Oliver Statler - Japanese Pilgrimage
Oliver Statler - Japanese Pilgrimage
Oliver Statler - Japanese Pilgrimage
OLI
STATLER
1983
The Confessions of Lad)' Nijo, translated by Karen Brazell, copyright 1973 by Karen
Brazell. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday Publishing Co., Anchor Press.
Heike Monogalan; translated by A. L. Sadler and originally published in two installments
of the Transactions 'if Ihe Asialie Society 'ifJapan, copyright 1918 and 1921 by the Asiatic Society
of Japan.
Hogen Monogalari, translated by William R. Wilson, copyright 1971 by Monllmenla Nipponien, Sophia University of Tokyo, Japan.
"The Japanese Mission to China, 80]-806" by Robert Borgen, published in the Spring
1982 issue of the journal Monumenla Nipponiea, copyright 1982 by A10nllmen/a Nipponien,
Sophia University of Tokyo, Japan.
Kukai by Yoshito S. Hakeda. Copyright 1972 by Columbia University Press.
Mirror for Ihe Moon by Saigyo, translated by William R. LaFleur, copyright 1978 by
William R. LaFleur. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Religions oflhe Easl by Joseph M. Kitagawa, copyright 1960 by W. L. Jenkins, reprinted
by permission of The Westminster Press. The passage quoted makes reference to The Wa)' to
Nirvana, by L. de la Vallee Poussin (Cambridge University Press, 1917) and Philosoph), of/he
Buddha, by A. J. Bahm (Harper & Brothers, 1958).
Some Prefer Nellles, by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, copyright 1955 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
"Songs on the Buddha's Foot-Prints," translated by D. L. Philippi, from NihonbwlkaKenkyujo-K~'o No.2, March 1958, copyright 1958 by Nilwnbunka-Kenk)'ujo-Kiyo, Kokugahin
University, Tokyo, Japan.
Sources 'if Ihe Japanese Tradilion, compiled by Tsunoda, de Bary and Keene, copyright
1958 by Columbia University Press.
Ugelsu Monogalari by Ueda Akinari, translated by Leon Zolbrod, Vancouver, University of
British Columbia Press, copyright 1979. Reprinted by permission of University of British
Columbia Press.
The maps on pages 17 and 18 are by Denise DeVone.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Avenue, New
York, N.Y. 10016.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Statler, Oliver.
Japanese pilgrimage.
Includes index.
1. Buddhist pilgrims and pilgrimages-Japan-Shikoku
Region. 2. Kiikai, 774-835-Cult. 3. Shikoku Region
Uapan)-Description and travel. 4. Statler, Oliver.
I. Title.
BQ6450.J32S48674 1983
294.3'4446
83-966
ISBN 0-688-01890-4
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
23456
8 9 10
BOOK DESIGN BY ELLEN LO GIUDICE
TO JOSEPH M. KITAGAWA
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MASTER
19
II
SAVIOR
79
III
PILGRIMS
179
32 9
POSTSCRIPT
335
INDEX
34 1
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MAP:
17
MAP:
Pilgrimage Route
18
23
25
27
29
artist
3I
49
60
II
JAPANESE
PILGRlMAGE
66
69
84
99
119
124
141
144
15 0
15 1
155
12
LIST
OF
ILLUSTRATIONS
157
160
161
185
188
200, 201
208
213
2I
2 17
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
235
254
259
LIST
OF
ILLUSTRATIONS
268
269
272
Roadside images
288
291
294
295
296
301
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PILGRIMAGE
307
Courte~y
3 13
of the Mainichi
3I 7
322
Denzo
324
if the artist
16
328
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Prefectuml Boundaries
.,., Town ~Reservolr -Route
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aster
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PILGRIMAGE
the emperor and the two retired emperors, he had returned here to
Mount Koya, to the monastic center he had founded in 816; banks
of snow still lay in the shade of the temples he had built. He had
chosen this spot to be buried. He made his will and named those
who would succeed to large responsibilities. A disciple, an imperial
prince who once was destined for the throne, painted his portrait.
The saint himself completed it by brushing in the eyes. And on the
next day, the appointed day, he passed out of this life.
As a priest he bore the name of Kukai but he is best known as
Kobo Daishi, a title conferred by the imperial court posthumously,
in 921. Kobo means "to spread widely the Buddhist teachings";
Daishi means "great teacher" or "great master," but considering
the connotations it is probably more accurate to be less literal and
translate it as "saint." He was neither the first nor the last to be
canonized as Daishi but the Japanese have a saying, "Kobo stole
the title of Daishi"-which is to say that when one speaks of the
Daishi there is no question whom one means.
The eminent historian Sir George Sansom called him the
greatest figure in the history of Japanese religion, a judgment I do
not quarrel with. As the founder of Shingon, a major sect, he is a
giant figure in the naturalization of Buddhism, in molding it to
flourish in Japan. He is one of his country's great scholars: a poet,
a calligrapher, an artist, an educator, a social worker, and, among
other things, a first-rate civil engineer.
It is faith in the Daishi that has always sent the pilgrim forth,
set him on the long route that encircles the island of Shikoku,
fourth largest of the Japanese islands. The journey is almost a
thousand miles: if walked-and for centuries there was no way to
go but to walk-it takes about two months.
One moves along sandy beaches and jagged rocky coasts,
through farmlands and villages and cities, goes deep into rugged
mountains. Along the way are eighty-eight Buddhist temples,
numbered in sequence, clockwise. This is the Pilgrimage to the
Eighty-eight Sacred Places of Shikoku.
Kobo Daishi was born on Shikoku, and after his conversion to
Buddhism he returned often to his home island for ascetic practice
22
23
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PILGRI:-'1AGE
he did not die, that he lies uncorrupted in this tomb under these
ancient trees, awaiting the coming of the future Buddha who will
signal the salvation of the world. Whether or not one holds to this
belief, it is a fundamental tenet of the pilgrimage that the pilgrim
walks with the Daishi-to some, quite literally; to others, in spirit.
The motto of the pilgrimage is "We Two-Pilgrims Together," the
Daishi and I.
I shiver, feeling the chill as this early spring afternoon wanes. I
bow once more, ask that he be with me, ask that my pilgrimage
may be a worthy one.
I move around the hall to the front. Before descending its
steps I look down the mile-long path that disappears under the
cedars, as the tops of the cedars themselves disappear in mist.
Some of those trees were standing when the Daishi founded this
mountain sanctuary more than a millennium ago.
Walking this path is walking through history. Stretching on
both sides is the greatest cemetery of Japan. Mighty names crowd
one another. These may not be their only graves, I know, for in
Japan one may have many graves~it is enough to bury a lock of
hair, a bit of ashes-but they are here because it was important to
be here, on Koya, this Buddhist mountain, close to Kobo Daishi.
Massive tombstones,
towers mossy with age; clean
fragrant air, a sense of
peace: I walk in deepening shade
toward the temple where I lodge, the temple among the hundred
up here that I call mine. Tomorrow I will go down from this holy
mountain, cross the wide strait to Shikoku, and take myself to
Temple Number One.
24
Temple Number One: * when I made my first pilgrimage I was puzzled and I asked the priest, why is this
particular temple Number One? \Vouldn't it be more
logical to begin at Kobo Daishi's birthplace? The very
first guidebooks for the pilgrimage, more than three centuries ago,
told pilgrims to start there, yet that temple is numbered Seventyfive.
The priest told me of a tradition that pilgrims should begin by
visiting the Daishi's tomb on Mount Koya, as I have done. Coming
Besides numbers, all the temples of course have names; they are given in the table beginning on page 329.
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PILGRIMAGE
down from Koya and crossing over to Shikoku, they arrived near
here. And so, when the temples acquired numbers, this became
One.
Yet I know that people have always done the sensible thing: if
they lived on Shikoku they started from home; if they came from
another island they started at the port where they landed, and that
might be on the opposite side of Shikoku.
It was, and is, entirely proper that they should do so. For this
pilgrimage has no goal in the usual sense, no holy of holies to
which one journeys and, after celebration in worship, returns
home. This pilgrimage is essentially a circle: a circle has no beginning and no end. And so it is not at all important where one
begins. What is important is that one go all the way around and
return to one's starting point. One must close the circle.
The lane that leads from the town's main street to the temple
gate is lined with pilgrims' inns and pilgrims' shops. Nowadays the
temple seems like an adjunct to the town, at its periphery. But the
temple came first; to serve those who flocked to it the town grew up
at its gate. Many Japanese towns began that way.
The gate makes that history manifest. It dominates the block
as it once dominated the town. It is monumental, two-storied,
capped by a massive, flaring tile roof that culminates in dolphins
who flip their tails as if in greeting. The gate is a symbol, summoning one from the secular world to the sacred precincts within.
Menacing giants flank the passageway: the rampant figures of
the guardian deities who protect the temple glare down in warning
to the insincere. For all their threatening stance these gods inspire
worship; here as at other temples straw sandals are tied to the
screens around their alcoves, offered by pilgrims wi th prayers for a
safe journey, or by local people for relief from suffering in feet or
legs-there is no mistaking the strength of those huge limbs or the
solidity with which those feet are planted.
It is said-at least it was said in the old days-that when a
pilgrim passes through the gate of his first temple he commits
himself to completing his pilgrimage even at the risk of death
along the way. His white robe testifies to that: in Japan white is
26
the color of death. Moving through the gate of Number One I too
feel a sense of commitment. Now I am a hem'o-a pilgrim to the
Eighty-eight Sacred Places of Shikoku.
Straight ahead, a long stone walk leads to the main hall. On
my left, open all around but under a roof, the stone ablution basin
holds water for symbolic purification; there are bamboo dippers so
that I may rinse my mouth, colorful towels left by groups of henro
so that I may dry my hands. Farther along is the bell tower; I may
if I wish-and I do wish-grasp the rope, pull back the heavy timber, and swing it forward to strike the bell, announcing my arrival
to the temple deities and to Kobo Daishi. Deeper in the temple is a
pagoda, a two-story structure distinctive to Kobo Daishi's kind of
Buddhism, the first story square, the second story round; with the
sculptures it houses it symbolizes the universe. On my right, beside
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PILGRIMAGE
a pool that is as much for fire fighting as for beauty, stands a tall
bronze statue of the Daishi in the garb of a pilgrim, an appropriate
figure for the first temple. Past him, at the end of a walkway to the
right, is one of thc essentials of a pilgrimage temple, the hall enshrining the Daishi. Beyond and behind the Daishi Hall are the
temple office, the quarters for the priest and his family, and the big
rooms where a couple of hundred henro can be lodged.
This is the traditional season for beginning the pilgrimage;
there are numbers of henro about. I make my way to the main
hall, light a candle, offer sticks of incense, and climb the steps to
the wide veranda sheltered by the projecting roof. Gratefully I ease
my pack off my back and step forward to bow in worship.
My mind goes back to the day some years ago when I began
my first pilgrimage, and to the early morning service that began
the day. I was traveling with a young priest; he joined the temple's
priest at the altar so that I was the only one in attendance. It was a
gray, rainy dawn. There was the soft early light, the murmur of the
rain, the music of the liturgy that reminds me of a Gregorian
chant. And there were the pigeons flying freely in and out of the
open-fronted hall, their coos and the whir of their wings making
accents like the priest's bell and drum. A temple is home to many
pigeons. They are drawn by the rice that some people still leave as
their offering, though most now drop a coin or two into the big
grate-covered offertory box.
Worship here is as the individual chooses. A devout and
knowing Buddhist may go through a whole litany. Some kneel in
silent prayer, some pray very audibly. But one phrase constantly
recurs to the lips of any henro: Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo. It is not
easy to translate: "I put my faith in the great teacher who brings
light to all the people, Universal Adamantine Illuminator." Or
more simply, "Homage to Kobo Daishi, who impels our quest,
who guides and acccompanies us." We Two-Pilgrims Together.
I take up my pack and move to the Daishi Hall. There is a
special warmth in the prayers said to the Daishi. "Namu Daishi
Henjo Kongo."
Beyond a bridging archway I find the priest and his wife. We
exchange greetings-we are old friends now-and I introduce my
The Daishi as a
pilgrim (a print by an
unknown artist)
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
children, and it will be several weeks before his visa comes through.
I considered carefully before I asked him to join me. First, he
is robust though not big (his sport is judo) and I think he will enjoy
the hard walking and climbing. Then, in contrast to most of his
peers, he is interested in his country's culture, and the pilgrimage is
a deep plunge into that culture. Finally, we like each other and
that is a good way to begin; I hope we can say as much when we
end. His name is Morikawa Nobuo (in Japanese style, which
places surnames first).
I have my equipment from previous pilgrimages but Morikawa must be outfitted, so we go to the temple's shop. He gets a
white robe like mine, about hip-length. Traditionally hemo have
dressed all in white but for practical reasons we will wear ordinary
slacks and hiking shoes.
He gets a stole, a purple band of cloth to wear over his shoulders, embroidered to announce that he started his pilgrimage at
Number One (technically it is the stole that is a priest's vestment of
office, his flowing robes are merely clothing; our abbreviated stoles
mark us as laymen engaged in religious exercise). He gets a sedge
hat, woven nowadays of straw, round, shaped like an inverted
bowl, about a foot and a half in diameter. Its ancient design is
really very practical, I have discovered: it shades the eyes, it is cool
on the head, and when its vinyl cover is stretched over it-a modern extra to compensate for the fact that neither the material nor
the weaving is up to old standards-it makes an effective rain hat.
He gets a rosary of a hundred and eight prayer beads. We each get
a bell of brass to hang from the belt; I have not carried one before
but this time I want to. A bell calls one to prayer and is a reminder
of impermanence: its quickly fading sound is like human Iife"changing, inconstant, unstable," predestined to be transitory.
He gets an album filled with doubled sheets of fine paper. The
pages are blank now but at each temple he will present this book
and on a fresh page his visit will be certified with vermilion stamps
and calligraphy in black ink. I have mine: one carries the same
album for life; the temples add stamps over and beside the old
impressions. Count the stamps and you will know how many times
a hemo has made the pilgrimage.
He
a supply of name-slips and a pouch to carry them in.
Printed on the slips are the name of the pilgrimage and a likeness
of Kobo Daishi based on that last portrait painted by his princedisciple. At every altar where we worship we will leave a slip on
which we have written name, age, home address, and date. Thus
henro testify to their prayers and presumably sublimate man's
deep-seated urge to commit graffiti. Yet many temple walls bear
names and dates historically valuable because they are centuries old.
Most important, Morikawa selects a sturdy staff. It is the
hem'o's one essential. He leans on it often, especially in the mountains; he is
for its support. But beyond that, it symbolizes
Kobo Daishi. It embodies the faith at the heart of the pilgrimage,
that the Daishi travels at the side of every pilgrim. And so the
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PILGRIMAGE
henro treats it reverently. When he stops for the night, his first act,
before he looks to his own needs, is to wash the base of his staff, to
wash the dust of travel from Kobo Daishi's feet as was necessary in
the days of straw sandals. And in the room where he sleeps he puts
the staff in the place of honor. On not only the staff but on much
of the rest of our equipment-hat, album, name-slips and the
pouch to carry them in-are the words Dogyo Ninin: "We TwoPilgrims Together."
The hat bears other writing. Four lines of a very Buddhist
poem radiate from the crown in the four directions:
For the benighted the illusions rifthe world.
For the enlightened the knowledge that all is vanit),.
In the beginning there was no east and westWhere then is there a north and south?
MASTER
33
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PILGRIMAGE
MASTER
wrought are found all over Japan, including areas he could not
possibly have visited in his lifetime, but nowhere do they cluster as
thickly as along the road that henro travel.
\Ve begin to encounter them at Temple Two. (Temple One
purveys no legends, perhaps because as its priest once said to me,
"Its position as Number One is sufficient unto itself.") At the second temple we find an ancient cedar said to have been planted by
the Daishi; people call it the Longevity Cedar and say that if you
pray pressing your hands to it you will be granted long life. Offerings of coins, hundreds of them, are stuck into its tough old baric
Nearby a statue of the Daishi celebrates another legend.
There once was a woman of Osaka who had been afflicted with
miscarriage after miscarriage so that she had never been able to
bear a child. Becoming pregnant again, she set out on the pilgrimage. Here at Temple Two labor pains set in, and then Kobo
Daishi appeared and helped her give birth to a healthy baby. And
if you demur, as I did, that she hadn't walked very far, the priest
will correct you: she had walked in reverse order, counterclockwise,
so she had nearly completed her pilgrimage. Since then pregnant
womcn have prayed here for safe and easy delivery, and one whose
prayer was answered contributed this statue.
At Temple Three the Daishi is said to have found that the
local people suffered from a lack of good water; he thrust his staff
into the ground and brought forth a spring. This is one of the
legends found most frequently throughout Japan, sometimes featuring another saintly figure but most often Kobo Daishi. It testifies to the concern about water that has always dogged the
inhabitants of these islands: they get goodly amounts of rain but it
runs quickly off the steep slopes into the sea. Many of the pilgrimage temples have a legend about the Daishi's bringing forth a
spring or digging a well in one night or taming an unruly river.
Temple Six, not far ahead, was founded when he opened a hot
spring with curative powers; he built a bath for the people and
beside it he erected a chapel that grew into the temple.
Though such tales interest me I keep searching for the ~esh
and-blood Daishi, the man who lived from 774 to 835. It is not
easy to find him-he is so buried under legend-but I keep trying.
35
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MASTER
37
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I have been imagining what his boyhood was like; we have so few
facts. He was born in 774 to a family named Saeki. The Saeki were
a branch of the great Otomo clan, whose antecedents stretched
back to mythological times. When the Sun Goddess sent her heavenly grandchild earthward to rule the Japanese islands, the ancestor of the Otomo put on his back a heavenly quiver, girt on his
heavenly sword, took up his heavenly bow, grasped heavenly arrows, and proceeded in front of the heavenly grandchild: Otomo
means "great escort." All of which signifies that the Otomo very
early allied themselves with the clan that became the imperial line
and that they distinguished themselves as warriors. They had ample chance to prove themselves, for the myths tell us that it took
four generations of fighting to push from the island of Kyushu to
the heartland where present-day Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka stand,
and there establish the heavenly grandchild's great-grandson as
the first emperor of Japan. That first emperor's greatest general
was an Otomo.
But as the chronicles point out, the Otomo were more than
generals: they "fought at the same time both for their Emperor
and to rescue the people from misery"; they were "learned ministers and enlightened assistants"; they "propounded the policy and
divine Japan flourished." Very likely their daughters married emperors, for imperial edicts call them near kindred. There were periods when they dominated the court and, there being no law of
succession, themselves settled the inevitable brawls by deciding
which prince would be emperor, following which they assumed the
post of Great Minister and conducted affairs. (Early in the game,
surely by the sixth century, Japanese emperors slipped into the
pattern of reigning without ruling.)
MASTER
39
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MASTER
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MASTER
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44
MASTER
homes of the gods or plaees where the gods descend when called
upon in prayer. One thinks of Sinai and Olympus, but nowhere
have mountains entered more deeply into life and faith than in
japan, perhaps because it has so many of them.
The ancient japanese drew no hard line between their gods
and their ancestors. Aneestors became spirits-occasionally malevolent but usually benign-who watched over the family in a continuing relationship with those living and those yet unborn. Spirits
regarded so intimately had to have a residence. Prehistoric japanese had only vague notions of an afterlife; it was somehow a
continuation of this existence. They peopled their mountains with
their dead.
Buddhism when it came from China did nothing to diminish
this reverence for ancestors; it made old beliefs stronger and more
complex. This mountain became a Buddhist mountain. Now the
dead are remembered in Buddhist ways.
Through the open fronts of the village shops we glimpse traditional artisans at work. This place has a virtual monopoly on the
production of hanging scrolls picturing Kobo Daishi; they are retailed here and wholesaled all over Japan. We stop at a shop with
a fine display of them and all manner of religious articles. The
owner, a round and genial little man, places cushions for us and
pours tea, all the while inviting us to leave our packs with him
while we make our way up to the temple and to rest awhile before
we tackle the climb-generations of henro have called it heart
pounding.
The cheaper scrolls, he tells us, are printed from copper plates;
the more expensive ones are painted. Alas, craftsmen are getting
scarce. He employs three painters. Repeating the same design
again and again, each man works swiftly, two paintings at a time,
adding strokes to one while the other dries. Still, with the increasing number of henro it's difficult to keep up with the demand.
He views benignly the new breed of henro who travel by bus
or car. They have money to spend and they don't mind buying
things heavy to carry. He chuckles: some try to bargain but they
45
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
don't succeed-a man can't expect divine favor from a sacred article after he's knocked down its price. It's only that bus henro are
held to such a tight schedule they don't have time to sit and chat.
He pours us more tea.
Finally we rouse ourselves and start up. The shops end, there
are a couple of farmhouses and noisy chickens, then the temple's
gate at the foot of the forested mountain and behind it the first
long flight of stone steps.
Halfway up is an altar where one must pause: a spring (credited to the Daishi, of course), a stone basin into which it flows,
images of Kannon and Jizo, two of Buddhism's friendliest deities,
and heaped before them, long thin strips of wood, each bearing the
name of someone who has died. We pray here. We dip water from
the basin and pour it over the statues, for in washing them we
cleanse ourselves. We wet the strips of wood in benediction to the
departed souls, to erase their sins and calm their spirits.
It's true: our hearts are pounding when we reach the main
hall. Inside at a high desk sits the old gentleman who inscribes
albums. The priest of this temple is a schoolteacher; I have never
met him. It was this old man with wispy chin whiskers from whom
three years ago I heard the temple's legend. He had been listening
to a baseball game on his transistor radio but he obligingly turned
down the volume and told the story.
When as a young man Kobo Daishi wandered Shikoku in his
search for the highest truth in Buddhism, he found at the foot of
this mountain a hut and a lovely young woman weaving cloth.
The girl, as warm-hearted as she was beautiful, gave him food
during the seven days he did ascetic practice on the mountain. On
the seventh day he asked if he might have some cloth for new
leggings and wristlets. The girl willingly gave him what he asked
for and cut another long piece of her finest weaving to make him a
new robe. Grateful and curious, he asked how she came to be at
this lonely spot and she told him her story.
At the imperial court her mother had been a lady-in-waiting,
her father a young officer of the guard. He became involved in one
of the cabals that swirled around the throne, was found out and
MASTER
exiled. Her mother was left pregnant. Knowing that she was suspect because of her affair with a conspirator, she feared that if her
child were a boy he would be killed, and so for six months she went
daily to Kyoto's great Kiyomizu Temple to pray that she might
give birth to a girl. She prayed to Kannon, the Buddhist embodiment of compassion. Her prayers were answered.
Seven years later Kannon came to her in a dream to tell her
that she and her daughter were in mortal danger and that they
should flee to Shikoku. They came to this place. Later, as the
mother lay dying, she told her daughter all this, told her she was
heaven-sent by Kannon, told her she should worship Kannon with
all her heart.
This story so moved the Daishi that he began at once to carve
an image of Kannon. He observed the strictest ritual, bowing three
times before each cut of his blade into the sacred wood. vVhen the
statue was finished the girl begged him to ordain her a nun and so
he cut her hair and administered the rites. As he did, a violet cloud
descended from the sky and heavenly music was heard all about
and in that instant the girl attained Buddhahood and was transformed into an image of Kannon. Kobo Daishi ascended the
mountain, founded this temple, enshrined both images, and called
the temple Kirihata-ji-kiri means "cut" and hata means "cloth""Cut-Cloth Temple."
This is one of the loveliest temple legends of them all. It dramatizes the heart of Kobo Daishi's Shingon, the belief that mortal
man-even woman, to whom the Buddhism of the Daishi's time
was not prepared to grant equality-can attain enlightenment, can
aspire to Buddhahood in this life. A Japanese writer has called this
the love story of Kobo Daishi's youth. A conventional priest might
find his remark impertinent but there would be agreement that
man, who has within him the seed of Buddha, is also flesh and
blood. Shingon, like the original Buddhism of the historical Buddha, focuses on this life, not on the hereafter.
Descending, we pause at the Daishi's spring. Facing the altar
is an old woman, her hands pressed tightly together in prayer. "I
am eighty-four years old, Daishi-sama, and I am so grateful to be
47
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here, to be able to come here again." She says it again and again.
When she turns, tears are streaming down her cheeks.
We exchange name-slips with her, as henro do who meet
along the way. She is from across the Inland Sea and she is certain
this is the last time she can make the pilgri mage. She had not
expected this chance, for she has no family left, but some neighbors
invited her to join them. At this point she could climb no farther
and, waiting here for her companions to come down again, she has
been pouring out her gratitude. We tell her truthfully that she
looks very healthy despite her eighty-four years. "I am quite ready
to die at any time," she answers. "I ask only to be buried along the
pilgrimage route."
We cross the wide gravelly bed of the Yoshino River and head into
the foothills to Temple Eleven. There we spend the night, resting
our blisters for the daylong climb up into the mountains to Number Twelve.
It is a long climb. Sometimes the old path is gentle underfoot,
sometimes rough and steep. We pass through tangled copses and
stands of tall cedars, plumb valleys, and file along ridges from
which the mountains fall away on either side to rise again in
ranges green and blue as far as the eye can see. We find gravestones
a century or two old. ]\10st bear no name, just HENRO and a date;
this trail has taken its toll.
It is late afternoon when we break into the temple's clearing.
The highest peak of the range looms before us. Far below are the
valley and its people. In the same instant we both start to say the
same thing: surely up here the vexations of life down there must
fall away.
Twelve is the first real mountain temple of the pilgrimage:
high in the mountains, deep in the mountains, of the mountains.
The Japanese have always revered their mountains. In this country
the universal emotions that mountains stir-the sense of beauty,
mystery, awe-became the singular Japanese blending of god and
man, nature and art. And so the mountain temples of the pil-
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the supreme miracle worker, they called upon as they tramped the
countryside, healers and diviners to the common people. It was not
orthodox Buddhism they brought. They took what they perceived
of it and grafted it onto their heritage of Shinto, creating a heady
mix dyed with the mystery of the mountains they had always
looked to as the source of their power. Nor did orthodox Buddhism
compete with them, for the priests of the temples clustered around
the capital had no time for the common people: they were preoccupied with ministering to the nobility and with buttressing Buddhism's position as a state religion. It was not until En the Ascetic
attracted a great following that, outraged, they had him "banished
to a far-away place" because "he led the people astray by weird
arts." Pardoned after three years, and unrepentant, he wandered
into western Japan still carrying the new religion to the countryside. And so very quickly after Buddhism's arrival in Japan he
and mystics like him began to naturalize it, adapting it to Japancse ways of thinking and feeling, making it the people's religion.
Legend says that sometime in his life he carne here. That they
say he climbed this peak shows how Buddhism had altered the
ancient native beliefs about the mountains. For Japanese scholars
say that the old ideas of the mountain as a sacred place prohibited
men from trespassing to the heights; they worshiped from below. It
was Buddhism that led to the climbing of sacred mountains to
perform religious rituals and to undergo the austere disciplines,
mental and physical, that brought superhuman powers.
En the Ascetic is important to henro-and therefore Temple
Twelve is a key temple of the pilgrimage-because he represents
something deep and elemental in Japanese Buddhism, the strong
current of mountain asceticism. This is the Buddhism not of priests
presiding over incense-filled temples but of wandering holy men, of
saintly laymen whose altars are the peaks. It isjust such a wandering ascetic that Kobo Daishi became when he turned to the
moun tains.
But there is another great current in Japanese Buddhism and
here on this windswept peak it too asserts itself. Far below but
insistent to the eye is the valley with its motley of cultivated fields,
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its villages and towns and distant city. Though the people gaze up
toward the mountains they live down there. That other great current is a tradition of service to the people.
It is typified by another of the Daishi's precursors, a priest
named Gyogi, who lived from 668 to 749. He was better trained in
Buddhism than En but still was unordained, a lay priest, a maverick, and a thorn in the side of the establishment. Like En he had
charisma. Even a hostile observer, writing about him and his disciples, had to admit that.
"They collect a great number of people at a spot in the hills
east of the capital, where they preach dubious words which only
confuse everyone. At times as many as ten thousand flock there to
listen .... Such individuals are clearly guilty of breaking the law."
The charges are reminiscent of those flung against En but the
"dubious words" that Gyogi preached were the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of cause and effect, that every thought, every deed,
every utterance will produce an effect in the future. Evil breeds
evil, good breeds good: this is the law called Karma.
And so Gyogi preached of "sin and happiness." He would
erect an altar and conduct a service in the open. "Everywhere
people flocked to him, leaving nobody in the towns, struggling
with each other in their eagerness to worship him." He urged them
to action that would atone for the sins they had committed in this
and previous existences.
Action to Gyogi was not an abstraction. He led an army of
holy men who went among the cornman people, organizing them
to build roads and bridges, darns to impound ponds for irrigation,
dikes to tame flood waters-these to make life easier; to make life
brighter Gyogi and his followers founded temples that were much
more than places of worship: they housed libraries that were centers of learning, dispensaries where simple medicines were given to
the sick, almshouses where the poor were fed and clothed. Most of
Gyogi's disciples worked at the age-old problem of raising money
but others were civil engineers, carpenters, metalers, sculptors,
painters. The people gave what tiny offerings they could and they
gave the strength of their arms and backs. The contribution of
each was small but the aggregate was great.
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I have seen several priests perform the goma. Each stamps his
personality on it as he must: it is not only a service conducted for
the worshipers but an intense inner experience for the priest. The
abbot of the temple where I lodge on Mount,Koya is a scholar and
a perfectionist; he brings to the goma precision and grace within
passionate concentration. The priest here at Twelve reflects the
traditions of this temple: he evokes beliefs before Buddhism, holy
men to whom the mountains were home. In his intensity there is
something wild: the sticks of firewood are jumbled, the thrown
leaves do not always fall in the fire. His little son, four years old
perhaps, scampers about the altar retrieving those that miss and
adding them to the flames. There is nothing unseemly in this: a
child cannot be irreverent.
The last stick of wood is placed in the fire; the flames die
down; the priest finishes the liturgy and rises to leave. At the doorway he turns and invites us, if we wish, to rub the smoke from the
dying fire on those parts of our body that need help. Then he is
gone. Is his leaving a gesture of disdain for an old superstition? If
so it is lost on us. We all cluster about the fire, catch the smoke in
our hands, and rub it on our legs, knees, backs, and, in obligatory
modesty, on our heads.
In the morning we leave Temple Twelve, start down thc
mountain. We comc to a roadside chapel, a great cedar, a gravestone, and the legend of how the pilgrimage began.
The story is that of the first pilgrim, Emon Saburo. It is the
story of a rich and greedy man who refused to give alms when the
Daishi appeared at his gate, but who then, chastened and remorseful, set out to find the Daishi and beg forgiveness. Worn out from
circling Shikoku again and again, near death, struggling up this
path in bitter cold, he finally met the Daishi here. Here the Daishi
gave him absolution as he died, buried him, and planted his staff
beside the grave. The stafr grew into the eedar that shades us.
(Actually, says a man passing by, this tree is the second generation.)
This is the primary legend of the pilgrimage. It points to the
basic concept of the pilgrimage, that the henro travels always with
the Daishi, for it is implied that Kobo Daishi guided Emon Saburo
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all through his grueling quest. And it emphasizes that the pilgrimage was originated by a layman, not a priest, attesting to the
popular nature of Kobo Daishi worship and of the pilgrimage. It
goes to the heart of the common man's religion, a religion of faith
and piety uncluttered by doctrine.
We continue down the mountain.
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Moments later we are invited in. We take off our boots (how
diseolored and sweaty our heavy socks!) and are led inside, around
to the back, and into a serenely handsome room thrown open to
the garden. Here the hubbub is shut out, there is only quiet and
beauty: almost at our feet a pool of lazing golden earp, a stone
bridge crossing it to paths that wander up a hillside sculptured
with rocks and bushes; a stone pagoda about the height of a man is
the focus to which the eye returns.
