ICHI-GO ICHI-E
If you meet a Buddha, kill him; if you meet a patriarch, kill him; if you meet a sage, kill him; if you meet your father or mother, kill them; if you meet your relatives, kill them. Only then will you obtain liberation and dwell in complete emancipated freedom, without getting emotionally caught up in things. – Rinzai
Shouldering the divine simulacrum, the mikoshi men chanted “Wasshoi wasshoi!” and passed slowly through the large torii into the cemetery’s temporary shrine. But Takao Abe was not feeling particularly festive. He felt abysmal. Perhaps because the weather was so abysmal. He had no idea why the tourists were looking at him so much. All those innumerable, reeking Western tourists, who had drunk their innumerable, reeking beers in Sapporo and were now missing the mikoshi’s radiant beauty. He would be only too happy to knock them all down, this noisy group, to smash all the curious figures into many pieces with one single blow of his fist.
Their spying presence filled him with disgust. They never ceased with their vulgar spying. They constantly badgered him with insinuations. If someone from this group dared to ask him about the death of his brother—someone who didn’t speak Japanese and would likely mispronounce hara-kiri, saying instead “hiri-kiri” or even “hari-kari”—he wouldn’t hesitate to strike them dead without a word. He’d end the life of anyone who gave the slightest hint of anything like an approach toward the gruesome topic of seppuku.
He passed under the great torii and walked along the entranceway for a short distance before turning onto a path that wound around the outside of the cemetery. Another short distance later, he turned onto an even narrower path, which led into the cemetery. From here, he made his way directly past the masses of stonework and small memorials where sprigs of star anise grew, to the attraction with which his client had charged Takao Abe & Associates, his architecture firm. This client wanted his firm to give visitors of their cemetery a more serene appreciation of the Buddha. The cemetery comprised many hectares of lush land and gently sloping hills of black pine, but the Daibutsu sat alone in a field, unsheltered from the weather.
Everything about this Buddha, from its rounded shoulders to the folds of its robe, was on a grand scale. Its chest was partially visible, protruding from the graceful lines of the sleeves that flowed down from its shoulders. Snails coiled like hair on the Buddha’s head, its long earlobes hung like dried fruit from a tropical tree, and its eyes were sick with bloom. But the cold stone had nothing to say of the Buddha.
Takao Abe turned his gaze away from the Daibutsu onto the emptiness, onto the unbuilt-ness, onto the pure possibility. He then closed his eyes and let himself see the stretch of cemetery beyond the graves. And like Minerva, born from the forehead of Jupiter, he comprehended the situation with wisdom: the project would be on the scale of landscape rather than architecture. Which meant that it was going to be a challenge—for all his ideas and designs typically culminated in building his own masterworks, not in enhancing those of another builder. Always one step ahead, he was already dealing with his reaction to that consideration. Already he was telling himself, I have to go forward. You have to go forward. Otherwise you lose. Go on living. Go on working.
The rain wasn’t falling as hard as it had been that morning. The pavement, covered with moss and fallen leaves, glistened in the winter shower. Takao Abe was without rain gear and was dressed in an old Western-style suit. His bulging necktie was fastened around his sweat-stained collar, and his face had taken on the hard and sombre expression of an insect. Despite his discomfort, he wanted to walk awhile to collect his thoughts.
Creation was fighting. Designing was a battle. When he was nineteen years old, following in the footsteps of his older brother, he’d fought a dozen professional kendo matches. And in his spare time, he’d visited not only Buddhist temples throughout Japan, the designs of which fascinated him beyond all expectation, but also Daibutsu statues, which were inevitably there too. So he wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the Japanese tradition of giant Buddha statues. He knew, for instance, that historically, the Daibutsu were made of wood, then bronze. Now, apparently, they were made of stone. He recalled the renowned works of colossal statuary and then considered this particular big Buddha, beginning to formulate what the completed project would look like. There was more than enough time for that. Time wasn’t a problem. There was no reason to hurry.
As he watched the statue, fascination gradually overtook him. Little by little, he edged closer to it. At length he looked and examined, and as he probed up and around the Buddha, it seemed that he was and was not. He felt his existence and did not feel it. He felt that all this before him might vanish, and that he too might vanish. Just one sunya thing evanescing into another. At that moment, all the statue’s surroundings were there only to serve it. It was the very hub, the very nucleus of the universe.
I’m going to have to rearrange the environment, Takao Abe thought, on the high-speed train headed back to Osaka. He would have to shape the landscape around the preexisting statue. It was a landscape project and nothing else—exclusively a landscape project, even if there was a figure of the Buddha involved. He couldn’t repeat this often enough to himself. But for now, he didn’t say anything, either to himself or out loud. For several kilometres he simply sketched in silence. Because why say anything? No one understood, anyway. Better to be quiet and sketch.
