The Gazing Heart

There are people with whom I had no particular connection, yet decades later I still remember them vividly, from their looks to their expressions and gestures, and the memory never fades. It is strange how clear it stays. One such person was the woman who taught us classical Japanese at high school.

One balmy spring afternoon she recited a poem by Ono no Komachi, the early Heian poet counted among the three great beauties of the world.

“The colour of the flowers has faded, all in vain, while I passed my days in this world, lost in nagame.” Then she went on: “The word nagame in this poem is the opposite of the modern verb nagameru, to gaze at something on purpose. It means looking without really looking: a hazy state in which you cannot tell whether you are looking at the world outside or into your own heart.” And all at once she raised her voice, pointed straight at me and scolded, “It means sitting there in a daze, like you!”

That one rebuke jolted me out of my nagame in an instant. Just that: a trivial incident of the kind that could happen in any classroom. Except that, as it turned out, it was not trivial at all.

Ever since, strangely, I have relived that scene and those words again and again, like a flashback. That must be why her image has never faded. Through that moment I glimpsed the deep, quiet joy that a gazing heart can bring, and my longing for it has ruled the rest of my life. The way I live, what I value, my absorption in Zen, even the building of a hotel made for gazing: looking back now, I believe it all began with that lesson on a spring afternoon.