Echoes of Incense A Pilgrimage in Japan by Don Weiss

Chapter Sixteen, part 2

An Ending

We spent that night at the same inn where Phyllis had brought me the good maps on the ninth night of my Winter Walk, when I was so frustrated by getting lost. The following day we climbed to Umpenji and crossed the mountains to Kagawa Prefecture, The Dojo of Entering Nirvana, the final section of our trip.

The four prefectures the pilgrim passes through are associated with four stages of spiritual progress. Taken in the usual order they are:

Tokushima

The Realm of Awakening Faith

Kochi

The Realm of Spiritual Practice

Ehime

The Realm of Enlightenment

Kagawa

The Realm of Entering Nirvana

The priests say that if you fail to achieve your spiritual mission in a prefecture, you should go back and do that part of the pilgrimage over again. We went on, down the mountain towards Kannonji.

When I walked this way in the winter, I passed near an elementary school just as the children were heading home for the day. The girls walked ahead or behind me, but the boys, seven, eight and nine years old, almost stepped on my feet, making jokes about the big foreigner. When I tried to speak to them in Japanese, they made fun of my accent and I was glad when they went home.

This time, with two of us, even more children gathered around. When one eight-year-old pointed at me and shouted, "Foreigner!"I tried my game of looking around and saying, "Where?"

He stood right in front of me, pointed at my nose and said, "Foreigner!"

I said, "Wrong. I'm not a foreigner. I'm a henro. I'm from Tokushima." He put down his hand and looked around, puzzled. Then he turned to an older boy standing a few meters away and asked, "Is Tokushima in Japan?" On another day, another little boy had called me a "foreign Kobo Daishi."

The next day we walked up onto a mountain due west of Takamatsu City where we had a reservation at a temple called Kappa Dojo. I wondered what kind of temple was named after Kappa, creatures from Japanese folklore who live in the clouds and love sake. As we approached the temple, we heard a loud pounding like a pile driver. Phyllis asked, "What the hell it that?"I suggested it was kappa feeding time. She laughed. It was the first time I'd heard her laugh in days.

A friendly German Shepherd and a friendly young priest welcomed us at the gate and led us into the temple compound. We saw an unfinished garden with a few statues, a pond, and four or five giant barrels set out under some trees. There were six new, small buildings completed and one very large one under construction. What we heard really was a pile driver.

The young priest led us into one of the buildings. There, we met the wife of the head priest. She gave us tea ceremony tea and let us rest for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then, when we were comfortable, we started talking with her and asked her about this new temple.

Her husband had started it just seven years before in an old bus parked on the mountain. He planned to make the temple a training center for troubled teenagers. The big building under construction would hold dormitories and classrooms. So far they had built this general purpose clubhouse, a Hon-do, a house for the priest, a bath house, and the Zen-do, the meditation hall.

The temple was of the Soto Zen sect. The barrels under the trees were for extended periods of intensive meditation. She asked if we meditated and invited us to join them the next morning at 6:30.

After a while, the young priest showed us to our room, a small cubicle in the Hon-do, right next to the Honzon. The main room was about 15 meters square. A mirror globe hung from the center of the ceiling. Little spotlights pointed at it from the corners of the room. I asked why. "Saturday night disco," he said, dancing two steps, then laughing.

The ground floor of the Hon-do housed the temple kitchen and dining room. After I washed and changed to clean clothes, I went down to meet the cook. I found her washing some vegetbles in the sink, washing and washing to make sure all the dirt was gone. I saw other vegetables cooking along with a big pot of aromatic brown rice. She asked me if we ate brown rice. "Yes," I told her. "We like it very much. We often eat brown rice in our house. We buy it at Sogo Department Store in Tokushima City." She seemed surprised.

There was another guest at dinner that night, a Japanese man who was riding his bicycle around Shikoku. He arrived just as we were about to start saying grace, so we all waited while he hurriedly came in and joined us.

Grace was shorter than what Suzuki-san did in his kitchen in the barn. In just a few minutes, our bowls were filled with vegetables, tofu, and tasty brown rice.

