Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (24 page)

At a fork in the road, halfway up Mount Hoshigajō, we left my bicycle behind and then drove deeper into a gorge to where cable cars ran up the mountainside. (I left my bicycle so that I could get it on the way down.)

The Kankakei gorge was magnificent. It’s odd, but my memory of Kankakei is in black and white, like the muted layers in a Chinese ink brush painting, with pine trees leaning out over straight-down crags of rock. Below the cable car, sheer crumbling walls and stone arches moved by.

The cable car didn’t go right to the peak. When I disembarked, I was greeted—if sullen silence can be called a greeting—by a few
loitering monkeys, castaways from a larger group farther inland. They were better behaved than the monkeys of Kojima; continual contact with humans had made them almost tame. Several were sunning their fur, eyes half shut, in the warmth of the early evening. Below them, Shōdo Island was spread out like an estate before a lord. I had no doubt that the monkeys of Shōdo, looking down on their realm, felt a certain proprietary pride. Humans were merely endured. The heights belonged, in a lazy way, to them.

I hiked up a sweeping grassland hill and then into a forest of pine trees. It was a long, thigh-straining walk, but well worth it. When I reached the summit, a break in the forest offered a panorama of Shōdo even grander than that admired by the primate potentates below, though it did bother me—as I arrived panting and sweaty and out of breath—that there were no monkeys up here. Hey, they seemed to be saying by their absence, we may be lower-order primates, but we aren’t
stupid
.

I was all alone at the top with the ego-inflating vertigo that comes whenever you find yourself at the very highest point of land available. It enlarges you to stand atop a mountain; you feel like a giant tottering on the peak and you hold out your arms, instinctually, trying to maintain balance. I leaned into the wind and almost took flight, over the Inland Sea, a sea the colour of hammered gold.

From these deluded Olympian heights, I followed an obscurely labelled footpath down the other side. The trail had the alarming habit of forking every few feet, and I ended up in a tangled thicket, from which I finally burst out of the woods and onto a highway, much in the manner of the Monty Python hermit.

There was only one road up here—a forestry road tarted up as a “Scenic Skyline Highway”—which greatly limited my choices. I walked south, through the unnatural silence of replanted forests. There was no traffic.

This did not bother me in the least because I knew, on a road as remote as this, that the first ride by would stop. And so it did. A surprised-looking forestry worker took me farther down the mountain to the site of Shōdo Island’s Greek Shrine.

This shrine, this “Greek” shrine, is routinely scoffed at in most guidebooks and is consistently misunderstood by most Western travellers. The important thing to remember is that Shōdo’s incongruous
Greek structure, complete with columns and stark rectangular lines, is, nonetheless, a working, consecrated Shinto shrine. It isn’t simply a tourist attraction. Classic Greek architecture is starkly beautiful, as elegant and stately as Japanese architecture is fluid. Combining the two is a feat that should be applauded, not sniffed at, and Shōdo’s Greek Shrine is a deft example of syncretic architecture. In this it has much in common with the historic homes in Nagasaki and Kobe, where Japanese and Western styles blended.

I walked through the shrine and over to the Greek-Buddhist Bell where the 108 sins of mankind are tolled out on auspicious occasions. Greek paganism meets Buddhist theology meets Shinto animism.

There is no point debating whether such structures are examples of synthesis or kitsch. It depends entirely on how you focus your attention.

I would have stayed for hours on the olive-green heights of Shōdo, but the sun had dipped behind the horizon and the lightscape had shifted from gold to dark blue. In film, they call this the Magic Hour, the moment just after the sun has disappeared and just before night falls, when the light is still reflected across the upper atmosphere. It is diffused, a time without shadows, when the landscape itself seems to be emitting its own illumination.

The lady who was closing up the shrine gave me a ride down the mountain to where my bicycle was parked. She wanted to wedge it in the back of her Mini-Car hatchback but it was a lost cause and, reluctantly, she abandoned me. No matter. I coasted down the hairpin turns of the mountain highway into a faceful of wind. The road was steep and my brakes were half-hearted at best, so what began as a pleasant ride became something of a suicide run. As I turned a corner in the descending forest, a Buddhist temple suddenly came into view. An excuse to stop. I skidded to a halt off the highway, and right across freshly raked gravel. My arrival caught the attention of the temple priest.

