Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [237]
He awoke about four hours later to the sound of temple bells ringing out the old year. The sleep had done him good. Jumping to his feet, he felt that his fatigue had been washed away. His mind was fresh and clear.
In and around the city, huge bells bonged in slow and stately rhythm, marking the end of darkness and the beginning of light. One hundred and eight peals for the one hundred and eight illusions of life—each ring a call to men and women to reflect on the vanity of their ways.
Musashi wondered how many people there were who on this night could say: “I was right. I did what I should have done. I have no regrets.” For him, each resounding knell evoked a tremor of remorse. He could conjure up nothing but the things he had done wrong during the last year. Nor was it only the last year—the year before, and the year before that, all the years that had gone by had brought regrets. There had not been a single year devoid of them. Indeed, there had hardly been one day.
From his limited perspective of the world, it seemed that whatever people did they soon came to regret. Men, for example, took wives with the intention of living out their lives with them but often changed their minds later. One could readily forgive women for their afterthoughts, but then women rarely voiced their complaints, whereas men frequently did so. How many times had he heard men disparage their wives as if they were old discarded sandals?
Musashi had no marital problems, to be sure, but he had been the victim of delusion, and remorse was not a feeling alien to him. At this very moment, he was very sorry he had come to his aunt’s house. “Even now,” he lamented, “I’m not free of my sense of dependence. I keep telling myself I must stand on my own two feet and fend for myself. Then I suddenly fall back on someone else. It’s shallow! It’s stupid!
“I know what I should do!” he thought. “I should make a resolution and write it down.”
He undid his shugyōsha’s pack and took out a notebook made of pieces of paper folded in quarters and tied together with coiled paper strips. He used this to jot down thoughts that occurred to him during his wanderings, along with Zen expressions, notes on geography, admonitions to himself and, occasionally, crude sketches of interesting things he saw. Opening the notebook in front of him, he took up his brush and stared at the white sheet of paper.
Musashi wrote: “I will have no regrets about anything.”
While he often wrote down resolutions, he found that merely writing them did little good. He had to repeat them to himself every morning and every evening, as one would sacred scripture. Consequently, he always tried to choose words that were easy to remember and recite, like poems.
He looked for a time at what he had written, then changed it to read: “I will have no regrets about my actions.”
He mumbled the words to himself but still found them unsatisfactory. He changed them again: “I will do nothing that I will regret.”
Satisfied with this third effort, he put his brush down. Although the three sentences had been written with the same intent, the first two could conceivably mean he would have no regrets whether he acted rightly or wrongly, whereas the third emphasized his determination to act in such a way as to make self-reproach unnecessary.
Musashi repeated the resolution to himself, realizing it was an ideal he could not achieve unless he disciplined his heart and his mind to the utmost of his ability. Nevertheless, to strive for a state in which nothing he did would cause regrets was the path he must pursue. “Someday I will reach that state!” he vowed, driving the oath like a stake deep into his own heart.
The shoji behind him slid open, and his aunt looked in. With a voice shivering around the roots of her teeth, she