A priest appears to welcome us. He pours fine tea, puts cakes
and fruit before us. He urges us to eat, saying that today the temple has been flooded with gifts of food. He introduces himself as
the head priest's assistant, his adopted son and son-in-law, and he
tells us that the festival is managed by the temple's support association. \Vhat a happy way to make money-no wonder the temple
looks prosperous.
An older man appears: obviously he is the head priest. I know
that today dozens of guests and supporters important to the temple
are visitors and we apologize for taking him away from them, but
he makes us feel as though we are the honored guests. "Very few
henro come here anymore," he says.
He talks while the younger man keeps our teacups filled.
"This temple was a school for the nobility. It is where Kobo Daishi
studied as a child, from the years when he was eight or nine until
he went up to the university at the capital. By that time he had a
very sound understanding of Buddhism. Here he was also taught
the other requisites, including of course calligraphy."
In japan calligraphy is a fine art and the Daishi is aclmowledged to be one of the greatest calligraphers ever. The priest calls
for and gives each of us a reproduction of calligraphy that he says
the young Daishi did here. It is a fluent brushing of the lroha.
Among the brilliant achievements credited to Kobo Daishi is
the invention of kana: forty-seven symbols, each representing a syllable such as sa, to, or mu. Given these symbols, with a couple of
modifying marks that, for example, change ha to ba or pa, one can
write japanese phonetically. Once kana was created no longer was
it necessary to learn thousands of complex Chinese characters-for
the japanese, who had no writing system when Chinese culture
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came to their islands, had taken over the Chinese way of writing,
the only one known to them, even though Japanese and Chinese
were totally different languages and the Chinese writing system
was singularly unsuited to writing Japanese. (This particular borrowing has fittingly been called the greatest disaster in Japanese
history.)
Kana democratized literacy in Japan. Reading and writing
were no longer reserved to scholars and aristocrats who could
spend years acquiring an expensive education. For centuries kana
was the common people's way of writing. For centuries it was also
a woman's way of writing, even if she was highborn, for women
were not considered to have the intellect necessary to wrestle with
Chinese. And so it was that in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth
centuries a coterie of court ladies wrote in phonetic script some of
the gems of Japanese literature, including the world's first great
novel, The Tale if Cellji.
The !roha, which the priest has placed in our hands, is a way
of writing kana in a sequence that uses all the symbols and repeats
none, and that makes a poem and thus a memory aid. The poem is
strongly Buddhist: "The flowers, however fragrantly blooming, are
doomed to wither. Who in this world can hope to live forever? The
remotest mountain pass of existence is crossed today! Awaking
from a dream so evanescent, I am no more subject to intoxication."
A Western scholar condensed it for impatient foreigners this way:
"All is transitory in this fleeting world. Let me escape from its
illusions and vanities."
The Buddhist flavor of the Troha is just one indication; cettainly it was priests, and very likely Shingon priests, who developed kana. First, they were among the most learned men of their
society; second, they had to study Sanskrit in order to read many
of the Buddhist scriptures and since Sanskrit is written phonetically they were aware of what could be done; and third, they
had to communicate with the common people. But modern scholars do not believe that kana was achieved in Kobo Daishi's lifetime
(thougH he sparked much that was accomplished by those who
followed him).
And so when we are handed this handsome version of the
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b)1
Sakata)
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For three days we walk along Tosa's bleak and craggy ramparts
against the open Pacific. From the highway hacked into the cliff
we look down on black rocks savaged for ages by a violent sea. The
old path clung to the shoreline. There is no trace of it on today's
maps but we wonder if some vestige remains. It was not an easy
path; in the wash of waves the traveler scrambled over rocks that
were "jumping stones, bucking stones, tumbling stones." Late in
our third day of walking above the booming ocean, as we near the
tip of the cape, we pass hundreds of stone statues of J izo. Jizo is not
only the guardian deity of children; he also stands between this
world and the next to rescue souls on their way to hell. His images
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trouble .... But all that aside, this place is sacred because it was
here that the young Daishi set his life's course."
Just short of the tip of the cape we reach the caves where
many believe that the Daishi invoked Kokuzo. "He chose to get
close to the sea, not to worship from the crest," the priest says.
"The caves open to the southeast so that from them he could have
seen Venus at dawn." For Venus is considered a manifestation of
Kokuzo. Affirming that in meditation at this cape he at last broke
through to enlightenment, he wrote: "The planet Venus appeared
in the sky."
A massive rock, clutched by the roots of a banyan tree
(Muroto is subtropical, brushed by the warm Black Current out of
the South Pacific) separates grottoes large enough to give refuge
from the wind and rain. Within, it is strangely hushed: the pounding of the breakers is muffled. All about are stones piled up by
people who have carefully balanced one upon another as evidence
of prayers offered.
Was it in this cave the young monk achieved enlightenment?
Was it here he pledged his life? "From that time on, I despised
fame and wealth and longed for a life in the midst of nature.
Whenever I saw articles of luxury-light furs, well-fed horses, swift
vehicles-I felt sad, knowing that, being transient as lightning, they
too would fade away. Whenever I saw a cripple or a beggar, I
lamented and wondered what had caused him to spend his days in
such a miserable state. Seeing these piteous conditions encouraged
me to renounce the world. Can anyone now break my determination? No, just as there is no one who can stop the wind."
Muroto:
The voice of Buddha
Is heard-Yet day in) da)1 out,
Winds roar and waves surge.
. . . winds and waves: the vicissitudes of life; despite them the voice
of Buddha is within us if we but listen. He was insisting on that, as
henceforth he always would.
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thrown into a frenzy for fear they might be sent. Some had to be
punished for evading government orders, and others became exhausted from mental strain even before embarking."
Despite the danger, the emperor and the court, now that they
were settled in the new capital we call Kyoto, began in 801 to plan
another embassy, for it had been twenty years since the previous
mission had returned. It took two years to build the four ships that
were needed and to collect the splendid gifts. On a spring day in
803 they set out from the port now named Osaka. Two days later,
while they were still in the usually placid Inland Sea, they were hit
by a violent storm. One of the ships managed to continue to
Kyushu. The three others limped back to their home port. The
mission had to be put off for a year in order to make repairs.
It was this postponement that made it possible for the Daishi
to go. Perhaps he had not been included earlier because, wandering in the mountains, he was not even aware that the embassy was
being planned. Perhaps his family was in such bad odor that an
earlier request had foundered. But given the delay he was able to
obtain consent; there has been much speculation over the circumstances. 'Vas his proficiency in Chinese now more persuasive?-for
among those drowned in the storm was a sorely missed professor of
classics. Did his uncle, the tutor to the imperial prince, exert influence on behalf of his wayward nephew? Or was the emperor trying
to make amends for his harsh treatment of the Otomo and Saeki
men some years earlier? Whatever the reasons, permission seems to
have come at almost the last moment: he was ordained a monk-a
necessary qualification he had not bothered with previously-just
days before the ships reembarked. He was fortunate-it was more
than thirty years before the government undertook another mission to China. He sailed on the ambassador's ship.
The three ships joined the fourth that had been waiting in
Kyushu, and together they sailed into the China Sea in the late
summer of 804. Chinese or Korean sailors would have known better; the Japanese had not yet learned: they sailed at the beginning
of the typhoon season and when the monsoon winds were dead
against them. On their second night at sea a storm struck. Two of
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the ships were blown back to Japan; Ships One and Two were
separated but each continued on its way. Ship Two, carrying a
notable priest named Saicho, older than the Daishi and a favorite
of the emperor, drifted for two months but did reach China and,
considering the navigational problems, not overly far from the
fleet's target, the mouth of the Yangtze River. Ship One, with the
ambassador and the Daishi, was thirty-four days at sea but landed
three hundred miles south of its goal, at a little port where no
Japanese envoy had appeared before and this one was not welcome. After two months of frustration they were sent to another
port, the provincial capital, but that was not the end of their difficulties. The governor of the province was new and unaccustomed
to Japanese idiosyncrasy. The Japanese followed Chinese protocol
only so fin: they were willing to bring "tribute," they were even
willing to label themselves barbarians, but they were not willing to
acknowledge the emperor of China as their sovereign and to pledge
fealty to him. The lack of such an obsequious message led the
governor to conclude that they were not an official embassy but
merely traders trying to evade a tax on their merchandise. He
announced he would seek instructions from the capital, more than
a thousand miles away, and meanwhile he refused to let the party
land. He ordered their ship moored in an unhealthful swamp and
kept it under surveillance.
They were saved from a long and painful wait by an appeal
that Kobo Daishi wrote for the ambassador. His Chinese was elegant and his argument was persuasive.
He began by observing "that under the sage rule of the great
T'ang dynasty, the frost and dew come in their proper seasons ....
The imperial virtue spreads throughout the universe .... Because
in Japan the natural phenomena are harmonious and well ordered,
we know that a sage emperor surely rules in China. Therefore, we
cut the timber that grows on great peaks to make boats and send
the best of our officialdom to visit your vermilion court."
He described the perilous voyage. "A fierce storm struck
us, . . . ripping our sail and breaking our rudder. Great waves
tossed our small boat . . . . We cringed before the terrible wind,
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terrified that the great waves might wash us away .... We drifted
north and south, and saw nothing but the blue of sky and sea ....
Our water was exhausted; our crew fatigued .... How can words
describe our plight!"
Then he got to the matter at hand. "Whereas the eight northern barbarians gather like clouds to grovel before the imperial palace, and the seven western tribes flock together like mist to kowtow
at the royal court, the great T'ang dynasty has always given Japanese envoys special treatment as respected guests of state . . . .
How could we be discussed even on the same day as those insignificant barbarians? Moreover, it is the very nature of inscriptions or
credentials to contain lies and fabrications. In a land of honest and
unaffected people, what need is there for such documents?
"But now, the officials of this province are emphasizing documents and doubting our honesty. They are inspecting our boat and
listing its goods, both official and private. To be sure, this is both
legal and proper as the duty of conscientious officials. On the other
hand, we have just arrived from afar with the weariness of our
journey and the hardships of our voyage still heavy on our hearts.
Yet we have not been able to gratify ourselves with the succor of
the wine of imperial virtue. The restrictions placed upon us leave
us in despair, unable to rest. ...
"Humbly we beg to be received with the benevolence granted
visitors from afar. ... Be indulgent of our customs .... We humbly
beg to be treated in the usual way. Filled with awe, we thus petition you."
The governor had glanced at the ambassador's own messages
and tossed them away but he was impressed by the Daishi's calligraphy and his mastery of Chinese. He immediately ordered that
the Japanese should be made comfortable and treated well. If the
ambassador did not earlier esteem the Daishi's scholarship, he
did now.
Clearance finally arrived and the party made the fifty-day
journey to the Chinese capital, Ch'ang-an. They reached it in late
804, about six months after sailing from Japan, and were settled into a government residence. During the ambassador's three
months at the capital he chose to keep in his official party the man
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who had proved invaluable, and so the Daishi was able to savor
the brilliance of the city: almost two million people, the greatest
metropolis in the world, symbol of the glory of China. The Japanese sensed that the T'ang dynasty was tottering toward its ruin,
but China was still the strongest, richest, most civilized country on
the globe, ruler of the largest empire yet amassed. Ch'ang-an
thronged with foreigners: embassies from all over Asia; traders
from the far reaches of the continent, the Middle East, the southern seas; missionaries Buddhist, Nestorian, and Moslem; soldiers,
adventurers, minstrels. To the Japanese the city was breathtakingly cosmopolitan, and there was an added fascination: it had
been the model for the capital at Nara, for the short-lived interim
capital, and for the new capital now being built, the city today
called Kyoto.
Buddhism flourished in Ch'ang-an. There were sixty-four
temples for monks and twenty-seven for nuns and, of special interest to the Daishi, there was a strongly felt new current from India.
Called Esoteric Buddhism, it was the kind of Buddhism he had
experienced in his meditation on Kokuzo and in the sutra on the
Buddha Dainichi.
On the same day that the ambassador started home, the
Daishi moved to an eminent Buddhist temple to take up the studies he had come for. Here at last he met the patriarch of Esoteric
Buddhism, Hui-ko. With the insight born of enlightenment the
aging master at once recognized the young Japanese as the successor he had been waiting for: "He smiled with pleasure and
joyfully said, 'I knew that you would come! I have waited such a
long time. What pleasure it gives me to look upon you today at
last! My life is drawing to an end, and until you came there was no
one to whom I could transmit the teachings.' "
Hui-ko had been holding on to life until his successor should
appear. Now he passed on all that he had to offer, as one would
"pour water from one jar into another." The Daishi showed amazing facility; his years of study and lonely meditation had brought
him further than he knew; within three months he was given the
final ordination as master. At the age of thirty-two he became the
eighth patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism.
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Near death, Hui-ko bequeathed to the Daishi the ritual Implements he had inheri ted from his master and told him to return
to Japan and propagate the teachings there. "When you first arrived, I feared I did not have enough time left to teach you everything, but now I have completed teaching you, and the work of
copying the sutras and making the images has also been finished.
Hasten back to your country, offer these things to the court, and
spread the teachings throughout your country to increase the happiness of the people. Then the land will know peace, and people
everywhere will be content. In that way you will return thanks to
the Buddha and to your teacher. That is also the way to show your
devotion to your country and to your family. My disciple I-ming
will carryon the teachings here. Your task is to transmit them to
the Eastern Land. Do your best! Do your best!"
It was the Daishi who wrote the epitaph for his master's tomb.
Under the gaze of his fellow disciples and of scholars at the capital,
he "moistened his inkstone with his tears" and produced a composition and calligraphy that proved him worthy. Then, one of the
two ships that had been blown back to Japan having at last
reached China (the other ended wrecked on a desolate island), he
applied for permission to return home on it. In about two years he
had learned Sanskrit; he had met Indian masters living in Ch'angan and with them had studied Buddhism as it existed in India; he
had studied poetry and calligraphy with eminent Chinese; he had
even learned such little essentials as how to make a writing brush
of badgers' hair-all while becoming the eighth patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism.
Back on the island of Kyushu late in 806, thirty months after
he had set out from it, he sent a memorial to the emperor. He
reported on what he had achieved as a government-sponsored
scholar, listing all the sutras and religious objects he had brought
back, explaining their
summarizing the Esoteric Buddhist tradition, and telling how he had succeeded to H ui-ko. And
then he waited. Religion was a function of the state and strictly
controlled by it. Without authorization he could not propagate his
teachings; he could not even take up residence in a temple.
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hind damask curtains save for the artfully draped display of her
sleeves, the heavy outer robe and the dozen underrobes of silk
layered to show the wearer's exquisite sense of color.
This was the capital that for the next four centuries would be
home to an aristocracy who measured taste and sensibility by the
elegance of one's dress and scent and handwriting, who kept the
sword subordinate to the writing brush, and who yet managed to
govern the nation without recourse to war and to bequeath a dazzling legacy of art and architecture, prose and poetry, and a memory of how civilized man can be.
In this new capital the Daishi was acknowledged as the master
of Esoteric Buddhism. Emperor and subjects sought him out. To-ji,
a state temple still unfinished but crucial in the plan of the city,
was given to him to complete as he wished and make his headquarters.
In 816 he asked Saga to give him Mount Koya-a place he
had discovered during his ascetic wanderings-as the site for a
monastic center. His petition stressed the importance of meditation. "Students of meditation ... are treasures of the nation; they
are like bridges for the people." Yet in Japan, "It is regrettable that
only a few priests practice meditation in high mountains, in deep
forests, in wide canyons, and in secluded caves. This is because the
teaching of meditation has not been transmitted, nor has a suitable
place been allocated for the practice of meditation.
"According to the meditation sutras, meditation should be
practiced preferably on a flat area deep in the mountains. When
young, I ... often walked through mountainous areas and crossed
many rivers. There is a quiet, open place called Koya located two
days' walk to the wcst from a point that is one day's walk south
[rom Yoshino .... High peaks surround Koya in all four directions;
no human tracks, still less trails, arc to be seen there. I should like
to clear the wilderness in order to build a monastery there [or the
practice of meditation, for the benefit of the nation and of those
who desire to discipline themselves .... "
Mount Koya was promptly granted to him. For the rest o[ his
life he spent as much time there as he could, planning the architecture to harmonize with the setting and with Shingon doctrine,
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As he neared the end of his life he retired to Koya. At midnight on the twenty-first day of the Third Month of 835-by the
Gregorian calendar, April 22-he breathed his last.
One of his disciples sent a report to the temple in China where
he had met his master, Hui-ko: . . . In the Third Month [of 835]
his fuel became exhausted and his fire was extinguished. He was
sixty-two years old. Alas! Mount Koya turned gray; the clouds and
trees appeared sad. The emperor in sorrow hastily sent a messenger
to convey his condolences. The disciples wept as if they had lost
their parents. Alas! We feel in our hearts as if we had swallowed
fire, and our tears gush forth like fountains. Being unable to die,
we are guarding the place where he passed away .... "
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stands why, when he phoned, the wife at the temple seemed hesitant about accepting us: they will be busy and we must take care
not to get in the way.
It isn't easy. We arrive early, learn that the priest is away for
the day. A group of women are at work in the big kitchen preparing food for the two hundred or more who will sit down to tomorrow's feast; other members are at other chores. One of them comes
at once to greet us. She has a face that evokes every loving grandmother. She wants us to know how pleased she is that we are here
and she wants to bring us some lunch. To avoid being a distraction
we go down to the town.
The priest returns in the late afternoon and despite the demands on him he seeks us out. He has age and dignity, mellow
authority. "The salient thing about this temple," he begins, "is the
historical record that Kobo Daishi trained here." Then, as background for the service that will be held tonight, he relates the
temple legend. "When the Daishi came here he found that monstrous beings, creatures of corruption, dwelled on this height; a
huge camphor tree was their lair. The Daishi overpowered them
and to commemorate having banished their evil he carved his own
image on the trunk of the tree. After he returned from China and
aehieved fame he asked the emperor's support in building temples
where he had trained as a young monk. In this place he removed
the image he had carved into the tree, eut down the tree and from
its timber built a chapel, and in the chapel he placed the image.
That image can be shown only one day a year, on the Daishi's
anniversary. It will be revealed tonight and displayed until tomorrow evening."
It has grown dark and we are called to supper. We join the
members who have been working all day (they will stay the night)
as they sit with the priest and his family. vVe are given a preview of
what is to come tomorrow, old-fashioned dishes native to Tosa that
strangers like us could never experience save on an occasion like
this. Unlike most henro of times past, I like Tosa and one of the
reasons is Tosa food.
Later we are summoned by the priest's son and assistant.
With him and the members we walk the long gravel path through
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the darkness to where the lights glow in the Daishi Hall. It is the
oldest building on this hill, dating from 1486. Fire destroyed the
rest of the temple in 1899: I am sure it was this building and its
revered image that they fought to save and did. As we mount the
steps and enter, a feeling of age carries us out of the present into an
ancient timelessness.
Six priests attend, in formal robes. The head priest takes his
place before the altar, his son close at hand. The others are ranged
at the side of the altar. Invocations are made and then they chant a
sutra I find very beautiful. Under its music are the low tones of the
priest as he recites the mystic formula obligatory when this image
is revealed, a secret petition and dedication that has been transmitted orally from priest to successor. As the liturgy draws to a close,
while all in the chapel chant, "Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo," the
priest and his son move to the inner altar, mount the steps, open
the cabinet.
The priest turns and speaks to his people, very simply. He
talks of this once-a-year chance to meet Kobo Daishi. He says that
he has the Daishi's blessing to transfer to us ail, and he urges each
of us to pray here, tonight, for what is closest to heart. He introduces the two of us as henro who have come to be with them on
this occasion.
One of the priests escorts iYforikawa and me to the inner altar
so that we may view the image. We kneel and pray; the words
tumble out: "Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo." ... I can see it clearly
now. It is much fuller than a relief carving, almost in the round but
not quite cut away from the wood of the tree, which forms a background. Age has blackened it but someone, long ago and reverently, whitened the face to indicate nobility. As sculpture it is
simple and naIve: it would be called primitive. Its appeal is direct
and I am stirred. It is the figure of a young monk, still a seeker.
Ahead are the great achievements, the remolding of Japanese religion, the everlasting impress on Japanese civilization, the momentous journey to final rest on Mount Koya one thousand, one
hundred, and thirty-six years ago this day.
The priest's son walks back to the residence with us and in the
study prepares that special treat, tea from the first picking of the
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new crop. He tells us that the major sutra we heard tonight, the
one that moved me so, is the scripture that in Shingon is chanted
for the dead, adding that, as is fitting in Shingon, it emphasizes the
enlightenment to be achieved in this life. Optimistic and heartening, it affirms the joy of love.
We are back in our room when he brings me a gift from the
elderly lady who came to talk with us this morning: a henro's
white robe on the back of which she has printed a portrait of the
Daishi fi'om a wood block that belongs to the temple-a gift to
cherish.
Next morning the priest somehow finds time to escort us to
the temple's treasure house for a private viewing. He unlocks a
steel door and reveals an astonishing collection. "J\1any of these
things belonged to the Daishi," he tells us. "They are here because
he gave them to one of his most beloved disciples, the holy priest
Chiko, who, after the Daishi's death, came here to live out the rest
of his life. He is buried here."
First to catch the eye is a portable set of altar instruments,
made to nest together and fit in a wooden case that a priest could
carryon his back. The utensils are small but every essential is
included, exquisitely crafted as such things must be in Shingon,
light, delicate, of thin polished brass. They were made in China.
The assumption is that the Daishi brought them when he came
home. Another set is a copy made in Japan, supposedly on the
Daishi's order, a little larger, a little heavier.
We are shown treasure after treasure: sculpture, paintings,
prints, bells, sutras. It would take weeks to become passingly familiar with all that is here. What the priest is most excited about he
cannot show us: ten scrolls encompassing the two basic scriptures
of Shingon. They had always been listed among the temple treasures, "never to be taken from the temple precincts," but a few
years ago, when a special government committee investigated the
cultural assets of the eighty-eight temples, these scrolls came to
light for what they are: a single set with the same calligraphy,
paper, and covers, made not later than the second half of the ninth
'entury. They are probably the earliest copies of these sutras made
\ Japan, transcribed from those that the Daishi brought from
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China, but much research remains to be done and it is not impossible that they are the scrolls he brought back. They were found to be
in excellent condition but some restoration was deemed desirable
and they have been in Kyoto for that work. They will be returned
to the temple next week.
It is clear that the priest believes-perhaps because he so wants
to believe-that these scrolls are the very ones the Daishi carried
with him from China. "He had mastered one of the sutras here in
Japan but the other had not been brought here yet. The two
realms are complementary, inseparable, incomplete without each
other. You know that Shingon centers on the Buddha Dainichi.
The sutra that the Daishi found at a temple in Nara reveals that
aspect of Dainichi which is mercy-Buddha reaching down to save
man. The other, which he had to go to China to find, reveals that
. aspect of Dainichi which is wisdom-the diamond-hard wisdom
that cuts through illusion, the wisdom that enables man to strive
upward toward Buddhahood.
"Buddha descending in mercy, creatures ascending in wisdom: two aspects of the whole. You can understand why he had to
find that second sutra. But he learned much more in China. Until
then the sutras had only been recited in Japan. He learned the
liturgy, the indispensable services and ceremonies, and he carried
back the indispensable instruments. Then and only then, having
learned all that the seventh patriarch, Hui-ko, could teach him,
could he formulate his doctrine of Shingon.
"You can appreciate the crucial position that the Wisdom
Sutra occupied in his life, in the development of his thought. It is
central to his insistence that man can achieve Buddhahood in this
existence." He shoots a look at us from under white brows. "It is
wisdom that impels henro to make the pilgrimage."
As he locks the doors he points out that the treasures we have
seen are a clue to the origin of the pilgrimage. Priest Chiko was not
alone in seeking out the places on Shikoku where the Daishi had
trained. Other disciples came also and many followed them.
Within a century or two a phrase, "the remote places of Shikoku,"
was in common use; quite clearly it meant the spots associated
with the Daishi. A book written in the early twelfth century by a
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not on the mountain but at its base, and they climbed to the peak
only on speeial days during the year. People generally considered
that Koya was finished. The governor of the provinee, whose duty
it was to protect and sustain the monastery, instead seized its manors, its rich rice lands, the endowment bequeathed by the pious.
Since the monastery had ceased to exist, the governor declared, its
manors were forfeit. What's more, when one of the priests drew up
a petition to initiate a campaign for contributions to rebuild, the
governor refused to forward the document to the imperial government for approval. Such a campaign would be futile, he said, and
moreover, soliciting within the home provinee, which he governed,
would drain away the wealth of the district to no purpose.
But he could not prevent a priest with the necessary connections at the court from making a direct appeal to the head of the
government, the regent. "The peaks piercing the clouds were
founded on a single fistful of soil, the deep waves were amassed
from single drops of water," the priest's petition began, paraphrasing the Daishi's appeal when he was building Koya. Rebuilding
Koya would require "the united power of many people ... from
His Imperial Majesty ... to the denizens of the cities .... For how
else can we hope to pile up hundreds and thousands of timbers?"
This was not a rhetorical question. The sizable contributions
that could be obtained from a few wealthy patrons would be nowhere near enough. Beyond that were needed the offerings of multitudes; their individual gifts might be tiny but collectively they
could rebuild Koya.
The regent gave his approval and support and the campaign
was officially opened. But winning over the regent and conducting
a countrywide campaign were two quite different problems. What
was needed now was a leader in the tradition of Gyogi, who had
achieved the Great Buddha at Nara, or of the Daishi himself, who
had proved to be a virtuoso campaigner when he built Koya.
What was needed was a man who could inspire an army of holy
men and send them out over the whole country to convince the
masses that they should contribute their handfuls of rice, their
cups of oil.
The holy men had already begun to gather. They recognized
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a need and an opportunity: whenever an important Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine faced a major rebuilding job, they rallied. In
that tradition older than Gyogi they were the campaign workers;
that was the way they lived.
And then a leader appeared. He was a priest named J oyo, an
ordained priest impressive in his learning and his saintliness but
one who knew what it was to be a holy man: he had chastened
himself as a mountain ascetic and he had journeyed the provinces
seeking contributions. At the age of sixty, or some say sixty-two,
Joyo climbed Koya to live there the rest of his life. The holy men
embraced him as their own. It was he who inspired and organized
their gathering army.
Tradition says that Joyo had ardently prayed for the sight of
his dead mother and father dwelling in paradise. Then in a dream
he beheld a vision of Kannon-Kannon clad as a pilgrim, holding
a pilgrim's staff-who told him that to see what he had prayed for
he should go to Koya, for Koya was paradise here on earth.
That was the belief that impassioned the holy men. The
Daishi's mountain, his monastery for the practice of meditation,
had become, like the mountain of Temple Ten, like so many other
mountains in Japan, home to the souls of the dead. But more than
that, it was the next world revealed in this world; it was a certain
gateway to paradise.
The regent himself validated this belief when he journeyed to
Koya in 1019. At the place where his ancestors were buried he
dedicated a temple and a hermitage for which he had given the
money. As he lighted the eternal flame that burns there yet, he
prayed that "all those whose bones are buried on this mountain ...
from the days of the past throughout the future shall be assured of
entry into paradise and the salvation of Buddhism." So began the
practice of bringing to the mountain the ashes of the dead, and
since that meant making an offering and establishing an everlasting tie, the monastery was rebuilt and became prosperous.
The holy men of Koya fanned out over the country. They
ministered to all, but most of them were of the common people
and they went to the common people; there where the need was
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greatest they brought spiritual solace and practical help, they recited incantations and built bridges. Above all, they assured entry
into paradise by carrying back to the sacred mountain the ashes of
the dead. They made Koya "the burial place for all Japan."
The holy mcn are nameless, almost all of them. They were
neither learned nor ordained and they left few records. But they
did leave a rich and still vital legacy. Every henro is in their debt.
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flow down his face, and, overcome at the thought of the transiency
of things, he had sunk to his knees beside the freshly turned sod
and poured out his heart in prayer. For he knew that he might
someday fall at the roadside. Would anyone carry his bones to
Koya?
When his sobs subsided, when he had composed himself, he
had picked bits of bone and ash from the dying flames and added
them to those in an almost full bamboo tube in his pannier, said a
final short prayer, put on his wide hat of cypress bark from the
holy mountain, and hitched up his black robe to free his legs for
the descent. In the gloom of the forest he had picked his way over
the tumbled rocks of a washed-out trail. Where the slope began to
level, the path broke into the open. Below him lay the crossroads,
the clustered houses of the village, the pattern of the paddy fields
that meted out the valley floor. A few minutes later he knew he
had been spotted. He could see three men setting out to meet him.
In the lead he was certain he recognized the figure of the headman,
in whose house he had always been made welcome. How long had
he been coming to this village, fifteen years? The headman would
know.
Of one thing he was certain: from this village he would head
back to Koya. He had been too long on the road. His muscles
ached, fatigue had crept into his bones, but that he knew would
pass, given a few easy days. More important, he was drained in
spirit. He had said too many prayers, led too many masses, exorcised too many wild and baleful spirits. He had been too long in
the world. He was beginning to be obsessed with desire for a
woman.
He was not a priest: he was a layman and he had sworn no
monastic vows, but he had chosen to become a holy man and a
holy man should forswear sex. Ever since the day he had walked
out of his house and shop to make his way to Koya he had been
celibate. He never thought of his wife; she was a slattern and he
despised her. He felt no concern for his son, the one child who had
survived out of the many born to them; he seemed to have inherited his mother's unruly nature and, anyway, he was then fifteen
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and old enough to run the shop if he ever could. He felt no yearning toward his family but sometimes, in the villages on his circuit,
he would see a woman so desirable that she would set him to
trembling while he conducted a service. It was worst of all when
that woman was part of the household where he was guest-wife or
daughter-and almost unbearable when her eyes told him that
given the slightest encouragement she would creep to his bed that
night while the rest of the family slept. At this next, this last village, happily, the torment would be minimal: the headman possessed a wife and two daughters-unless the young women had
been married off-who were quite remarkably ugly. He smiled a
Ii tde.
But he wanted to be out of temptation's way. He longed for
the sanctity of Koya, for its pine-scented air, for its valleys that
were utterly quiet save for the birds that sang of the Three Treasures of Buddhism, "Bup-po-so, Bup-po-so." He longed for the
company of others like himself, for days of chorusing homage to
the Daishi and to Amida Buddha, for the sight of Joyo and the
spur of Joyo's faith and fervor. Joyo would speak of revelation and
of the holy ground they stood on, of the bliss to come and of the
hard task they meanwhile faced, of the great halls that must rise
again to thrust their golden finials toward Koya's sky. Joyo would
praise him for the contributions he brought and inspire him to do
more. And when his allotted time on the mountain was over he
would return to the world and his campaigning, fresh and eager.
But now he was tired.
The villagers were within hailing distance now, hurrying to
greet him. He pulled himself a little more erect.
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the living, formulas that would guide them on their passage to the
next world. Greatest boon of all, he would carry their ashes to
Koya, he would inter them in that sacred soil near the Daishi, and
so he would assure their rebirth in paradise. It was agreed that he
would conduct a mass for the dead next morning, which all the
village would attend.
