Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (21 page)

In most parts of Japan, February 15 is celebrated as Buddha’s death date. Temples unveil statues of the Buddha reclining on his side; this is the final position the Buddha took before his soul became a part of nirvana.

On March 11, 2011, Taniyama still had his reclining Buddha statue out on the main altar, but the earthquake had unceremoniously dumped the gold figure onto the floor, where it still lay upside down, gouging the tatami. Candles, bronze bowls and bells, and other Buddhist implements lay scattered on the floor. Numerous other statues had fallen over, tearing the paper walls. In the room where Taniyama housed the remains of his parishioners who had elected not to pay for an actual burial plot, hundreds of urns and their nameplates had been scattered across the floor. Two years of rain and disuse meant that mushrooms were now growing in
through the tatami matting. “See, look,” Taniyama laughed lightly again. “Where there is a hole in the roof or in the floor, the radiation level goes up!” The Geiger counter cackled earnestly, and the number rose from two millisieverts to four.

The earthquake had also disturbed many tombstones in the graveyard nestled around the perimeter of the main temple. Japanese tombstones are usually made of granite or marble and can consist of numerous parts: a stone “box,” a base, and then a plinth inscribed with the names of the deceased. Many of these plinths had fallen over. Here and there were small bouquets of flowers and unburned bundles of incense. Most likely parishioners had come to visit the cemetery during Ohigan, the biannual Buddhist holiday that falls on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when the barrier between the living and the dead thins and the ancestors are said to come home for a visit.

A garden still retained its general shape: azaleas, stone lanterns, and maple trees. But vines crawled across the gravel driveway, threatening to turn the grounds into a Sleeping Beauty–like place of slumber. Taniyama took me to see a giant iron bell hanging in a wooden-framed tower. “This bell,” he said, “is the largest in Fukushima Prefecture. For some reason, the earthquake didn’t hurt it at all.” He gave the bell a big thwack, and the sound reverberated through the trees. “There’s no one here to hear us,” he laughed. “Just the birds. Imagine that! No one for miles!”

After about twenty minutes we decided to go back to Iwaki. Out the car window I saw fields and fields of large black bags being stacked by cranes. “Radioactive topsoil,” Taniyama explained to me. “There’s so much, no one knows where to put it all.” After a moment he added, “There are a lot of cows in those bags. They were slaughtered, but because of radiation, no one knows what to do with the carcasses.”

Regulations required us to visit a checkpoint before we left
the exclusion zone. Two young men wearily waved fluorescent-orange batons to usher us into the parking lot of the Number Two Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Reactor. Taniyama stopped to chat with one of the men, a local he recognized from town. Then as we continued on our way, Taniyama said, “He makes a hundred dollars a day waving that baton around. We are a poor town, you see. That’s why everyone foolishly thought that the nuclear reactor would be a good thing to build. It was supposed to give us jobs.”

Taniyama drove the car inside a mammoth white tent hunched over a broad stretch of smooth concrete, wide enough for half-a-dozen semis parked end to end. All around, signs instructed me not to take any photos. Men wearing decontamination suits waved us forward. Their eyes widened with surprise when they saw my foreign face, but Taniyama put them at ease. “Just showing my friend here what my temple used to look like,” he smiled. I sat in the car while a man scanned my feet. Only after I received an all-clear signal did I peel the suit piece by piece from my body and dump it in the garbage. We bowed, then drove back out to the highway.

There was a young field of rice just on the edge of the exclusion zone. Scientists were experimenting to see just how much radiation would taint a new crop. Plants, of course, do not know any better than to come up in the spring, even under a cloud of radiation. If the rice turned out to contain manageable levels of radiation, then perhaps the farmers could once again harvest rice.

“It’s just this much dirt,” Taniyama said to me, holding his fingers apart by five inches. “If we could just remove that little bit everywhere. Life could return to normal.”

“You want to go back,” I said.

“My wife grew up there. So did my son.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

He shrugged. “Nothing terrible has happened to any of us. We haven’t gotten sick. I don’t see why they couldn’t let people past
a certain age go home.” Taniyama had laughed throughout our conversations that afternoon, in the slightly hysterical manner of someone dissociating from a tragic event. But now I watched a deep weariness cross his face. “I will spend my life restoring that temple. I want
you
to come back and see it the way it is supposed to be.”

I promised him that I would.

SIX

B
UDDHA ON THE
A
RCHIPELAGO

A History in Five Lessons

P
RACTICALLY THE FIRST THING
anyone learns about Buddhism is what is known as the first Noble Truth: life is full of suffering. For many years I had tremendous difficulty accepting this first principle. In a journal I kept at age seventeen, I recorded a conversation I had with Semp
. I told him that I objected to Buddhism because of the first Noble Truth.