After several solitary hours had passed, Takao Abe found himself quite hungry, so he went to the train’s sushi restaurant, sat at the bar, and ordered a sukiyaki dinner. No one else was around. The cook chipped at the crusted ash in the cold hibachi with a pair of tongs and then, after putting on a fresh apron, threw himself into the task of chopping vegetables. His busy fingertips filled platters with multicoloured sashimi and broiled fish and meats.
Lying there in the lamplight, Takao Abe’s plate of sushi seemed dull and pale. As he ate, he tried to think about how best to deal with the project, but chewing interfered with his calculations. He acknowledged that the silence of eating sushi was a relief to him. After all, how many more times before he died, he wondered, would he experience the pleasure of eating? Whenever Takao Abe talked about his brother’s suicide, he could either describe it but not be able to explain it, or he could explain it but not be able to describe it. But really, he didn’t need words to make himself understood. He always understood it best when he operated in silence. Given that he had the mind of a twenty-first-century-ite, he struggled to express his thoughts on the topic. For seppuku was an idea that did not belong to this era—it was an intolerable idea of beauty and purity that stubbornly refused to be acknowledged as what it truly was: not only pure righteousness but also pure evil.
The Daibutsu was a grievous sight: a Daibutsu that had lost its world. So enormous, immeasurably enormous—and yet it was nothing at all. It didn’t belong here nor anywhere upon the earth, having originated from a heavenly realm beyond concept that no longer existed because the heavenly realm of Vajrayana, of the truly eternal present, had itself disappeared from the human world.
Takao Abe wondered when and why something like a Buddha would come to this world. It was difficult to encounter a Buddha. He seemed to remember reading somewhere that you would meet one only once in a million kalpas. At first, he thought, we look for support from the person closest to us—not a Buddha. But clinging to this person ultimately means the suicide of our spirit, the suicide of our being, our soul. Then we think that we must turn to the professionals of the mind, the soul, the world of things. But in them we meet only deep disappointment. It was obvious to Takao Abe that no help was to be expected from anywhere at all, and under no circumstances from people living the religious life.
And yet it remained here, this Daibutsu from a heavenly realm remained in the region where Takao Abe’s samurai ancestors had once guarded and pacified the Jomon people of northern Honshū and Hokkaidō, until Abe no Sadato surrendered. After which, Abe no Sadato’s adversaries returned to Kyoto, carrying his head.
Takao Abe’s brother had had a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral. His body had been arranged in the zazen position inside the sitting coffin, giving the appearance that he was a warrior in silent meditation. After that, Takao Abe had started taking a route past an old temple whenever he cycled home from work at the Osaka office. The doors were always open. He’d been meaning to go in, just to see what it looked like inside. He wondered why he hadn’t—why he hadn’t gone inside and sat down for the evening chants and silent group meditation and then listened to the temple’s quiet. Maybe it was insecurity. Maybe awkwardness. Maybe just laziness.
The answer to the design problem, when it finally came, was an evasion. Though in danger of losing the forest for the trees, Takao Abe nonetheless reasoned that if he were to conceal the religious artifact within the very land itself, the Daibutsu would no longer need to be on display. In fact, it would no longer be a Daibutsu but a hibutsu, a hidden Buddha. It wouldn’t be available for regular viewing, but it would still draw crowds of thousands during specific public events, such as kaichō ceremonies. This evasive solution he’d been searching for came during an afternoon in the office, when he was bent over a meaningless architectural blueprint. If Takao Abe really was a genius and the world of his architecture mere emptiness, then why shouldn’t he be able to prove it? As an architect, he was at the centre of society. He had planned and planned and planned many of the world’s masterful works.
The many drawings rose up beneath his hands. There were no beginnings or ends to them, just moments of continuation. And everything—the spirit, the people, and the geography—all met in one genius loci: the figure of the Buddha. And because all Buddhists believed that the Buddha represented reality, Takao Abe wasn’t quite sure what to call his idea. Cognitively, the Buddha is dead, he thought, but affectively, he is alive. This idea clung to his mind like rust, and he felt a black satisfaction in not naming it. Suddenly, he no longer felt human. That is to say, without ceasing to be a human being, he came into another mode of being in which he got rid of the human part of himself—a part of himself that was merely a thing to all other beings. A dead object. And he became obsessed with something in the part of himself that he had exiled. There was something sinister, something ominous about it. At that moment, he was certain that he was holding the seeds of a problem immense enough to fill the vast emptiness of the cosmos.
His brother had purchased a short blade called a tantō. He’d worn a white cotton kimono and matching hakama, a costume worn for death. The white clothing had seemed to enhance his brother’s air of quiet determination. These culturally significant objects led Takao Abe to speculate about what style of self-disembowelment his brother had eventually chosen. Perhaps single-line disembowelment (ichimonji-bara) or crosswise disembowelment (jumonji-bara)? Maybe crosswise disembowelment in modified T-shape (henkei jumonji-bara)? Or even vertical disembowelment (nambu-bara)? He couldn’t remember which.