The headman and the two elders, those who had met him,
now exchanged uneasy glances; instinctively the holy man knew
that this village was troubled and he tensed, wondering what burden would be laid on him. Haltingly, which was unusual for him,
the headman explained. There was a family in the village that was
accursed. One of the dead had been its head, a strong, stout fellow
who had never been ill till he toppled over as he worked his land;
he had spoken not a word after that, though he had lived several
days and made guttural noises that surely emitted from the evil
spirit that had seized him: his eyes never lost their terror at what
he alone beheld. A few days later his widow had given birth to a
baby that was unspeakably malformed, clearly the work of that
same malevolence; the midwife had drowned it, of course, and so
two of the dead were from the same family. There were differing
ideas, the headman went on, as to the identity of the spirit that
was afflicting that house. Fingers had been pointed at other villagers who might have harbored jealousy or hatred of the dead
man-other villagers both dead and alive, for it was common
lmowledge that the obsessed soul of a living person, without that
person's being aware, could wander off to wreak vengeance. There
had been gossip--ugly gossip, the headman added vehemently, and
the holy man realized that the headman had been a target of that
gossip and he understood why this village leader, who had always
been so self-assured, today seemed hesitant and distracted. The
headman paused, seemingly unable to continue, and one of the
elders concluded: the villagers looked to the holy man to identify
the vengeful spirit and pacify it. The holy man did not answer. He
had a feeling that it was unfair of them to present him with such a
problem when his spirit was so depleted. But there was no escape.
He must resolve their mystery or lose their faith in him, and, yes,
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From his pannier he unpacked his picture scroll and his bellround, dish-shaped, pierced in the rim for a cord-together with
the wooden mallet he struck it with. He hung the bell from his
neck and followed the headman to the open space in the middle of
the village. The assembled villagers squatted there, looking expectant; there was a welcome hum of greeting as they bowed. He was
glad to see that a couple of them had brought hand drums. There
was wood piled in the center of the area, ready to set ablaze.
lie would not preach long this evening. The important thing
was to raise their spirits. The headman had seen to it that a pole,
forked at the top, had been planted beside the flat rock he would
stand on. He hung his scroll there, still tightly rolled, and turned to
face the people. He raised his arms to quiet the buzz, took a deep
breath to fuse them in suspense, and then burst ou t, "Glory to
Amida Buddha and Kobo Daishi!" There was a tentative response.
He cried, "I put my faith in Amida Buddha and Kobo Daishi!"
The answer was firmer. Again. He had them now. Full-voiced,
they chanted together, "I put my faith in Amida Buddha and
Kobo Daishi!"
He silenced them as abruptly as he had begun. Turning he
pulled the cord that bound the scrolL It fell open. It was a picture
of the Daishi. There was a collective gasp of reverence; foreheads
touched the ground.
"I come as a messenger of Kobo Daishi!" he proclaimed, and
they caught their breath and bowed again.
"I come from the Daishi's temple on Mount Koya, the home
of numberless Buddhas! All who climb to its sacred heights will
experience paradise on this earth! All whose bones are buried in its
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originated in India said that those who did not achieve a state of
grace in this life were doomed to rebirth and another life of suffering-endless rebirth, endless suffering, The historical Buddha
found a way to achieve that state of grace-of enlightenment; he
made it his mission to lead men to it. But Buddhism, like the
Hinduism from which it emerged, remained deeply pessimistic: for
ordinary mortals enlightenment was almost beyond achieving.
The Japanese are an optimistic people, In Japan, over the
centuries, Buddhism was transformed into an optimistic creed,
Kobo Daishi's contribution to this was his insistence that manand woman too, for whom earlier Buddhism held out no hope-had within him the seed of Buddha; by hard practice following
strict precepts anyone could find and nurture that seed, could
manifest his innate Buddha nature-could achieve enlightenment.
About a century after the Daishi some priests pushed optimism to new heights. Hard practice, strict precepts they declared
unnecessary; simple faith was enough, Their faith was in the deity
Amida: one had only to eall on Amida to be saved-not to achieve
that state of grace called enlightenment but to be assured that
after death one would be reborn in Amida's paradise, Amida's
Pure Land.
There were variations on this theme. Some said that one
should constantly call on Amida, to be certain that his name was
on one's lips whenever death came, however unexpected, Some
said that to call upon Amida once, just once, was enough, Some
said that one must call upon Amida with faith. Others said that
faith was unnecessary, for Amida's compassion was without limit
and included a special concern for the wicked.
We are told that many eons ago there was a king who, having
renounced his throne to become a monk, examined a multitude of
Buddha-lands and then vowed to create his own, which would
combine the excellences of alL Moreover, he vowed to bring to his
Pure Land all sentient beings who would call upon him, After he
passed through an infinite number of kalpas (a kalpa is a period
defined in various ways, such as the length of time required for a
celestial nymph to wear away a ten-mile cube of stone if she
brushes it with her garment once every three years), during which
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He neverJails
To reach the Lotus Land oj Bliss
Who calls,
If Ol1b) once,
The /lame if Amida.
Kuya was an inspiration to the holy men. He made Buddhism
a joyous celebration that anyone could understand. He carried
Buddhism to the common people as the holy men labored to do.
He went into the countryside to build bridges and dig wells. He
went into the city in the midst of plague.
Worship of Amida as Kuya taught it invigorated Japanese
Buddhism. Temples and monasteries that had grown torpid since
the days of their great founders were again infused with energy.
Their priests were roused to reach out to the people. The new
fervor swept all the religious centers of the time, including Kobo
Daishi's Mount Koya.
Veneration of Amida was not new. Images of Amida stood in
the temples of every sect; priests of every sect invoked Amida as
they invoked other deities. Evangelism like Kuya's came not as a
new creed but simply as a rousing way of worship-too rousing,
complained some of Mount Koya's priests, but the monastery's
holy men seized on it, following their leader Joyo. The valleys
where their temples stood echoed with exultant noise. The priests
put up with it. They could not know that future evangelists would
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the largest, a cupful of rice the smallest, but he knew that in each
case a sacrifice was involved and he was satisfied. To make each
family feel that their contribution had meaning he quoted the
Daishi when he was building Koya: "A bit of earth will make the
mountain higher, a drop of water makes the ocean deeper."
He postponed until last the visit he dreaded, for there he must
conduct an incantation to try to force the vengeful spirit to reveal
itself. He knew it would be grueling, he was not at all sure he
would be successful, and he feared the consequences of failure.
They received him with fresh wails, the dead man's widow
and mother, while two small children stood wide-eyed and apprehensive in the background. It took some time for him and the
village elder who had accompanied him to subdue the distraught
women. They handed over the ashes of the dead man and the
infant in the same bamboo. He placed it before him and asked also
for a kimono that the man had worn. The widow got it and laid it
before him. "His name was Hikosuke," she sobbed. The light outside was fading and the room was dim; he was glad of that, but he
asked that the door be closed and secured to deepen the gloom and
prevent intrusion; the elder stationed his son outside.
He lighted a stick of incense he had treasured for such an
emergency, and as the scented smoke rose he closed his eyes, joined
his palms, and prayed earnestly to the Daishi and to Amida, first
silently, then audibly. Slowly he began to recite an incantation he
had learned on Koya. He did not know the meaning of the formula he chanted but he knew it was magical. At first there were
moments of panic when he was certain that nothing was going to
happen; then almost imperceptibly he began to fcel the hypnotic
power of those resonant syllables, feel a responsive hum begin in
his gut. He drifted then, unconscious of where he was, his chanting
involuntary, into a whirling void, neither light nor dark, neither
noisy nor quiet. He was searching, searching, but there was only
thc void, there were no forms, no meaning, no answers. Again he
felt panic rising in him like a shrill scream, louder, louder, until it
was unbearable. He clapped his hands to his cars in pain, and in
that paroxysm of desperation he knew, and he knew he knew. It
was clear now and slowly he unwound, the hum in him lessened,
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there was something like the sound of a great bell, and he found
himself bent over, his palms braced against the floor, sweat dripping from his face and running down his spine, back in this hovel
of a farmhouse.
The elder put an arm around his shoulders and held a cup of
water to his lips. At first his eyes would not focus, but then with an
exercise of will they did, and across the hearth he saw the widow
and the mother, pale, silent, mesmerized.
He sat erect and straightened his robe. "It was revealed to
me," he said, and in a voice flat and unemotional he recited.
"Hikosuke went to the mountain to forage for firewood. A man lay
there in the agony of death. He begged for help but Hikosuke was
frightened and fled down the mountain. In its fury the spirit of the
dead man struck down Hikosuke and the newborn child.
"There is no longer anything to fear. Crossing the mountain
on my way here I found the body and cared for it. I said prayers
and I will carry the ashes to Koya. The dead man's spirit is at
peace."
He bowed and left the family, carrying its ashes and its offerHe trudged back to the headman's house, the elder at his side
bursting to reveal that their tribulation was over, that no one in
the village, least of all the headman, bore any responsibility.
He sat by the headman's hearth that evening, the focus of
gratitude and admiration. He felt numb.
The next day, with the headman and all the elders, he went
into the fields, invoking the gods to make them bountifuL He
made the round of the other houses in the village, chanting over
each hearth a prayer to prosper those who gathered there; he collected their offerings. In two houses he was asked to treat the sick;
he recited a special incantation and prescribed a brew to be made
from herbs found in the forest. He was received everywhere with
deference; the contributions were larger than usual.
He could not, of course, carry the contributions back to Koya.
Small though they were, the sum of his collections at all the villages was too much to carryon his back. Each village carried its
offerings to another until they reached the "kitchen temple" at the
foot of the mountain, the monastery's accounting department.
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On the twenty-sixth of November, 1140, a young captain of the guards in the elite corps of the Retired Emperor Toba, having received Toba's permission, forsook
the world to become a Buddhist priest. It was not a
decision he made lightly. He had considered it for months if not
years. Especially it pained him to leave his wife and, some say, a
four-year-old daughter and an infant son, sending them back to his
wife's family with the stigma of being abandoned, rejected, by
husband and father.
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to mount his horse, much less stay on). Loving to ride and race,
spurred by competition, he excelled at polo and at kickball, a sport
demanding grace as well as speed and stamina. He was a vigorous
and robust young man.
He was also a poet. The atmosphere of the court was intensely
literary and had been for generations. The reigning emperor loved
poetry and frequently held poetry-composing parties. Good poets
abounded among the nobility: a man who could not compose a
creditable verse on a moment's notice was not socially acceptable.
Our captain of the guards was better than that: young as he was,
he was recognized as a rare talent. But he would never be invited
to one of the emperor's parties. Because of the complicated structure of court ranks and privileges-because though his family had
served in the capital for generations they were still regarded as a
provincial family-he was permanently locked out of associating as
an equal with the "beautiful people," the people who had access to
the throne and the men who were the really fine poets of his day.
There is no doubt that this had something to do with his
forsaking the world. Neither is there any doubt that he felt a genuine call to the religious life. But the fact remains that by becoming a priest he could shed his worldly status and assume a new one.
As priest he could enter any home in the capital. As priest he
would be welcome as a poet. As courtier his gift for poetry could
never mature; as priest there would be no bounds on it. As priest
he became one of Japan's great poets. When he became a priest he
took the name of Saigyo.
Formalities marked his leaving the secular life: his application
to the Retired Emperor Toba, its transmission through bureaucratic channels, Toba's acceptance of it. A poem shows the young
man's ambivalence and pain once he had taken the step.
So loath to lose
What reallJ, should be loathed:
One's vain place in life;
Maybe we rescue best the self
just by throwing it away.
SAVIOR
On a moulltain stream,
A mandarin duck made single
B)I loss of its mate
Now floats quietly over ripples:
Aframe ojmind 1 know.
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Yoshino drew him and it continued to draw him the rest of his
life. Yoshino's mountains were famous as a setting for religious
exercise. The most sacred of its many sacred peaks had nurtured
En the Ascetic; it was said that he had planted the tens of thousands of cherry trees that made-and still make today-its slopes
and valleys a brocade of bloom each spring. Kobo Daishi had
practiced in Yoshino as he had practiced on Shikoku; pushing into
the mountains beyond Yoshino he had found Mount Koya.
Saigyo was increasingly drawn to the Daishi as a model. Although at first he sojourned at temples of other sects he shifted to
those of Shingon. He was attracted by the Daishi's insistence on
practice in nature, and by the Daishi as a poet who found fulfillment in nature.
To both the Daishi and Saigyo, art and religion were one.
Enlightenment could make possible the creation of art-sculpture,
painting, poetry-which in itself possessed Buddhahood; in a circular flow of blessedness, contemplation of that art could bring enlightenment. The Daishi wrote that the teachings of his Buddhism
were so profound that they defied expression in writing, they could
baffle a novice's attempt to approach them intellectually, yet they
could be revealed through a sacred painting because its images
"are products of the great compassion of the Buddha; the sight of
them may well enable one to attain Buddhahood .... Art is what
reveals to us the state of perfection." Eleven centuries later Andre
Malraux called art "a manifestation of what men are unable to
see: the sacred, the supernatural, the unreal."
Saigyo said (late in life, when he was a mature artist) that
composing a poem required the same state of mind as sculpting a
Buddha; and that to ponder such a poem was exactly like reciting
a formula such as the Daishi had used to invoke Kokuzo: the poem
like the formula could lead to enlightenment.
The mindJar truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
Atfirst, but then
Adds more and more depth
While gaining greater ciaril)J.
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To push further, to both the Daishi and Saigyo nature and art
and religion were one. To Saigyo nature did not exist as the creation of his god; nature was not a symbol of the Buddha, not something through which one might approach the Buddha, not an aid
to comprehending the power and majesty of the Buddha~nature
was Buddha.
Saigyo became the greatest nature poet of Japan. To Saigyo,
being in nature-being alone in nature, open to it, vulnerable to
it--was a religious act. To merge with nature was his ultimate goal.
His poems are his acts of worship, composing them was his way of
practicing Buddhism.
During the f"irst years of his religious life, Saigyo stayed in the
vicinity of the capital, the former capital of Nara, and the Yoshino
mountains. Sometimes he went into the capital; he kept in touch
with his old friends. He cherished their friendship; he never lost his
loyalty to the people of the court. But he had another reason also:
on occasion he solicited contributions from them. Since he had not
joined a temple he drew no support from a temple. Instead he
enlisted in the campaigns to rebuild one temple or another ravaged
by time or fire. He became a holy man and a campaign worker,
one of the few who could approach the nobility. He could call on
his old acquaintances because he had been one of them and because his reputation as a poet was growing steadily.
In the early spring of 1147 Saigyo began his first long pilgrimage. Hc headed north, probably because that was where his
family had originated; Fujiwara relatives there held huge tracts of
land and had built a capital to rival the emperor's. He knew that
in their domains he would be received hospitably. No doubt he
carried some temple's commission to solicit contributions.
His journey lasted almost two years; he did not return to the
capital until the close of 1148. In the next year fire again swept
Mount Koya: the great pagoda and other central halls were leveled. It was then that Saigyo moved to Koya. For the next thirty
years and more Kobo Daishi's monastery in the mountains would
be his home while he helped raise funds to rebuild the lost structures. He was a distinguished addition to the army of workers: he
was appointed manager of the campaign. For this long period of
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his life he was a holy man of Koya; in the history of the holy men
he is one of the most eminent. Like the best of them, when he was
on Koya he frequently retired in solitude to do ascetic practice.
After the worldly business of raising money he had to restore his
spirit.
Because he was in and out of the capital and on intimate
terms with the ruling class he was witness to the tumult and disintegration of this distressing period. One of the early even ts shook
him personally. Early in the Seventh Month of 1155 came the
death of the Retired Emperor Toba, whom Saigyo had served.
Retirement had not prevented Toba from controlling the imperial
family. He had always had a strong dislike for his first son because
he was born of a consort who had been chosen for him by his
grandfather, an earlier retired emperor with a forceful personality;
Toba suspected that the boy was his grandfather's son, not his
own. Nevertheless when Toba chose to retire that son was his only
heir and at the age of five ascended the throne as the Emperor
Sutoku. As soon as his grandfather died Toba acquired some new
consorts, and when a favorite among them bore him a son he
quickly had the baby declared crown prince. Two years later he
forced Sutoku to abdicate and installed the infant as emperor.
The child emperor died at seventeen. Established practice dictated that Sutoku's son should succeed him but Toba chose
another of his own sons and made that son emperor with the
name Go-Shirakawa; then he made Go-Shirakawa's son the crown
prince. Sutoku's line was excluded from succession.
We do not know how Saigyo fclt about this murky Elizabethan maneuvering but we do know that he felt loyalty and
affection for both Toba and Sutoku. He had served Toba and it
was during Sutoku's reign that he had grown up, become a man
and a poet, and finally left the world for the priestly life. Sutoku,
who was almost the same age as Saigyo, was a poet and a patron of
poets. He created an atmosphere in which poetry thrived and
Saigyo was devoted to him.
Naturally Toba's treatment left Sutoku bitter, and of course a
party at the court sympathized with Sutoku and let him know that
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they considered him wronged-most of them had their own interests at heart as much as his, for they would profit if Sutoku's line
came to power. The final indignity came when Toba died: Sutoku
was refused admittance to the palace to join in the last rites for his
father. Now his injuries seemed unbearable and his anger erupted.
His supporters gathered and-something unheard of for centuriesmounted an armed rebellion in the heart of the capital.
Saigyo and men like him were horrified. The imperial family
was split against itself; the Fujiwara family was split against itself.
Saigyo had just come down from Koya to the capital, summoned
by word that Toba was dying. He performed funeral services and
then watched aghast as revolt erupted.
It did not last long. Sutoku's forces were few and ineptly commanded. They performed heroic feats of arms but the battle,
fought at night against the flames of a burning palace, lasted only
a few hours. The aftermath was as horrifying as the insurrection
itself: as a shaken chronicler set down, "There was a child who cut
off his father's head, there was a nephew who cut off his uncle's
head, there was a younger brother who exiled his older brother,
there was a woman who drowned herself in grief. These things are
unnatural events in the annals of Japan." It had been nearly three
hundred and fifty years--three hundred and fifty years of a gentle
civilization-since the death penalty had been inflicted on a government official. Now a new age was born, an age in which men
like Saigyo felt themselves aliens, an age dominated by martial
emotions including, as historian George Sansom lists them, "anger,
pride, rapacity, and cruelty." It began with a vengeance. Some
seventy of Sutoku's supporters were executed and dozens were exiled. Sutoku, when he realized that his cause was lost, had his head
shaved to indicate that he renounced all worldly ambition, and
fled for sanctuary to the great Shingon temple Ninna-ji on the
outskirts of the city. His younger brother was chief abbot there
(from its founding until modern times Ninna-ji had an imperial
prince as its superior).
Ninna-ji being Shingon, Saigyo had friends among its priests.
He went there to try to see Sutoku but was told it was impossible.
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message that, "since the Emperor regards your guilt as heavy, not
even your handwriting can be placed near the capital." Sutoku
was consumed by rancor and despair. They say he bit through his
tongue and in his own blood indited across the scrolls an oath to
wreak vengeance in the afterlife. "Becoming the Great Devil of
Japan I will disorder all under Heaven, I will trouble the Realm."
Adds a chronicle: "After this, he neither cut his nails nor had his
hair trimmed; leaving his appearance unsightly, he was sunk in
evil meditations; it was frightful." And it was said that when he
was cremated, although the wind was blowing strongly out of the
north, the smoke of his burning inclined northeast toward the
capital.
Saigyo's visit to Sutoku's grave quickly became embedded in
the folklore of Japan. The most vivid account of it was written
some six centuries later as one of a collection of tales about the
supernatural; "you who pick up this book to read must by no
means take the stories to be true," the author cautioned. Here is his
version, much condensed. Saigyo is speaking:
The mountain was so densely covered with oak and pine trees
that it felt as dreary as if a steady drizzle of rain were falling. Then,
in a small clearing among the trees I saw a high mound of earth
above which three stones had been piled. The entire place was covered with brambles and vines. Sad of heart, I wondered, "Is this
where the emperor rests?" 1 could hardly hold back my tears. "I
shall honor his soul throughout the night," I vowed, and kneeling
on a fiat rock in front of his grave, I began softly to intone a sutra.
Soon after sunset an eerie darkness filled the recesses of the
mountain. An uncanny terror gripped my heart as I grieved on
through the pitch-black night. Almost in a trance I heard a voice
call, "Saigyo, Saigyo." I opened my eyes and peered through the
darkness, where the strange form of a man loomed, tall of stature
and thin as death. It was impossible to distinguish his features or the
color and cut of his garments but at once I knew that I was confronted by the ghost of the Emperor Sutoku. I bowed with tears in
my eyes and replied, "But why is your soul still wandering? You
ought to find repose in the soul of Buddha."
Sutoku gave a laugh. "It's I who've recently caused all the
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trouble in the world. I will put a curse on the imperial family. I will
throw the whole nation into chaos."
"I beg of you, forget past grudges. I pray and beseech you to
show intelligence and return to the land of paradise and find eternal
repose."
The compendium of wretched fates that befell Sutoku's enemies was of course historically accurate: the writer had the benefit
of hindsight. With the exception of Sutoku's half brother, Go-
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Shirakawa, who barred the palace gate to Sutoku when their father died and who refused to accept the sutras Sutoku had copied
in repentance, every notable enemy of Sutoku died in defeat and
misery. Go-Shirakawa had a long life and died in bed but the years
he presided over were filled with calamity for the imperial line and
he was more than once humbled; though a born survivor, history's
verdict on him is harsh: some call him mad and some say he was
"not mad but not at all wise ... a 'dark ruler' ... addicted to
intrigue and conspiracy."
Even before Sutoku died, apprehension or feelings of guilt had
led the court to erect a Buddhist temple on the site of the battle in
which his supporters went down to defeat, honoring those who lost
their lives there. Then the courtiers who had been banished were
called home. Seventeen years after Sutoku's death in 1181, faced
with fresh disasters, they tried to pacify his spirit by giving him
back his title of emperor. In spite of this, war swept the country
and his enemies were crushed. In 1184 he was raised to be a Shinto
god and at the battleground a shrine was dedicated to him, and
still there were whirlwinds and earthquakes and no tranquillity.
The efforts to placate his spirit almost literally never ceased, for
never again did the imperial house control its own destiny. Envoys
were sent to Shikoku to make offerings at the temples and shrines
dedicated to him every year until 1868, when briefly it seemed that
the imperial house would come into its own again. The assumption
proved illusory.
As for Saigyo, after a visit that surely was less harrowing than
the one described above, he went on to the Daishi's birthplace. The
place where his family home stood is marked by the im posing
Temple Seventy-five but nearby and closely associated are Seventy-four, Seventy-three, and Seventy-two. It seems clear that
Saigyo stayed for a while at Seventy-two or in a hut in its precincts. In the compound grows an extraordinary pine that they say
the Daishi planted. Today it is low, spreading, almost circular, and
more than fifty-four feet in diameter. Rising gently to a peak in the
center, it looks like a greclt green pilgrim's hat. One of Saigyo's
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he had talked with the regent, the absolute ruler of the country; he
had succeeded in getting Koya exempted from a tax recently
levied to reconstruct a Shinto shrine, and as a measure of appreciation he asked that all the priests of Koya be assembled for a service
to chant one million times a formula to insure the regent's wellbeing. He added that he had appealed to the regent to pay for
paintings to decorate the walls of their temple and that discussions
were proceeding nicely. "Owing to matters of business, I am afraid
I shall be staying in Kyoto a little longer and my return to Koya
will be delayed. I trust that you will continue to pray devoutly on
behalf of the regent so that when I meet him for our next long
discussion I shall find him fully satisfied." In addition to the
prayers, Saigyo accommodated the regent by tossing off "public
poetry" of the kind a poet laureate is expected to produce; for
example, a poem commemorating the opening of a new port built
to facilitate trade with China. Certainly there were few others
among the holy men of his time who could campaign as effectively
as Saigyo.
It is a mark of the changing times that the regent Saigyo dealt
with was not a Fujiwara; he was the head of a powerful warrior
clan that now was dominant. Emperors and the Fujiwara were
permitted ceremonial roles but they danced to a military tune.
The last decade of Saigyo's life began with a great war between two military families to determine which would rule Japan.
In the world of men it came to be a time of waifare. Throughout the
count1)!-west, east, north, and south-there was no place where war was not
beinl1.fought. The count of tllOse dj,inl; ... climbed continua1b). ...
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from Mount Koya to the great Shinto shrines at Ise. There was a
cluster of poets there and it would be a haven from the fighting.
There was no rupture in his beliefs for, as he pointed out in poetry,
the Sun Goddess enshrined at Ise had come to be considered a
manifestation of Dainichi, the central Buddha of Shingon-so close
had Shinto and Buddhism become in a process advanced by the
Daishi and continued ever since.
In five years of bloody fighting the control of Japan passed
from the family Saigyo had known in the capital to another whose
strength was in the northeast. In 1186 he undertook his last major
journey and again he went north, though it was not out of a desire
to cultivate the new ruler, for his loyalties were tied to the defeated. He did not even intend to seek an audience but he was
recognized as he was sightseeing in Kamakura, the new seat of
power, and was summoned by the new strong man, Yoritomo.
They talked all night, as the Japanese are wont to do, in what
must have been a delicate fencing match. Yoritomo suspected
Saigyo of being a spy and tried to find out by leading him to
discuss the martial arts that had engaged him when he was young.
Saigyo tried to pry a contribution out ofYoritomo for he was again
campaigning, this time to rebuild the Todai-ji at Nara, that eminent head temple for the state-established temples in the provinces; the Todai-ji and its great bronze Buddha-Gyogi's supreme
accomplishment-had been destroyed in a senseless act of war by
Yoritomo's enemies. (Saigyo's soliciting for the Todai-ji indicates
no change of heart toward Koya; holy men often shifted from one
effort to another, and the Todai-ji campaign was the great effort of
the day.)
Yoritomo, however, could truthfully state that he had already
given generously and all Saigyo got was a personal gift, a silver cat,
which he gave to a child in the street as he left-an act that must
have been calculated to show disdain for the giver, since Saigyo
could easily have asked that the valuable gift be kept for him until
he passed through on his way back; the cat would have fetched a
tidy sum to be added to the funds for the Todai-ji.
In all religions there is a constant theme in the stories of men
who come to be canonized or deified, as the Daishi has been and as
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valleys, truly a spot to purify the heart; beneath the forest mists the
flowers blossom; the bells echo to the cloud-capped hills. On the
tiles of its roofs the pine-shoots grow; mossy are its walls where the
hoarfrost lingers." The young monk sensed that the passage was
from the repertoire of those holy men who moved the hearts of the
people by storytelling; his heart was moved and he vowed that he
would cross the Inland Sea and climb to Koya, someday. (He
never made it.)
.Mostly Chogen talked about his bathhouses, sometimes about
his "invention": in hilly districts he had taught the people to build
fires in the caves and then pour water on the hot rock; result-a
steam bath.
The people, even the ignorant common people, needed baths,
he insisted. If they could keep themselves clean they would avoid
many of the diseases that devastated them. But perhaps more important was the spiritual benison, for bathing expunged pollution,
the pollution everyone incurred from death in the family, a wound,
intercourse, menstruation, childbirth. He spoke of how the Daishi
always lustrated himself in some pure swift-flowing stream before
he began ritual training or a challenging mission. And Chogen
confided that he had taught his campaign workers to tell the story
of the eighth-century Empress Komyo of blessed memory. Pious
and humble, this lady vowed to wash the bodies of a thousand
beggars; she had bathed nine hundred and ninety-nine when the
last appeared before her as a loathsome leper. Without a sign of
repugnance the Empress bathed him. When she had finished, a
glory oflight radiated from his body and he ascended heavenward.
Not everything that Chogen said rang true. He boasted of
having visited China three times, though vague about exactly how
or when. The monk was young and naIve but when Chogen described gold and silver pagodas and silver bridges that no sinful
man could cross, he was not convincing. The monk considered this
and then rationalized that Chogen had the right to invent legends
about himself if they furthered his good works.
Midway in the construction of Zentsu-ji's bathhouse Chogen
sought out the young monk again. He had noticed, he said, that
the golden canopy above the principal image in the main hall was
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cracked and some of the glittering pendants were missing. lie uttered no word of reproach but his attitude said this was unseemly.
He said he had craftsmen skilled in working with brass and gold;
he could make the necessary repairs. This time the abbot had not
frowned; he gratefully accepted the offer, and for the rest of the
time that Chogen and his men were there he had given short shrift
to complaints about their nighttime chanting, dancing, and beating of drums and bells.
When all the work was finished, when patrons had been lined
up to supply wood for the boiler (they were so eager to part with
their money that the monk wondered if Chogen had cast a spell
over them), the abbot received the holy man in formal audience to
express his gratitude. The young monk attended; it occurred to
him that Chogen, though there was nothing wrong with his manners, seemed abstracted, almost bored: the completed tasks no
longer interested him; his mind was fixed on his next undertaking.
All the rest of his life, given the slightest provocation, the monk
would reminisce about the holy man. "Ah there was no tranquillity about him. He gripped his prayer beads as a soldier does
his sword; he fingered them as a merchant does his money." The
junior monks heard that speech so often that they mimicked it
when they were safely private, and some suggested that the priest
tried, unsuccessfully, to display the same intensity.
When years later word came that the imperial court had summoned Chogen from Koya to take charge of the reconstruction of
Todai-ji and its gigantic bronze Buddha, the priest professed no
surprise at all. Nor was he surprised when he learned that Chogen
had actively campaigned to get the job; that was like him, he did
not lack self-confidence. Other priests may have been considered,
but of course Chogen was the right choice, though it was a matter
for regret that Mount Koya would lose his services.
Certainly Todai-ji had to be rebuilt. Situated at the old capital, Nara, it was the headquarters temple for the Kokubun-ji, the
national temples, one in each of the sixty-odd provinces, established in 741 "for the protection of the nation." Its Great Buddha,
a towering figure in gilded bronze, was a national sym bol. J\J uch of
the nation's energy was dedicated to recreating it; a man like
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cor:-.l,
men at a time chant for two hours-that is their only duty, that
their devoutness may serve as a model to others. Now at Todai-ji
when I find one among the workers whose profound faith and
great accomplishment are exemplary I reward him by sending him
to that hermitage on Koya for a period of retreat and devotions."
The letter was signed "Chogen, who crossed over to China three
tifnes."
The monk could see that the holy men who visited him were
sustained by hero worship. One of them told how Chogen chose a
chief carpenter. Summoning all the master carpenters he asked
them to do something that was quite impossible. One after another
they said so and refused, but one of them took up his tools and
said, "I have never done such a thing or seen it done, but if the
High Priest instructs me to do it I shall try." Chogen stopped him
then, saying he did not actually want the job done; he was testing
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their faith in him and absolute obedience to his orders. And the
carpenter who set out to try was appointed foreman.
At Zentsu-ji Chogen had boasted that his men could do anything, but faced with the technical difficulties of casting the Great
Buddha he was not above impressing a Chinese caster who had
come to Japan several years earlier for another project and whose
attempts to go home had been frustrated by shipwreck.
Chogen was not one to wait until he had enough funds to pay
the bills before starting work. He knew that con tributions would
flow faster if construction was underway, and shortly after his appointment he made a round of calls on high officials in the capital,
beginning with Sutoku's half brother, the Retired Emperor GoShirakawa (who had taken the tonsure on leaving the throne and
was himself in priestly robes), Go-Shirakawa's favorite consort, and
the prime minister. He was seeking large contributions and he was
able to report that the molds for the Buddha's spiral tresses were
already completed.
In the first flush of the campaign, contributions poured in and
work on the Buddha went smoothly. It was completed in four years
and the monk at Zentsu-ji heard glowing accounts of the magnificent ceremony staged to invest the statue with its sacred spirit. GoShirakawa was master of ceremonies.
But construction of the mammoth hall to house the Buddha
did not progress with that same speed. Stories were still heard of
Chogen's technical innovations: the huge logs that would become
the pillars had to be moved more than two hundred and fifty miles
from mountain forest to Nara; he devised a new system of trundles
and pulleys so that sixty or seventy men could do what before had
taken as many as two or three thousand. But it was not easy to
keep the contributions rolling in year after year. The court and the
shogun made him governor of three provinces so that he could use
their revenues; he promptly got into boundary disputes with the
governors of neighboring provinces. Hearing of such things, the
monk at Zentsu-ji worried: he was afraid that to Chogen the ends
justified the means.
