Echoes of Incense A Pilgrimage in Japan by Don Weiss

Chapter Sixteen, part 1

An Ending

The next morning we walked up through the hills to Temple 65, Sankakuji, The Temple of Three Sides. Much of the time, the trail ran deep under the trees. The forest was warm and humid, with dappled sunlight filtering greenly through the leaves.

Phyllis and I were both very quiet this morning. I'd been thinking a lot about our life together and our marriage. Finally I expressed the thought that had become dominant. "I think the next few years we shouldn't spend so much time together. We can live apart, mostly, and each do our own thing."

She didn't reply. We walked on together, gradually higher up the mountain. At a point about kilometer from the temple, we stopped for a brief rest in a little clearing where the sun shone brightly. I told her, "I'd hoped that doing the pilgrimage would bring us back together, but it hasn't worked. I felt like this was our last real chance."

She started to smile, then to laugh. Suddenly she stopped. "I had the exact same thought,"she said. "I've decided after we're done, I'm going to China for the summer. Then our marriage is over."I looked at her, nodded, and continued on up the trail. I felt I should be able to say, "Ah, so desu ka?"Oh, really? But I was not as unattached as Hakuin.

The name Sankakuji comes from a story of Kobo Daishi's visit here. He came and did a Goma of Victory using a special triangular altar. Then he carved the statue of Eleven Faced Kannon that is the Honzon. The goma was intended to suppress a ghost that lived on the mountain that loomed over the temple. It's called Yurei-san, Ghost Mountain.

There are two ponds in the temple courtyard. The smaller one, built around a tiny Shinto shrine, holds several dozen small koi. They swam about energetically, brilliant orange, black and yellow against the dark mud. A cherry tree above was dropping the last of its blossoms onto the water. The delicate pink of the cherry blossoms and the brilliant colors of the koi contrasted with the plain wood of the shrine.

Sankakuji is a rather dark temple. The trees crowd around and lean in over stone walls inscribed with the names of people who contributed money the last time the temple was rebuilt. Like almost all the pilgrimage temples, Sankakuji was repeatedly burnt in war and rebuilt when the armies had passed. Incense drifts out of the Hon-do and merges with the scent of cedar from the forest. In the warm spring air it was a fragrant oasis.

One of the unnumbered pilgrimage temples we had never seen was Sankakuji's okunoin, on the other side of Ghost Mountain. We had phoned and made a reservation at their shukubo so, after a lunch of cookies and fruit, we followed the old henro stones that pointed the way up the mountain.

Above the temple, we walked past some fields being readied for spring planting. The temple stood at about 320 meters, and the fields were slightly higher, so the season was not as far advanced as below on the plain. The farmhouses had thatched roofs covered by metal sheets painted dark red. These roofs are found all over Shikoku. New houses have tile roofs, more expensive and less comfortable in very hot or very cold weather.

The forest started just above the farms. Massive old mountain cherry trees grew here and there, some with trunks over a meter thick. Fallen blossoms carpeted the trail, turning the ground pale pink. Near the top of the mountain, one huge mountain cherry stood behind a sign saying it was over 200 years old.

The trail crossed a pass 400 meters above Sankakuji, then plunged down the other side. Immediately, we started passing statues and tiny chapels. One Fudo chapel seemed still in use and there were offerings of one yen coins and name slips in front of the moss-covered statues. It seemed a well-used trail.

Below the Fudo chapel, the trail was lined by a set of statues for a mini-88 Temples pilgrimage. The trail gradually steepened and turned into a twisting staircase that tumbled down the cliff like a stone waterfall. Trees grew from cracks in the rock, statues stood under the trees. It was a scene out of a 13th century Chinese painting of the Southern Sung Dynasty. We walked down and down and finally reached the temple.

According to a legend, Kobo Daishi came here in 794 and met Hodo. She was from India, a Hindu who had come to this mountain to live a life of solitary prayer. The Daishi performed a goma ritual and Hodo gave her cave and the surroundings to be a Buddhist Temple.