There's a special method when you eat at a Soto Zen training center. We followed it pretty well, since we had heard about it from Tony. His wife is the daughter of a Soto Zen priest and he had visited Eiheiji, the sect's home temple. The bicycle tourist had trouble. It took him a minute to understand that normal table manners weren't okay at a dojo, a training center. Each of us had a set of five nesting black lacquer bowls. They had to be set out in a certain way, with the napkin that had held them spread out just so. The head priest made a joke, for our benefit, saying the foreigners learned faster than the Japanese.

There had been nothing served to drink with dinner. When everyone had finished eating, one of the teenage boys got a kettle from the kitchen and poured hot water into our rice bowls. Then we each took our last slice of takuan, pickled radish, from our takuan dish and used that and the hot water to wash out the bowls, again following a special order. The hot water was poured from one bowl to another, picking up the taste of the takuan and the last uneaten scraps of food from all the bowls. Then we ate the takuan and drank the water, so we didn't waste the tiniest bit of food. Finally, we used the napkin to wipe out the bowls and then put them back inside one another, handling them in a special way to avoid making any noise. Then we wrapped the bowls in the napkin, ready for breakfast.

I got up at five. I went out into the garden and walked around, getting my tight leg tendons loosened up in preparation for sitting cross-legged. I'd sat zazen (sitting meditation) in the distant past, but on the pilgrimage my legs were so tight when I first got up in the morning, I knew I had to stretch for at least fifteen minutes before I tried it. Now, since I have finished the pilgrimage, I sit zazen every morning, but then I wasn't sure how it would feel.

At 5:45, a teenage boy came out to the Zen-do and went inside. He opened the shutters, then came out onto a porch that surrounded the Zen-do and RACED around, pounding a drum and calling out something at the top of his lungs. Then he went back inside the Zen-do.

Just before six, the head priest and all the other teenage boys arrived and we all lined up and went in. One of the older boys showed me how to hold my hands, how to arrange the meditation cushion, which foot to put up first, etc.

I sat down and crossed my legs. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Not that way. Like this."He tried to get me to assume a lotus position. I shook my head and said, "I'm sorry. I can't. One and a half years ago I broke my right kneecap."He nodded and sat down.

I sat. There are two basic kinds of meditation, concentration and insight. In the first, the meditator concentrates on an image, a sound, a question, or a combination of the three. The latter involves examining the contents of your mind while you just sit, not moving except your breath. Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, taught his followers to think about "no thought."

I sat. Around me, I heard the others breathing. Every few minutes, somebody coughed and after a while I heard somebody leave but we all sat facing the walls, so I didn't know who.

The walls were new, light-colored wood, with beautiful natural grain. The dawn light, filtering in through the paper of the shoji covering the windows, dusted the wood with an enveloping gleam. Sometimes my eyes drifted a little to the left or right with the grain of the wood, but most of the time they stayed centered. It seemed the natural thing to do.

The morning bird chorus started soon after we sat down, and it grew and changed while we sat. I thought about what it might be like, sitting in this room during the muggy, rainy days of June, or the hot mornings of August, or the typhoons of September, or the icy mornings of February. I thought about those thoughts and sat.

After some time, perhaps 30 minutes, a bell chimed softly. I sat longer, until the head priest said, "Dozo."Then I turned. He smiled at me, then began the prayer service. The morning's zazen was over.

After perhaps ten minutes of prayer, we walked to the Hon-do. Phyllis, the priest's wife, and a few others were waiting. The head priest sat on a six-inch-thick cushion. The rest of us sat on a thin carpet laid over a wooden floor. It was very uncomfortable. I had to move my legs every few minutes. The prayers seemed about an hour long. Then we had breakfast, left-overs from the previous night's dinner. After we wiped out our bowls and wrapped them in the napkins, we got our things together and prepared to go.

It took a few minutes to find the priest's wife. I offered to pay. This was politely but firmly refused. "O-settai." She bowed deeply and wished us a good pilgrimage.

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.