“Hullo,” I said breathlessly.

The priest smiled and, without a word of explanation, waved me over. He took me by the arm and pulled me up a slippery earthen hillock beside the main building. Puzzled, I followed, pulling myself
up on a grappling chain. I asked him where we were going. He didn’t reply, just urged me onward.

At the top of the hillock was a mobile-like sculpture made of hanging sheets of slate. The priest was now almost entirely lost in the darkness, his black robes dissolved into the falling night, his face disembodied and faint. Picking up a small hammer, he tapped the sculpture once, lightly. A single metallic note sounded. The note lingered, like that of a tuning fork. He struck another hanging slate; another note, lower than the first. Then another, softer, and then, in overlaying veils of sound, he struck several more and stepped back to listen to them disappear, one by one, in slowly fading layers.

The priest handed me a wooden stick and together we managed to produce a shimmering version of “Jingle Bells,” after which he clasped my hand and called on the name of Kōbō Daishi to protect and bless me.

This was a splendid chance to scam a ride and I succeeded brilliantly. We wrestled my one-gear rent-a-bike into the back of the priest’s truck, and he transported me back down the mountain.

The road descended suddenly from dark forest into narrow streets. Instead of dropping me off at the hostel, the priest waved his hand in dismissal and took me instead to another temple. Every time I took a stab at conversation, he stopped me with a raised hand and a small embarrassed laugh and said,
“No English. Sorry
.” “But—but I’m speaking Japanese, really I am.”
“English. No.”
It was demoralizing.

We entered the lower temple through a two-storey wooden gate, and a young priest came out to greet us. He had a Jiminy Cricket face and a shaved head. The older priest nodded toward him and said with deep satisfaction, “America.”

Shuhō Jishi, the young priest at Seiken-ji Temple, spoke English fluently. He spent six years at a Shingon mission in San Francisco and had adapted well to life in America but, when his father died, he was forced to return to Shōdo Island and take over the family temple. “I’m the oldest son,” he said simply. Priesthood is not a calling in Japan; it is a hereditary post. Training and proper knowledge are absolutely necessary, but a deep spirituality is not mandatory. As in so many things in Japan, it is proper behaviour that is the essence of worship: how to follow the rituals, how to recite key sutras, how to avoid making errors of protocol. Buddhist priests are not celibate and Shuhō
was no exception. He was married with three small children, and after his time in America he was still adjusting to the elevated but sombre position of temple priest. Seiken-ji Temple was over three hundred years old, and its treasury contained sutras, lacquerware, and Buddhist statuary that were more ancient still. It was a heavy responsibility.

Shuhō invited me to stay at his home. His young son was in elementary school and the kid took an immediate liking to me, in the same way that some kids like big friendly Saint Bernard dogs. I was obviously not very bright. After all, here I was, all grown up, and I spoke Japanese with a terrible, thick accent. But I was, he decided, harmless.

He was a gangly kid, all arms and legs and ears, and endearing in his very gawkiness. While Shuhō’s wife prepared a vegetarian supper, I sat with their son on the floor and played noisy absurdist games with his collection of Transformer Robots.

You’ve got to love the way children make robots and toy soldiers fight. Shuhō’s son would pick one up, like someone holding a mallet, and deliver a series of complete body slams to the victim.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t this hurt the person delivering the blow as much as the one receiving it? I tried to explain this to him, but he just looked at me like I was stupid and continued the bout.
Wham!
Kids can be so illogical.

The Transformer Commando, having body-slammed the evil villain into unconsciousness, folded himself into a rocket ship and flew away. Another Transformer turned into a submarine, another into a rocket-launching tank. These toys, now standard fare, were invented in Japan and they strike me as being very Japanese, a form of “identity origami” that alters itself from one context to another. You change yourself completely to suit the role. Shuhō himself was living a transformer life, first in San Francisco and then, flip-flip
-bam
, a temple priest upholding an ancient way of life. In Japan, heroes transform themselves. In the West, they have “secret identities” (Superman/Clark Kent, Batman/Bruce Wayne, etc.), and I think this is a key distinction. The Transformer approach to things is very different from hidden greatness and secret identities. A secret identity is a superficial mask. Superman fools people, Batman wears a hood, but the Transformer changes
completely
. He doesn’t hide his true self, he rearranges it entirely to fit the situation.

