SHE HAD SEEN HIM A hundred times or more — who has not? — in travel books, on postcards, as a miniature copy in San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden. But when he sat before her, seeming to fill half the sky with the mightiness of his peace, she knew that she had never known him.
Her days of fine weather had turned cold, with a sharp little wind. The Great Buddha loomed green-bronze against a gray overcast. Maybe that helped the feeling to well up in her that nothing else mattered, not the low buildings and autumnal trees around nor the other visitors chattering and photographing nor even her own life. Or rather, said a bewildered thought, everything mattered equally, everything was the same, for Amida was in all that was.
From more than six tall man-heights he looked outward and slightly downward, as he had done for more than seven centuries. The smile of compassion barely touched the serenity of his face. His robes flowed to hands lying curled on his lap, the attitude of meditation, as if so bared to the truth that they had no need to grip it, so strong that they would not ever need to wield their power.
She was not religious— had not been unless as a small girl, sometimes in the dark crying out to Jesus. She only stayed for a while that she did not measure, drawing a kind of silence around herself, gazing, half lost in the presence.
