Japan on Foot book

The Prisoner

“Walk on!” ? The last words of the Buddha to his disciples

Having completed a 7,494-kilometer walk through Japan, a 16-month odyssey that took me and my walking partner, Etsuko Shimabukuro, on a zigzag route from the nation’s northernmost point, Cape Soya in Hokkaido, to the mysterious underwater structure that lies off the shores of Yonaguni-jima, Okinawa, a place so mysterious that some maintain it is the ruins of the lost civilization of Mu, Asia’s equivalent of Atlantis, I returned to Tokyo aching to embark on an even more challenging journey.

Japan on Foot had ultimately been a “roving reporter” walk, but it had proved to be an experience that had had a profound affect on me, inspiring me to head off on another trip to Mu?but this time it would not be to Mu, the pyramidal structure under the ocean surrounding Japan’s westernmost island that if ever proved to be the result of the hand of man and some 10,000 years-old, as a marine geologist who has devoted his life study to this structure claims, will ultimately be acknowledged as the world’s oldest civilization, predating that of even Egypt and thus change the face of the world’s ancient history. The Mu I was now aiming for is the one that Buddhists uphold as being the void; the enlightened space where there are no thoughts but universal all-knowing. This would be a journey that entailed no buses, trains or plane tickets. I wouldn’t even be required to put one foot in front of the other and suffer the anguish of endless blisters. Instead, I would have to sit on my bum, like the Buddha himself had once done, and just sit and sit for hours, weeks, months, perhaps years and decades on end, emptying my mind in pursuit of satori (enlightenment).
And so I set off on a path knowing that I might never find its end, a journey without maps whereby I wouldn’t even be able to walk the path until I had truly become the very Path itself. Had I gone stark raving bonkers? Certainly, most of my friends thought so.
“It’ll be like a prison. You’ll go mad in a temple. How can you cut yourself off from the world like that,” an English journalist friend had scoffed.
“Don’t be daft, you won’t last a week,” Beezer, a photographer friend in Tokyo, had been another one to guffaw. “No fags, No wine, no steak and chips for Mary, and nooo hanky panky. You wouldn’t find me dead in such a place. It’ll kill you.”
“You’d better be careful in such a place,” Benny, yet another so-called bosom-pal had warned. “Aren’t you scared that you’ll end up institutionalized?”
And so it was that with various other great votes of confidence I set off for a Rinzai-sect Zen temple out in the wilds of Japan’s Chugoku region. I also had plenty of doubts about my being able to stomach one year, or four seasons of the soul, a regimen of getting up at 3:30 a.m., surviving on a vegetarian diet, denied the home comforts and vices of Tokyo life that I am so attached to, as well as having my life ordered for me down to the most miniscule detail. I would have to cast away my ego, my identity and worldly cravings to while away a year sitting in a zendo (Zen meditation room) perched on a cushion in an agonizing lotus or semi-lotus position while trying to think of absolutely nothing. Perhaps I truly had already lost my mind, I pondered as I stepped off the bus in front of the Tomato Bank on the outskirts of Okayama city and made my up a lane lined with pine trees towards Sogenji Temple. Passing through the huge main wooden gates of the 17th-century bodaiji (family temple) of the Ikeda feudal lords, one of the largest temples in Western Japan, I hesitantly stepped along a cobbled stone pathway where moss-covered trees towered over me. I was entering another world, one that I hoped would be more heaven than hell.
XXXX
2003/Aug/One Hand Clapped: No. 2 story
"In the beginner's mind there are numerous possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." Shunryu Suzuki

It was the third time that I had stepped over the threshold of the 300-year-old temple that sits at the foot of the Maruyama hills surrounded by forests of pine and thickets of towering bamboo. I wasn’t sure what I was truly letting myself in for, or if I would even be deemed worthy to study Zen at Sogenji for one year with the 20 or so foreign Buddhist acolytes, monks and nun as I now had to pass what was considered the ultimate initial test -- a rigorous O-sesshin, an intensive one-week retreat that is held each month and involves sitting continuous zazen for some 12 hours each day with only breaks for sutras, eating and a minimal amount of sleeping. The aim is to deepen one’s inner being in pursuit of the True Mind. I was worried that I would not only be able to jump this hurdle but that as a woman, another stroke might go against me. Apparently, there had been some sort of fling between a foreign monk and nun studying at the temple, and the Roshi (master) had decided that it was time to start phasing out women residing full-time at the temple. Despite the fact, that I was a pure beginner I had faith that the Roshi might somehow change his mind, and felt that the fact that I had even been welcomed to venture down from Tokyo and join the O-sesshin was an indicator that in Japan one should not be fooled into thinking that there are any principles set in stone; things tend to go “case by case.”
A number of Westerners studying at the temple were curious by my presence, and their interest was tweaked slightly further when I said I hoped to study full-time for at least one year.
“Four seasons of the soul, that’s what I would like to do,” I had told a Frenchman just a month before, when I had visited the temple for just a weekend of meditation and mingled with a few of the acolytes during the afternoon snack in the kitchen.
“Ah, no women,” the Frenchman had firmly told me at that time. “No more women at zis temple, is what the Roshi says. Zere is a biological problem wiz zee women and ze men, you know,” he added with a wry smile. I asked the shaved-headed fellow if he didn’t think there wasn’t occasionally a “biological problem” between two men, or even two women, and if separating men and women was truly the answer. He stopped cutting the cucumber on the chopping board in front of him and stared at me blankly for what felt like an incredibly long time. My words, however, penetrated and with the strike of enlightenment at what I was referring to, he gasped in astonishment, “Wah! My God, I ‘ave never thought of zaaaat!”
During just that two-day stint I had had my own moment of significant enlightenment too. While staying in the guesthouse I had been asked, after breakfast, to do a simple gardening chore. “Just separate the rocks, branches and leaves from those three piles of dirt over there,” the friendly but ghostly-white Swiss woman who was taking charge of the guesthouse had asked me. “Throw the leaves in the forest over there, and put the rocks here,” she said, pointing to what was already a small pile of rocks, “The branches can go with the others just there.”
It all seemed easy enough, and I had 30 minutes in which to do it all before taking a break prior to being given my full morning’s samu (work) which was due to start at 9 a.m.
However, as I started to sift through the piles of earth my mind clouded over with doubts and fears of perhaps not doing a good enough job. “At what point does a stone become a rock?” I mumbled to myself. “Indeed, at what point does a twig become a branch?” These were two very simple but personal koans (a Zen riddle that leads to an ultimate truth) I felt, as they underlined my constant striving for perfection and struggle with an inner hypercritical voice.

