argues that Kawaguchi was neither a spy nor a state-sponsored
traveller, but only a lay Buddhist Zen monk, a spiritual seeker and a poet, who trespassed
several foreign states illegally. He epitomizes the travels of this subaltern monk in a
melange of two poles of consciousness: love of pristine nature and spirituality. But this
assumption always cannot be taken in favourably due to sundry reasons as discussed.
Kawaguchi left Japan at an era when Imperial Japan had fallen into a mad wolf-race for
modernization with a seen-through ambition of extending its empire with guns and canons in
the Asian continent, starting from China, in the early and the later thirties and forties
of the twentieth century, which eventually ended up in a nightmare of disaster. But the
sad irony is that "many Japanese of the present generation (still) strongly believe
that their fathers and grandfathers came to China to do good", write Bartholet and
Esaki-Smith in the Newsweek, July 20,’98. It was a disconcerting form of
psychological agility that had made it possible for Ekai Kawaguchi to trespass alien
territories without possessing a travel document, which could be either brought about by
spiritual urges, or instigated for a specific secret mission under state sponsorship. To a
modern eye, Kawaguchi’s visit in the Asian states including Nepal more than a century
back is significant, and Prof Subedi’s assertion that this monk is "a strong
metaphor of peace and diplomacy for Japan today" is equally noteworthy. Although Ekai
returned home in 1915 carrying loads of scriptures and samples of flora and fauna of the
states he visited, he was not welcomed very kindly by many. Why? The inference is clear
that his was not a holy mission as presumed by many, including the writer of Ekai
Kawaguchi : The Trespassing Insider, who wilfully or ignorantly barked a wrong tree.
Yes, a spy can also be a poet and a diary keeper.
Despite his profound love and admiration for Tibet
where he was experiencing a solitary life, full of pains and uncharted satori as well,
Kawaguchi remained a Japanese, a nostalgic patriot with a great attachment to his native
Japan with its unique poetic tradition as one appended below:
When rising slow among the mountain heights,
The moon I see in those Tibetan wilds,
My fancy views that orb as Sovereign Lord
Of that Celestial Land, my country dear,
Those islands smiling in the far-off East.
This abrupt out-burst of nostalgia nevertheless
enriches the verse with a sense of aestheticism. The following uta depicts a level of
satori, the jnyana he acquires, the moment which defines its own raison d’être:
How beautiful
It is to see grass dead, but blooming yet
With frost, upon a high plateau.
Ekai was a monk representing both holy and poetic
nomadism according to the author of the book. His poetry equals the rank of other
monk-poets like Ryokan, Basho, Gusai or Shutaku, which records the moments of epiphany,
temporal crisis and aesthetics saturated in the Zen phenomenon, the sound of silence.
Prof. Subedi, a poet himself, whose poetry, in fact, far outweighs his prose in style and
potential, digs into the poetic tradition of Zen monks, together with a comprehensive
survey of Kawaguchi’s works in a series of systematic analysis, combining keen
insight and scholarship.
The monk-poets combine individualism, the original
moments of creativity with the boarder spiritual and communal harmony, a mode of unique
communication, a literary partnership, a unique brotherhood not seen in any other poetic
spiritual tradition. It is the sharing of the poetry – sharing of the moments of
satori, or that of the flash of the jnyana with fellow monks or poets....
Apart from the readability of this work, though a
stack of unpleasant cookie-cutter repetitions frequently assails one, the probing accounts
of the self-imposed exile of the monk and moments of satori, are interestingly laid down.
Given the overall perspective of this publication, the author should have cast this
handsome book into a genre of hagiography rather than these extended essays on this
mysterious nomadic monk. Nevertheless, this doesn’t diminish the scholarly merits and
ingenuity in the author. The quality of analysis and presentation makes one anticipate a
delicacy of high-level erudition at least by Nepali standards. Here, he concludes his
sweeping views on this monk and the distinction of his excursion:
Kawaguchi’s history is the history of an
individual. He had weaknesses and strengths like any other human being. He lived and
searched for meaning and references like the character in a modern Japanese novel. His
dream was to awaken in the realm of divine and scripture. But being too pragmatic a
person, he failed in that, and he did not regret it. In short, he was a round character in
the grand narrative that he wrote himself in a very Japanese style leaving a message that
modern Japan has no choice but to follow – that is the message of peace, love and
light.
In a sheer contrast, Mishima’s Mizoguchi, the
young priest (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) whose mind is obsessed and tormented by
the unsurpassable beauty of Kinkokuji (The Golden Temple, Kyoto), finally devastates it by
setting it on fire. But in Kawaguchi’s case his devastation on the Tibetan’s
sense of hygiene is far more civilized in nature by levelling them as the "filthiest
things" inhabiting the highest plateau of the world. Sadly, he failed to appreciate
the immunity of the tough Tibetans and the peerless beauty of their unique culture, during
his spiritual quest for satori in his much-cherished Shangri-La, Tibet. Or was it the
outcome of a sense of alienation that blossomed into something close to full-scale culture
shock? Ekai’s virtues were richly Japanese virtues; his flaws were deeply Japanese
flaws.
Prof Subedi’s elaborate report on
Kawaguchi’s visit to China, Tibet, Nepal and India, in which this celibate monk
springs out from the elegant pages of the book, is unforgettable. This is the evidence of
his one-year long research in the country of the monk’s birth. But, here arises a
mounting perturbation that are we really short of local heroes as who do not seem to
deserve to go into print, because the author has arbitrarily settled on a foreign hero who
himself has a skin-deep "name" in his own country, let alone the outside world?
Prof Subedi should have gone for a bigger fish to fry, and reasonably a native species
would have been far better. Or should one say it is a harvest of sleepwalk under the
influence of sake, sushi or yen?
Still, it wasn’t a gross waste of time. Nippon
or Nihon, which means, "source of the sun" and samurai is worth visiting for any
one.
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