NOBUNAGA'S CASTLE

Went on Sunday to a mountain across the Lake to check out Oda Nobunaga's Azuchi castle digs, he wasn't there, hasn't been for several centuries now, nothing left on that mountaintop but huge stone foundations that cast the eye into high fortifications and the mind into standing guard outdoors in high twisting corridors of stone on savage winter nights alert in the dark of long before electricity, listening through the howl of the wind for sounds of conspirators edging up through tilted blackness, and only three years after all that magnificence was built, Oda made his biggest mistake, got cornered at a lowdown temple near Kyoto's Gion district (still a pleasure center today), and slit his own belly rather than be captured by an upstart, and the very next day the plotters burned those brand-new golden towers, those treasure walls down to the bare rough stones I saw on Sunday, overlooking vast holdings that belong to no one after all, is what the ruin says, and only ten days later Hideyoshi carried out an amazing forced march and sent the surprised plotters themselves to where Oda and his fabulous dream-filled castle had gone, and there 400 years later was I, standing on a post stone 30 meters below where Oda's candle-lit tower room had risen into the night with its painted walls, broad doors open to the vastness beneath the stars, no one there today but some elderly visitors stumbling to the top of what's left of the foundation to exclaim on the view from here, in fact one can see much much farther in so many ways from such places as this, royal chambers in the air where once were trysts and plottings now repossessed by the crowns of trees, the fights of crows and how fickle is power, as one's boot fits the wear in the time-tilted grand steps of stone a nation once climbed, in obeisance now as far from here as Nobunaga is...

VISIT TO ENRYAKU-JI

Moving through the ancientness of the trees in the mist up on Hiei-zan (Mt. Hiei) to stand before the Shaka-do (simply, Buddha-Place), I looked up at the time-worn beauty of its orange walls and yellow-tipped eaves rising in the rain, and in the silvered light I realized that this was the way to see these things, that they are best seen in a dim light like history itself, with the rainglow of now about and beneath the eaves, the movement of the rain past the stillness imparting to the Shaka-do an aura of motive holiness that religious abstractions can only hint at.

In front there was a politely phrased sign saying that 400 years ago warlord Oda Nobunaga had burned the mountain (i.e. he was a lowlife scumbag), and this building had been transported here from Sakamoto by Hideyoshi (apparently some form of recompense). The implicit scumbag tone of the language regarding Nobunaga reminded me of all the signs I used to see in Korea at the famous places, saying that the Japanese had destroyed this, ravaged here, pillaged that etc., the Koreans in this day and age having in Japan a whole nation to malign (as do China and most of Asia); Japan has nothing to malign but its own history.

This sign in front of a Buddhist monument indicates that such animosity is at one remove actually directed toward humanity at its most depraved, more than at nationalities. For it goes without saying that such things went on long before there were "cultures." And of course the monks up here back then had their own armies and their own agenda, and were extremely militant and aggressive, which is why Nobunaga reduced it all to ashes, but nothing is mentioned of the monks, or of what the monk armies did to Kyoto in the name of enlightenment.

Later at the big hall with its blue-tipped eaves, and bamboo growing in stone boxes atop the moss, the deep understanding of things of the soul is spelled in the dance-gesture curves of the thickly cedar-shingled roof and the worn red polish of the lintels, the mist-muffled long velvety bellsound and the generous ancient doorways, the centuries of satori glowing in the grain of the lantern-darkened wood, spirit-echo shimmering in the sheen the feet have worn on the way to all they've prayed for.