| Few pictures, a lot of
public transportation.
I got up and left for the Okunoin, the
"back temple" where Kobo Daishi's body rests. It's at the back
of a large cemetery where virtually everybody in Japan wants to be
buried (or so the tourist literature says). When the day comes
that the Daishi comes out of his meditation, a sort of Buddhist-style
resurrection will occur. And anyone who's nearby gets raised
first. In Japan, a person can have many tombs: a lock of hair
here, a piece of bone there, so companies maintain mausoleums here to
put a piece of their employees in! Insiders say it's quite a
source of income for the mountain.
Anyway: I went to the Daishi.
When you get to the last bridge before the hall behind which he rests,
the area is "no pictures allowed." Here's a shot looking
toward the beginning of the "forbidden zone."
I went into the main hall, dropped a
coin, then went around back and prayed in front of the crypt. And
wept uncontrollably, I don't know why. Then I came back out and
did business.
I bought the stamp book for the Shikoku
pilgrimage, and had the first page done at Koyasan. I also bought
a white pilgrim's shirt that will be stamped as I go along. It
goes over whatever else the pilgrim is wearing.
Actually, it kind of gave me the
willies. White is the color of death in Japan, and this shirt is
like a shroud. Many pilgrims used to die along the path.
(Bishop Miyata, who wrote the religious guide book I'm using, has had
two participants die on bus tours he led!) So the white
shirt gets you ready. It is also a symbol of one's vow: finish or
die.
Anyway, not to worry; I don't reckon it
will be white for long.
After making purchases, I went back to the
guests' hall, picked up my bags, and took off--only to realize, 20
meters down the path, that I had left my stick in the hall.
This happened once before. It's a big
no-no, as the stick represents Kobo Daishi. And I left it at the
guests' hall in front of his mausoleum! Oh, the shame of it all.
One could spend days photographing the
cemetery in front of the Okunoin. Instead, I spent minutes.
(I covered it pretty thoroughly a year and a half ago.) So check
out the Words
and Pictures page to see what I
saw--briefly.
The rest of the day was mostly travel.
Bus, cable car, train, train, lunch, train, train, boat, bus, train.
I took the ferry to Shikoku. I walked from the train to my room at
Temple #2, Gokurakuji. I have to be up for a 6 a.m. service here,
then backtrack to Temple #1 to start the pilgrimage. Yes, I'm
stoked.
I did have a funny encounter tonight.
I asked the head priest here to inscribe my hat--something he's
apparently not used to doing. So he wrote a Sanskrit letter
representing the Daishi, and the expression Dogyo ninin--"We
two, pilgrims together." Then he wrote my name in katakana,
the Japanese syllabary used for foreign words. A little unsure
what to do next, he added ro-su-a-n-zhe-re-su, the name of my
hometown. Still not satisfied, he put the name of the temple and
his name. It's a masterpiece, a definite one-of-a-kind.
(Most pilgrims get Dogyo ninin, a poem, and their name.) I
think the padre may have been into the sake before he started to
work! |
HISTORY