Because of Hodo, Senryuji, The Temple of the Hermit and the Dragon, came to be associated with female henro. It was customary for henro, after they had completed the pilgrimage, to travel to Koyasan to pray at the chapel housing the body of Kobo Daishi. Until a century ago, women weren't allowed within three kilometers of the chapel, so many of them came to Senryuji and prayed to the statue of Kobo Daishi that is the Honzon.

The temple sits in a narrow gorge where cliffs and trees hide the sky. Probably, in winter, the snow piles up, making it difficult to move around. So the Hon-do (which is a Daishi-do, since he is the Honzon), the office, the priest's residence and the shukubo all share one large building about 80 meters long. The foundations have been recently repaired, but the rest of the building is about 160 years old, the wood aged and stained by hundreds of typhoons and thousands of freezing winter nights.

We left our walking sticks and shoes by the door and went in. When the door closed behind me, it was as dark as a cave inside. I called out, but nobody answered. Then, once my eyes were used to the dark, I saw a sign pointing to the Hon-do. We walked ahead, turned left, and found a room built onto the cliff. By the light of some candles burning on the altar I could see a cave leading back into the mountain. In front of it, in a cloud of burning incense, stood the Honzon, the statue of Kobo Daishi. We recited the sutra, then walked over to where the priest sat, waiting to do our stamps and welcome us to the temple.

He showed us to a large room, one of about ten near the front of the temple. We were the only guests. He gave us complicated directions to the bath, so complicated that he then had to show us the way. It was down some steps, along a corridor, down again, out onto a terrace, up some steps and in a door.

The tiled tub grew out from the natural rock wall of the mountain. A wooden partition kept out prying eyes, but not the wind. In winter, it must be unusable except for those who like to stand in prayer under icy waterfalls. Of all the wonderful baths I used in Japan, this was my favorite.

At dinner, I was surprised to find sashimi since we were in the mountains, far from a main road. I wondered if the priest's wife had made a special trip into town to buy it for us or if it was a regular part of their menu. We also got amego, a kind of trout found in the local rivers.

When the temple was closed for the night, we pulled down some bedding from the stacks, two meters high, that the priest had shown us in one of the unused rooms near ours. We put our futons a little further apart than usual in token of our decision to separate, but otherwise our routine remained the same. We did our name slips, Phyllis copied the Heart Sutra, I read Kobo Daishi's commentary on the sutra, and we went to bed.

The night was absolutely silent, the forest sounds stilled by the thick timber walls of the temple. At our house in Ishii, we lived surrounded by rice paddies, so in spring and summer frogs sang us to sleep. Here in the forest, all was quiet, dark, and cool ‹ no wind, no frogs, no traffic. I moved down so only my nose stuck out of the covers.

In the morning, the priest heated soup for our breakfast -- rice, vegetables and cold fish were already put out on trays for us. When I asked how much to pay, he bowed and said, "O-settai."I bowed back, lower, and thanked him. I signed the guest book and saw we were only the fifth and sixth guests in two months.

The henro path followed a road down the valley from the temple. A narrow lake backed up by a dam filled the valley. The lake waters lay dark and still. The few farms in the valley looked deserted, the school looked closed. Like so many places in the mountains of Japan, young people had left this isolated valley, leaving their parents to grow old and die.

The henro route followed the lake, then turned uphill and climbed over the mountains towards Route 192. Just before we got there, we visited another unnumbered pilgrimage temple, Jo Fukuji, The Temple of Eternal Good Fortune. We had a picnic lunch sitting in the courtyard, prayed, then looked around. At one corner of the Hon-do we saw a new statue of a man in priest's robes. The robes were pulled apart in front, displaying a huge, erect phallus. A meter away, we saw a female figure, also of new granite. Phyllis pulled aside the apron covering the statue's lap. Underneath, the figure was nude, her labia parted and painted red.

Published by Don Weiss (henrodon@gmail.com) -- All rights reserved. You may read this electronic copy on the web or print it out for private reading but no part may be sold or included in any work for sale except for short excerpts used for review purposes.All photographs and maps are likewise copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission except for private, non-commercial use. Updated June 17, 1999.