“If you say that life is full of suffering, then you’re just making yourself suffer.” I asked, “Isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

Semp
listened to me calmly as I confidently laid out my defense of stoicism and the importance of having a good attitude. Then he said, “It is wonderful that you feel this way. But some day, when you are older, you may see things differently. And then you will understand why Oshakasama [the historical Buddha] said what he said.”

By the time I had reached forty, the message was very clear.

I. BUDDHA

The story of Buddhism begins around 500
BC
, when the prince Siddharta Gautama was born in an area located today in Nepal. At that
time, Nepal and neighboring India already had a rich religious tradition, today called Hinduism. Certain key ideas that we associated with Buddhism—rebirth, karma, and meditation—were already practiced and revered by the ancient Hindus.

According to legend, a blind seer prophesized at Siddharta’s birth that the baby would be either a great king or a great religious leader. Siddharta’s father, preferring the former fate for his son, vowed to keep the boy safe within the walls of the palace. But at the age of twenty-nine, Siddharta ventured outside his cloistered environment. On his travels, he was shocked to encounter a sick man, an elderly man, and a corpse. These experiences revealed to Siddharta that it would be his fate—and the fate of his wife and newborn son—to age and die in the same fashion as everyone else. The revelation shook him greatly.

Siddharta wasn’t the only person of his time to be upset by the terror and horror of living. Other men plagued by the same discovery sought liberation from the endless cycle of rebirth and death in which the Hindus believed. These men believed that ascetic practices like starvation, homelessness, and self-flagellation held the key to freedom. Siddharta followed suit, abandoning his family and fleeing into the mountains to find enlightenment.

His early methods were extreme. He starved himself, he refused to sleep, and he cut and burned his skin. Six years later and on the brink of death, Siddharta accepted a bowl of rice and milk from a young woman named Sujata. The food revived Siddharta, and he realized that nothing was possible unless his body was sufficiently nourished. He decided from then on not to harm himself, but to seek a “middle path.” He went into meditation under a Bodhi tree. Forty-nine days later, he awoke, enlightened and in possession of the Four Noble Truths and the steps necessary to escape the endless cycle of painful death and rebirth. Siddharta Gautama, now known as the Buddha, or “the awakened one,” would spend the rest of his
life communicating his insights to as many people as possible, until his death around 483
BC.
Mastering the Four Noble Truths would set a person free from suffering, and let a soul migrate to nirvana, a permanently enlightened state. These teachings are the basis for all forms of Buddhism.

The first Noble Truth declares that life is full of suffering. This is followed by the second Noble Truth, which asks followers to acknowledge that suffering is brought about by human attachment. Most people are familiar with the idea of being excessively attached to material goods, but emotions can cause attachment too. In my case, I had been struggling for quite some time with the notion that the Japan of my childhood—the one with my grandparents and my great-aunt, and my young and healthy mother—was already fading when the tsunami struck. What I wanted then, and even now, in my childish way, was to have all of these things back.

These first two steps lead to the third Noble Truth: we can rid ourselves of suffering if we rid ourselves of attachment. Finally, we arrive at the fourth Noble Truth: to end suffering and to cease attachment, one must live correctly, by following the Eightfold Path. In English, these specific steps are called right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

In the millennia after the Buddha died, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path inspired kings and paupers—and prompted many others to ask questions. For example, when the Buddha spoke of entering nirvana, did he mean that all one had to look forward to was nothingness? Should the individual care only about his own enlightenment, or was it important that everyone reached nirvana?

Part of Buddhism’s power resides in the concept that attachments—the material, physical, and temporal ones we crave, in addition to the very act and feeling of desire—are all illusory. The world
doesn’t really have a beginning or an end. And so, when Siddharta Gautama transcended our mundane existence and entered into nirvana, he went into a place that had always been there. But if nirvana has always existed, surely there must be other entities who had also become enlightened in the past. According to Siddharta Gautama, there were precisely twenty-seven beings who preceded him, bringing the total number of Buddhas in the world to twenty-eight. But, said some, if time and space were infinite, shouldn’t there be an infinite number of such enlightened beings?

Questions such as these eventually prompted Buddhism to divide into numerous schools. The main divide occurred between what are known as the Therav
da and the Mahayana school. The older version of Buddhism, Therav
da, or Hinayana in Japanese, is now found in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, and many other Southeast Asian countries, and it emphasizes the hard work of the individual in reaching nirvana. For followers of the Therav
da school, the Buddha is a great teacher. One strives to be like the Buddha, engaging in the ascetic tradition of living separately from the outside world and attempting to transcend the mundane. Therav
da followers believe in the historical Buddha, and in the presence of twenty-seven Buddhas who preceded him. They also believe in Maitreya, the Buddha of the future.