Why live in a state of confusion? Perhaps this was Honda's thinking on the first leg of his journey to the holy places of Benares - full of Hindu ghats - and the ruins of the Buddhist caves of Ajanta.
The pestilential rivers of humanity of the former, as well as a majestic holy cow, have a great effect on him,as do the pure waterfalls and serene emptiness of the ancient Buddhist retreats.
As he explains, Buddhism became a footnote to Hinduism in India, while flourishing abroad. Buddha is merely the ninth avatar of Vishnu.
Then he mentions Greek colonies in India and, on his return to Japan (at the height of WWII) fervently pursues philosophical enquiries. King Milinda of Sagara receives the wise man Nagesema and his questions and answers form an ancient text.
The king's castle is surrounded by fortifications, a variety of ramparts, majestic, forbidding side gates, high white walls, deep moats, and the protection provided is complete. The city's squares, crossroads, and marketplace are most aptly designed: beautifully decorated stores are filled with countless invaluable merchandise. Several hundred of charitable hospitals add dignity to the city, while several thousand mansions and high pavilions tower like the Himalayas high in the clouds. And in the city streets, throngs of people are visible, men like pines, women like flowers, priests, warriors, farmers and traders, serfs - people of all classes pass by in groups. The Questions of King Milinda (page 110)
There is a long sequence on the development of anatman alaya Buddhism. Buddhism maintains atman - self - is not an independent entity, and a long period of development was required to explain consciousness.
This harks back to Honda's meeting in book 1 with the abbess of Ghessu, and her speech on instantaneous creation and destruction being time. It seemed to me as if Honda was rethinking his opposition to that doctrine.
These ancient philosophies are exploring cause and effect, which clearly involves time. As a side-note I googled 'time is an.illusion', and someone online mentioned that in the Upanishads virtually everything is an.illusion! Maybe so, but why is it relevant that we should view time a illusory in modern physics?
Anyway, the mention of the Greek colony in India allows Mishima to introduce a large chunk of Greek and medieval philosophy. This was meat and blood to me, and he makes a strong case for Asian influence.
For a start, Dionysus is an Asian god, a frivolous and sensual being who was fused with local Earth goddesses. Dionysian cults sought ecstatic exit from self (atman), which he allies with the Eucharist.
The Greek myth says that the Titans eat Dionysus and only his heart remained, which bore another Dionysus. The Titans who became Man carried that original sin.
The cults of Dionysus are bordering on a type of physical dissolution, an urge to bloody sacrifice leading to a joy that presages rebirth.
This is a sense parallels Honda's experience at Benares where goats are sacrificed by the hundreds, and the skulls of newly dead devotees roasted by the cremator. Honda is astonished by the leprous odors but equally recognizes the joy of samsara (reincarnation).
In any case, all these ancient beliefs and practices take place in primitive absolute time - the sun and moon. The moon goddesses and Earth goddesses are the substance that we lack in our modern confusion of numerical science. Ishtar, in the Hyborian lands, who was mated with subservient sky gods who died and were reborn annually (see Yaple HB106).
The sun, like the sea, is illusory, but the moon supplies a counterbalance that is visible with Earth's rotation in the cosmos. Primitive absolute time is psychic, if you think of sun and moon as deities or brother and sister (Artemis and Apollo).
Cause and effect in the ancient world refer to absolute psychic experience, so it is another sense to the one spoken of by modernday physicists, which is simply numerical (whether you call it illusion or reality!)
That seems to be a confusion, in that Hinduism is on a par with Stonehenge in antiquity. We often in the modern day seem to be talking about two different things, and hence the underlying confusion.
The fact that the Earth's rotation - as noted by Mishima (as well as by Vincent of UVS) - is not perceivable except scientifically is simply a fact of our existence in a cosmos where all things spin. A cosmic dance of time - the dance of the four-armed Shiva that destroys but also enables creation.
What I took from Honda's investigation was a strong sense of pestilential almost fly-fattening dissolution that one can identify with Benares as well as the Greek Dionysus.
The physical dissolution is a chthonic substance that produces inchoate living form. The mosses and lichens that are associated with rotting trunks - see Kayanan's illustrations to the 'Red Nails' sequel in time-lost caverns .
The inchoate or the developing forms that are associated with blood and the dark womb of rebirth and the female moon. Hecate, the primitive chthonic witch goddess of moon.
All these things are nothing to do with the physics of atoms in resolved space, and all to do with absolute experience of time on Earth (midgard) under the archetypal planets.
It seems to have much more to do with Jung than it does with the dry-as-dust world of quantum physics. We happen to live in a spinning universe that gives us an absolute conception of reality. If things spin in aether then the harmonics are also part of that reality.
When the Thai Princess of Moonlight, Ying Chan, visits Japan at the age of nineteen, Mishima invokes a sense of chthonic power long hidden to western eyes.
Ying Chan, this black lotus that had blossomed from the mud of life's flow..(page 209)