He was not prepared, however, for the great blow. In the' hills
southeast of Nara is the temple called Muro-ji; in a pagoda at this
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temple Kobo Daishi was said to have interred a sacred ball containing thirty-two grains of the holy remains of the historical Buddha that he had carried from China: belief in these relics was
fervent. In 1191 the sacred ball disappeared. Chogen was accused
of stealing it.
To defend himself he appeared before the prime minister, who
had always been one of his staunchest supporters. He maintained
that he had nothing to do with the disappearance, that it was the
deed of a Korean priest who was quite mad. But the investigation
continued and grew more heated and a few days later Chogen
abandoned work on Todai-ji and vanished. The distraught prime
minister rushed to report this to Go-Shirakawa. His majesty the
retired emperor seemed not in the least surprised; he merely
grinned. Now the prime minister was even more upset; he suspected the worst. Nevertheless he quashed the charges against
Chogen, who then reappeared at the construction site.
A week later it all came out. Go-Shirakawa summoned Chogen and the Korean priest Chogen had accused and to them
handed over the sacred ball-minus two grains, one of which he
had given to that favorite consort, the other to a sycophantic courtier. It was obvious that Chogen had conspired to pander to that
"dark ruler." And indeed large contributions followed.
As bits and pieces of this story drifted down to Zentsu-ji the
monk was forced to the same conclusion the prime minister had
reached: there was no trick Chogen would not stoop to; he would
complete his mission by fair means or foul. The monk retired to
pray alone. He recalled the face, the posture, and the blazing intensity in the eyes of the holy man he had come to idolize, and he
told himself it was all in character. "He has to live in the world,"
he murmured; "he cannot help becoming worldly." And for the
rest of his life he offered prayers for the salvation of Chogen's soul.
Chogen and Saigyo were not the only holy men of Koya who had
access to the nobility. There was, for example, Butsugen, who for
twenty-five years enjoyed a familiar relationship with the prime
minister. Chogen was indebted to Butsugen) for the latter had used
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The service for the dying man illustrates how Butsugen yoked
the Daishi's Shingon to faith in Amida. He was a learned man and
he felt it necessary to reconcile the two. He started from the Shingon concept of the Buddha Dainichi as constituting the entire universe, the Buddha from whom all other Buddhas were born.
Therefore Amida emanated from Dainichi, and therefore to worship Amida was to worship Dainichi, to become one with Amida
was to become one with Dainichi, to attain Amida's paradise was
to attain the paradise of Dainichi and all the Buddhas. Which
made it perfectly all right for the holy men to preach faith in
Amida even if they never mentioned Dainichi, especially as they
also proclaimed the Daishi as a savior and Koya as the gate to
Amida's paradise.
This is a crude statement of the thesis that Butsugen expounded in a weighty treatise that he carried to the prime minister
for perusal. The prime minister-current head of the Fujiwara family-was certainly the one to take it to, for besides occupying the
highest position at the court he was a man of wide learning and an
excellent writer, as his diary demonstrates.
In that diary he noted the visit when Butsugen brought his
six-volume work. "Dipping into it I found a number of mistakes in
style and I pointed these out." (This should occasion no surprise,
because it took the highest education Japan had to offer, plus earnest application, to master the highly Sinicized language that a
serious writer of that time had to use.) "The holy priest accepted
my corrections with great gratification."
Sometime later Butsugen delivered a revised manuscript and
the prime minister wrote that he had spent the entire day reading
it. He declared that "Without reservation, it is a work of genius."
What was more, he added, he had heard that it was the tonsured
retired emperor who had urged Butsugen to write it. A holy man
like Butsugen had links even to the imperial family.
But it is doubtful that studies of doctrine, however brilliant,
would have brought Butsugen close to such important people. On
a more practical level, he was renowned as a rainmaker, but he was
even more famous for his incantations to cure illness, as the prime
minister noted: "The holy priest Butsugen came today and we
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He could see the crossroads now. A good thing too, for the sun was
low in the west. He had heard that in the old days the headman
and elders used to come to meet a holy man, but nobody had ever
come to meet him.
As he entered the village a couple of small children ran to
hide; an emaciated dog snarled but retreated quickly enough when
he brandished his staff-almost toothless, he saw, too old to forage
for itself.
He sought out the house of the headman, the biggest in the
village. At the gate he jangled the rings on his staff and began to
chant. The headman took a little too long to emerge, but when he
did he was civil enough and without prompting invited him to
lodge there.
When he said that he wanted to hold a three-day service for
the dead his host demurred; the villagers were just too busy. But
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when he displayed the skull and explained his mission the headman sucked in his breath and agreed. He sent his son to summon
the elders; they concurred that in view of the honor to befall their
village a three-day mass was entirely proper. Early in the morning
they would dispatch the young men's association to collect rocks
for the burial mound.
The headman's wife tried to keep her in the shadows but the
holy man could not help noticing a nubile daughter; he thought
there was concupiscence in her eyes. Surreptitiously he tried to fan
the flame.
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the same time, with the same reverence, also honor the spirits of
your dead-the restless, anxious spirits of those who have died since
I last came to your village, who wait for me to conduct them to
Mount Koya, to bury their earthly remains in that sacred earth, as
Priest Shunkan's remains were buried there-except, of course, for
this wretched, unhappy skull. The ashes of your dead I will receive
during this service, the spirits of your dead I will assuage, and
when I return to Koya I will usher them to eternal peace in Amida
Buddha's paradise of the next world.
"And not only those recent dead. We will pray here for the
spirits of all your ancestors. Together our prayers will rise to them
and they will know that they are remembered and esteemed. Do
not be unfilial! Do not make them {eel forgotten, for great resentment can arise from neglect!"
He thundered and cajoled, and when he thought they were
ready he changed his tone. "Let us pray as the Daishi taught us to
pray," he began. "Homage to Amida Buddha, glory to Amida
Buddha!" He got tpem chanting, rhythmically, hypnotically, and
when he judged they were keyed up he again slowly elevated the
skull. His eyes glazed, he seemed rapt, no longer aware of the
villagers before him but transported to another time and place.
When there was absolute quiet save for the distant cry of a crow,
the anguished words came out: "I am Shunkan!"
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it afire and endangering the shrine, so that its priests, who recognized an evil omen when one flared in their backyard, drove the
holy man from their precincts. But the myopic Fujiwara missed
the point and was infuriated when he was passed over in favor of a
son of the real ruler of the realm, the head of the warrior family
then ensconced in the capital-Saigyo's friend. The Fujiwara man
swore vengeance and hatched his plot.
His fellow conspirators were mostly Fujiwara nobles of no
great importance with a scattering of men from the rival military
clan. Priest Shunkan entered the picture because ancestral loyalties
tied him to that rival clan. His own ancestors had not been warriors, but his grandfather had been a redoubtable bully who terrorized all who passed his house by standing at the gate and
grinding his teeth in a most ferocious manner; Shunkan inherited
his pugnacious nature. He was a priest of quite high rank, abbot of
a rich Zen temple. The plot was shaped at his mountain hideaway.
As is usual with botched schemes of this sort, one of those in
on it decided it was bound to miscarry and he had best save his
own skin by betraying the others. All were rounded up. A satisfying number were beheaded and the rest banished (the Fujiwara
ringleader was first banished, then executed).
Priest Shunkan was exiled with two others to a truly remote
place, a little island almost two hundred miles from the southernmost tip of Japan's main islands, about halfway to Okinawa: "a
place that even sailors cannot find unless quite certain of the way,
an island where few men live. There are some people there, it is
true, but they wear no clothing and neither can they understand
our language. Their bodies are covered with hair and are black like
oxen. There is a high mountain that burns with eternal fire and the
land is full of sulphur. Thunder rolls continuously up and down
the mountain. It is not possible for anyone to live there for a moment"--"anyone" meaning of course any cultivated resident of the
capitaL
Two of the exiles were earnest believers, and despite the chilling description of the island they found a place that was surpassingly beautiful and there set up an altar where every day they
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offered prayers for their safe return to the capital. Sometimes they
spent the whole night in prayer. One of them carved a thousand
pieces of wood in the holy form of a Buddhist stupa, cutting into
each his name and a prayer for pity; these he cast into the sea one
by one as he invoked the Buddhas and gods of heaven and earth.
But Shunkan, though he was a priest, was a skeptic and he
would take no part in their devotions.
Back in the capital there was great excitement. The military
ruler of the realm, whose name was Kiyomori, had married one of
his daughters to the reigning emperor, just as the Fujiwara had
made a practice of doing. The young woman fell ill, which greatly
worried Kiyomori until it was discovered that she was pregnant,
and then he rejoiced, for the emperor was as yet childless and
should she be safely delivered of a boy it was certainly within
I<iyomori's power to have the emperor abdicate in favor of his
infant son. Kiyomori already had almost every honor available but
he wanted his grandson to be emperor. He summoned "all the
priests of high rank and saintly reputation and bade them use all
their knowledge both open and secret that a son might be born."
As the months of her confinement passed the lady suffered
more and more, and divination revealed that it was owing to evil
spirits. It was then that the banished Sutoku, seventeen years after
his death, was given back his title of emperor in an attempt at
pacification. At the same time the Fujiwara ringleader of the plotting at Shunkan's lodge was posthumously forgiven to placate his
spirit, and Kiyomori's son urged that the exiles on the island be
pardoned as another act of expedient mercy. Just recently one of
the stupas cast into the ocean had by some miracle floated into the
Inland Sea and washed ashore at a shrine to which Kiyomori was
devoted, so he was feeling soft-hearted. He agreed to recall the two,
"But as for Shunkan," he declared, "this is the man who held
meetings at his villa to plot audacious designs against me. Him I
will certainly not pardon."
An envoy was hastily dispatched. Coming ashore, he called in
a loud voice for the two who were pardoned, but they as usual
were on the other side of the island at their prayers; only Shunkan
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heard him. The envoy produced the letter of pardon and Shunkan
opened it. "He read it from the beginning to the end and from the
end to the beginning, but two persons only were mentioned, there
was nothing said of three. 'Ah,' he cried, 'the three of us were
exiled for the same offense and to the same place, how then is it
that two only are granted a pardon and I only am left out?' He
looked up to heaven and cast himself down to the earth, weeping
and lamenting, but all in vain."
\Vhen the ship carrying the other two put off he seized hold of
it. He was "dragged out up to his loins and then to his armpits,
following after them as long as he could and entreating them:
'Comrades, how can you thus abandon me?' Giving himself up to
despair, he flung himself down on the beach. 'Take me with you!
Let me go with yout' he cried, but it was all of no avaiL The ship
rowed away till it was seen no more. Shunkan did not return to his
poor hut but spent the night lying where he was, wetted by the
spray and dew." When the two reached the capital they did everything they could to obtain a pardon for Shunkan but they were not
successful.
When Shunkan had been abbot of his temple he had a faithful servant named Aria. Hearing that the exiles had been pardoned, Aria set out to meet them where they would disembark. It
was there he learned that Shunkan had been left behind. Grief
stricken he determined that he must go and join his master. Officials tried to block him and he suffered a hard sea passage but he
reached the island. He could scarcely communicate with the primitive inhabitants but he managed to learn that the one who had
been left behind had wandered hither and thither as though beside
himself; lately he had not been seen. "On learning this Ario
plunged deep into the uncertain mountain paths, climbing the
peaks and descending into the valleys, but never once did he see his
master. Then he searched along the shore-none answered his cries
but the sea gulls. At last one morning he saw a figure creeping
along by the rocks, emaciated as a dragonfly. Over his skinny,
wrinkled frame a few rags were hanging. He was trying to walk but
staggered like one drunken. Aria had seen many beggars in Kyoto,
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but never yet had he seen one like this." But he thought even such
a creature might know something of his master, and going up to
him he asked, "Can you tell me where I can find Shunkan the high
priest?" The servant did not recognize the master but how could
Shunkan forget Aria? The exile cried out, "Here! here he is," and
sank down senseless on the sand.
Aria took him on his back and carried him to his hut of bamboo and reeds. Shunkan begged for news of home and Aria had to
tell him that his property had been confiscated, his retainers had
been put to death, and his wife and all his children but one daughter had died. From this time Shunkan refused all food and earnestly gave himself to invoking the Buddha Amida and saying the
death prayers. On the twenty-third day after the coming of Aria he
expired at the age of thirty-seven. Clasping the lifeless body,
Aria wept unrestrainedly. "Ah, how gladly I would follow my master to the other world, but because there is no other to pray for his
happiness in the afterlife, I must continue to live and to pray that
he may attain enlightenment." He broke down the hut and
heaping dry pine branches and reeds upon it, he lighted the
pyre. Afterward he gathered up the ashes and hung them in a
pouch around his neck, and when a merchant ship appeared he
returned to the home islands. He climbed up to Mount Koya and
there he buried the earthly remains of Shunkan near the innermost
place, where Kobo Daishi sleeps. Then he joined the foremost
temple of the holy men and set out to perform pilgrimage through
all the provinces while praying for Shunkan's salvation in the
next world.
Other holy men heard from his lips the story of Shunkan, and
after Aria's death they continued his prayers. \Vherever they went
they would gather people about them and recount the plot and its
discovery, the grief of exile and death. People wept to hear it, and
made offerings that prayers might be said on Koya in Shunkan's
and Aria's behalf.
A whole new method of campaigning developed-storytelling.
Holy men learned to heighten the effect by relating the tale in the
first person with a suitable prop. In telling the story of Shunkan a
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Graves of Shunkan dot the countryside but there were other stories
in the repertoire of this breed of holy man, stories of awakening
and repentance.
One told of a young courtier who fell deeply in love with a
serving girl, a match his father forbade, for he intended that his
son should make an advantageous marriage and rise in the world.
Trapped between love and disobedience, reflecting that the prime
of life is but "a flash of fire," the young man renounced the world
and entered a temple. The girl followed him and sent word into
the rough cell where he was chanting the sutras that she had come
to see him one last time; he only sent someone out to say: "The
person whom you seek is not here." So there was nothing left for
her "but to swallow her tears and wend her way back to the capital, sad and bitter of heart."
But since she had discovered where he was and he did not
trust himself to steel his heart against her should she come again,
he climbed to Mount Koya, where no woman could follow. She
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too left the world, but even in a nunnery "she was unable to forget
the past and brooded over it until she fell sick and died." When he
was told of this he redoubled his religious austerities, so that he
came to be known to all as the Saint of Koya.
There is also the story of the warrior Kumagai. In a climactic
battle of the great war between military clans, Kumagai found
himself forced to kill an enemy captain who was a mere youth, of
delicate features and about the age of his own son. "'Alas,' he
cried, 'what life is so hard as that of a soldier? Only because I was
born of a military family must I suffer this affliction! How lamentable it is to do such cruel deeds!' From this time the mind of
Kumagai was turned toward the religious life." He too climbed
Koya and became a holy man.
Stories like these, in which Mount Koya always figured,
moved men's hearts and opened their purses, helped to rebuild
Koya and keep it prosperous. Today these tales are embedded in
the epic literature of Japan. They are one of the legacies of the
holy men.
The third day was over. The holy man lay on his mat in the
darkness and congratulated himself that the offerings had been
quite satisfactory. He calculated how far he would have to walk
before he could safely repeat his performance. He always enjoyed
doing Shunkan; he thought he did it well.
The people had to believe; that was the crux of the matter.
They had to believe in the holy man who came among them.
Whether by withdrawing to commune with the gods in secret
places in the mountains, or by living on a diet of nuts and berries
and a few green leaves (he had himself noticed that those who
eschewed rice and the lesser grains acquired a gaunt and saintly
look), or by climbing Koya for training presumed arduous, the
people had to be convinced that a holy man possessed a power.
He had a gift for storytelling. When he recited tales of the old
days he could catch and hold an audience. He could make them
believe that the tortured spirit of Shunkan entered and possessed
him. He could make them weep, and give. Some storytellers ac139
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I40
l'}
.:~~ ~5.
~'t
Temple Forty-five; the ladder at left rises to a pinnacle where Kobo Daishi
is said to have meditated (dctailfrom a print by an unknown artist)
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SAVIOR
envying those on it, when she caught sight of us in henro robes. For
a moment she glared, then relapsed into dull resignation. I felt as if
I had eaten lead."
But unlike Muroto, there is an alternate approach to Ashizuri,
a quiet road along the coast linking fishing villages. Morikawa and
I walk that road and are rewarded with unspoiled headlands,
coves, and white sand beaches. Still it is a long walk and a relief to
reach the temple. We drop our packs and go to cliff's edge, stand
there gazing out at the limitless ocean and down a dizzying drop to
rocks scoured to fantastic shapes and colors; the sea pounds at
them, white water explodes over them and falls back into blue
pools.
This place is infamous for suicides. We understand why. The
contorted rocks seem to beckon; the endless breakers offer surcease.
Maudlin stories abound: our guidebook tells of a young geisha who
danced off this ledge. There is a well-known novel about a young
man who came bent on killing himself but who here found
strength to live: the writer intended her story to end the suicides; it
multiplied them.
The name Ashizuri rneans "foot stamping"; there are legends
and chronicles to explain it. I quote from The Confessions of Lady
Nijo) the memoirs of a remarkable lady of the imperial court. Concubine of a retired emperor, she managed several other love affairs
simultaneously and with great style, until her luck ran out. Then
she became a wandering Buddhist nun. She writes that in 1302 she
came here.
The main image in the temple at Cape Ashizuri was a figure of
Kannon. The temple grounds were not fenced in, there was no head
priest, and traveling monks and ascetics could gather there without
regard to class or position. When I asked how this had come about I
was told the following story: "Long ago a monk came here with a
young disciple to act as his servant. The disciple put compassion
above all else. One day another young monk arrived-no one knew
where he had come from-and joined them for their meals. The
disciple always shared his portion with the newcomer, but his master admonished him, 'Once or twice is enough. You must not continue sharing your meals so freely.' When the young monk came at
143
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mealtime the next day, his friend said to him, 'I would like to share
with you, but my master has scolded me, so this must be the last
time. Please don't come again.' Then he shared his meal with the
newly arrived monk, who said, 'Such kindness as you have shown
me is unforgettable. Please come and see where I live.' The disciple
accepted the invitation, and they went off together. The old monk
grew suspicious and secretly followed them to the cape, where the
two young men got into a small boat, took up the oars and headed
south. The old monk cried, ',,yhere are you going without mc:" The
young monk replied, 'vVe're going to the realm of Kannon.' As the
older monk watched they stood up in the boat and turned into
Bodhisattvas. In grief and anguish the monk wept and stamped his
foot, giving the place its name, Cape Ashizuri, the Cape of Foot
Stamping. Leaving his footprints in the rocks, the old monk turned
away empty-handed. He met this sad fate because he had considered himself superior, so ever since then, people living here have
avoidcd making distinctions."
This is much more than the usual temple legend. The part
about tbere being no head priest and hence no protocol of rank has
a simple explanation: in Lady Nijo's day the temple had fallen on
hard times. Despite its distance from the capital it had in the past
attracted aristocratic supporters; now they had lost their estates
and could no longer provide for a priest. But wandering holy men
had come to train here long before there was a temple or a priest
and they continued to come when there was no longer a priest and
the temple had fallen into disrepair. More important, the part
about the young monks' putting to sea on a voyage to the realm of
Kannon is not fantasy: such things happened.
Kannon has always been popular among the Japanese. The
embodiment of compassion-not a Buddha but a Bodhisattva, one
who has postponed Buddhahood in order to work for the salvation
of all beings-this gentle figure attracted a great following among
both the upper classes and the common people. More temples of
this pilgrimage are dedicated to Kannon than to any other deity.
From the ninth to the twelfth centuries worship of Kannon came
to full flower: of the treasured statues from that period, the majority are of Kannon; there came into being a pilgrimage to thirtythree Kannon temples stretched across the waist of Honshu, the
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main island; and it was then that men actually tried to sail over
the seas to reach Kannon's blessed realm.
They sailed to the south, reflecting a belief that had its origin
in India, where Kannon was said to abide at the very tip of the
subcontinent, Cape Comorin, on a rocky mountain called Potalaka, a name that in Japanese becomes Fudaraku.
As Buddhism traveled east, mountains in Tibet and China
came to be called Fudaraku. In Japan many temples bear the
name but none so aptly as the one built on this rocky promontory.
It was a long hard distance from the capital but that only enhanced the longing to come here. There were many who yearned
for rebirth in Amida's Pure Land in the West or in Yakushi's Pure
World in the East, but it was Kannon's Fudaraku, the Pure Land
in the South, that men tried to reach in this life.
There are stories besides the one told by Lady Nijo, stories
that give names and dates. Especially we are told of a saintly holy
man named Kato who came from Awa in 997 and entered into
retreat here. He prayed devoutly for an opportunity to go to Kannon's Fudaraku and finally received a holy sign. On the eighteenth
day of the Eighth Month of 1002 he boarded a boat hollowed from
the trunk of a tree, and with his disciple Einen cast off at the Hour
of the Ox, "and breasting the waves which stretched for thousands
of miles, he departed as if he were flying."
Holy men sailed from other places too, most often from
Kumano. Kumano stands at the tip of the mountainous Kii Peninsula, jutting into the Pacific east of Shikoku. Many of Kii's peaks
were sacred: En the Ascetic came out of Kii; Mount Koya rises
there. A rocky cape directly south of the capital, an ancient goal of
pilgrimage-it was natural that Kannon should be worshiped at
Kumano.
In 1142 a priest of Kumano wrote of how, when he was a boy,
a monk desiring to sail to Fudaraku carved a statue ofKannon and
put it in his boat and placed the tiller in the hands of the statue;
then for three years he prayed for a wind out of the north; finally it
came, strong and steady, and the priest, overjoyed, boarded his
boat and, praying all the while, sailed into the south. The narrator
told of climbing to the top of a mountain to watch the little craft
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* * *
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His is not the only such mound. Not much farther along is
another. Farmers come to it to pray for rain. They say that long
ago in a time of searing drought a holy man came this way. Seeing
the distress of the people he said: "I shall enter into a state of
meditation in order to bring rain to you." Silent, immobile, the
holy man sat in meditation for twenty-one days, still as a statue.
On the twenty-first day bounteous rain began to fall, but the holy
man now was still as death. The people buried him reverently and
come to his grave even now to pray for relief from drought.
There are many such burial mounds. They are among the
traces left by the holy men.
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This wall of rock testifies to the holy men's faith in Amida and the
Daishi, but it echoes too an earlier belief: in the bottom form of the
five forms of each stupa, the square base (earth), and sometimes in
the round form above (water), are deep niches, receptacles for
bones and hair and ashes. Like the mountain on which Temple
Ten stands, Seventy-one's mountain drew the souls of the dead.
Spirits ascended the mountain to become purified, as ascetic
holy men did in life, and for a year after death their relatives held
them in awe. They accompanied the spirit to the mountain, carrying the ashes to sanctuary in a niche, and during that uneasy year
they returned as often as they could-certainly on the haunted
days of spring and autumn equinox-for reunion and prayer that
the soul find repose. On their way they visited seven temples, beginning at Number Seventy-seven and ending here at Seventy-one.
Like the ten-temple pilgrimage to Temple Ten, this ancient seventemple pilgrimage became a link in the pilgrimage to the Eightyeight.
They still come, even from across the Inland Sea. They come
every spring, in groups of three hundred and fifty or more, so
crammed into their boats that they must sail and land clandestinely, for harbor authorities would not permit such overcrowding.
They worship at the seven temples and spend the night here at
Seventy-one and the next day they offer settai-gifts to henro who
corne by, gifts of money and food, of help and encouragement to
pilgrims walking with the Daishi.
I have special feelings toward this temple, for it was here I first
learned about the pilgrimage. :Morikawa has heard the story often.
I had corne to Shikoku on the advice of an old friend to investigate
the prototypes of Japanese inns: temples that took guests, and
farmhouses that in the spring pilgrimage season were opened to
henro to earn some extra income. I came only just aware of the
pilgrimage and not interested in it; it was the origin of inns I
wanted to study.
I had an introduction to a local scholar who volunteered to
guide me. He took me to some temples, showing me their big
rooms where henro slept, the tubs they bathed in, the cavernous
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kitchens with huge vats to cook the rice they ate. He introduced
me at two farmhouses where henro could lodge. And he said,
"There is another place I want you to experience, a teahouse and
pilgrims' inn on the path up to Seventy-one. You should spend the
night there." Late afternoon saw us toiling up that path. Rounding
a curve I was swept by a sense of deja vu. There was the teahouse
with its shady veranda to rest on, its banners announcing the specialties. I knew I had seen it before. Then I realized: of course 1 had
seen it and others like it countless times in the woodblock prints of
Hiroshige. This was a teahouse out of history.
The owner told us that he was the third generation to operate
it. Not long after the war he had come by as a young henro and
when the old woman who ran the place invited him to stay, he did.
Her husband had been clerk at the temple until he and she moved
down the mountain to take over the teahouse. The old man was
fond of sake and one day when his wife was away he asked a
passing hemo to join him for a drink. The "hemo" did, and then
bashed his host on the head with a hammer and, leaving him to
die, fled with the little cash on hand. So the old woman was quite
alone and needed help. She adopted the young man and when she
died he inherited the place. He hung the walls with haiku composed by guests. The Haiku Teahouse, people call it.
He was open and friendly but when I asked to stay the night
he turned me down. "I have two businesses," he said. "I run this
place and 1 raise chickens. I've been working with the chickens all
day and I'm tired. I don't want a guest. VVhy don't you ask up at
the temple?" So we climbed the rest of the way.
The priest took me in and 1 found myself in a rambling structure built against the mountain on more levels than 1 could count.
After supper, the priest and his son, who is now the priest, came to
my room and for two or three hours told me about Kobo Daishi
and the pilgrimage and hemo. (I learned only later that in another
part of the temple there was a gathering of haiku poets that they
missed to talk with me.) The thought of performing the pilgrimage
was planted in me then, though I didn't realize it. The next morning they showed me the carved rock face of the mountain.
IS3
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I54
I -
.,
\
\ ~---"
\\
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There are many others. They are rarely shown, some never-they
are too sacred.
Some of the holy men's bequests are less tangible than carvings, but no less real. Each temple has a song, a short hymn reflecting the temple's tradition and faith. Henro sometimes sing these
songs as they walk. The words of almost all of them are deeply
dyed not with Kobo Daishi's assurance that man can attain Buddhahood in this existence, but with the holy men's faith in Amida's
paradise of the next world.
At the sanctuary on the mountain where the Boy Daishi leapt
into the arms of angels, the priest prepares a bath for worshipers on
the fifteenth of every lunar month-at the time of the full moonand on certain other holy days. He draws the water from a spring
the Daishi is said to have brought forth, heats it in a big tub, and
blesses it with prayer and incantation. Can anyone doubt who
began this custom?
As the mountain behind Seventy-one demonstrates, the holy
men carved both images and their invocation, "Namu Amidabutsu." At Temple Forty is a worn old woodblock, black with ink,
about two feet tall. They say the Daishi carved the temple's central
images, and when he finished he had this piece of wood left over so
he put it to good use. Within the graceful stylized silhouette of a
roadside statue-a standing deity with a halo, a suggestion of
grasses at its feet-are carved the six characters that read, "Namu
Amida-butsu." The temple sells all sorts of articles imprinted from
this block. We are told that its miraculous powers have cured
blindness and heart disease, enabled a mute to talk; a person
whose body bears this stamp will not fall ill; a woman who wears a
bellyband with its design will have an easy pregnancy.
One of the best-known bangai of the pilgrimage bears the
name Crippled Pine Life-Prolonging Temple. The pine is a huge
circular tangle of twisted low-spreading limbs suggesting a snarl of
octopi. There is not a needle on its branches: traffic fumes have
killed it.
"With the blessing of Kobo Daishi it lived more than a thousand years," the priest says. "He planted it on one of his pil-
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"We get many letters but most people do not write: they revisit the temple and express their gratitude in person. Here's a
letter addressed to Kobo Daishi from a Nagoya man who tells
about his recovery from a gastric ulcer after using the talisman.
And here's a letter I think will interest you."
He hands Morikawa a letter from a province in the far north;
it is brushed in cultured calligraphy on fine paper. It tells about
the birth of a baby to a neighboring family. The mother-to-be had
taken two talismans; when the baby was born, the nurse at the
hospital found one in the baby's right hand. In the writer's words,
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159
The Daishi's tomb, Mount Koya's innermost sanctuary (a painting b), Kawabala)
is the future Buddha, and the holy men calculated that, three
hundred years having passed since the Daishi entered nirvana, he
had yet" five billion six hundred and seventy million years to wait
for the rebirth of Miroku and the salvation of the world."
In the meantime, they preached, he walked the countryside as
a pilgrim, helping those who were worthy, rebuking those who did
evil, seeing into the hearts of all, performing his miracles. His robes
had to be replaced periodically because they became tattered in his
travels.
The Daishi that the holy men created is so powerful a figure,
he so seized the hearts and minds of the people, that he has dis-
r6r
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placed other figures who once lodged there. He has taken over
legends once devoted to other heroes. The process still continues. A
contemporary Shikoku folklorist writes of a tower of stones in the
countryside; it dates from the sixteenth century, an age of almost
incessant civil war, and clearly was erected as a memorial to the
war dead. When he visited it thirty years ago he was told by the
local elders that it was the work of a wandering Buddhist nun.
Returning recently he found the people now saying that Kobo
Daishi built it-built it in one night.
Morikawa and J have ourselves found examples of the same
mutation. Moving on from Temple Twenty-two we wanted to seek
out a bangai Morikawa had learned of from an old guidebook.
Entering a village we found three women chatting at the roadside:
a girl, a young wife holding a baby, and a granny-an obaasan. We
asked directions and Obaasan said she would take us there. "I have
a feeling that Kobo Daishi has asked me to guide you," she said,
"and while I'm there I'll say a prayer myself. I was on my way to
vote but that can wait." It was election day.
She quickly established her credentials. "I am eighty years
old," she told us, a fact I would not have guessed from her straight
back, smooth face, and firm step. "I was born in a house just below
the chapel, though when I married 1 moved to a village half a mile
or more away. As a young wife I opened our house as a henro-inn
each spring. There used to be three such inns around here but
they've all gone out of business."
I asked if there were stories of the Daishi in these parts. "Oh
yes," she said. "A village you passed through a little way back,
there used to be a clear brook running through it and steppingstones to cross on. An old woman was washing clothes when the
Daishi carne by and asked her for a cup of water. She was a surly
one and she refused him, saying the water was dirty. Ever since
then that brook has been dirty and the village has had to dig wells
to get good water, though every other village hereabouts gets
plenty of clear water from streams.
"At another village a little more than a mile from here, the
Daishi was crossing a riverbed filled with shells when the sharp
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point of one pierced his straw sandal and hurt his foot. He touched
the point of that shell with his staff and since then the shells in that
river have had no points."
She led us off the road up a hill to two small weathered buildings and a cluster of stone statues snug against a slope, in the
shadows of tall trees. But for her we would have passed by unknowing. No priest lived there. The people of the village took turns
in caring for it, she told us.
We shed our packs, sat on the veranda to rest, and asked her
to tell us more about herself. "Once I was possessed by a badger,"
she began, badgers being notorious for their mischievous nature
and magical powers. "It was when I was much younger, forty-six
or forty-seven. I could foretell things, like the direction a tangerine
tree would grow, and I could make dumplings faster than anybody
else. People took me to the shrine near Number One Temple and
the Shinto priest there said I was a person with miraculous powers,
like a medi urn, and that the people of the village should consult
me about everything. When I was counseling someone I felt as
though I was simply repeating what a voice was telling me. But I
grew tired of this role-it was hard on me-and I prayed to the
Daishi to relieve me of those powers so I could go back to being an
ordinary farm woman, and he did. Yet some people still call me
sensei.)) Sensei means "master."
