It was in his effects at his death, the only one of his effects that I had any desire to cart away to my own bookshelf. So, spying it in a box, I did just that. And there it now sits with its eternal smile, its bald Buddha head smoothed by generations of adherents giving it a passing rub for fortune. Better had he been left in place but nothing lasts, not even peace.
It constitutes a bit of the furniture of my childhood. In childish fashion I once asked what it was and was told that it was an "idol." I knew what an idol was because part of my early family regimen was to hear my father reading us tales from the Old Testament, the only novel with which he was remotely acquainted. So I knew of Baal, and of Molok, the hollow iron image within which a roaring fire was built and firstborn babes (like me) placed in the glowing arms as sacrificial offerings. Given the range and depth of human depravity, I consider this one of the only facts to be garnered from the book. But this little stone head didn't seem, to me at any rate, to be an idol quite on the scale of Molok.
I decided, at the age of about seven I suppose, to do a little theological investigation. So, gathering my sister and brother in the living room, I placed it on the floor in the middle of our small circle, and told (or dared) them to bow down to it (explaining first what I supposed idols were and probable consequences of any signs of obeisance). I forget now whether there was compliance or demurral, but I nonetheless got on my knees and touched my head to the floor, this being my rather standard idea of religious devotion. I wasn't certain what I expected might follow upon this blasphemy - probably some peculiarly antedeluvian scourge like leprosy or the clap. I remained unscathed, of course, but not unaffected - it was my first small foray into ecumenicity, a venture I am convinced none of my forebears had ever made. Atheism, as I see it, is ecumenicity in its broadest form.
I don't think the young sailor who snapped the head from its place along the street thought of his act as one of vandalism. Possibly it was (knowing him as I did in later years) a kind of subliminal act of theological ravaging. The Okinawan Japanese were culturally inferior because they were pagans (ones who had recently lost a war) and pagans were idolators and ipso facto submerged in falsehoods of all sorts (the Old Testament being the real stuff). He was no more interested in their salvation than he was in their prosperity or happiness following on the Navy's departure from their heathen shores. It wasn't by itself an act of evangelical zeal so much as an act of cultural indifference. The zeal, the hidebound refusal of ecumenicism, the willful ignorance of difference, the evangelical's monopoly on truth, all of these hardened in later years. In that, he was a good American.
So the little Buddha head (I cannot think of him as mine, he belongs to himself and the world) is permanently displaced to a country that has scarcely known anything of harmony. Of the standard trinity of eternal sages, no one ever listened to Socrates; Jesus seems a facile fellow, co-opted to sanctify any passing brutal strain of nationalist primacy; and Buddha, remaining silent, merely smiles an eternal smile and awaits a visit from some solitary wandering soul who wonders what this is all about.