By now I was studying these toys like an anthropologist. Shuhō’s son was bored and had moved on to other things. Shuhō leaned over to me and said, “If you like that toy you can have it.” I was tempted—the dual-identity Transformer was a perfect talisman for anyone travelling in Japan—but I declined the offer. Even I have my limits, and taking toys from children, even incredibly cool toys, was something I usually tried to avoid.

21

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
, Shuhō took me up the mountain to see a Buddhist chapel. It was built inside a dark, alcove-like cave just behind the main temple. Sticks of incense, glowing like impaled fireflies, were arrayed in pin-cushion arrangements deep in bowls of ash. The smoke uncurled in thin filaments and hung, wavering, in the air. Over time, the smoke had laid down extra layers of darkness inside the cave, a patina of soot and old prayers which made the small gilt statues seem that much more lustrous. The golden statues stood in a half-circle around a thick stone column, a spatial mandala with the central stone pillar forming the focus.

Shuhō and I lit incense, waved away the flame, and bowed deeply. He then turned to me and said, “This cave began as just a small hollow in the rock. My father was convinced that a deeper cave lay within the mountain. He spent years chipping and digging, looking for it. The stone was like a spider’s egg, there were bubbles and gaps in the rock, and the deeper he went the more certain he became that somewhere within this there was a greater cave. A magnificent cave hidden deep inside this mountain. He knew, one day, he would find it.” Shuhō smiled with satisfaction.

“Did he?”

“No. He never did. But he never stopped chipping away. And eventually, he ended up making a cave of his own. This cave.”

We stood for a moment without speaking. Shuhō looked to the back wall of the cave, where the chipping and cutting had finally come to an end. “My father,” he said.

22

N
AME DROPPING
works wonders in Japan, and having a Shingon priest as a reference opened many a door for me while I was on Shōdo Island. I spent several days hitching rides and cadging free meals, most of it on the strength of Shuhō’s good name.

I used Akihira Kawahara’s book,
The Eighty-Eight Pilgrimage Sites on Shōdo Island
, as my guide and it was as thorough as Mr. Kawahara himself. The book had overlapping maps and detailed information on the prayers and poems to be recited at each site. Some passages were hard to decipher, but that just added to the appeal. Here, for example, is one of Kōbō Daishi’s creeds, which appears in what can only be a verbatim translation (if you figure it out, let me know):

Since we go astray, the three worlds are castles. Since we are enlightened, all the directions are non-existent. In fact, there are no norths, nor souths. Where on earth are the east and west?

The song of Shōdo is the hollow
tonk-tonk
of wooden Buddhist clappers and the low mantra of pilgrims. Where Shikoku’s pilgrimage is epic, Shōdo’s is intimate—and varied. The temples of Shōdo Island are hidden in secluded forests, tucked inside bamboo groves, deep within caves, down narrow footpaths, and beside busy streets. There are springs with miraculous curative powers, there are temples for love, temples for marriage, temples for childbirth (to put them in the proper chronological sequence). There is even a temple of wisdom, with a stone ring through which laughing children squeeze in the hopes of becoming wise. One temple has a live dragon trapped inside, behind a stone ceiling that is
suitably claw-marked (the dragon had been captured by Kōbō Daishi himself, naturally). Another temple had imagery embroidered in human hair donated by one hundred thousand people, including past prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru. Another had once been a nursery for a captive tiger, another had as its altar a piece of Buddhist statuary that washed up onshore from the bottom of the sea in 1651. There was even a newly erected giant statue of Kannon, several stories high, with stairs inside it for devout pilgrims to scramble up and look out at the world through the eyes of enlightenment (literally).

However, the sakura had begun to scatter and it was time to move on. Shuhō took me to Fukuda Port to catch a late-night ferry, and—convinced that we were late—he flew along at breakneck speed, taking American risks on narrow Japanese roads, using the centre line as a crosshairs. Shuhō was right. We were late, but fortunately, at some point we hit Warp Speed and managed to arrive five minutes before the ferry set out. Convoys of granite-laden trucks were already filing on as Shuhō came zooming in, and I scrambled on board, my pack having grown even heavier in the interim. I was the last person on, and I didn’t stop for any farewell bows. Shuhō waved from the dock as the ropes were tossed down.