We prayed and left our name-slips and offerings, and she too
prayed and made an offering. Then she gave eaeh of us ten yen,
"as settai." We have been given settai often; in return we present
our name-slips, as henro should, the same offering slips left at altars. As we were writing ours to give her, she considered, reopened
her purse, and over our protests gave us each ten yen more. I put
her name and address in my notebook and asked if I might take
her photograph; she posed in prayer and I promised to send her
some prints. We moved to the Daishi Hall to offer our prayers
there. Once more opening her purse she gave Morikawa the last
money in it, a hundred-yen coin. We begged her to keep it but she
was adamant. It was settai.
Then she told us the chapel legend. "Kobo Daishi came here-
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stumbled and fell, stricken with colic. Then the man remembered
having heard that a very great priest was peregrinating Shikoku,
and he realized that the one who had asked for the fish must be
that priest. So he ran back, gave the Daishi a fish, and begged him
to cure his horse.
"Kobo Daishi handed the man his iron begging bowl and told
him to bring water from the sea. When the man did, the Daishi
performed a service over the water and told the man to make the
horse drink it. At once the animal recovered.
"The man was so awed by this that he knelt before the Daishi
and vowed to enter the Buddhist way of life-to become a priest.
Kobo Daishi was touched: he said to the man, 'Let me show you
one more thing,' and carrying to the shore the dried and salted fish
he had been given he placed it in the water and said a prayer. In
the man's eyes the fish came to life and swam away."
The priest looked at us to make certain we grasped the nice
point he was making: "The spellbound packhorse man thought
that the fish swam away-it so appeared to his bedazzled eyes ....
Then the man asked where he should build a hermitage to live out
his life as a priest, and the Daishi answered, 'Under that pine tree,
because that is a place sacred to Buddhism.' And since the man's
experience had so much to do with mackerel, people called his
chapel Saba Daishi."
The priest paused. "The story as I tell it is different than it is
in the guidebooks." Indeed it was. It was even different from the
printed account he handed US, which stated explicitly that the
dead fish really came to life and swam away-not that "it so appeared" to the bedazzled packhorse man. I wondered if the priest
had modified his story for a foreigner, but I decided it would be
rude to press him on that. Instead I asked when it is considered
that the temple was founded, expecting him to say 815, the year
the Daishi is said to have founded the pilgrimage. His answer
surprised me. "As a chapel, when the packhorse man entered the
religious life here; as a temple, in 1945, when I came. Before that it
was just a hermitage; it had no supporters; no priest ever stayed for
long. It was I who founded a proper temple here."
It struck us that 1945 is probably when the legend was trans-
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only legends but the pilgrimage can still be altered, as it has been
in the past, by one gifted priest and special circumstance, the circumstance in this case being that the temple is just off the national
highway at a convenient place for henro buses to break a three- or
four-hour trip. One of them pulled in as we sat there and the
temple was suddenly crowded. The priest had to busy himself inscribing albums and our interview was ended.
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possessed by a desire to find that holy man, confess the evil he had
done, beg absolution. He gave his lands to his peasants and his
goods to the poor and then he set out with little more than a sedge
hat and a cedar staff. Now he was the one who was asking alms,
begging for food to stay alive. He followed that priest's trail all
around Shikoku, never catching up, but at each place where the
priest had stopped Emon Saburo wrote his name and left it as a
record that he had been there and was searching. He circled the
island and carne back to where he lived. Without even pausing he
began the second round of his pursuit.
"He made the long circuit of the island again and again; he
wore himself out in his search. After four years and twenty rounds,
his health failing, it occurred to him that he might have a better
chance of meeting the priest if, instead of endlessly following after,
he went in the reverse direction. On his twenty-first time around
that is what he did. On a day in early winter he struggled against a
biting wind on a mountain trail climbing to a temple high above
the clouds. He was sick, exhausted, near death. He could go no
farther. He collapsed on the rocky path.
"At that moment Kobo Daishi appeared before him. He
heard the Daishi tell him that his sincere repentance and hard
training had washed away his sins; he was forgiven. He was asked
if he had a last wish, and he prayed that he might be reborn as the
lord of his horne province of Iyo, for then he would have great
power to do good: in the next life he could atone for the evil he had
done in this one. Kobo Daishi picked up a small stone, wrote on it,
and pressed the stone into the man's left hand. Emon Saburo
slipped into death as though going to sleep. Kobo Daishi buried
his body and marked the grave by planting Saburo's staff there.
The staff grew into a great cedar.
"Late next summer-nine months later-the wife of the lord of
Iyo gave birth to a baby boy. This baby was a handsome child,
well formed in every way except that his left hand was convulsively
closed. They tried everything but they could not open that hand.
At last they called the head priest of the family temple. He came
and chanted powerful prayer and secret words over the baby. The
17 0
SAVIOR
little fist slowly relaxed and opened. Inside was a stone and on it
was written 'Emon Saburo reborn.'
"From that time on, the name of the temple was changed. It is
now called Ishite-ji, 'Stone-Hand Temple.' It is a temple that all
pilgrims visit. And they also worship at Emon Saburo's grave beside the mountain trail leading to Temple Twelve on the opposite
side of the island."
They would be weeping now, and the holy man would drive
home the lesson. "A man may sin greatly and yet be forgiven. All
of you!-you have sinned greatly in this life and in previous lives.
But the Daishi will wash away those sins if you put your faith in
him. He will save you if you seek him and beg his help, if you
repent sincerely, if you demonstrate that you have repented. How
do you show that you have repented? By giving generously! Heed
well the lesson of Emon Saburo, who refused to give to the Daishi.
Give, and then give more! Prove that you repent your sins. For
otherwise beyond doubt you will twist in the fiery tortures of hell!"
The legend of Emon Saburo is not without flaws. First, it
pictures Kobo Daishi as vindictive; but the holy men knew, like all
evangelists of all creeds, that the threat of damnation is a more
powerful stimulus to giving than the promise of paradise. Their
Kobo Daishi punished evil as well as rewarding good, and not only
Emon Saburo: when a churlish woman refused him a potato, saying they were inedible, the potatoes of that place became inedible
and remain so today-a story told with variations from one end of
Japan to the other.
Second, it is impossible to believe that Emon Saburo had
truly achieved enlightenment if he was gripped by such a worldly
desire as to be reborn a ruler. But this is a point of doctrine that
did not much concern the holy men or their audiences.
Despite these defects the legend is significant. It points to the
basic concept of the pilgrimage: that the henro travels always with
Kobo Daishi, for as the holy men would point out, it is clear that
the Daishi was always at Emon Saburo's side, guiding him, though
Saburo, because of his sins, could not see him. The tale validates
the practice of leaving one's name-slips at each sacred place. It
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SAVIOR
commercial. Some began by giving "gifts" in return for contributions-noodles, medical plasters, remedies for diarrhea--and ended
by becoming common peddlers. Others, less scrupulous, sold ordinary ashes as holy ashes from the fire ceremony at the altars of
Mount Koya , "efficacious against any disease"; or, to hold charms
and amulets, they sold little cloth cases, vowing that they were
made from robes that had clothed the Daishi. Holy men were
found to have sold images they had stolen from temples. Their
lascivious behavior and homosexual affairs were exploited in popular fiction. A punning slur became current: "Never offer a night's
lodging to a holy man if you don't want your daughter raped." At
festivals in the capital, celebrants masqueraded as degenerate holy
men, burlesquing their entreaties.
He could see the crossroads now but he felt only bitterness. He had
never been treated well in that village and it was no pleasure to be
coming toward it late in the day, after the wearying climb over
the mountain, after depressing days when he had garnered few
offerings.
He had heard there was a time when the headman himself
had come out along the road to welcome a holy man and escort
him to his own house. That must have been a long time ago. He
spat.
True, the first time he had come here he had been given lodging. Eagerly too. The young wife had given him the glad sign and
had whispered that once asleep nothing could wake her husband.
Well, something had, or maybe the deceitful rube had only pretended to fall asleep. She had scarcely reached his bed, was just
stretching out to enter his arms, when a sword had plunged into
the pallet between them, cold steel barring two bellies about to
fuse. He had been terrified, he admitted. He had pleaded innocence, blamed the wife (of course she had started it), but that
young ruffian had run him out of the village in the middle of the
night, rousing everyone by shouting that he was a seducer and
flashing that sword so that it almost nicked his backside. It was a
nasty experience, but he hadn't even got his arms around the
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An old woman came out of a house and hope leaped up. "A
lodging, a lodging ... " She threw back her head and laughed. She
laughed without mercy. She extended her arm and gave him an
obscene sign. The boys around him shrilled and mimicked her.
She finished him. If people were merely cold there was still
hope. When they laughed at him it was no use.
He turned to leave this village. He would sleep another night
on the hard ground. He would search the fields for a turnip they
had overlooked. The boys gave up but the vicious dogs snapped at
him far past the last house.
Many of the holy men were vulgar and some descended to evil, but
I want to remember that most of them were devout and strongwilled. They tramped thousands of miles through the countryside,
bringing the people the kind of religion they thirsted for, giving
hope and solace to those who otherwise would have had little of
either, dutifully carrying the ashes of the dead to Koya for burial
in its sacred soil, conferring its promise of paradise.
The holy men glorified the Daishi and made Mount Koya
preeminent. The contributions they brought rebuilt its temples
and kept it prosperous. They made it the burial place for all Japan
and a goal of pilgrimage for nobility and commoners alike.
Yet there was always friction on the mountain, friction between the holy men and the proper priests of Shingon. There was
conflict over doctrine, for the mysteries, the complexities of Shingon scarcely brushed the holy men. The priests were irritated by
the holy men's loud chanting, their gongs and bells and drums;
annoyed that the holy men outnumbered them, seemed to have
taken over the mountain.
For centuries the priests and the holy men needed each other,
and so a strained and often rancorous alliance was maintained.
But when the holy men became ineffective, when the contributions
they brought dwindled to a trickle, when scandal and ridicule
changed them from an asset to a liability, the priests went on the
offensive. They accused the holy men of living worldly lives of
pleasure, of harboring evildoers and criminals, of destroying the
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The holy men faded from the scene but the pilgrimage they had
founded drew more and more worshipers; the Kobo Daishi they
had created became more and more compelling: a deity, a miracle
worker with the power to bring forth springs of pure water, to
grant easy birth to women suffering a difficult pregnancy, to make
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the blind see and the crippled walk, to punish evil and reward
good.
From one end of these islands to the other he crept into hearts
and lodged there. He inspired faith and hope. There arose a deep
longing-to be with the Daishi, to be at his side, to walk the path
he trod to enlightenment. They came in ever greater numbers: the
young making a rite of passage to adulthood, the elderly seeking a
bridge to whatever comes next; they crowded the doors of the
temples with the supplications and the testimonies they affixed.
They still come, to pour out their hearts to him, to beg his
help, perhaps to meet him face to face on the long road around
Shikoku.
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Pilgrims
At Temple Number One the present priest's grandfather and father gave all henro starting there a
leaflet, Exhortation for Pilgrims to the Sacred Places qf
Shikoku.
The pilgrim is not to veil his body in impurity or harbor evil
thoughts in his soul; he should enter upon the penitential journey
with a cleansed body and a pure heart. In whatever difficulties
and disagreeable situations he may find himself, he should let no
thought of anger rise in him. He should take care, that he may
attain the fulfillment of his vow.
Arriving at a temple, one should first perform one's devotions
with a quiet heart, then complete the written offering without haste,
not getting too far from one's baggage if there is a crowd, but being
careful, since mistakes are easily made even without evil intent.
Pocketbook, money, and the like should under no circumstances be
put down or shown to others.
Those who set out together should assist one another lovingly
and obligingly. If they meet a weak pilgrim or one troubled by
illness, they should spend themselves in caring for him; that is charity after the Buddha's heart. In the choice of companions met along
the way one must be cautious; one must consider that there are
times when it is pleasant to have a comrade to talk with, but there
are also occasions when one's faith in a companion is betrayed. For
there are bad people who have the most honest appearance; they
approach and pretend that they want to point out a shorter way, to
deliver effieacious prayers, or to teach a secret magic; they end by
forcibly taking money or even violating women. Such people are to
be found here and there upon the roads of Shikoku: those who wear
pilgrim garb to hunt for their livelihood. It is not necessary that
other people pray for one; he who merely follows the Daishi with his
whole heart can have his prayer granted .... Also one should not
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write name and address too clearly on one's pilgrim staff, nameslips, and the like, since every year numerous people fall victim to
swindling through the mails.
The rule of setting out early and putting up early is as good for
today as it was for earlier times. Where one is invited to spend the
night one wiII surely not be dealt with badly: one should therefore
turn in, even if the sun is still high. If one tries to go on a little
farther, the way often stretches out; before one realizes it, it is late
and one does not know where to stay.
Ascetic training in the form of standing before the gates of
strangers and asking for alms is to be performed every day at about
twenty-one houses, following the example set by the Daishi. To do
so is velY good practice toward forming a pious nature. One should
not think that one does it in order to receive money or other things;
he who makes that his goal is only a beggar and his piety is
degraded ....
In the spring there are everywhere settai, gifts from the hands
of pious people or free sojourn in their houses. If such favors are
bestowed on one, they should be accepted in the most thankful
spirit and one's name-slip given in return.
A hasty journey with a heart full of business does not lead to
piety. One is only brought to shame by it. \Vithout other intention
or thought, calmly and without haste, with "Namu Daishi Henjo
Kongo" upon one's lips~that is how to make the true pilgrimage.
Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo.
Postscript: Whoever upon the pilgrimage experiences spiritual
disturbances or has other cares should turn with confidence to the
priests of the pilgrimage temples.
Morikawa and I consider this nice mix of spiritual and practical counsel. Much of it is still valid and the rest summons up times
past.
The warning against those who preyed on gullible henro is out
of date. The shark who masqueraded as a pilgrim has disappeared.
In a more sophisticated world he has moved on to more sophisticated endeavor.
Begging alms as ascetic training has all but disappeared,
though it is still prescribed. (Imagine a busload of pilgrims swooping down on a village.) I have not practiced it. I tell myself that a
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Number One for more than a hundred years, they said, meaning
longer than anyone could remember. There had been only one
interruption, a couple of years during World War II.
Each spring they collect money and the oranges for which
their district is famous. They make the four- or five-hour voyage in
fishing boats belonging to some of their members~-no problem to
get boats because any boat making that trip is bound to haul in
lucky catches all through the ensuing year. Others of their group
are farmers and shopkeepers. The name-slips they receive from
hemo are carried home and distributed to the households who
gave. Families treasure them as powerful talismans against misfortune. (Later in our pilgrimage we hear of a family who have traditionally offered settai at a ferry crossing. About fifty years ago a
terrible fire swept the town. That family'S house was in the middle
of it but on a straw rope they tied the hundreds of name-slips they
had received that year from henro and strung them around their
house; it was saved.)
In the old days people often gave straw sandals and breechcloths for the long journey. There were those who offered to carry a
henro's pack for a while (Morikawa and I appreciate the blessing
that would be). Villagers sometimes set up a stall along the road
where they offered to dress the women's hair and give shaves to
the men.
A well-known story about settai originated near Temple Six. I
was reminded of it before that temple came into view, when I
caught a whiff of the heavy, sweet aroma of a small old-fashioned
sugar mill. ...
Toward the end of the eighteenth century a diligent young
farmer named Tokuya lived in a nearby village. It was a desperately poor village, cursed with soil that would not grow rice, wheat,
barley, or the money crop of the province-indigo, the source of an
enormously popular dye, a soft, glowing blue. Tokuya was an enterprising and intelligent young man and he tried hard, but with
no success, to find some crop that would do well in that soil.
One day a hemo passed by to whom Tokuya wanted to offer
settai. Since there was nothing in the house to give he massaged
the man's back and shoulders. ,,yhile his hands worked, Tokuya
The sugar mill near Temple Six in the old days (a book illustration
by an unknown artist)
talked of his village's plight, and the pilgrim mused that perhaps
sugarcane would grow there; his own home on the island of
Kyushu was near a fief famous for its production of sugar and the
soil there appeared to be quite like that here. Beyond that the
henro knew little: the plants and the secrets of cultivation and
manufacture were jealously guarded.
Excited by this tip, Tokuya slipped away from home, smuggled himself into that sugar-producing fief, and worked as a farmhand for a year. At the end of that year he succeeded in stealing
three stalks of cane such as are used for planting. He secreted them
in a bamboo walking stick, escaped, and returned home.
Plants sprouted from his cuttings; three years later he had
propagated them and knew that they thrived. Unfortunately he
had not learned how to make sugar so again he stole away to
Kyushu. It took him two years to land a job in a sugar mill and
three years more to learn the whole process. At last he was able to
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come back to his village and make sugar, sugar even better than
that from Kyushu. His village prospered; sugar production spread
up and down the valley; the province's sugar became famous and
brought a high price on the commodity exchange in Osaka. The
lord of the province made Tokuya a samurai, a member of the
military aristocracy with the right to carry two swords, and he was
installed as chief of sugar production for all the province. And no
one has ever forgotten the anonymous henro who set Tokuya upon
his quest.
There are other stories of the benefits that henro brought.
They are credited with teaching the use of herbs in Chinese-style
medicine, with teaching the art of the potter, and with teaching an
especially efficacious version of that popular remedy and restorative, moxa cautery, in which little cones of vegetable fiber are
burned on the skin to draw poisons out of the system (it is called,
naturally, Kobo moxa). Shikoku was an out-of-the-way place and
travelers from the other islands brought new and better ways of
doing things.
Over the centuries the most valued act of settai has been an
offer of lodging. Food and lodging are the major expenses of the
pilgrimage and as the Exhortation said, "Where one is invited to
spend the night one will surely not be dealt with badly." Morikawa and I heard a story about that from a companion who
walked with us the first few days of our pilgrimage, a man who had
made the pilgrimage before.
"It was just about here) he told us between Temples Nine and
Ten, "that some years ago I was invited to spend the night at a
farmhouse. I accepted, of course. Later I learned that a daughter in
the family was soon to be married and at bedtime I was told that
the women of the house had finished making the new bedding she
would take with her as part of her dowry. That night they asked
me to sleep in it and so give it a henro's blessing. I did; I stretched
out in it but only briefly. Then I moved to my own bed, which had
also been laid out."
Hearing his story, we pondered another dimension of this selfimposed mission of being a henro. For the henro is associated, he
has associated himself, with Kobo Daishi, and he has taken on a
J)
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trace of the Daishi's aura. When one puts on a henro's robe he puts
on something more, something he should cherish and protect. I
told myself I must remember this.
From time to time Morikawa and I travel with companions. Some,
like Kobo Daishi, are not visible. Two of those whose company we
most enjoy are from the province of Tosa. One is a man who made
the pilgrimage in 1819 with a friend from the same village. He
kept a diary and as we walk we sometimes dip into it to see what it
was like along the same stretch of path more than a hundred and
fifty years ago. The two of us have vowed to walk the entire pilgrimage but in 1819 henro had no choice, and it was easy for no
one. Leaving Temple Seven we remembered an entry from his
diary: "Just outside the gate of Number Seven we found the body
of a dead henro. A companion told us that a child henro died last
night at the inn where we stayed, and soon we came aeross another
body. So many dead in close suecession depressed us."
At Number Eight we could not help thinking of our other
companion from Tosa, our friend Tosa Fumio, the novelist and
journalist who has taken his pen name from his province. He
finished his pilgrimage about a month before we started ours.
He undertook it beeause the newspaper he writes for asked him to
do a series of articles, a long literary diary, about the pilgrimage
and his experiences as he performed it. His articles are now appearing daily and we read them eagerly whenever we find that
newspaper.
Temple Eight is deep in a valley. Even the great gate, which is
all we can see of the temple as we approach it, is set far back from
the road. The gate, built in 1688, is the biggest among the eightyeight temples. They say a band of robbers once lived in its second story but that tale seems overly romantic for this peaceful
countryside.
The temple halls stand under old trees in the narrowing ravine: a pagoda in a sad state of decay, the middle gate, and then a
long flight of stone steps up to the bell tower and main hall. More
steps rise higher to the Daishi Hall. We strike the bell and as the
tones echo and die we look about us. This is a temple that once
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The letter is not there now, hut the setting-quiet, lonely, redolent of decay-brings it to mind. We picture the distraught
woman, come from the far side of the island. How long did she
pray here in the shadows? "O-Daishi-sama, please!"
Tosa found other letters from her at succeeding temples. The
tone altered. Although her rancor against the other woman remained feverish, some of her bitterness shifted toward her husband. At Temple Twelve, high in the mountains, she had begun to
examine herself. "If I have given cause for complaint, I will
change. If I have bad points, let me reform .... " That was the last
of her letters Tosa found.
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with-mailed back to make our packs ride easier on sore but toughening shoulders.) As we set out in the morning after spending the
night at the temple, Morikawa pauses to drink in the vistas. He
.smiles. "We're really into our pilgrimage now," he says, "no longer
starting. "
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PILGRIMS
make excuses-it will soon be dark and we have a long way to go.
Now she bares what is on her mind. She focuses on me. Will I,
she begs, examine her daughter, who is suffering from a chest condition? The urgency in her tone, the sound of the voices from
within-I have the feeling that the illness is serious.
I know what this woman is asking. Just this morning we encountered a healer. Morikawa spotted a sign saying that a couple
of hundred yards off our road was "a temple related to Kobo
Daishi." Curiosity took us there, a small chapel adjoining a house.
A woman answered the door, a priestess. Over tea and cookies she
sketched the chapel's brief history: it was opened by an aged nun
who settled here after making the pilgrimage; when she died an
elderly priest came from the city to live out his life here; then it
was taken over by two nuns "who were unsuccessful"; when they
moved on about three years ago this woman came, after (like that
first nun) completing the pilgrimage. What was it, I wondered,
that she was evidently successful at but the two nuns were not. She
told us: "People suffering from illnesses, physical and mental, come
and ask me to perform rituals of prayer for them." She was a
shaman, a healer.
Now I am asked to be one. As a man with hair gray enough to
imply some wisdom; as a stranger-there is mystery in that word,
the mystery of a person unknown unexpectedly appearing from a
world unknown-and doubly a stranger, a foreigner; and above all
as a henro, I am being asked to minister to a sick girl.
I panic, utterly at a loss. Nothing I have studied has prepared
me for this. Suddenly I am not a henro, I am a misplaced doctor's
son from Illinois (one who instinctively shied away from his father's profession). I have no religious power, I tell this woman. I
am wearing a henro robe but I have no religious power. I have no
ability to diagnose an illness or to cure it.
She pleads with me just to look at her daughter. Another
daughter, an attractive young woman, comes to the entry, kneels,
and smiling, joins her mother in urging us in.
I repeat that there is nothing I can do for the girl, that I am
afraid anything I might do would only make things worse. I urge
them to call a doctor.
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ful." She puts it on her young breasts and closes her eyes. His heart
overflows and he prays silently, afraid to trust his voice. He sees
something he should not: a teal' flows gently, gently down her cheek.
Along the same stretch of road where the girl's grandmother hailed
Tosa, Morikawa and I catch up with a lone henro and walk with
him as far as the bus stop he is heading for. "Two years ago I made
half the pilgrimage," he tells us. "Now I want to complete it ....
My reasons? Well, my grandson has heart disease-he's just a little
fellow, only six years old-and I pray for his recovery. I'm not in
good health myself: there's a hole in my heart. And I have a neighbor who is mongoloid. I say prayers for my grandson, my neighbor,
and myself."
There are literally numberless stories of cures wrought by the
Daishi, of the blind given sight, of the crippled enabled to stand
and walle One hears of such miracles at every temple and along
the path between. Several temples have collections of casts and
braces and crutches left by those who no longer needed them.
The doors of temples are crowded with written supplications:
for a sick child, often with a photo that gives my heart a wrench;
for better sight or hearing-sheets filled with a single character for
"eye" or "ear." There is a chapel-unnumbered, a bangai-whose
deity specializes in diseases of the breast; its walls are covered with
replicas of breasts brought by women who prayed there. At several
temples there are altars enshrining a god, more Shinto than Buddhist, whose province is woman's anatomy "from the waist down."
"It was holy men who installed that god here," says one priest; "its
altar had two or three centuries of prosperity but almost no one
visits it anymore." Yet some temples report that it is popular with
women of the entertainment quarters who come to seek protection
from venereal disease, and others that it is visited by women who
suffer ill health after giving birth. As for birth, I have not been able
to count the temples with deities noted for their power to grant
pregnancy and easy delivery; the sheer number of such altars
speaks eloquently of the life that Japanese women have lived-the
obligation to bear children, the perils of childbirth in the past.
Temple Sixty-one has in two generations changed from the poorest
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health was so poor that she could no longer do her share of the
work. For twenty years or more she had suffered from a nervous
ailment: headaches, sleeplessness, malaise, her condition becoming
progressively worse. She lost weight: "I looked like a ghost." They
went to physician after physician; each ended by saying he could
do nothing for her.
They explained that for years they had been worshipers of
Kobo Daishi. Their farming village had had no temple and they
had joined with their neighbors to form one, of the Shingon sect.
"About a year ago," Mr. Ishii continued, "my wife's health
was so bad and worsening so fast that we had just about given
up"-I got the impression that they had contemplated suicide
together, though they certainly didn't say so. As a last resort, they
decided to undertake the pilgrimage. "We realized that she
might die attempting it," Mr. Ishii said, "but no other hope was
left to us."
They started at Number One. For several days it was agonizing for her, and for him at her side. They were able to walk only a
short distance each day but they went as far as they could, and
they prayed, they prayed. Slowly she began to gain strength; the
days became a little easier. They went all the way around and by
the time they reached Temple Eighty-eight she was in truth cured.
A year later, as we sat there at supper, her weight was normal,
her color was good, and she looked fit. I told her so and she demurred a little: "I'm not completely well. But I can live again.
Each morning and evening I pray in gratitude to Kobo Daishi."
Mr. Ishii finished: "We have returned to give thanks. We won't do
all the pilgrimage-only Awa-but every year for the rest of our
lives we intend to do at least one province." (There is a tradition of
doing Shikoku's four provinces one at a time, with an interval
between.) "We cannot forget that we have been blessed."
I went to bed conscious that I had heard the story of a miracle. I knew that the regimen of the pilgrimage had been vital-the
physical exercise, the eloseness to nature, and just getting away
from home; but without faith they would not have been enough. I
have thought of the Ishiis often in the years since. I hope that
spring still brings them back as henro to worship in thanksgiving.
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length face down over the fire; reversing his grip, he flips her
over, face up. He sets her on her feet, kneads her again with his
hands, thumps her with the three prongs of brass, propels her back
among us.
I am mesmerized. It has been a violent, almost fearful performance-it would have been fearful but for his strength and his
assurance.
He calls the mother. Her treatment is briefer and he does not
hold her over the fire. I look to see which of the women on my right
he will summon.
"America-san !"
Me? If I could speak-but no words come. I find myself rising,
advancing to the altar. I am thumped, massaged, rubbed with hot
and smoky papers. My neck is snapped, my spine cracked. And
then, incredibly, he picks me up, holds me outstretched over the
fire; the heat flares on my face. He reverses me; my back glows. I
am again massaged and thumped. I float back to my place.
Morikawa is called. He does not get held over the fire.
The flames are burning low now. The priest sits again before
the altar. The other two women are called in turn to kneel before
him, receive a relatively perfunctory treatment. He is now ready to
answer their questions.
The older woman is concerned about her grandson. He is
twenty-three and has not
found a wife; what should they do?
Nothing, he answers; he will not find the right girl until he is
twenty-six; she will come from the direction of such-and-such a
village. Will he have more traffic accidents?-he has been involved
in several. He cannot avoid such misfortune, she is told; he will
have another and serious one in December.
The young woman's husband is giving her trouble. The priest
listens, comments briefly, advises her that the man's name indicates he will never be a success as a farmer: he should change his
occupation.
The priest rises. The women murmur their thanks, bow gratefully, and leave; I am certain they made an offering earlier. Others
are already coming in to pray and to be counseled. We are again
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As we near the end of our pilgrimage, the priest of the mountain bangai is still on my mind. I realize that we must talk with
him again. Morikawa phones; he says that he will welcome us. We
catch an early morning train for the four-hour trip across the island over its high spine of mountains. From the station we take a
cab up into the hills to the temple. The driver doesn't have to be
told how to get there: he says he makes the trip often. Nor does he
seem surprised to find four women sipping tea in the entry, waiting
for a taxi in apparent confidence that one will be along soon. We
get out; they get in.
The priest appears, as tall and sturdy as I remembered. He
receives us warmly, asks about our pilgrimage, thanks us for coming so far to see him again. He talks of the holy men of Koya (as if
he knows the reason we are here) and of the mystic power of the
goma fire. "There are things that cannot be explained by science."
We are several times interrupted. When we were here before I
thought perhaps he was busy because it was a Sunday and a day
off for most people, but this is a weekday and there is a steady
stream of visitors. Many of them he turns away because we are
here; we ask him not to but he says they can come anytime and we
cannot. He does receive a few: from his study we can hear the
murmur of their worried voices and his confident one, and the
sounds of shoulder thumping and spine cracking; they leave looking grateful.
He take us up the mountain, guides us into the forest along
traces of the old henro-path a few yards from the road we walked
forty days ago, points out gravestones along the path. On one we
make out a date: the Month of the Boar, 1803. "There are twenty
or thirty stones along this path but actually only a few graves are
marked-those of pilgrims whose families were well-to-do, who
could send money or come themselves to erect a stone. The poor
and sick came to Shikoku hoping to die along the pilgrimage route
and become part of its sacred soiL The bodies of most of them were
just thrown down a mountainside or tossed into some ravine.
"About twenty years ago when I was digging to widen the
road I heard a voice crying from the ground. Working very care-
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"1 always ask first if they have been to a doctor. If they have
not, 1 tell them to consult one. If it seems necessary I send them to
a hospital at once." This is what 1 wanted to hear.
It is dark before we recross the mountains. Morikawa is dozing. I tell myself that this hard day has been worthwhile. My eyes
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the lists vary. There is agreement only on this temple for Awa and
on the one for Tosa. Nineteen's famous legend has to do with its
role as a barrier. It has been told and retold but I feel I have it
straight, for I heard it from the temple's distinguished high priest.
It begins in a port town on the Sea of Japan. A merchant
called Gimbei had three daughters; our story concerns the second,
Okyo. Okyo's parents were not models for their daughters. They
wrangled constantly. Gimbei kept a mistress; his wife had taken a
lover. In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that Okyo grew up
wild.
Nor is it surprising, given the extramarital involvements, that
Gimbei had financial problems. In this situation he and his wife
were able to agree on one thing: weighing Okyo's nature and their
own need for cash, it was expedient to sell her as a geisha. They
accepted the offer of a house in Hiroshima, across the island on the
Inland Sea. Before she had completed the term for which they had
sold her, however, another monetary crisis loomed. She was sixteen
when they spirited her away and resold her in Osaka. It was a
comedown: in the new house she was more prostitute than geisha.
In Osaka she took a lover named Yosuke. He paid the fee to
release her from her contract and set her up as his mistress. She
journeyed home and asked her parents' permission to marry
Yosuke. They were outraged by her unfilial conduct, because once
she married they would lose control of her and would not be able
to sell her again, but she threatened to kill herself if they didn't
consent, so they gave in and she returned to Osaka. She knew very
well she could not marry Y osuke because he already had a wife,
but she had escaped her parents' grasp.
