Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (47 page)

A third figure, large and shadowy, now strode onto the altar and sat in the throne. We couldn’t see his face. There was just enough light to make out his profile—I could see his ears, but I couldn’t really see him. I couldn’t even tell if he was facing us or facing the back of the room. He looked, instead, like a living statue.

We were lectured in Japanese on the Eightfold Path, the rules one needed to follow to achieve enlightenment, but it was not a version of Buddha’s teachings that I had ever heard before. The man in the middle—the man on the throne—said that humans had cravings and that it was impossible to remove desires and cravings, but
that day by day we should think about the things we wanted and try to make it a habit to respond to our hungers in the best possible way. In doing so, over time, we could be closer and closer to Buddha. “Avoid gossip,” he repeated. It seemed like an odd thing for a Buddhist priest to say, but it struck a chord with me. I was far too old to worry about what people thought about me, and yet I did all the time.

All too soon, the man in the middle began to read our names. The older man with the long hair climbed up to the altar first. He was from Hokkaido, the very north of Japan, which only confirmed for me that he was on a pilgrimage. Then it was my turn, and finally the girl from Canada. The priests departed, and a moment later the doors were opened and we went outside into the pouring rain. We crossed from that hall to another larger temple room and then back into the visitors’ center.

I stopped by the information desk to thank the lady for having helped me, but before I could say anything, she waved her hand emphatically. “Hey! Ry
shin-san!” she called out. “This girl is staying at your temple and she wants to meditate.”

I turned around and looked. It was the arrogant priest from my Jukai session. It was now lunchtime, and he was chewing on something. “Hmm?” he mumbled, his large, round eyes open wide in disbelief.

“You go and talk to him,” the information lady ordered me.

I very much did not want to talk to this man, this priest who assumed all foreigners were rude enough to keep their cell phones on and who was apparently working so hard at his day job, that Yanagi and all the others at Sh
j
shinin had to work doubly hard to make up for his absence. And why was he absent all the time anyway if he was the
j
shoku
? The fact that he was even better looking up close made the situation even more annoying.

Before I could say anything at all, Ry
shin swallowed his food
and spoke to me. “Yeah, I heard there was a request for meditation. So have you ever meditated?”

I said that I had done zazen but had never tried
ajikan
. I explained that I had relatives in T
hoku who ran a temple, and that they weren’t sure I really understood Buddhism, and that I thought I owed it to them to try to be better educated. I said I was the sort of person who liked to read and always thought it was possible to learn everything from books, but that I now was not so sure. “There’s almost nothing written down about Shingon,” I said. “There must be a reason for that.”

“I don’t read many books myself,” Ry
shin said cheerfully.

He told me that at its core, Shingon required followers to put certain practices in the body. It was only by inhabiting these behaviors that one would understand K
kai’s teachings. Perhaps in the future I would come back and do sutra copying. It was an entirely different thing to chant a sutra out loud, let alone read it silently. If I wrote it down, I would have a deeper understanding. There was a distinct shift in the way he spoke to me now. A genuine warmth, mixed in with a gentle curiosity. He would be very happy, he said, to teach me the basics of
ajikan
meditation after dinner.

I
N THE AFTERNOON,
I went to K
yasan’s museum to look at the treasures accumulated over the centuries. K
kai was particularly interested in the mandala, a depiction of nothing less than the entire universe. There are two kinds of mandala: the “diamond” mandala, which is square in shape, and the “womb” mandala, which is round. The diamond mandala represents the outside world, and the womb mandala the inner world. Most of the time, mandalas are depicted through very colorful, geometrical paintings featuring rows and rows of Buddhas and bodhisattvas seated in meditation.

Unlike Zen altars, which usually house the historical Buddha, Shingon’s
prime being of worship is known as Vairocana in Sanskrit, or Dainichi Nyorai in Japanese. Guidebooks often explain that Dainichi Nyorai is the “Cosmic Buddha”—he has always existed and always will exist outside the confines of time. By contrast, Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, was born a man and became an enlightened being, and thus has a specific beginning. In nature, the Dainichi Nyorai appears like the sun, which accounts for his brilliant jewelry and elaborate clothing. He is also often surrounded by a motley crew of other Buddhist deities who have dozens of arms and sometimes extra eyes and heads. Intellectually, I knew that these many-armed and -eyed creatures were supposed to represent the Buddha’s ability to be everywhere all at once, but I always found statues such as these to be more amusing than enlightening.