Tag: Shukubo Ekoin

We rose early at Ekoin – well, we did go to bed early the night before and we were trying to sleep on floor futons.

In any case, we needed to be up early for the morning service at 6:30. So after a quick slug or two of coffee from the excellent communal coffee machine, we shuffled along to the Ekoin Temple. Unlike the meditation, which is a sort-of service for the tourists, this morning service is the real Shingon monk macoy and had started bang on time. So we were a tad late, but not the very latest of the visitors to show up.

Very hypnotic chanting – one of the young trainee monks seemed to be very good at it. The senior monk, who looks the part in every way, not least his Buddha-like shape, was not quite so pleasing on the ear, chant-wise.

I discreetly (in accordance with the rules of etiquette provided) videoed a short clip, which is hard to see but you can hear the sound of the mantra chanting and bell ringing quite clearly:

Then we attended the 7:00 Fire Ritual in the adjoining chapel, which appears to be used solely for that purpose. Again our fellow visitors seemed exceptionally eager. We reckon that we did well to be tardier and therefore nearer the door because it wasn’t half carcinogenically smokey in there. Again I discreetly videoed a short clip so you can see what it was like – the clip gets more visible as the flames rise some 30 seconds in:

Janie also took a discreet, rather evocative photo or ten in the fire ritual:

Then breakfast – a modest vegetarian meal along similar lines to, but much smaller than the late afternoon feast. The highlight was the seaweed wafers which enabled me make rice only sushi rolls.

Yes, that’s right folks. High on a mountain I was rolling my own weed. But this breakfast did not make either of us feel high.

After breakfast, but before going off for our walks, we sneaked back into the temple to take some pictures of that rather stunning space and the Ekoin monastery surrounds in good light.

We wanted to see the town and we were told that there is an excellent hiking trail up a peak, Bentsen Dake, near the town, where you can leave the town at the western gate, Daimon, re-entering through the northern, Nyonindo and back to Ekoin.

So, to get to the Daimon Gate, we first needed to stroll the length of the town, which in itself would be about 25-30 minutes walk without stopping.

But we did stop a few times; to buy some tuck in an attempt to sweeten the austerity of our diet. Also to pick up a few interesting little gifts and the like. This pilgrimage town is for sure touristic, but more oriented to local tourists and it seemed less tourist-trap like than, say, Takayama.

We also looked briefly at the largest temple complex in town, Danjo Garan, before heading for the Daimon Gate and up into the “mountain” – really just a good rigorous peak walk than a mountain.

It was glorious up there.

In the words of Kobo-Daishi:

I never tire of admiring the old pine trees and moss-covered stones of Mount Koyasan. Clear streams on the mountain never cease flowing with compassion. Beware taking pride in the superficial poisons of secular fame and profit.

So there.

As for our walk, pictures probably tell most of the story better than I can with words.

We encountered hardly anyone up there. While we stopped at a resting point, just before we reached the peak of Bentsen Dake, we heard beautiful operating singing, which seemed to be getting nearer. It was – a young Japanese woman, with a glorious voice, stopped singing when she realised we were there and seemed most embarrassed. She explained in broken English that she likes to practice her singing while walking up there.

I think we only saw one other person the whole walk, although we did hear a choir singing in the distance (down in the town) later on during our walk – perhaps that chorus was the reason the young woman was practicing earlier.

The very top of Bentsen Dake has a small shrine and not the best views – but there’s only one trail so you need to go all the way up if you want to come down the other side and see those views; also glorious.

It was much easier going down – who knew?

Back through the town, quite tired but we were keen also to stroll the graveyard by light. So we retreated to Ekoin for a while to take some tea, rest, take stock on the photos and then set off again for the graveyard.

The graveyard has a totally different look and vibe during the day. Very photogenic and far fewer people on the walking trail from the town. However, once we got over the second (of the three) bridges, we were diverted (due to restoration works) to pick up the road and the more heavily populated and commercialised route from the bus & coach stops.

In a way this was a good thing, because we might not have seen that side of the cemetery at all had the regular trail been open all the way.

There are some really weird graves and mini-mauselia there. Some with the names and logos of companies to honour. One, presumably erected by an aeronautical company or in honour of an engineer, looks like a rocket. Some are stunning in design, some garishly so.

Anyway, we had a good look around, took some interesting photos and then return to our pilgrims quarters just too late to attend meditation this afternoon. What a pity.

Still, we meditated in our own way, by reviewing our photos, then soon enough it was time for our late afternoon meal. I tucked in more heartily than Daisy, as indeed had been the case throughout our stay. Again the centrepiece was vegetables and noodles in broth, but when that broth and sesame tofu in a blandish daishi sauce are the highlights, you know you don’t want me to tell you about the lowlights.

A bit more photo-reviewing and the like after the meal – we’d done the night cemetery walk yesterday after all and there isn’t anything else to do in that town at night. We raided our tuck rations, sufficient of which remained from earlier in the day – Daisy’s acquired skills from boarding school coming in useful at last, all these years later.

Then an early night on that floor futon for the last time. Strangely – perhaps through increasing familiarity or perhaps through tiredness from so much walking – I slept well that last night on the futon, as did Daisy.

All the pictures from Day Eleven can be seen by clicking the Flickr link here or below:

Postscript

I also, discreetly, took a photograph for the King Cricket website, which was published only 18 months or so later:

A cricket book in the Ekoin Monastery Temple in Koyasan, Japan

If anything were ever to go awry with the King Cricket site, you can find that article here.

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?