Life with only one man was dull, however, and Okyo soon
acquired another lover, a gangster named Chozo. For a time she
enjoyed the favors of her two men, but then Yosuke became suspicious. He announced he was going on a business trip, doubled
back, and caught Okyo and Chozo in bed together. Some very
unfriendly things were said.
Okyo and Chozo brooded about this and a few days later they
acted. Okyo lured Yosuke to a secluded spot and there they killed
him in a most cruel fashion. (The priest was not certain how, but
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he speculated that they may have cut him up alive, piece by piece.)
The murder was so barbarous, in fact, that when it was done they
were seized by remorse. They discussed double suicide but decided
that Osaka, where they were both so notorious that the deed would
create a sensation, was not the proper setting, and so they crossed
the Inland Sea to Shikoku. It was the spring of 1803: the boat they
crossed on, the port, and the road were crowded with henro. They
decided to move with the pilgrims.
When they arrived here at Number Nineteen, the barrier gate,
Okyo tried to pray at the main hall. Suspended above her was the
acorn-shaped brass bell that worshipers jangle (it is called crocodile mouth because of the wide slit in it). She grasped the bell rope.
Suddenly her long hair rose on end and twining itself around the
rope began to twist its way up, lifting her bodily. Chozo rushed for
the priest, who was already corning in response to Okyo's screams.
He prayed, and finally she dropped, leaving most of her hair and
part of her scalp enmeshed in the rope.
She had in truth been tonsured and, accepting this, she
begged the priest for tutelage and became a nun. She lived in a
small chapel belonging to the temple and devoted the rest of her
life to prayer. Chozo lived out his days as a temple laborer. The
temple still has that bell rope, displayed in a case behind the altar
in the main hall. A young priest lights a dim electric bulb so that
Morikawa and I can peer at it.
When we emerge into daylight on the veranda that stretches
across the front of the hall, the priest points to the statue placed
out there. It is Binzuru, he says, and asks if we know his story.
I have seen such an image at every temple, always outside like
this, always seated resignedly, always red-faced-clearly a mortal. I wonder how I could have been so unmindful as never to ask
about him.
"You see how shiny his body is? Many hands polish him.
Someone sick rubs him and then presses the part of his own body
that hurts, for Binzuru was a physician from a long line of physicians. He was first among the sixteen disciples of Buddha. He had
just one weakness-he was too fond of liquor. One day a rich man
carne to Buddha and begged him to overcome an evil spirit that
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was afflicting his house. The Buddha could not go, for he had been
summoned to expound his doctrine to the king, and so he sent
Binzuru, cautioning him under no circumstances to drink while on
this mission.
"Binzuru went to the rich man's house and found that indeed
the evil spirit was there and all the residents were suffering from it.
Binzuru confronted the evil, struggled with it, and by proclaiming
Buddha's teachings overcame it. The rich man was so grateful that
he insisted on setting forth a banquet. Again and again Binzuru
refused drink but he was sorely tempted, and at last he convinced
himself that he should take just one cup so as not to offend his host.
Of course he could not stop at one cup. He became quite drunk,
his mastery over the evil spirit dissolved in the alcohol, and soon
the people of the house were suffering again.
"The Buddha was greatly vexed and cast out Binzuru from
his disciples. But Binzuru was remorseful and he continued to go
where the Buddha taught; he could not enter, but he listened from
outside, and the Buddha knew this and did not prevent it. As the
Buddha was about to enter nirvana, he called Binzuru to him and
told him that he was forgiven but that he could never enter nirvana: he must remain forever outside, in this world, ministering to
the people. That is why he sits outside at every temple, red-faced
from his love for drink, but curing the people's ills and protecting
them from eviL"
We have lingered an hour here at Temple Nineteen. The elderly woman who was walking between the Daishi Hall and the
main hall has completed her hundred rounds and gone; two others
have appeared. Back and forth, back and forth, one moves a little
faster than the other: they pass at a different spot each time. Their
eyes do not meet; each is intent on her own prayer. Half-hypnotized by their ritual, I am tempted to sit here in the sun until one
of them finishes and then try to strike up a conversation. I would
ask her age, not a rude question in Japan; old folks like to be
congratulated on their longevity. Has she lived all her life here by
Nineteen and worshiped at this temple? How many days has she
pledged to walk the hundred turns? And (diffidently) what is she
praying for? I am quite certain it would not be something for
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A henro-stone
marking the route
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is
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toward the valley. It is past one o'clock when we begin the climb to
Temple Twenty; the rain has not let up. The path is muddy and
slippery and where the feet of generations of pilgrims have worn it
into the mountain it is a gully filled with a torrent of brown water.
Tosa muttered that it is so steep "one's chest hits the rise ahead"
and told of a man who escaped from prison in 1952, aiming to seek
refuge at the temple above; about halfway he gave up and meekly
went back to jaIl. The 1819 diarist and his friend grew exasperated; their guidebook gave the distance in the old Japanese measure called cho and they watched for the stones that marked them
off: "We felt that in this case every cho was too long and Hikobei
proposed tbat we measure them ourselves. It took us 335 steps to go
one cho and since usually 180 steps is enough, the cho here are
almost double the usual." Morikawa and I recall that some of
those stone markers are dated 1365; they have guided henro for
more than six centuries but neither of us is inclined to stop in the
rain and examine them closely.
'-IVe reach the temple rain soaked and cold, debate whether to
stop for the night, foolishly decide to push on to Twenty-one.
It is harder going down the other side of the mountain than it
was climbing up. The path is rougher and today the footing is
precarious; I am continually bracing and braking and sometimes I
fall. '-IVe finally reach the river. I peer through the rain but am
unable to pick out the house where Priest l'VIizuno and I stayed and
met Mr. and Mrs. Ishii. Cross the bridge, start up again; for a short
while it is easy, a wide trail used by the villagers who work in the
mountains. Then the climbing begins in earnest, alongside a
stream that races down a rocky course-surely the same stream the
Daishi followed when he ascended this mountain to invoke Kokuzo on its summit. This path up to Temple Twenty-one is steeper,
rougher, and longer than the one up to Twenty; today it is more
treacherous.
We take consolation fi'om knowing that we are not the first to
find this section of the henro-path difficult. Down one mountain
and up another, it is traditionally one of the toughest stretches of
the pilgrimage, one of its tests. Folklorists say that physical trials
like this, trying the henro's will and stamina, were the original
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"barrier gates," an idea that only later was given a religious gloss
and focused on temples like Nineteen.
For a long time~from the seventeenth century into the twentieth-the pilgrimage was in many districts the coming-or-age rite.
Especially in Iyo and in Hiroshima across the Inland Sea, neither
young men nor young women were considered ready for marriage
until they had completed the pilgrimage, endured its physical
trials, and been tempered by its asceticism. (Some who were poor
ran all the way-a feat that seems almost incredible to me-since
by shortening the time they could cut their expenses.) Bands of
young folk, happy pilgrims, used to be seen often along the path.
When they got home there was a congratulatory party and they
were accepted as adults.
We strain upward, wet and chilled. It is almost dark when we
reach the steps up to the main gate. Across the lightIess compound
the residence is shuttered tight against the night and the weather.
We ring the bell and wait. The young priest who answers, a caretaker in the absence of the chief priest, is taken aback to see us. He
remembers that l\10rikawa phoned to make a reservation but we
were not expected so late and in such a rain. He and his wife and
an elderly couple who have served the temple for years scurry to
make a bath and fix some dinner for us. We are embarrassed to
have discomfited them and yet, huddling over a hibachi in the dim
light of one naked bulb in a room where all the cold of the night
seems to have concentrated, we are grateful to be at this temple
dedicated to Kokuzo, on this mountaintop where the Daishi struggled toward enlightenment.
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western Tosa, close to the border of Iyo. vVhen I was still a baby
my father died. When I was five or six my mother remarried and
moved to another village. I was adopted by a distant relative in my
home village; I have not seen my mother since,
"My foster father was seriously ill as a boy but recovered
thanks to his pilgrimage of Shikoku. My foster mother too had
recovered from illness as a result of her pilgrimage. Both wanted to
make another pilgrimage of thanksgiving but he could not obtain
permission from the authorities, and so my foster mother set out
with me-I was eleven then-and her own son, just three years old,
We passed through the border gate and began to visit the pilgrimage temples in Iyo.
"When we were near Matsuyama City my little stepbrother
fell ill with a high fever. A henro who was a physician examined
the boy and told us he had smallpox; that same night he died at
his mother's breast. It was a tragedy but there was no help for it;
after the burial my foster mother and I continued our pilgrimage.
She was deep in sorrow: she could not sleep at night and every
young one she saw reminded her of her lost child. She suffered a
relapse of her chronic stomach disease and in the mountains of
Awa she died. I had no money but the people there were kind
enough to arrange a funeral and the priest of the local temple
issued a mortuary tablet bearing her posthumous name and the
date of her death.
"I was now so lonely and perplexed I didn't know what to do.
The headman told me that the best way for me to get home was to
follow the pilgrimage route and so I set out as a mendicant henro,
telling passersby my situation and appealing for sympathy. Some
gave me fifty copper coins and some a hundred, so that after a few
days of begging I was able to change my coppers into a silver coin,
which I carried wrapped up with my foster mother's mortuary
tablet." Utakichi must have been an engaging tyke: he had already
collected enough money to see him all the way home.
"Carrying this bundle on my back, I went on my way. It was
thcn I met a henro monk who told me that in the mountains a
temple was holding a festival where I could easily beg money. He
offered to guide me there and I followed him without suspicion, At
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lraveled with Eizo a long time and I got to know his character.
Believing that sooner or later he would bring me back to Tosa and
remembering the frightening experience of traveling alone, I put
myself in his hands."
Slowly they worked their way up Honshu. Eizo outfitted his
young companion in the robes of a pilgrim to the sixty-six provinces, and Utakichi wavered between pride in his new clothes and
worry that he was even more deeply obligated. In Kyoto they visited the great temples. They went up to Mount Koya. They
walked north along the Sea of .Japan, crossed the .J apan Alps, lingered three weeks in the shogun's capital, Edo, and then, though
winter was coming, kept pushing north. One of Eizo's feet became
infected; in the mountains at year's end he could no longer walk.
"Village officials kindly provided a place for him to rest and I
stayed there with him. One night two wild monks forced their way
in and stole the seals and inscriptions of all the temples and shrines
we had visited. After that I was told to move to the home of a rich
farmer named Magozaemon but every day I visited Eizo, bringing
the food that Magozaemon gave me for him. As the weeks went by
Eizo's condition grew steadily worse. In the Third Month he died.
"Officials summoned me and questioned me and I told them
my whole story. They found it hard to believe but I convinced
them. In the meantime Magozaemon and his wife were ever so
kind to me; they let me sleep in the same room with them and they
offered to adopt me as their son and even give me a share of their
land. After all my bitter experiences it was like paradise.
"Then one day I was summoned again and the officials told
me that a man of my own province had come to get me. He was a
man of high position and I was afraid of him. More than that, it
grieved me to leave Magozaemon and his wife, whom I loved so
much. But I had to go. The man took me to the Edo mansion of
the Tosa authorities, and in due time I was sent back to my native
place.
"Since all our seals and inscriptions were stolen I have no
evidence to support my story. I have tried to remember the names
of the shrines and temples Eizo and I visited but I can't remember
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them all. I really had no choice but to go with him, I was so afraid
of traveling alone. I was timid from birth: as a child I was afraid to
go alone to the toilet at night.
"I want to express my gratitude to the authorities for sending
me home by ship."
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one is to strike its bell as many times as one's age and then "offer in
the main hall a danger-banishing charm. Finally one should go to
the office and order danger-banishing prayers."
l\tlorikawa forgoes the new sandals and simplifies the procedure somewhat but he fulfills his responsibility. I offer a prayer for
the young man I last saw praying at this temple, the young fellow
who fled Tokyo and a potato chip factory for the henro-path on
Shikoku. I pray that his quest was rewarded.
Then we sit for a while in front of the Daishi Hall, lazing in
the late afternoon sun as pestle and bell are struck in the background. Below is the town, embraced by green hills: patterns of
gray and red tile roofs, white accents of fishing boats moored in the
river. Legend after legend explains the existence ofthis temple and
its power to shepherd believers through the ominous years, but idly
I wonder if the temple's power and its presence here may be somehow related to the reality of those awesome turtles, their fabled
longevity, and their inborn drive to continue their kind, which
spring after spring brings them back to the warm white sand of
that special beach.
We have worshiped at the last temple in Awa and we have plodded another twenty miles or so along a national highway. Almost
without realizing it, for there are only small markers at the border,
we leave Awa and enter Tosa Province.
It did not use to be so easy. At this point in the old days henro
faced the Tosa barrier gate. All those wishing to enter the fief were
strictly examined. Henro were given a hard time.
They had, of course, to present a valid travel permit, issued
with the approval of their own fief, signed and sealed by local
functionaries and the priest of their home temple, specifically authorizing them to tour the sacred places of Shikoku. Tosa officials
at the guardhouse would receive this with distaste and scrutinize it
carefully. They would demand to see money, evidence that the
henro would not have to beg his or her way across Tosa, "thus
draining away the wealth of the province." They would ask questions, trying to screen out undesirables: the sick and diseased; beg226
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gars and ruffians in henro guise; and most of all, spies. Each fief
kept vigil against secret agents from other fiefs. Then, after the
early seventeenth century, they were all apprehensive about the
agents of the central government, the shogunate. It maintained a
vast spy apparatus to check on the semi-autonomous lords of the
provinces, the daimyo. Were they engaged in unauthorized military buildup? Was there any hint of rebellious thought? Were they
mindful of their subjects' well-being? Spies were at the top of any
fiefs list of unwanted visitors.
At last, if the officials at the barrier gate could find no reason
to reject the pilgrim, they would issue a permit to travel through
their land. It would specify that only thirty days were allowed and
warn that overstaying would bring punishment when leaving the
province; it would restrict travel to the prescribed henro-path and
forbid wandering into byways (where alms might be more generously given to pilgrims, or gulls more readily found by sharps tel's,
or information more easily gathered by spies). Finally, reluctantly,
the henro would be allowed into Tosa, assured that he was not
welcome.
Not surprisingly, many henro tried to sneak across the border.
Tosa guards were on the watch for them. Illegal entrants caught
inside the province were whipped~forty, fifty, a hundred lashesand deported. Repeaters, or those guilty of thieving or swindlingselling "magic" medicines or talismans-were branded on the arms
or cheeks so that they might never again pass unrecognized.
In a formal scheme of things devised by priests to reinforce the
idea that henro should begin their pilgrimage at Temple Number
One, Awa was labeled "the province for spiritual awakening"; in
Iyo and Sanuki, the third and fourth provinces, the consecrated
pilgrim would approach enlightenment and Buddhahood, but
only after hard labor in Tosa-Tosa was "the province for ascetic
discipline." Morikawa and I speculate as to which came first: was
it the concept that the second province should be the arena for
hard training, or was it the fact that Tosa was least hospitable of
the provinces?
Even today, Tosa is different. The other three provinces of
Shikoku face the Inland Sea, a land-gentled sea studded with a
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Of course this is too harsh an epithet, though it gained currency. Not all the people of Tosa rebuffed the hemo, but a
welcome and settai were generally found only around the pilgrimage temples and they were few. The long road through Tosa is
more than a third of the pilgrimage, yet along it are only sixteen
numbered temples, less than a fifth of the eighty-eight.
Even those oases of warmth were a source of disappointment
to fief officials. In a memorandum of 1810 that is typical of the
directives they issued in a steady stream, they sighed that in spite
of strict ordinances and their repeated remonstrations, "there is no
end to henro who stray from the prescribed route and who, in some
cases, feign illness to stay longer than scheduled, or practice exorcism, or sell fake medicines, or conduct gambling, or commit thievery. This is because the villagers in the neighborhood of the
pilgrimage temples are such stout worshipers of Kobo Daishi that
they show extraordinary kindness to henro, even to the extent of
overlooking suspicious behavior." But when it came to reporting
rascally hemo, other villages too were lax: "Being loath to use the
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selves a very easy schedule around Muroto: a night at East Temple, Twenty-four, right at the cape; a night at Port Temple,
Twenty-five, only four miles away; and another night at \Vest
Temple, Twenty-six, little more than three miles farther. That
should give us plenty of time to accost fellow henro.
We do meet one couple at Twenty-four. The man, retired
from business in Tokyo, says he previously walked the entire pilgrimage but because his wife is with him this time they sometimes
take a bus. They are making the pilgrimage simply to give thanks
that life has been good to them.
Arriving very early at Port Temple we climb a sharp slope to
the main hall, small and plain. Incense offered by fishermen's
wives with their morning prayers is still burning in the urns. How
many wives have climbed this hill to pray for the safety of their
men? And how many have come here for solace?
Down by the priest's residence we loll in the compound,
catching up on our diaries, waiting for henro. One finally appears:
the same one we chatted with in Awa, the man with a hole in his
heart; somewhere along the line we passed him without knowing.
vVe begin to understand: the reason we encounter so few walking
henro is that there are so few.
A round-faced priest appears and, seating himself in the open
window where he inscribes albums, joins us in waiting. We move
over to talk with him. He tells us the temple legends and its more
recent history. And then he smiles the quizzical smile of someone
who feels he ought to be recognized. At that moment a young
priest comes out the door to welcome us. Suddenly I realize where I
am. It was at this temple, not at Twenty-six, that Mizuno and I
were so warmly entertained. I feel foolish.
But our stretched-out schedule has only happy consequences.
It results in our staying the next night at West Temple, privileged
guests at its annual festival and revealing of the statue of Kobo
Daishi. And here we are received like old friends. Our packs and
gear are at once moved from the henro quarters upstairs to the
family's garden room where Mizuno and I feasted. I am given
snapshots of the two of us standing with the family in front of the
Daishi Hall, starting out from here the following morning in rain;
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they have held the photos against the day I should reappear. The
young priest takes us to tour the port. He shows us the market shed
where the day's catch is being packed in ice for shipment; he points
out the small boats that fish the warm currents offshore for bonito
and mackerel, the big craft that make six- or seven-month voyages
after tuna into the Indian Ocean, the Tasman Sea, even the Atlantic. Once, but no longer, whales could be hunted just outside the
harbor. A hemo who made the pilgrimage in 1884 kept a diary
that is seldom quotable because he usually confined himself to a
laconic listing of temples and lodgings, but here he got carried
away. "Walking from East Temple to Port Temple we saw a whale
being caught. We canceled our afternoon schedule, took lodgings,
and watched the fishermen carve up the whale in the sea. As they
did, scores of local housewives jumped into the sea and tried to cut
meat from the dismembered carcass. Angry fishermen brandished
bamboo poles to drive away the women, who did not flinch. They
were like flies on the back of an ox. Some were beaten and injured
about the head. It was an interesting sight."
After coffee we walk back to the temple. 1 did not think it
possible but we are wrapped in even greater hospitality than before. Two heavy easy chairs are lugged into the garden room for us.
The day has been overcast but now the sun breaks through, slanting across the hillside, picking out bursts of bloom, azaleas in pink,
lavender, rose, white. Buses have arrived and white-robed henro
climb to the main hall, the bells at their waists tinkling. They will
be staying here tonight.
The young priest joins us for dinner, bearing a tray laden with
beer, a fine whiskey, and Hennessy brandy. We feast; Morikawa
and I both indulge in double portions of tataki. The bus henro are
eating in a big room nearby, but not nearly so w~
The head priest joins us after dinner. He has been drinking
and is jovial. "I used to drink a bottle of sake every evening," he
says, "but the doctor told me I was threatened with diabetes so I
switched to whiskey and lemon."
His son-in-law asks us to go into town again "for just one
drink." I beg off-the day has been full enough for me-but Morikawa joins him and 1 am left alone. There is no point in trying to
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every hamlet, and if there were any Japanese who didn't know his
name when he started they surely did by the time he reached
Kyoto.
The coronation over, one of Japan's great national newspapers, the Asahi) suggested that he continue his trip to the western
extremity of the island under their sponsorship. The idea delighted
him and the Asahi published his diary of the journey in ninetythree installments. The enterprising editors then suggested that if
he went north from Tokyo to Aomori he would complete a twelvehundred-mile traversal of the main island, so he took them up on
that. He loved to travel, and he loved to get into the "old" Japan,
where tradition was still strong and folklore vital.
He was always a political man. He was concerned about progress toward constitutional government and the direction in which
Japan was heading, and so he was dogged by plainclothesmen on
all his trips, the police being not at all sure what he was up to. He
climbed Fuji three times, using every route, and he did the rather
dangerous midway path that circles the mountain halfway up and
is seldom attempted except by cultists; the police trudged after
him. He complained but he must have known it would do no good.
He went up to Mount Koya in 1917 and again in 1920, and
he made a preliminary visit to Shikoku in 1917, but it was 1921
before he undertook the Shikoku pilgrimage. He had wanted to
walk it all like a true pilgrim, he said, but that year his schedule
was too tight, so most of the way he would have to ride. And by
now he was too much a celebrity to travel anonymously in Japan;
as he modestly admitted, he was the best-known foreigner in the
country. Reporters chronicled his visit to every temple, climbed
every mountain in his wake (the snow was more than a foot deep
on the alpine path from Number Eleven to Number Twelve).
Newspapers vied to provide him with a car and be his host, and
every town of any size begged him to make a speech.
He started at Temple One and he went all the way around to
Eighty-eight and back to where he had begun, but it is Tosa where
he is best remembered, a fact that reflects a kinship of original and
independent spirits.
Take for example his reception at Temple Twenty-eight. He
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must have felt that he was falling behind schedule, because instead
of staying overnight in Aki town, as the people there begged him to
do, he gave them a matinee talk and then took the interurban train
to a station half a mile from the temple. It was dark by then but as
he walked he collected a crowd of local people eager to have a look
at the foreign henro.
He arrived at eight-thirty, so unexpected that the priest was
absent. He was received by nonplussed monks and some members
of the temple. He was invited to spend the night, he accepted, and
then, settling back, he asked to be shown something distinctive of
Tosa. The priest's chief disciple was perplexed about how to entertain him-confronted with a guest, the Tosa instinct is to break out
the bottle, but it was well known that Dr. Starr shunned liquor, as
well as tobacco, women, and telephones. Even without alcohol
they decided to demonstrate one of those drinking games played
with chopsticks. The professor was intrigued and joined in; there
was a match between the American and a Tosa man. (That was
the way a local reporter would naturally put it: not between an
American and a Japanese but between an American and a Tosa
man.)
After the game they tried to teach Starr and his interpreter a
Tosa folk song. Folk songs almost demand the lubrication they
were denied that night and the effort was doubly doomed since, as
a reporter noted, neither of the guests had much of a voice, but
Starr ordered his companion to master the song before they left
Tosa.
The next morning the professor was up early, lighted candles
and incense before the altar, and then in his white robes sat at a
desk to write in his diary. When he left after warm good-byes, he
was delighted to find kite flying in progress below the temple and
some of the villagers obligingly staged a cockfight for him. A newspaperman recorded the speculation circulating among the people:
"He may have a great knowledge of Kobo Daishi, but can the
Daishi understand his prayers in English?"
He went on into Kochi City, where for two days he received
celebrity treatment. The two newspapers jointly sponsored a lecture at the city auditorium before an overflow crowd. His subject
was "Japan and America" and judging from the newspaper reports
he touched on his favorite themes. He praised Japan for its astonishing progress since emerging from seclusion; for having amazed
the world by defeating those two giants, China in 1894-1895, and
Russia ten years later; for being the only nation in the Orient to
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sleep at night; they spoil the sanctity of the shrine by cooking and
doing other dirty things. None has ever been found carrying a
travel pass. Some even escape while officials are studying how to
deal with them. lYlost worrisome is that they may start a fire because of their carelessness.
That fear was not unfounded. The Tosa record of crimes and
punishments shows that it was about then that a novice from a
temple in Awa and the two young women who were performing
the pilgrimage with him-a trio that in itself might raise eyebrows-were sentenced to be flogged forty times and deported because the fire on which they were cooking rice at another shrine got
out of control and burned down the shrine.
At the same time it may be noted that what the priests were
complaining about was no new thing. On some of the buildings of
Tosa Shrine are old graffiti like this one dated the Sixth Month of
1571: "Ah! ah! there is no place to lodge-I stayed at this shrine."
Perhaps the priests of that earlier time were more tolerant.
The Tosa Shrine priests' petition continued: "Their dirty
presence is desecrating. They converge in such numbers, one group
on the heels of another, that they are quite beyond control. We beg
you to find a way of keeping them out of the shrine." Tosa authorities found a way. They demolished the temple. Its images of
Amida and Kobo Daishi were transferred to Twenty-nine, which
for the next twenty-three years functioned as both temples.
In 1893 a temple named Anraku-ji in Kochi City acquired the
statue of Amida from Twenty-nine (which was no doubt relieved
to part with it) and declared itself Temple Thirty-it had the principal image, which is in essence the temple. And for the first time
the henro route led straight through the city: in feudal days henro,
always suspect as possible spies, had to skirt the castle town or
court dire punishment. It is clear that with modern times the officials of Tosa-Kochi-were losing their capacity for indignation
over pilgrims.
But the Tosa spirit of stubborn battle persisted in the adherents of the old temple, which had been named Zenraku-ji. In
1929 they succeeded in reestablishing it (since the national govern-
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ment refused to authorize any new temples, they transferred a defunct but legally existent temple from the Tokyo area)-at least in
name, for they had the money to erect only a marker on the old
site in the shrine grounds. Now their fight began to heat up. In
1938 they were able to erect a temporary building. They brought
back the statue of the Daishi from Twenty-nine and they demanded that Anraku-ji relinquish the Amida. Anraku . ji, whose
name means "peaceful enlightenment," refused and war was
declared.
A battle between temples is embarrassing to the hierarchy. In
this case the situation was complicated by the fact that the two
temples belonged to different schools of Shingon, so that two hierarchies were involved. There has been more than one attempt at
resolution. In 1942 an agreement was signed that Anraku-ji would,
within three years, return the Amida and would thereafter be designated the innetmost sanctuary of Zenraku-ji; three years passed
and the Amida did not move. In 1952, after more negotiations
of staggering complexity, Anraku-ji was declared to be Temple
Thirty, Zenraku-ji was designated "a place of historic importance," and to insure that this agreement held, Zenraku-ji was
transferred to the same school as Anraku-ji and the same chief
priest was appointed to both temples. I have no confidence that the
fighting is over. The author of our most up-to-date guidebook is
wrathful on the subject. To him Zenraku-ji is indisputably Number Thirty: Kobo Daishi founded the pilgrimage and chose the
temples and assigned to each its number, and nothing has changed
since then. It may be mere coincidence that the author is a priest of
the school to which Zenraku-ji formerly belonged.
His indignation notwithstanding, it is clear that the pilgrimage can be altered. There have been battles between other
temples over which was the properly authorized place for henro
prayers. Most of these occurred some centuries ago and cosmetic
history has both veiled the fight and assured us that the righ tful
temple was the victor-for that is where we worship today.
Here in Tosa, in the case of Temple Thirty, the ehange was
wrought by revolutionary fervor that engendered religious fanati-
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and the others gathered there were spared. vVith other foreigners
he was evacuated from the country as soon as could be. It was his
shortest visit.
He was lucky, Morikawa says. Nobody knew that better than
he, I answer, for he had walked through the havoc, the thousands
of bodies, the stench of death.
Morikawa and I spend three full days in the city of Kochi, resting,
getting our clothes clean, and enjoying long helpful conversations
with friends like Hirao Michio, a Tosa historian with a national
reputation, and Tosa Fumio, who is pressing to finish his long
series of articles about his own pilgrimage.
Then we set out again, stopping at Temple Thirty-three,
which we visited before we entered the city, to offer prayer-to say
good morning, as Morikawa puts it-by way of getting started.
Next door to the temple is a Shinto shrine that vividly illustrates what has come of the Restoration government's use of
Shinto and abuse of Buddhism.
No sooner had Buddhism come to Japan in the sixth century
than it and Shinto began a long process of accommodation. In
many respects the two complemented each other and the priests of
each soon saw advantages in coexistence and even alliance. At first,
Shinto deities were invoked to protect the new religion: Shinto
shrines were built alongside Buddhist temples. But before long, the
situation was reversed: then Shinto deities, like ordinary mortals,
were considered to be in need of salvation through the power of
Buddha, and so Buddhist scriptures were recited before Shinto
altars and Buddhist chapels were built beside Shinto shrines. In
time the two faiths grew so close that in the people's minds they
mingled and merged and it became difficult to know where one
began and the other left off.
All along the pilgrimage route Morikawa and I have seen
Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine side by side. Through most of
their history the two were in reality one institution, most often
administered by the Buddhist priests-one institution offering the
option of prayer at two kinds of altars to meet any worshiper's
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back to Tokyo and to St. Luke's Hospital but he died two days
later at the age of seventy-five. The funeral was to be held in
Tokyo. "In accordance with the express wish of Dr. Starr, who
deeply loved Japan, his body will be dressed in formal kimono."
The program he had laid out to busy himself till he was 120
would not be completed; most of the books would remain unwritten. Japan had lost a staunch and vocal friend: he had been able to
say good things about her rule in Korea; he had defended her
actions in the Manchukuo dispute.
I do not mean to overpraise him. Scholarship has advanced
since his day. But he created wide interest in anthropology, he was
a brilliant teacher, and he gave his students an appreciation of
Japanese culture they could get at almost no other university in
the West (the course that he taught for twenty-five years was
dropped when he retired).
The temple is soliciting contributions to repair the severe
damage done by a typhoon last summer. Morikawa and I buy a
copper sheet for the roof. We sign and date it, and add: "In memory of Frederick Starr." Then we shoulder our packs and set out
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was not satisfied with it. He wanted to produce a guide that would
give pilgrims all the counsel they needed to perform the pilgrimage
properly-not only keep them from getting lost but tell them the
story of each sacred place, explaining why it was holy and how to
worship there. He knew that his book was inadequate and so he
climbed Koya to seek help from a priest named Jakuhon.
"I did my best," wrote Jakuhon, "selecting and arranging his
material, but many details were not clear. To remedy this, Shinnen
revisited the temples with two or three companions and obtained
the missing information while also making a sketch of each temple,
and I was able to finish compiling this work."
The expanded and polished guide, seven slim volumes printed
from woodblocks, was published in 1689. It begins at the Daishi's
birthplace and it lists ninety-four temples without assigning them
numbers-today's eighty-eight plus six bangai; the route is the
same as it is today. Jakuhon is credited as author but the preface
acknowledges that the impetus and the information came from
Shinnen. It was expensive but it was quickly plagiarized by
cheaper books. Henro had what they needed to guide their steps
and their worship.
Shinnen turned to another need. On the three-day trek to
Ashizuri, from Temple Thirty-seven to Temple Thirty-eight, pilgrims often found themselves without a roof to sleep under even in
the foulest weather. At a junction, a spot passed by henro going to
the cape and by the many who chose to backtrack along the same
road in going on to Thirty-nine, he built a chapel and a shelter,
enshrining a life-size statue of the Daishi he had carried on his
back from Koya. Here he lived out his life, helping henro. Helping
often meant nursing them in sickness, sometimes burying them.
There are many graves in back.
Although Shinnen established the hermitage at that junction,
the Jakuhon-Shinnen guidebook suggested an alternate route to
Temple Thirty-nine: not the backtrack and then a path west over
the mountains, but a road that went west along the coast and then
veered north, where there was a temple to be visited. The temple
never acquired a number-it became a bangai-but certainly some
henro went there, for at Ashizuri the authorities of Tosa fief grew
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:Moon~:Mountain
Temple
(an illustration from the
guidebook b)' Jakuhol7
aJld Shinnen)
back, from a pool formed by a spring the Daishi had brought forth.
