Having a Core of Your Own
In the village of Ikaruga, if you walk a while from Horyuji along a path between the rice fields and farm plots, you come to a small temple called Hokiji. It is said to stand where Okamoto Palace once was, the place where Prince Shotoku gave lectures on the Lotus Sutra, and that his son, Prince Yamashiro no Oe, turned the palace into a temple, following the prince's last wishes. Within its grounds stands a three-storied pagoda about twenty-four metres tall. Its building was first vowed in 685, and it is thought to have been finished in 706, which makes it the oldest three-storied pagoda still standing today.
At the heart of the pagoda, a single thick pillar called the shinbashira runs straight up from bottom to top. The tall spire that rises above the roof, the sorin, is fitted over the upper end of this pillar. Yet in old wooden pagodas like this one, the weight of the three roofs, and of the posts and beams that carry them, is borne not by the central pillar but by the posts standing around it. Each storey is built as if set down upon the one below, and none of them is fastened tightly to the single pillar in the middle.
Japan still has a great many old wooden pagodas, yet hardly any stories have come down of one being brought to the ground by an earthquake. Why they stay standing is something scholars still do not agree on. This pagoda, too, over more than thirteen hundred years here in Ikaruga, must have come through who knows how many earthquakes, and how many storms. Beginning in 1970, it was taken apart and repaired over five years, and brought back, as closely as possible, to the form it had when it was first built. Today it still stands in the same place, beyond the fields.
"Having a core of your own" is something entirely different from being stubborn, obstinate, selfish, and the like.
A person who has filled themselves, and who has a core of their own, is, on the contrary, flexible, and can fall into step with others with ease.
That is neither indecisiveness, nor being swept along by others.
As autumn deepens, cosmos flowers grown by the people of the area come into full bloom in the fields around the pagoda. Each time a breeze comes through, the slender-stemmed flowers all lean the same way together, and once it has passed, they quietly rise again. Along the paths between the fields, people who have walked over from Horyuji go by, each at their own speed. Some stop to take a photograph; others walk on slowly, talking as they go. The pagoda simply watches them all pass, from beyond the fields. And through its centre, today as well, a single pillar runs straight up.