Takao Abe’s brother had requested that he be the kaishakunin in the ritual suicide. “I cannot commit hara-kiri alone,” his brother had said. Because after he sliced open his stomach, his intestines would spill onto a small metal tray, and then, having severed the descending aorta, he was sure to die of blood loss or shock if Takao Abe did not decapitate him.
It would be an act of loyalty without courage—an act shot through with anger and burning, with emotional contempt. It would be loyalty that was almost betrayal. The only way Takao Abe could cope with contempt of this sort was to hold onto a belief in his own nobility, and this he did with moderation rather than with the blind traditionalism of his brother. To be the kaishakunin, however, was to take part in a detailed ritual, as Takao Abe’s laidō classes would reveal. He remembered his conundrum well.
To perform kaishaku will mean destroying my brother at the moment of his final agony. It’s all directed against my brother, everything I’ve ever done in my life, perhaps. Instinctively, I’ve always acted against my brother. And now, by realizing my role as kaishakunin in the ritual of kaishaku, I am proceeding most radically against my brother. These proceedings are proceedings against my brother.
The courage that had then propelled Takao Abe to learn how to perform the task of kaishaku had frightened him: his hands had trembled. To calm his nerves, he’d visualized himself as a Japanese Zen monk in the kyudojo releasing the arrow from his bow toward a target. His passion had all the semblance of fire with no function of burning.
Takao Abe would build a prayer hall to enhance the attractiveness of the stone Buddha sculpted so many years ago, by some anonymous sculptor. He’d even gone so far as to inquire with various bureaus about the statue’s biography, but he’d received no results. He felt a tense indecisiveness. The movements and gestures that would lead him to complete his project were not the movements and gestures of faith and devotion to his craft but those of fear and hope—fear and hope that somehow it would become visible that nothing he did was true, sincere, open, or natural.
It was he, right here in his office in Osaka, who surmounted everything with the greatest of sensitivity, because he alone had a heart he could feel, and with his heart he looked at the landscape project. He could see it now, too. Even though Takao Abe was no longer in its presence, the Daibutsu was still deep in his mind, and it was with his heart that he could now see that everything was woven into one undivided essence—for the kami, derived from nature, would always be present: the kami of the earth with the kami of the water, the kami of the water with the kami of the sky, the kami of the rain, the kami of the wind, the kami of the sea and river, the kami of thunder, flowers, rocks, forests, even the kami of the human. Because into the earth and the water and the sky, into this indescribable cosmos, was woven humankind’s fragile existence as well—but merely just one moment that could not be traced. For as soon as it appeared it was no more. It disappeared for all eternity, irrevocably. Nothing else remained.
Only and exclusively the landscape project on Takao Abe’s drafting table. Everything was there in his hand and his heart. He measured precisely, looking at the drawing plans continuously, to measure accurately and to draw accurately. His brother’s repeated clapping in reverence to the gods before committing seppuku still echoed through him.
After Takao Abe had set out food and drink, he drank a farewell cup of sake with his brother, who sat down facing east upon a tatami mat and unfastened his kimono. His brother ate very little, believing it unseemly to have food pour out when the sword cut into his stomach. Takao Abe brushed his brother’s cheeks lightly with rouge, so that the glow of health might remain even after his death. Then his brother took up his short sword, cut open his stomach with it, and pressed his blade to his throat in gesture.
“This is the correct place, brother. Strike with graceful dispatch and bring my life to a brave conclusion.”
Thus, having been issued the order to strike off his brother’s head, Takao Abe—filled with grief at such a parting, having no will to strike such a blow—converted his sadness to anger. He unsheathed his sword, lifted it above his head, and took aim at his brother’s neck. In an instant, Takao Abe’s blade came sweeping down. And then the corpse slumped forward in fulfillment of the ritual.
His brother, who’d felt oppressed by his sense of responsibility, had begun preparing to take his own life after his own company, Abe Construction, suffered financial losses. He’d written a short death poem, no more than a line, upon the white headband—now flecked with fresh blood—that he’d worn the night of his last kendo match: “With death, all is purified.”
Takao Abe took the headband off the severed head to read the poem and then hurriedly screwed it up into a ball and threw it to the floor. He couldn’t help feeling that a thrill of joy had gone through him with the knife. His clear voice had been like a blade cutting through his brother’s core shame.
“Ichi-go ichi-e, brother.”
by Brandon Teigland
Brandon Teigland is an emerging Canadian writer with a growing history of writing speculative and literary fiction. He studied Neuroscience, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Literature at Dalhousie University and King’s College in Halifax, NS. His debut novel Under a Collapsing Sky was released by AOS / Ace of Swords Publishing in Fall 2021. His flash fiction story Continual Gehenna was published in the 2022 Summer issue of Sci Phi Journal, winner of the European Hall of Fame Award for Best SF Magazine. All of his online publications to date can be viewed on Linktree @brandon.teigland.