For a moment I wonder whether this tale might signify that the
bell was recovered from the wreck of a boat that sank offshore.
But I put this thought out of my mind: here in the compound
for all to see is the pool, and the turtle is memorialized in red
concrete.
The priest escorts us a few hundred yards to the innermost
altar. We pass a lone farmer scything a field of wheat and come to
a Hooded field with a crop we have seen in both Awa and Tosa but
could not identify: clumps of slender green grasses like long pine
needles. The priest tells us that they are the reeds that are woven to
make the covers of tatami mats. Now they are about as high as the
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wheat the farmer is harvesting but they will grow almost as tall as
a man. The seedlings are transplanted in the coldest season and the
reeds are harvested in the hottest. They used to be grown almost
exclusively in Okayama Prefecture but they do not tolerate contamination: poilu don on the other side of the Inland Sea has
brought this crop to Shikoku.
Hanging inside the little chapel are large red banners, many
of them, each bearing the name, age, and address of someone
whose prayers to the Yakushi of this temple have been attended by
recovery from illness. Outside are dozens-no, hundreds--of little
flags, red and white, planted in the ground, signifying the same
blessing. "There are innumerable stories of cures," the priest murmurs, "from tuberculosis, blindness, paralysis--but the stories are
no different, I suppose, from those of any other temple."
He reflects. "To intellectuals, religion seems strange. But the
point of the religious life is mental and spiritual training, and that
cannot be achieved by oneself. We need help from some source like
Buddha or Kobo Daishi or Yalcushi." He considers us. "The point
of the pilgrimage is to improve oneself by enduring and overcoming difficulties."
Now we leave Tosa. In the old days there was just one authorized
exit, a mountain pass called Pine Tree Ascent right on the border
between Tosa and Iyo. There is always something significant about
crossing a pass. A scholar has noted that the Japanese word
for "mountain pass" originates from a verb meaning "to offer,"
"because travelers always had to offer something to the god of the
pass as a prayer for safe journey (a custom also seen in Korea,
Mongolia, and Tibet) .... There are many instances where large
mounds have accumulated from the offerings of small stones."
At Pine Tree Ascent was a barrier gate. There was a flood of
Tosa edicts, one every three or four years for more than two centuries, stipulating that it was the only point where travelers might
cross the long border with Iyo. Of course henro who had entered
Tosa by evading the barrier gate at the other side of the province
had no choice but to try to evade Pine Tree Ascent-and, if caught,
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horses tethered there made the surroundings much too dirty for the
Daishi. Finally the old men's club of the town at the foot of the
mountain offered a suitable location and the villagers accepted
gratefully. One of the members of the club has shown me to the
little chapel that stands on the grounds of the chamber of commerce building, the town's social center. Inside was a crutch, offered by someone who no longer needed it; this Daishi, he told me,
is renowned for its power to help cripples. And there was the image: a seated figure about two feet high, carved in sections-primitive art with simple strength.
Once we achieved the pass we sat to rest like thousands of
hemo before us, and pulled from our packs some of the snacks we
always carried. The boy, having delivered us, vanished just when
we wanted to share our food with him, but almost immediately the
farmer who had set us on the path appeared. "I saw that you were
having difficulty," he said, "so I hurried up to help." He sat with.
us in the little clearing, chatting and eating, until we started down
into Iyo. He had been wrong about only one thing: on the Tosa
side it was certainly a good path, except for that last short stretch,
but on the Iyo side it was even better-clean, often shaded, and
with lovely views of the mountains and valleys. Unfortunately it
ended where a great gash had been cut in the slope to build a new
highway, and we had to inch our way down to the road.
And so Morikawa and I, now that we know the path exists,
cross the border from Tosa to Iyo over Pine Tree Ascent as henro
should. In the town we find a comfortable inn and then we go to
pray before the Daishi. Presently we are relaxing in a hot bath. As
we are finishing our dinner and it is growing dark, two new guests,
young men, limp past the open doors of our room. They are so
evidently footsore that Morikawa grins in sympathy. "Henro," he
says.
After they have bathed and dined we eall on them. The older,
whom I guess to be in his thirties, does the talking. He tells us that
he works in an office in Osaka. Year before last he began his pilgrimage and he has continued it every time he could get a few
days' holiday. Sometimes the younger chap has accompanied him,
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Now we face the mountains of southern Iyo. From here to the plain
where the city of Matsuyama rises is about a hundred and fifty
miles, mostly mountainous and mostly beautiful. It is possible to
walk nearly the entire distance on national highways as suggested
by our modern guidebook with its primary concern for motorized
henro. That unpleasant possibility we reject. We want to stay away
from busy roads and we want to seek out the old henro-path.
It is not far, only a couple of hours, to Temple Forty but we
stop there for the night, giving ourselves an easy day and time for
long contemplation of the old woodblock that reads, "Namu
Amida-butsu." We try to sense the magical power of that carved
board, the faith that has inspired countless cures, given measureless comfort.
The next two temples are forty miles away, over a mountain
four times higher than Pine Tree Ascent, with views that seem to
encompass all Shikoku. We spend the night up there at a bangai
that through most of its history was ambiguously Buddhist and
Shinto but since the 1870's has, of course, been classified as Shinto.
Down and to another bangai in a castle town famed for bullfighting-not man against bull but bull against bull-and the next
morning we reach Temple Forty-one. This is another of those institutions that joined Buddhism and Shinto, here so intimately
that until the severing of the two a single hall was both Buddhist
temple and Shinto shrine and it enshrined as principal image a
statue of a Shinto deity believed to have been carved by the
Daishi. For more than a century temple and shrine have been
housed in different buildings but the spleen aroused by the divorce
is still mordant; each claims that it houses the image that the
Daishi carved. We see that the temple priest has set up new signs
identifying the buildings: main hall to the left, Daishi Hall to the
right, and up the hill a "local shrine." He has chafed an old wound
and while we are there a village leader comes to protest. He
charges that the wording "local shrine" is derogatory in implication and tantamount to telling hemo not to bother visiting the
shrine. The priest says not at all; he has done no more than tem-
says, "but it's slow going. There was no priest for five years and for
ten years before that the old priest was senile and it was as if no
priest was here." Sad, for when Bohner made his pilgrimage he
found that same man to be exceptional: "This is a temple where
every hemo, be it ever so early in the day, is invited, even urged, to
stay overnight, and where care is taken for his edification .... The
temple has many old documents, some dating back nearly seven
hundred years."
The priest gives us a print from a centuries-old woodblock; it
promises long life to cattle. "People purchased these talismans and
pasted them on the ceilings of their barns to protect their livestock," he says, "but the temple was known for guarding humans
as well, especially from smallpox. Letters came from all over pleading for protection against that disease."
We ask about the old hemo-path to Forty-three, over another
mountain, through Long Tooth Pass. It still exists, he tells us, and
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the temple's innermost sanctuary stands at the pass, but the path is
difficult to find. He has an appointment but he phones a member
of the temple and asks him if he can help us. And then he walks
with us more than half a mile up the road. He must, he says; he
must introduce us to Mr. Furuya because he asked him to be our
guide.
Mr. Furuya meets us, a stalwart, handsome man wheeling his
motorcycle; he'll ride it back, he says, but when we explain that
we'd like to walk the old path, not the new road, he eheerfully
takes the bike home.
He returns and we set out through fields and soughing bamboo groves. He is fifty years old and a farmer, he tells us, getting
the preliminaries out of the way. I say that I think the village is
lucky to have such a fine priest after a long hiatus. He agrees.
"And he's a young man too. I was a member of the eommittee that
took charge of temple affairs when we had no priest. We had difficulties. The members wanted this priest but the headquarters of
the school our temple belongs to is a major temple in Kyoto, it has
the authority to designate the priest, and it had a different candidate, an elderly man. Our village had had enough of aged priests
after suffering through ten years when the old priest was incompetent. The situation was aggravated because our temple has high
rank; headquarters argued that they must send a priest of high
degree. I made four trips to Kyoto trying to resolve the issue. What
it came down to was that headquarters' nominee was a greedy
man; our people raised two million yen to buy him off." (I blink:
two million yen at today's rate is almost ten thousand dollars and
this is a rural community: they must care about their temple.) "So
we got the priest we wanted, who is a good man, and the people
are happy to have him."
Now we are climbing through a forest of cedars, fine tall trees.
"One of these mountains belongs to the schools and the timber
helps support them. It was given by the people back in the old
days." The old days in this case means the late nineteenth century,
when public schools were coming into their own in Japan.
We break into the open above the forest. Ridges of dark green
mountains twist below us. Beyond is the strait and more islands
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than I can count. "On a clear day you can see Kyushu," Mr.
Furuya says.
We pause to catch our breath, look down into the narrow
valleys at the pinched villages that snake along the bottoms.
"That's Yoshida town. The farmers down there used to have a
miserable existence, barely scratching out a living by growing silkworms. Then came the citrus boom and now they're prosperous.
More tangerines and summer oranges are grown there than any
other place in Japan." I don't doubt it; citrus groves are planted
right up to the tops of the mountains. "They have the climate for
it," Mr. Furuya goes on. "That side of the mountain is one layer of
clothing warmer than our side, but I wonder why people would
want to live in such dark, closed-in little valleys."
He leads us up a bushy bank to a spring marked by a henrostone. "Its name means 'clear water.' Henro always stopped here
for a drink." The spring is clogged with dead leaves. Back on the
path: "It was along here-a henro testified that along here he saw
Kobo Daishi. He came down to our temple and donated a stone
lantern to memorialize the miracle. It's in the garden." We enter
the pass and find loquat trees bordering the path. "The farmers
planted them so they'd have something to eat when they worked
up here in the summer." Wild iris are in bloom-and appropriately, for today is Boys' Day and the iris is the flower of that old
festivaL
Then we top the summit. There are spectacular views of the
strait, and masses of wild iris all about, and square in the pass
named Long Tooth is the innermost sanctuary, the Hermitage of
Hail and Farewell. It is a disappointment, though it cannot spoil
the pleasure of being here: a plain little building of concrete block,
and when we enter to say our prayers we find that someone has
used charcoal to scrawl a nude on the wall behind the altar. "The
old building burned a few years ago," Mr. Furuya tells us. "Henro
used to sleep in it; some of them must have started a fire. This new
chapel was built by the people of Yoshida town. Once there was a
teahouse here. The old people of the village used to come up here
to offer settai, and they kept the path clear. But now ... " Now
there is no traffic.
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but the inspector gave him two rice cakes so he was quite pleased
at his success.
"A horrible old woman poked me, demanding that I write
a letter for her. She dictated: 'If you don't send me money I'll
curse you into the grave. Praise the Daishi! From sainted henro
Okane.' "
A couple of days later, at the little chapel that Shinnen
founded after he finished his guidebook: "There are many graves
of henro. Scraping at the moss on one, I could barely read the
name. \Ve have so often seen lonely graves along the henro-path,
many marked only by a staff or a sedge hat."
Again and again she writes of her loneliness on the pilgrimage
but she was beginning to realize that she would be lonely all her
life and she was coming to terms with that. A few times she speaks
of a hospitable family, of caring for a baby or exchanging songs
with a young girl, but underlying these brief encounters is the
certainty that they are transient; she will never see these people
again. She and the old man stopped to rest for ten days at the
outskirts of Kochi City but she mentions meeting no one. Their inn
was on the bay; once the ladies of the castle had rested there when
they took boating excursions, but nothing was left of its former
elegance. Across the water at night she heard,merry voices from the
gay quarter; "they deepen a traveler's loneliness ....
"The old man considered himself to be my escort and guard
and he always acted accordingly. He also took charge of our
money, which he kept in a long cotton purse, once white but now
grimy. Since his eyes were bad he would often drop coins and had
difficulty paying for things, but though I worried I watched him
fumble our money without a word.
"Whenever we came to a village or a town he never failed to
ask alms. Leaving me to guard our packs at the roadside, he would
stand before each house, ring his bell, and recite the sutra. In his
role as my protector he felt he should be the one to beg, especially
for lodging, so as to shield me from demeaning negotiations. He
was a commanding figure but he looked so dirty that he was an
unwelcome sight and was usually refused. Then I had to step in
and smooth things over to get us lodging, though he resented my
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interference and said that those who treated him meanly were in
the wrong.
"We each had a bag hanging from the neck in which we
carried the handfuls of rice or barley we were given; if we gathered
more than we needed to eat we could exchange it for coins at a
henro-inn.
"People would go out of their way to bring settai to me. In
one town we collected a large sum of money but I have a feeling it
was because I went with him. People asked him whether I was his
daughter or his mistress and so embarrassed me that I ran off by
myself, homesick and thinking of the past. But I realized that human nature is the same everywhere, and all the time I was struggling to change myself. ...
"We had to sleep on the beach some nights. The thunder of
the Pacific breaking on the shore kept me awake but the old man
slept soundly....
"At a small henro-inn one of the others staying there said he
was a descendant of one of the most powerful lords of old Japan
and though he was a pilgrim he was also a medical doctor. A man
who had been talking with him bowed as low as possible and said,
'Please oblige me by telling me what I can pay you for your help.'
" 'I am not a merchant,' was the lofty reply.
" 'Ah-then please accept this.'
" 'Oh? I cannot deny your request.'
"Then a young man approached with his mother, both bowing very low. The 'doctor' put his hands on the young man's head,
turned and twisted it, and peered closely at his forehead. Then he
wrote in his notebook and double-wrapped some powder, saying
that no regular doctor could provide this medicine. 'I brought this
back from the United States. You must take it at exactly twelvefifteen p.m. with a prayer. You are in the first stage of brain congestion. No ordinary Japanese doctor could diagnose it.'
"The young man and his mother bowed so many times they
almost hurt themselves. Then the young man said hesitantly, 'This
is my mother. She has terrible pain in her legs. One doctor says she
has rheumatism-'
" 'You don't have to tell me. A doctor like me can see what is
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Morikawa and I agree that the pilgrimage has become much tamer
since then. Yet once in a while, an echo of those times .... We stop
for lunch at an ordinary restaurant. As we are eating, the door
clatters open and a scruffy old man in hemo robe bursts in. Confronting the owner, who presides at the cash register, he asks alms.
The owner eyes him coldly and refuses. The old man's voice rises.
"I carry Kobo Daishi on my back! You must respect the Daishi!"
The owner tells him to get out. The jabberer rages, repeats himself.
The owner gets up, seizes his arm, and pushes him out as the storm
continues: "-Kobo Daishi on my back! Respect the Daishi!" The
door is banged shut. The voice continues a moment, then breaks.
Through the frosted glass I watch an apparition sag, turn, and
shuffle from view. The owner is already back into his newspaper.
Takamure never made another pilgrimage. She married the
man-the "materialist"-who was part of what she was fleeing
from, but marriage and a baby who died soon after birth only
intensified her loneliness. She spent the last thirty-three years of
her life, almost half of it, immured in their house in Tokyo, burying herself in her writing, never going out, never receiving visitors,
in touch with the world only through her husband. Sixteen years
after her pilgrimage, again facing a nervous breakdown, she decided to return to Shikoku-alone as she had promised herself she
would; before she set out her health improved and she plunged
back into her work on marriage customs and women's rights.
But being at Temple Forty-three reminds us of someone else
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money for it, and the name of the man who introduced Mohei to
him, and it states that this is the 286th henro-stone erected by
Nakatsuka Mohei.
From here it is three days' walk to Temple Forty-four. 'vVe stop the
first night at a bangai that celebrates one of the pilgrimage's deeprooted legends. Kobo Daishi found himself at this place one winter's night. In a biting wind he made the rounds, asking at every
house for lodging and being everywhere refused. He could only
take shelter under the bridge; trying to sleep at the river's edge he
composed a verse:
They will not help a traveler in troubleThis one night seems like ten.
Since then the bridge here, though many times rebuilt, has
been known as Ten-Nights Bridge. And so as not to disturb the
Daishi's rest, every henro lifts his staff, never letting it tap on this
or any other bridge he crosses. We climb down the bank to the
altar beneath the bridge where a stone image of the Daishi lies, as
the real Daishi did not, under thick comforters.
When I came here on my first visit to Shikoku the tottery old
house nearby was a henro-inn where a pilgrim could sleep and eat
supper and breakfast for the equivalent of twenty-eight cents if he
brought his own rice or thirty-nine cents if he did not. Behind the
house is a one-room building about twelve feet square that then
was new; the charge to sleep in it was five and a half cents; no
bedding was furnished but there was a mosquito net and outside
was a shed with a simple hearth where henro could cook their own
food. The two women who ran the inn told me that in spring and
summer they averaged ten guests a night but that traffic was decreasing as fewer henro walked. Now the inn is out of business.
The next day we walk into the mountains again. In the afternoon our legs let us know that we are climbing. We are following
the course of a clean, swift river through a ravine that deepens as
Roadside images
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By his prayers the Daishi created a river and made the soil fertile;
people moved in, and did the only decent thing-they named their
town after the old woman, whose name was Kuma.
We plan to stay at the temple tonight but we could stay at a
henro-inn; there used to be several along the lane leading up to the
temple, and one that has operated for many generations is still in
business. Tosa and his friends stayed there. They fell into luck, for
their host fed them bountifully (he had received a cancellation
from a party of skiers for whom he had laid in special food) and
told them stories about innkeeping for henro. Before the war, he
said, they would often nurse a sick henro for two or three months;
it seemed that one no sooner recovered and left than another appeared. The arrival of parent and child henro would make the
family wary: within the innkeeper's lifetime his family had raised
three children who had been abandoned at the inn. "One of them
still lives in the town, happily settled here and married."
From the high plateau below us to the city in the distance
stretches the wide Matsuyama plain. Late tomorrow afternoon, if
we can keep to our schedule, we will have visited Forty-four below
us and Forty-five up a canyon to our right (that fantasy world of
rocky cliffs sculpted by nature). Then we will descend the old path
to the plain and the first of the six temples that lie along the road
to the city. All of these temples are close to home and as familiar as
old friends. And along that road to the city we will be walking
among the fields that, as henro know, once belonged to Emon
Saburo. Down there is where the legend of his redemption begins
and ends.
At Temple Forty-six, the first on the plain, we will find a stone
engraved with a haiku by Japan's greatest modern haiku poet,
Masaoka Shiki, a native of Matsuyama. On a spring day (much
like this one) in the 1880's he came to the temple, whose name is
Joruri-ji, and sat beneath its two huge sandalwood trees, about a
thousand years old.
A little farther along we will come to the spot where they say
Emon Saburo's gate stood, where he dashed the Daishi's begging
bowl to the ground. A bangai stands there now, and its priest
recites the story, pointing to the illustrations above his head. Then,
back from the road a couple of hundred yards, we will visit the
eight lonely mounds marking the graves of Saburo's sons. That of
the eldest is the largest, perhaps thirty feet square and twelve high;
the others are somewhat smaller. On top of each is a tree and a
stone image of Jizo, guardian of children.
All about them farmers cultivate rice. Farmers are notoriously
unsentimental about land, yet these mounds remain inviolate. Archaeologists say that they do indeed date from twelve or thirteen
centuries ago, the Daishi's time. That long they have resisted wind,
rain, and man's encroachment.
It is a little way to another small bangai. This is said to be the
site of the hermitage where the Daishi stayed; this is the first place
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that Emon Saburo came looking for him; this is where the long
pilgrimage of the first pilgrim began.
When I began my first pilgrimage, and even when Morikawa
and I began this pilgrimage, I was troubled that I knew so little
Buddhist doctrine. How could I understand what 1 was doing?
Morikawa too, though Buddhism is part of his heritage, confessed
that he knew almost nothing of doctrine in general and nothing at
all of Shingon doctrine and he worried that this would limit his
ability to help me. (I confessed that 1 would be just as hard put to
elucidate for him the doctrine of the Protestant Christianity that is
my heritage.) But as we have walked together, as we have thought
about the holy men who were the real founders of the pilgrimage
and who were certainly not strong on doctrine, as we have talked
with other henro at the temples where we stayed overnight, finding
that most of them are not members of Shingon and hearing them
reiterate that the pilgrimage is nonsectarian, that "you don't have
to belong to Shingon to believe in Kobo Daishi," we have come to
realize-we have been relieved to realize-that doctrine plays little
part in this pilgrimage.
Emon Saburo personifies the religion of the pilgrimage-the
common man's religion. He was a layman, not a priest. Salvation
came to Emon Saburo not through study of doctrine but through
hard practice. Morikawa and I have learned that the essence of the
pilgrimage lies in treading a route that tradition says the Daishi
trod, and in the conviction that, spiritually at least, one walks in
the Daishi's company.
The henro puts his faith in the Daishi. Beyond that, doctrine
is for priests.
The last of the six temples on the plain, Fifty-one, is well inside the
city. Sightseeing buses and taxis will be crowding its parking lot
and inevitably there will be a traffic jam at its entrance. It has
always bustled there. In the old days a market, a fair, and a playhouse flourished; it was infested with beggars and pickpockets (a
sign still warns against the latter). The poet Shiki came there often
on his walks. His only haiku in which he used the word "henro" he
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mountain marks the boundary of Sanuki and Awa but the temple
stands in Awa. It bears a name that means "Temple Near the
Clouds" and at about three thousand feet it is indeed the highest of
the eighty-eight and another of those ancient places where holy
294
men have grappled the mountains for the secrets of their power.
It has been a key point militarily as well, for the crest commands on one side a view of Awa's mountains and valleys and, on
the other, of the whole Sanuki plain. In the spring of 1577 that
Tosa warlord Chosokabe Motochika, who very nearly conquered
all of Shikoku, stood at the crest with the chief priest of the temple.
The priest seized the occasion to rebuke him for his boundless
ambition, indicating that he would better follow the will of heaven
if he went home and looked after his own people. Motochika replied by comparing himself to "the lid of a teapot made by a
master potter," implying that he intended to take and shield all
Shikoku. The priest's retort: "That would be like trying to cover a
water bucket with a teapot lid."
Motochika turned to his chief of staff and asked what he
thought. "You should consult a priest about religious matters and
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Rain dulls the light of early morning. We follow other henro along
a covered passage to the morning service. Usually I have trouble
following a priest's sermon and my thoughts wander. This morning I hear a familiar name and I strain to understand. The priest is
talking about the visit to this temple of Ichikawa Danzo.
In April, 1966, the prominent Kabuki actor Ichikawa Danzo
VIII formally retired from the stage in a series of gala performances. He was eighty-four years old but still vigorous, and retirement was not altogether traditional: many Kabuki actors die in
harness. Almost at once he came to Shikoku, alone, and undertook
the pilgrimage, a long-cherished dream. Finishing in late May he
boarded an Inland Sea ferry but instead of crossing to Osaka he
debarked at Shodo Island, which is encircled by a short replica of
the Shikoku pilgrimage. He spent a few quiet days at an inn there,
boarded a midnight ferry, and an hour later slipped over the stern
in darkness to end his life. The press treated his death sensationally.
During the years I lived in Tokyo I sawall the Kabuki I
could. Danzo was a familiar presence on stage; I liked watching
him. I am still grateful for the pleasure he gave me, and again and
again during our pilgrimage I have thought of him. After breakfast, when the other henro have departed in their bus, we ask the
priest for all the details he can remember about Danzo's visit.
"It was just about this time, May 26 or 27, that he appeared.
He came with bus pilgrims he had met at Sixty-five: they offered
him a ride because they thought the climb to Sixty-six would be
too difficult for him. The bus group was to spend the night here
and I suggested that he stay also but he said he was afraid newspapermen would come and make trouble for the temple; he would
go on.
"He complained about being harassed by reporters. Since on
his white robe were written the names of those who had helped
him during his long life, benefactors whom he was memorializing
by pilgrimage, he was conspicuous and I suggested that he take off
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We are nearing the birthplace of the pilgrimage now, for surely the
Daishi's birthplace was the great magnet for worshipers. The fivestoried pagoda of Temple Seventy-five calls to us across the plain.
Biggest and busiest of the eighty-eight temples, the town it generated at its gate is the biggest and busiest of the temple towns. But
its streets are no busier than the scene inside the gate. The long
walkway is lined with stalls selling food, drink, souvenirs, toys,
crockery, gewgaws; a few years ago there was an old man peddling
pornographic photos-he seems to have disappeared. Big and popular temples and shrines usually have such a market at the gate. I
was pleased to learn that each stallkeeper pays the temple a percentage of his take; I shrugged when I heard that he also pays
protection to the underworld boss of the district-some things are
universal. Before the war, beggar henro posted themselves here,
observing the established financial grocedures. They tell of one
who did so well that he became a moneylender.
After the country temples we are used to, the precincts seem
huge. The heart of the temple is a complex of impressive buildings
where the family home stood; we are told that construction began
in 861 after the Saeki family moved to the capital. We follow
others up the broad steps and kneel to pray. At the far end of the
hall, encased in cabinetry, is another of those statues of the Daishi
carved by himself. The lavish altar glimmers; the smoke of incense
rises; a priest intones a service. At our backs, worshipers tramp
across the wooden floor, toss coins into the collection box, request
and pay for memorial services, while pIgeons flutter in and out,
scavenging offertory rice.
vVe browse through the temple's treasure house, its collection
of ritual objects, imperial rescripts, paintings, and sculpture. What
excites us most is one of the national treasures, a single scroll, part
of a sutra, each line of text followed by a row of roseate little
Buddhas on lotus pedestals; the calligraphy is thought to be by the
Daishi's mother, the Buddhas by the Daishi. We linger in the temple gardens, return to pray again at the altar. We find it difficult to
leave. Morikawa remarks that there is much to be said for beginning one's pilgrimage here, as Shinnen and J akuhon directed in
that first thorough guidebook.
But is it the Daishi's birthplace? On that score there is argument. About ten miles away, on the shore of the Inland Sea, is a
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do for their parents. If they hear that the master is coming, they will
run out in haste to welcome him. I sincerely request that he be
appointed the director."
Hyperbole was called for in such a document, but after discounting that, the Daishi's prestige and magnetism are evident. Years of
social work among the people had won their admiration and
affection.
He arrived in the early summer of 821; the people rushed to
him in such haste (says the chronicle of those years) that many
slipped into their sandals wrong-foot-to. He began with a fire ceremony and prayers (an inlet in today's reservoir marks the spot).
To the crowd assembled he explained that he had been given
an imperial order to reconstruct the pond; he asked for their
help. They gave it. The job was completed in less than three
months.
This and other reservoirs that he was associated with demonstrate that he had an advanced knowledge of civil engineering. For
instance, the dam is curved back against the impounded water;
engineers today are often surprised to find that he knew that principle. The earthen dam that he built has never failed. Through
carelessness and neglect, the wooden sluice gate has sometimes rotted out, but the dam, except that it has been raised somewhat
during the past century, is as he built it.
We walk into the river valley and climb the dam. Even expecting bigness, I am surprised at the size of the lake that stretches
far into the hills. The huge curving dam, wider than a highway on
top, slopes gently into the water, its surface paved with stone. I feel
a sense of exhilaration: after being asked so often to take on faith
that he did this and that, it is tonic to stand before a. certified
achievement. This reservoir alone would account for the faith in
the Daishi among farmers.
There is a statue of him overlooking the lake, and higher on
the shore, a temple. We seek out the priest and he gives us some
figures. This is the fourth-largest irrigation reservoir in Japan, the
largest held by an earthen dam. The dam is more than 500 feet
long, rises 105 feet from the valley floor. It is nearly 13 miles
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around the edge of the lake, which irrigates almost 12,000 acresmore than one-eighth of the Sanuki plain. It is named Manno-ike,
the "Pond for Ten Thousand Fields."
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We try to skirt their battle, scrambling over the rough terrain with
the crack of their rifles and mortars in our ears, devoutly hoping
that we are not between opposing forces and that if we are their
ammunition is blank.
Across that dusty highway we might have had to walk we
enter a forest and find the path to Eighty-one. We know we are
nearing the temple when we come across old stone monuments
directing us to dismount and proceed respectfully on foot.
It was in one of this temple's hermitages that the banished
Emperor Sutoku was cloistered after his ill-fated little rebellion in
1156. It was at this temple that his ashes were interred after he was
murdered in 1164. It was to this grave that his friend the poet and
holy man Saigyo came to pray in 1168.
Fittingly, this is one of the beautiful temples of the pilgrimage: tall pines and cedars, swept gravel walks, white walls,
impressive gates, handsome buildings. There is a hall dedicated to
Sutoku, a structure of quiet elegance, roofed with reeds of miscanthus, draped with a white hanging bearing the imperial chrysanthemum in scarlet; it was dedicated in 1414 with most sincere
prayers that his troubled and troubling spirit be soothed and
swiftly achieve enlightenment. Behind this hall, at the top of a
long flight of stone steps bordered by hedges, is his grave: two
levels of raked pebbles bound by stone balusters, shaded by cedars.
There are stone lanterns, a sacred sakaki tree with glistening leaves.
There is quiet and peace.
~y
Sakata)
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worship we walk through the gate; this is one of the few occasions
when we have a chance to visit an adjacent Shinto shrine that is
active and has a full-time priest. He welcomes us, seems pleased
that we have called. "The pilgrimage grew out of popular belief,
which was a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, but nowadays
henro do not visit shrines. This is contrary to custom. One reason
may be that the guides provided by the bus companies have little
knowledge and a very tight schedule." We demonstrate that our
schedule is not tight by accepting another cup of tea.
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manuscript to the Theater Museum at Waseda University to deposit it there, and was surprised when the director insisted on its
being published because of its excellence.
He took the subway to the theater every morning and, after
the Kabuki actor's usual twelve-hour day, home again at night.
Unless you recognized him you would not take him for an actor.
His colleagues respected him but his reserve kept them at a distance; they considered him solid, cautious, a little dull. Scandal
never touched him, although his father had a certain notoriety as a
womanizer. His hobby-listed as long ago as t 909 in a book about
actors-was "travel to see historic relics and famous places." Returning from an engagement in another city, he would take a local
train instead of an express as the rest of the company did (he
would say he'd be back in time for rehearsals for the next month's
bill and he always was) and then he'd get off at any stop that
looked attractive. When he registered at an inn he never identified
himself as an actor or requested special favors; he did ask about the
local points of interest and he visited them alone. He was especially attracted to temples and shrines, where he worshiped with
deep respect. He dreamed for a long time of making the Shikoku
pilgrimage.
He had spoken of retirement as early as 1943, when the theater's business management pushed him into assuming the name of
Danzo. It was the thirty-third anniversary of his father's death and
the management liked to have the great names
was good
box office. He protested but the pressures they applied were irresistible. Retirement certainly occurred to him in 1955 on the death
of the head of the acting company, his intimate since their youth,
and the last great surviving star of the prewar years, Kichiemon 1.
But
troupe continued, he still felt at home in it, and there was
his sense of responsibility.
What he dreaded was "becoming unpresentable." He remembered that his father, playing a starring role when he was elderly,
had while seated onstage dozed off during a long byplay, and had
to be wakened and prompted. He was determined never to exhibit
any sign of senility to an audience. That was the reason he gave
when he announced his retirement. At eighty-four he was healthy
3 10
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3 12
* * *
Later he revised it to add, "Don't accept funeral gifts or hold a
wake." He must have thought about death often on his pilgrimage.
I am sure he knew the line from the fourteenth-cenmry essayist
Yoshida Kenko: "What shall it avail a man to drag out till he
becomes decrepit and unsightly a life which some day needs must
end?"
He moved rather swiftly, walking where the temples were
close, taking a bus when it was convenient. On his third day he
rested under the arbor of wisteria in full bloom at Temple Eleven.
On his tenth day he reached Kochi City. He had had the experience of being hailed by an old woman and given a coin as settai:
he knew he was convincing in the role of henro.
