Japan Day Ten: Journey To Koyasan And Cemetery Walk, 29 October 2018

It was a fairly complicated journey to get from Kyoto to Koyasan. So rather than bore your with the details, I have decided to explain the physical and spiritual journey of a few hours in the form of 10 haikus.

 

furtive morning

journey planned to excess

tickets hiding

 

Kyoto heaving

rail passengers queuing

without us

 

kind travellers

assist our passage

Osaka bound

 

Osaka heaving

towards Shin-Imamaya

train looping

 

farewell throng

Gokurakubashi

beckons calmly

 

guard advises

carriage change needed

train uncoupling

 

climbing slowly

motionless waiting

Nippon Chigley

 

sunny hillsides

glorious images

serene smiling

 

Gokurakubashi

peace briefly suspended

cable car

 

speedy taxi

Ekoin shukubo

welcoming

 

Not that haikus have anything specifically to do with Shingon or Esoteric Buddhism, which is centred at Koyasan. Although the 9th century founder of this sect, Kukai aka Kobo-Daishi, wrote some mean poems before transferring to “a state of eternal meditation” in the year 835.

For those who prefer pictures to haikus, here is the latter stage of the story in pictures.

We stayed in the Ekoin shukubo, or pilgrims dwellings, where relatively wimpish and well-to-do tourists, like ourselves, can enjoy the austerity of monastic life in comparative luxury. So we had heating in the form of a mobile air-conditioning unit and en-suite toilet and bathroom of surprisingly high quality, albeit somewhat utilitarian in look.

An especially smiley trainee monk, Nori, looked after us on arrival and to some extent thereafter. Most of the trainee monks were less smiley than Nori, as were most of the guests, especially the Western visitors (it seemed to be about 50%/50% at Ekoin between Japanese and Western “pilgrims”), who seemed to be taking the experience very seriously indeed.

Not that Janie and I were being facetious or disrespectful towards our hosts – far from it – but we suspected that some of our fellow Western visitors wanted to flaunt their “more spiritual than thou” credentials. We were relieved that this shukubo went for the “dine in your own room” tradition rather than the communal dining which is the tradition in some.

But before our modest late afternoon/early evening meal (temporally misnamed by almost anyone’s standards as “dinner”), we participated in the afternoon 30 minute meditation, which (as with all the activities) is voluntary for guests.

I enquired about the floor sitting requirement for the meditation and was informed that there are chairs available for those who, like me, want to have a go but fear the consequences of trying to meditate in the floor-sitting posture for that long.

As it turned out, I was the only meditator that afternoon who wimped out for the chair – everyone else tried to follow all of the instructions, including the sitting bit. Although, as Daisy pointed out, with the possible exception of herself (on the floor) and me (sitting in a comfortable chair-seated position), all of the Western meditators started to fidget and ended up fidgeting like crazy by the end of the session.

I found the breathing element fine – I usually do – but the mind-emptying side of things is a struggle for me, as was the strange injunction to keep our eyes half open – half shut.

Soon after meditation came the late afternoon meal referred to as dinner, an ornate-looking feast of fruit, vegetables, tofu (multiple types), noodles, rice…but no meat, no fish and very little that was “full of flavour” in the way we have become accustomed to in Japan. Daisy wondered whether she could survive two whole days on such rations. I wondered if I could survive two whole minutes eating on the floor and decided that i could not – moving relevant bits of my grub onto the small table and chair provided on our covered terrace/viewing deck.

After the meal, the monks removed the food and made up our floor-futon beds. But we didn’t see that room transformation, as we had booked to do the cemetery walk that evening.

The Okunoin Cemetery night walk seems to be organised through our shukubo, which is right at the Okunoin end of Koyasan. Okunoin is the largest cemetery in Japan and is the location where Kobo-Daishi is “eternally meditating”. It is the done thing to walk the cemetery at night, apparently. As Kobo-Daishi himself said:

Why, you ask, do I compare human nature and the moon?

It is because the round and clear shape of the full moon is not unlike a mind aspiring towards enlightenment.

It should be a profound experience, but the enormous group of us, perhaps 40 in our English language group and perhaps 20 more on the Japanese tour behind us, not just from our shukubo but tourists from all over the town, made for a rather regimented event. Not least, perhaps because it was so cold at night, people were stomping along at speed and with purpose that seemed, to us, to detract from the peaceful cemetery atmosphere.  The Zen lot might ask, “what is the sound of 50 or 60 space cadets peacefully marching?”…Or some such koan.

Anyway, stomp to the mausoleum we did, then the larger group split off to walk a shorter distance to the bus stop and ride home, while we and a handful of hardier folk walked back across the bridges to the town entrance. The walk back was more in keeping with the atmosphere we had hoped for.

We walked a bit deeper into town, in the hope of finding the convenience store that is said to stay open “late” – it was 21:00ish – but that place is a little deeper into the town than Daisy wanted to go to satisfy her craving for something sweet to stave off the absence of her coveted meat and fish.

So we returned to our room and the futon beds on the floor. For one reason or another or indeed for several reasons, I don’t think either of us is cut out for the monastic life. Who knew?