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the raw fish, and asked for more; after that we served extra portions. He didn't want to converse with the maids, so dinner was
quiet. He drank two bottles of sake." (The bottles in which sake is
served hold about three-fourths of a cup.)
"He said he was an early riser and asked to have his breakfast
brought to him the evening before so that he could eat whenever
he liked. Rice and pickles and a thermos of hot water for tea were
left in his room; he made ochazuke. (Ochazuke is one of the simplest of Japanese meals: tea poured over boiled rice.)
"We thought he would stay just one night but he asked to stay
another, and then another-three nights in all. Perhaps he went for
a stroll in the morning-we don't know-but mostly he stayed in
his room."
She takes us down to the Pine Room. It is just as it was when
he was here. Its simplicity must have pleased him: rather like the
dressing rooms in which he spent so much of his life, but with a
view. One looks far down through the tops of pine trees to a sheltered little bay and the headlands that embrace it. He pulled the
table over to the window so that he could sit there and look out.
He had a couple of paperbound detective novels: he read, and
watched the changing light on the Inland Sea, and napped; perhaps he thought back on his pilgrimage and his life. He rested. It
was off-season: the inn was quiet, as it is now. He had found a
peaceful place.
He left on the morning of June 3. When he was leaving this
room he turned back for a long look. "He walked very briskly up
the hill to the bus stop. We wanted to provide a car for him but he
wouldn't let us."
He did not return to Tonosho but went to the nearer port of
Sakate. Two boats a day stop there on the way to Osaka, one at
noon, the other at midnight. He went to the pier and bought a
first-class ticket on the noon boat. With a few hours to wait he
went to a nearby inn, took a room, and asked the maid to wrap a
parcel for mailing to Tokyo: his pilgrim's robe, souvenir towels
from inns he had stayed at, extra socks. As she worked he looked
out the window toward the mountains. She ventured to tell him
that the temple on the hill in the foreground was Kannon-ji.
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
PILGRIMS
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
3 20
PILGRIMS
and on the temples that crown those peaks. He knows what the
mountains will demand of him and what they will give in return: a
lifting of the spirits at the summit, a sense of awe.
Along the slopes the last of the wild azaleas fade and falL The
ascent becomes steeper; the road is hemmed by rocky peaks with
rough perpendicular faces. In the grass we see a worn old stone
marking a henro's grave.
The poet Masaoka Shiki, whose haiku I quoted as we approached Matsuyama City, battled most of his life against, first,
tuberculosis of the lungs and, then, of the spine. For the last seven
years of his life he was bedridden but he never stopped working,
pressing forward in his campaign to revitalize haiku, which, after
the brilliance of the masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, had subsided into stagnation. This was the lifework he
had set for himself while he was still a university student. Shiki's
last years were tortured with pain. He considered suicide, and resisted it. He wrote: "Up till now I have been mistaken in my
understanding of the word 'enlightenment.' I thought it meant the
ability to confront death without flinching. I know now that it
means the ability to face life without flinching, no matter what the
circumstances. "
A year or two before he died he wrote a story called "The
Dog," Shiki never made the pilgrimage but he knew that for many,
resolve has crumbled just short of the goal, and that graves are
numerous along this road to Eighty-eight.
Once upon a time in ancient China there was a kingdom whose
people and their king had a great love of dogs. One day in a brawl a
man killed the favorite dog of the king. For this not only was he
executed but in the next life he was reborn as a masterless dog in a
cold province called Shinshu in a remote island country called
Japan. Since this Shinshu was in the mountains there were no fish,
and in order to eat, the dog was forced to go to Oak Mountain.
[Oak Mountain is that legendary barren crag where the aged, no
longer able to work for their keep, were carried by their relatives
and left: to die; because in legend as in
women usually outlive
men, most of those cast away were women.] There the dog eked out
3 22
PILGRIMS
human being and worship at two would expiate two of his crimes,
so barking "Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo" he dashed from one sacred
place to the next. He had safely offered his devotions at eighty-seven
sacred places when suddenly-probably from relaxation at the
thought that he had only one place left--he collapsed just before the
gate of the last temple. Gasping for breath he weakly lifted his head
to find in front of him a stone statue of Jizo with a broken nose. [It is
Jizo who saves souls from hell, guiding them to salvation.]
At once the dog offered a prayer to Jizo-sama, saying, "Please,
will you show me the path I should take at the six crossroads so that
I may reach the world of human beings? If you grant me this, I
promise that I will give you a red bib after I am reborn." And the
Jizo answered, "Your desire will be granted. You will realize your
great wish." On hearing these words the dog was overjoyed: he
growled three times, turned around, and died.
From somewhere a flock of eighty-eight crows appeared and
swarmed over him, tearing at his belly and face and devouring him
so ferociously that a passing monk took pity and buried his corpse.
Then the Jizo spoke up: "The eighty-eight crows were the avenging
spirits of the eighty-eight women. Had they been allowed to eat his
flesh, his sins would all have been atoned for. Burying his corpse
seemed like an act of mercy but really it was not. However, this is
what fate decreed and it cannot be helped. He will be reborn as a
human being but he will suffer from sickness and poverty all his life:
his chance of becoming a worthy man is slim indeed."
... There was a dog like this and it could very well be that he
was reborn into this world as me. I cannot stand upon my legs. I can
just manage to crawl like a dog.
PILGRIMS
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
In the morning we ask the priest about the henro graves that cluster at this temple and he says he will guide us to them. After
morning service and breakfast we shoulder our packs and he leads
us down the steps, across the road, and down again into a ravine
cut by a swift stream. "The old henro-path runs below the present
road," he tells us, "and below the henro-path are dozens of graves.
This came to be called the Valley of Amida's Pure Land." We
plunge into a tangle of rank weeds and scrub, searching for stones.
Of those we find, most are marked simply HENRO; a few bear a
posthumous Buddhist name and a date. Morikawa finds one, still
decipherable, from 1845.
Some were old. Some were ill or diseased. Some were outcasts,
paupers, or beggars. Some had no home to return to: they had
committed a transgression, or they wanted to lift a burden from
their family, or their family had suggested they go on pilgrimage
and not come back. Whatever their stories, they finished their
pilgrimage.
PILGRIMS
"We have planted cedars and someday their shade will eliminate this thicket but so far they barely show above it. This used to
be a bamboo grove; a blight killed it." It must have been lovely
then: the deep shade, the ground clean of grass and weeds, the
whisper of the wind through the bamboo.
vYe climb back to the old path, say good-bye, and set out. We
still have walking to do, and we have the kind of path that makes
portions of the pilgrimage a joy, old and well worn but clear and
clean. There are hemo-stones to mark the distances and images of
Jizo to watch over it. It reminds me that there have always been
happy hemo who went home grateful and at peace.
Morikawa takes the lead here. His pack is as usual a little
askew-our maps bulge at one side-but it rides easily on shoulders
two months toughened. There is a bond between us now, a bond
forged of shared delights and discomforts, of mutual dependency,
of search and discovery, each into himself and together into a new
landscape. They say a hemo carries the baggage of his life: true,
and the pilgrimage gives him time to sort out some of it.
We are headed back to Number One but I know now that my
pilgrimage will not end there. When I started from Mount Koya
on my first pilgrimage, the abbot of my temple sent me off by
saying, "You will see all aspects of man, some pure, some impure.
You should see both without misunderstanding." Pure and impure: I have seen both aspects, in myself. He also said, "If you are
earnest, you will to some degree be transformed." This I know to
be true. Anyone who performs the pilgrimage seriously must be to
some degree transformed. But in my own case, to what degree? Of
one thing I am certain: the transformation I yearn for is incomplete. I do not know whether I am any closer to enlightenment-I do not really expect to achieve it-but I know that the
attempt is worth the effort.
The pilgrimage is addictive, as a hemo we met some time
back remarked. This circuit around Shikoku will pull me back to
try again. And again. It is a striving, and that goes on. vYhat is
important is not the destination but the act of getting there, not
the goal but the going. "The Path is the goal itself." Morikawa,
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
NUMBER
NAME
Tarin-in
Ryazen-ji
Gokuraku-ji
Konsen-ji
Aizen-in
Dainichi-ji
Jizo-ji Okunoin
(innermost sanctuary)
Jizo-ji
Anraku-ji
Juraku-ji
Kumadani-ji
Horin-ji
Shonen-ji
Kirihata-ji
Fujii-dera
Chado-an
3
B
4
B
5
6
7
8
9
B
10
11
B
DEITY
SECT
Awa
Yakushi
Shakuson (the
historical Buddha)
Amida
Shakuson
Fuda
Dainichi
Shakuson
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Jizo
Yakushi
Amida
Kannon
Shakuson
Amida
Kannon
Yakushi
Kobo Daishi
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Jodo
Shingon
Zen
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
3~9
JAPANESE
NUMBER
PILGRIMAGE
NAME
DEITY
SECT
Awa
B
B
12
B
B
B
B
13
14
B
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
B
23
B
B
Yanagi-no-mizu-an
Ipponsugi-an
Shosan-ji
ShOsan-ji Okunoin
Joshin-an (Emon
Saburo's grave)
Konchi-ji
Dogaku-ji
Dainichi-ji
(Ichinomiya-san)
Joraku-ji
Koyasu-an
Kokubun-ji
Kannon-ji
Ido-ji
Onzan-ji
Tatsue-ji
Jigan~ji
Kakurin-ji
Tairyu-ji
Byodo-ji
Tsukiyo O-Mizu
Daishi
Yakuo-ji
Taisen-ji
Saba Daishi Yasaka-ji
Kobo Daishi
Amida
Kokiizo
En no Gyoja (En
the Ascetic)
Jizo
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Zao-gongen
Yakushi
Dainichi, Kannon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Miroku
Kannon
Yakushi
Kannon
Yakushi
Yakushi
Jizo
Kannon
Jizo
Kokuzo
Yakushi
Yakushi
Shingon
Shingon
Zen
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Yakushi
Kannon
Kobo Daishi
Shingon
Shin.gon
Shingon
Shingon
Tosa
24
33 0
Hotsumisaki-ji
( Higashi-dera,
"East Temple")
Kokuzo
Shingon
THE
NUMBER
PILGRIMAGE
DEITY
NAME
TEMPLES
SECT
Tosa
25
26
27
28
29
B
30
31
32
33
B
34
35
36
B
B
B
37
38
B
39
Shinnen-an
Kongofuku-ji
Tsukiyama Jinja
Enko-ji (Terayama)
Jizo
Shingon
Yakushi
Shingon
Kannon
Dainichi
Kannon
Amida
Amida
Monju
Kannon
Yakushi
Kobo Daishi
Yakushi
Yakushi
Fudo
Fudo, Jizo
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Zen
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Kannon
Kobo Daishi
Shingon
Shingon
Fud6, Kannon,
Yakushi, Amida,
Jizo
Kobo Daishi
Kannon
Getsuei no Reiseki
Kannon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
(Shinto)
Shingon
JAPANESE
NUMBER
PILGRIMAGE
NAME
DEITY
SECT
1)'0
40
B
B
B
B
41
42
43
B
B
44
45
46
47
B
B
48
49
50
51
B
52
53
B
B
B
B
B
54
55
33 2
Koya-san Butsugan-in
Kanjizai-ji
Kankiko-ji
Sasayama Jinja
Ryuko-in
Ganjo-ji (Kujira
Daishi)
Ryuko-ji
Butsumoku-ji
Ageshi-ji
Fudakake Daishi
Toyogahashi
Eitoku-ji
Daiho-ji
Iwaya-ji
Joruri-ji
Yasaka-ji
Tokusei-ji Monju-in
Fudahajime
Sairin-ji
Jodo-ji
Hanta-ji
Ishite-ji
Gian-ji
Taisan-ji
Enmyo-ji
Tsue Daishi
Kama Daishi
Henjo-in
Aoki Mizu Daishi
Enpuku-ji
Enmei-ji
Nanko-bo
Shingon
Kobo Daishi,
Yakushi
Yakushi
Yakushi, Kannon
Four Shinto deities
Kannon
Amida
Shingon
Zen
(Shinto)
Shingon
Zen
Kannon
Dainichi
Kannon
Kobo Daishi
KobO Daishi
Shingon
Shingon
Tendai
Shingon
Shingon
Kannon
Fudo
Yakushi
Amida
KobO Daishi, Jizo
KobO Daishi
Kannon
Shakuson
Yakushi
Yakushi
Yakushi
Kannon
Amida
Kongo
Kobo Daishi
Yakushi
Kannon
Kannon, Jizo
Fudo
Daitsuchisho
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Zen
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
THE
NUMBER
PILGRIMAGE
DEITY
NAME
TEMPLES
SECT
!yO
B
56
57
58
59
B
B
60
B
61
62
63
64
B
65
B
B
Koya-san Imabari
Betsu-in
Kobo Daishi
Shingon
Taisan~ji
Jizo
Amida
Kannon
Yakushi
Yakushi
Yakushi, J1zo
Dainichi
Fudo
Dainichi
Kannon
Bishamonten
Amida
Jizo
Kannon
Kobo Daishi
Jizo
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Eifuku-ji
Senyu-ji
Kokubun-ji
Doan-ji
Shozen-ji (Ikiki-zan)
Yokomine-ji
Koon-ji Okunoin
Koon-ji
Hoju-in
Kichijo-ji
Maegami-ji
Izarimatsu Emmei-ji
Sankaku-ji
Senryll-ji
JOfuku-ji
(Tsubaki-do)
Sanllki
66
67
68
69
70
71
B
Unpen-ji
Daiko-ji
(Komatsuo-j i)
Jinne-inll'
Kannon~ji*
Motoyama-ji
Iyadani-ji
Hichibutsu-ji (Chichi
Yakushi)
*Kannon-ji and
two Sacred Places.
Kannon
Yakushi
Shingon
Shingon
Amida
Kannon
Kannon
Kannon
Yakushi
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
now occupy the same compound; they constitute one temple but
333
A PAN ESE
NUMBER
PILGRIMAGE
NAME
DEITY
SECT
Sanuki
72
73
74
B
75
B
76
77
B
78
79
80
81
82
83
B
B
84
85
86
87
88
B
Mandara-ji
Shusshaka-ji
Koyama-ji
Senyugahara Jizo-do
Zentsu-ji
Jinno-ji (Manno-ike)
Konzo-ji
Doryu-ji
Kaigan-ji
Gosho-ji
Tenno-ji (Kosho-in)
Kokubun-ji
Shiramine-ji
Negoro-ji
Ichinomiya-ji
Koya-san Sanuki
Betsu-in
Honen-ji
Yashima-ji
Yakuri-ji
Shido-ji
Nagao-ji
Okubo-ji
Yoda-ji
Dainichi
Shakuson
Yakushi
Jizo, Child Daishi
Yakushi
Yakushi
Yakushi
Yakushi
Kannon
Amida
Kannon
Kannon
Kannon
Kannon
Kannon
Kobo Daishi
Amida
Kannon
Kannon
Kannon
Kalmon
Yakushi
Yakushi
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Tendai
Shingon
Shingon
Ji
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Tendai
Shingon
Shingon
Jodo
Shingon
Shingon
Shingon
Tendai
Shingon
Shingon
POSTSCRIPT
When I decided that I wanted to write this book I turned to Professor Joseph M. Kitagawa of the Divinity School, University of
Chicago. His counsel and enthusiasm gave me the start I needed
and through the years since then he has educated and encouraged
me. He read my long first draft and the present one and gave me
invaluable advice. Without him the whole pleasant task would
have been much more difficult. This book is affectionately dedicated to him.
One of his first acts was to introduce me to Shingon priest and
scholar Shozui M. Toganoo; * he too has been a support and he
introduced me to the Reverend Keiryo Mizuno, who in 1968
guided me on my first pilgrimage. The accounts of my own pilgrimages are based chiefly on that one and on my second all the
way around, with Nobuo Morikawa in 1971. I am indebted to
both Mizuno and Morikawa for their companionship and their
help. Morikawa has been a fast friend ever since and has aided me
in many ways at many times. I am grateful also to the friends who
accompanied me on other, shorter pilgrimages along sections of the
route; I cannot name them all but there is something of everyone
of them in this book.
When I made my first pilgrimage I already had a circle of
friends on Shikoku. I visited that lovely island initially in 1961,
armed with introductions. Mr. Saburo Takeda took me to Zentsuji, the Daishi's family home, to nearby temples and henro-inns,
and finally-as described in Chapter 12-to the Haiku Teahouse
and Temple Seventy-one; later he introduced me to his brother,
* Japanese names in tbis Postscript are given in vVestern style, surname last.
335
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
POSTSCRIPT
337
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
who suffered toothache and of one who prayed for rain do exist, in
the neighborhood of Temple Fifty. Chapter 9 about Saigyo relies
on Professor William R. LaFleur's unpublished University of Chicago dissertation Saigyo the Priest and His Poetry oj Seclusion: A Buddhist Valorization of Nature in Tweifth-Centwy Japan (1973) and his
translations of Saigyo's poems and headnotes in MirrorJor the Moon
(New York: New Directions, 1978); Professor LaFleur has further
helped me by reading this chapter. In writing of Ashizuri in Chapter 12 I have used Professor Yoshihiru Kondo's Shikoku Henro
(Tokyo: Ofusha, 1971). Throughout this section I have been
guided by Professor Ichiro Hori's Folk Religion in Japan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968).
The translation of Kuya's songs is from Tsunoda, de Bary,
and Keene, Sources oj the Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958). Chogen's description of Mount Koya and
the stories of Shunkan, the Saint of Koya, Kumagai, and the imperial messengers to the Daishi's tomb are all drawn from Heike Monogatari as translated by A. L. Sadler (Tokyo: Transactions of the
Asiatic Society ojJapan) 1918 and 1921). The poetry on page 138 is
from Arthur Waley's translation of the No play Shunkan in The No
Plays ofJapan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921). The fictional account of Saigyo's visit to the tomb of Emperor Sutoku is
from Leon Zolbrod's translation of Akinari Ueda's Ugetsu Managatari (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974);
other quotations in this episode are from William R. Wilson's
translation of Hogen Mano.gatari, a Monumenta Nipponica monograph
(Tokyo: Sophia University, 1971). The account of how Cape Ashizuri was named is from Karen Brazell's translation of The ConJes.lions of Lady Nijo (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973).
The song on page 151 is D. L. Philippi's translation in "Songs on
the Buddha's Foot-prints" from Nihanbunka-Kenkyujo-Kiyo No. 2
(Tokyo: Kokugakuin University, 1958). Fumio Tosa has graciously
given me permission to draw on his account of his own pilgrimage,
Dagyo Ninin (Kochi: Kochi Shimbun, 1972), and I have done so at
several points. The translation of the four-line poem on the henro's
hat is by Edward G. Seidensticker from his translation ofJunichiro
P 0 S T S C RIP T
339
JAPANESE
PILGRIMAGE
priest of almost every temple, with other henro, with persons along
the way, and with scholars and enthusiasts who have studied one
or another aspect of the pilgrimage. It would take a long chapter to
list all those who have contributed to this book. It would include
my students: in 1977 I was invited to be a visiting professor of
Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I
taught a seminar on the pilgrimage. The lively intelligence of the
participants helped me to sharpen and clarify my ideas; I hope
that they were equally rewarded.
Readers may notice that I have not mentioned many of the
pilgrimage temples. I do have favorites among the temples-each
has its own personality-but some of my favorites were omitted; I
focused on those temples that fit the structure of my narrative.
lowe much to the friends who read my manuscript and gave
me the benefit of their opinions: in addition to those already mentioned, Professor Hakeda and Kenneth and Priscilla Hecht read
the first draft, and the present version was read by Colonel Jesse
Doyle, Professor Windsor G. Hackler, Jeffrey Hackler, and Professor James Brandon; special thanks go to Damaris A. Kirchhofer
for her close reading and detailed comments.
A Guggenheim Fellowship enabled me to undertake this book
and a University of Hawaii Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship made it possible for me to finish
it. I am deeply grateful for both.
OLIVER STATLER
January) 1983
Honolulu
34 0
INDEX
(Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations)
34 I
I N D E X
218,223,226-227,260-261,
263, 320
bathhouses, 120, 121, 122
Binzuru,210-211
birth, pregnancy and easy birth, 35,
158-159,176,194-195,253
Bodhisattva, 145
Bohner, Alfred, 229, 234, 261, 269
Boys' Day, 265, 271
Buddha (historical), 47, 62, 97,117,
260
Buddhahood; see enlightenment
Buddhism:
asceticism, 88, 142, 168; see also
Kobo Daishi: ascetic practice;
mountain asceticism
Esoteric, 73, 74, 75, 76, 206
introduction to Japan, 45, 50
Mountain (Shugendo), 51, 273,
285, 286
naturalization in Japan, 22, 50-51,
87,97, 1I6, 250
persecution of, 245, 247, 251, 258
service to the people, 52-53, 88,
91,93,98,100,102,118-120,
129,130,207,297; see also Kobo
Daishi: service to the people
traditional, 47, 68, 96-97
women, attitudes toward, 50, 59;
see also Kobo Daishi: women,
attitude toward
Buddhism and Shinto, linked, 116,
250-251,266,267,306-308
Butsugcn, 126-129
caves (used for asceticism), 142,
214-215
Ch'ang-an, 72-73
Chicago, University of, 237, 239,
248, 249
Chiko, 85, 86
Children's Day; see Boys' Day
China, 39, 40, 41, 45, 50, 57-58,
68-75,77,82,85,86,115,121,
124,125,126,128,146,238,
34 2
242-243,249,276,321,325; see
also Kobo Daishi: China, trip to;
Sino-Japanese War
I N D
343
I N D E X
Kiyomizu Temple, 47
Kiyomori (Taira Kiyomori), 135
344
Kobo Daishi:
Amida, linked to, 93, 95, 96, 118,
128,133,149,176,285
ancestors; see Gtomo family; Saeki
family
and art, 106, 107
ascetic practice, 22-23, 42--43, 50,
51,53,61-65,67,81,82,87,
106,121,216,218
biographer; see Hakeda, Yoshito
S.
birthplace, 301-302
calligraphy, 22, 57, 72, 74
China, trip to, 68-75, 85, 86, 303,
325
cures wrought by; see faith healing
death, 22, 78,81,83
deity, 159, 176
disciples, 22, 41, 85, 86, 87
displaces other figures in legend,
161-162,164,166
enlightenment, attainment of, 53,
61-65,67-68,81,142,177,218
family home; see Temple 75
irrigation pond; see bangai:
Manno-ike (75-76)
legends, 24, 34-37,46--47,53,54,
55,57-59,66,82,114,126,129,
142,151,154,156-158,159-166,
168-172,199,214,215,
223-224,266,287,289,291,
293
letters to, 189
life, 22, 35--43, 61-65, 67-78, 81,
86,87,159,297,300,303-304
meaning of title, 22
meditation, 41, 43, 53, 61-65, 67,
76,77,99,214,215
miracle-worker, 159, 161,162,163,
165, 166, 171, 176,271;seealsa
faith healing; Kobo Daishi:
water, springs, brings forth
mother, 59, 301, 302
and nature, 106, 107
painting, 301
pilgrimage in his company, 21, 23,
I N D E X
24,28,31-32,55,171,183,263,
292, 326
portrait, 22,23,28,29, 31
rain, prayers for, 302
school, founded, 77
sculpture attributed to, 82, 83,
154,156,164,232,263-264,
266,267,300; see alw holy men,
sculpture by
service to the people, 53, 77, 200,
303-305; see also Buddhism:
service to the people; Kobo
Daishi: legends
tomb, 21-24, 25
walks as a pilgrim, 28, 161, 167,
172,174,177,183,213,271
water, springs, brings forth, 35,
46,47,156,164,176,259,
303-304
women, attitude toward, 47, 59,
97
Kobo moxa, 186
Kochi City, 241, 243, 244, 246, 250,
280,289,313,314
Kochi Prefecture; see Tosa Province
Kokubun-ji (state temples in the
provinces), 39,116,122,168
l{okOzo,53,54,61-65,67,68,73,
81,106,216,218
Komyo, Empress, 121
Korea, 50, 53, 70, 120, 126,249,
253,255,260,277
Koya, Mt, 21-24,25, 78,83,88,89,
90,92-93,95,98,100,101,
102-103,107,109,1I0,1I4-115,
116,117,118,120-121,122,
123-124,127,129,130,137,138,
139,146,148,151,160,166,172,
173,174,175,176,183,221,240,
256, 285, 327
burial on, 24, 90, 91, 92, 94,
95-96,100,102,110,127,133,
137, 175, 176,251; see also Kobo
Daishi: tomb
cemetery; see burial on
fires, 88, 107, 172
I N D E X
Magozaemon, 221
Malraux, Andre, 106
Manchukuo, 255
Manno-ike; see bangai: Manno-ike
(75-76)
Mantra of Light (Komyo-shingon),
127,158
Masaoka, Shiki, 290, 292-293,
321-323,322
Matsuyama, 219, 220, 229, 266, 289,
290
meditation; see Kobo Daishi:
meditation
Mexico, 266, 279
Minamoto, Yoritomo; see Yoritomo
Miroku, 160-161,161,258
Mizuno, Keiryo, Priest, 28, 195, 216,
229-230, 232
Mohei; see Nakatsuka, Mohei
Mongolia, 260
monkey trainers, 261,262
mortification of the flesh, 140
mountain asceticism, 36, 38, 51, 120,
204,295; see also Buddhism:
Mountain (SJwgendo)
mountains, homes to souls of dead,
44-45, 152; see aLm Koya, Mt:
home to souls of dead
mountain worship, 36,44-45,48,
50,51,239,285; see also
Buddhism: Mountain
(Shugendo)
Muro-ji,125-126
Muroto, Cape, 65-68, 69, 81, 87,
142-143,229,319; see also
Temple 24
Nakagawa, Toyoko, 189
Nakatsuka, Mohei, 284-287
name-slips, 31,170,171,182,183,
184,243-244
individual designs, 243
oldest, 244
talismans against misfortune, 184
wood or metal, 244
28
Nara (as early capital and
headquarters of Buddhism), 38,
39,41,53,64,73,86,105,107,
116,122,125,258
Naruto,317,318
New Yorl, World, 238
Nijo,Lady, 143-145, 146
Nijo, The Confessiolls of Lady, 143-145
Nil1na-ji, 109, 110
nirvana, 161,21 1,320
Obaasan, 162-164,222
Occupation of Japan, 251
Okayama, 195, 260
Okinawa, 134,147
Okyo,209-210
Olympus, Mt, 45
atomo family, 38-42, 70
passport, pilgrimage; see pilgrimage,
Shikoku: travel permit
permit, travel; see pilgrimage,
Shikoku: travel permit
Perry, Commodore M. C., 243
Pershing, General John J., 248
Philippines, 248
pilgrim; see Jumro
pilgrimage to Ise; see Ise Shrines
pilgrimage to Mount Koya; set! Koya,
Mt: pilgrimage to
pilgrimage, Shikoku; see also henro;
henro-inn; henro-path; henrostone
ascetic exercise for laymen, 56,
172,182,218,227,229,275,
280,298
a circle,
26, 320
coming-of-age rite, 177,218
cures effected by, 196, 219, 260,
325; see also faith healing
founding, 167-172, 176,292
of gratitude, 47-48,219,232,298
I N D E X
347
I:-.IDEX
Temple 21,61-65,195,216-218,222
Temple 22,162, 197,222
Temple 23,198,222-226,225,229
Temple 24, 66-68, 81,142,229,
232, 233
Temple 25, 81,229-234
Temple 26, 81-86, 84, 154,230,
232, 234, 235
Temple 28,154,240-241,242
Temple 29, 243,246,247
Temple 30,244-248
Temple 31, 243,251
Temple 32, 237, 243, 253
Temple 33, 250,251,252
Temple 34, 252-255, 254
Tachibana-so,314-315
TempIe36, 142, 198
Tairyu, Mt; see Temple 21
Temple 37, 220, 256
Takamatsu, 286, 306,308,318
Temple 38,142-147,256,257
Takamure, ltsue, 273-284, 293
Temple 39, 256, 258-260, 278, 279
Talismans of the Thousand-fold
Temple 40, 156,157, 265,266,267,
Blessing; see bangai: Crippled
278
Pine Life-Prolonging (64-65)
Temple 41, 267-268
Tamayori, Lady; see Kobo Daishi:
Temple 42, 268,268-271,269
mother
Temple 43, 269, 272, 273, 275,278,
falaki, 230, 233, 236
283, 284, 286
tatami mats, reeds to make, 259-260
Temple 44, 287,289,290,293
temple, pilgrimage (references
Temple 45, 141-142,141, 148,215,
follow by temple number); see
290
also bangai
Temple 46, 290
Temple 1, 24, 25-33,27, 35, 36,
163,168,181,183-184,189,196, Temple 48, 291
Temple 51,171,292-293,294
227,240,312,320,325,327,
Temple 52,295
328; see also Exhortation for
Temple 53, 244
Pilgl'i1ns
Temple 61,194-195
Temple 2,35
Temple 65, 299
Temple 3, 35
Temple 66, 293-297, 296, 299,319
Temple 6,35, 184
Temple 67, 297-300, 302
Temple 7,187
Temple 71,150-153,150,151, 156,
Temple 8, 187-189,188
168
Temple 9,186
Temple 10,44-48,90, 152, 168, 186 Temple 72, 113-114
Temple 73, 36. 113, 114, 156
Temple 11,48,240,313
Temple 12,48-55,49,171,189-190, Temple 74,113
Temple 75, 25,36,37,110, 113,
212,240
117-123,125,126,168,256,297,
Temple 18,59-61,60
300-301,302
Temple 19,207-212,208,218
Temple 76, 2M5
Temple 20, 195, 197,212,216
Sinai, Mt, 45
Sino-Japanese War, 242
snake cult, 54
Starr, Frederick, 237-245, 248-250,
252-255
storytelling; see Koya holy men:
storytelling
stupa (five forms), 24,25,151-152,
151
sugar,184-186,185
Sun Goddess, 38, 87,116
Sutoku, Emperor, 108-113, 114, 125,
135,167,306
I N D E X
Temple 77,152,168
Temple 78, 176
Temple 79,110,113
Temple 80, 305
Temple 81, llO, 111-112, 113,
305-306
Temple 83, 306,307
Temple 84, 325
Temple 86, 318-319
Temple 87, 320-323
Temple 88, 196,240,314,320-321,
323-327,324
temple songs, 151, 166
temple towns; see towns, temple
Theater Museum; see Waseda
University Theater Museum
Tibet, 146, 260
Toba, Retired Emperor, 103, 104,
108,109,110
TOdai:ji, 39, 53, 89, 116, 120,
122-126
To-ji, 76, 77
Tokaido Road, 239,249
Tokushima City, 59
Tokushima Prefecture; see Awa
Province
Tokuya,184-186
Tonosho, 314, 315
toothache, holy man's, 148-149
Tosa, Fumio, 142-143, 187, 189,
192-194,216,250,288,289,
290, 297, 298
Tosa henro ofl819, 187,212,216,
235-236,261,288,297
Tosa Province, 65, 81, 87,142,154,
187,198,209,218,219,220,
221,226-230,231,234,241,
245,246,258,259,260,261,
263,264,295,303,319
character, 228, 236, 241, 246
pilgrimage records, 234, 235-236,
246
regulation of henro, 227,
228-229,234,235,256-257,
260-261
Tosa Shrine, 244, 245-246
Yakushi, 53,154,164,224,260
Yakushi's Pure World in the East,
146
Yawatahama, 273, 282, 284
Yoritolllo (Minamoto Yoritomo), 116
Yoshida, Kenko, 313
Yoshida town, 271
Yoshino (Kii Province), 76, 105-106,
107,117
Yoshino River, 34,48
Yosuke, 209-210
Zen,134
Zenraku-ji; see Temple 30
Zentsu:ji; see Temple 75
349