I know nothing about gardens, be they English or Japanese, having never gardened in my life before but surely if I was being asked to work in the grounds of a Zen temple then I was being set a Zen task?a gardening koan that I figured would reveal the inner workings of my heart and mind, meaning that if I did a sloppy job of the rocks, branches and leaves I might blow my chances of studying Zen for a year. Surely, if I was being asked to separate the rocks, leaves and branches then I must do this to the point whereby it strikes the observer that there has been no less than divine intervention, a perfect mind at work, a trace that the hand of the Buddha Mind was present.

And, so it was that I took no break that morning while I laboured on in my pursuit of perfection, separating the very earth into fine granules, pulling out the smallest leaves and twigs, even discovering stones that were incredibly miniscule but worlds unto themselves. I worked to the point of disappearing, until I became one with the task and actually felt I had achieved a spirit of Zen when on being shaken back into the present world by the sound of a gong, I felt that time had passed through my fingers as smoothly as the earth’s dust.
On reporting for morning samu, I was delighted to hear that I was to be in one of the Zen gardens. It was a garden of sand-colored earth, resembling, I rather fancied, a mini-desert, complete with a gorgeously lush oasis of velvety green moss in a far corner. Amidst this fine carpet of thick moss grew a huddle of old, twisted and knarled pine trees, covered in lichens and their own lickings of moss. It was an incredibly beautiful landscape to be asked to work in but I was scared at the prospect of what havoc I might wreak inside this Zen garden, which looks out toward a pond of pink and white lillies where golden and yellow carp swam and splash around. The pond is a focus point of the garden, as like many other Zen gardens in Japan, it was designed to resemble the kanji (Chinese character) for kokoro, meaning heart and mind. As I gazed out towards what is the central snake-like stroke for kokoro, a bespectacled German monk handed me a bamboo rake, a witch’s broom, a scoop and a tool that left me completely flummoxed. “It’s a scraper,” he laughed at my confused expression. “Please weed the garden, sweep the leaves, and then do the lines,” he said before stomping off to attend to some bonsai matsu pine trees.
“But, I don’t know anything about Zen gardens,” I stuttered. The fellow turned and laughed again at me, leaving me to fathom out my work. I squatted down and started to scrape at the earth and pull up the weeds with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I knew that I was more than likely do something dreadful.
“They can’t just let me loose in a Zen garden like this,” I mulled, “This place is sacrosanct. What’s he on about, ‘do lines.’ What bloody lines?”
“But there’s nothing here to damage,” a calmer inner voice soothed me, “it’s just weeds.”
“Oh, but don’t you remember the first time AND the last time I was let loose with gardening tools, some 20 years ago on a Kibbutz in the Jezereel Valley where the Israeli farmer had asked me to clear his vines of leaves so the sun could get to the grapes?”

I shuddered as I recalled the grimace on the farmer’s face when he had returned to his vines out in desert that blistering-hot morning. I was burnt like a lobster and severely dehydrated. The Bedouin women had spent most of the morning tittering their heads off at the young blonde woman who had worked non-stop for three hours without taking a moments rest, even ignoring their pleas to drink water, sit with them and share some pita bread and hummus and Arab cakes dripping with honey. The farmer had leaped from his tractor, asking me how many rows of vines I had managed to clear, and I was taken aback at his abrupt and ungrateful manner when I answered that I had completed three. “Three rows? You should have finished the whole lot by now. What on Earth have you been playing at all morning?” he snapped, pushing me aside as he went to investigate for himself. I was frazzled from the heat and the amount of energy I had put into the work, and I was hurt by his attitude, but all was revealed. “Oh, My God! Kus umm muk!” the farmer cried, covering his face with his hands. The Bedouin women clapped their hands on their fleshy hips and roared with laughter.
Yitzak turned on me and scowled. “You have ruined my vines, my grapes. Are you stupid?“ he rasped. “I only meant take a few leaves off here and there. I didn’t mean strip the whole bush of its leaves. The sun will ruin them completely.”
“I’m sorry,” I blathered. “But I’ve never seen vines before, I’ve only ever seen grapes in a fruit bowl or in Tescos and Waitrose. I’ve never been in a desert before, I know nothing about farming.”
And so it was therefore likely that I would make a similar faux pas in a Zen garden. As my thoughts of that magical purple, blue, red and golden light that bathed the Jezereel Valley at dawn faded and I was brought back to the present of the mini-desert of the Zen temple’s garden I pulled up a clump of green and held it up to admire it. Weeds can really be quite beautiful, I pondered, and it was in that split second, just as the young woman kneeling beside me glanced in horror at what I was holding and opened her mouth to speak, that I felt as if one hand clipped me hard round the ear.
“You’re pulling up moss,” the woman’s voice quavered, and I felt in that instant that I might just curl up and die like some beetle that has been turned on its back in the mud. I had committed the utmost sin. “Moss, my God, how could you do that?” I berated myself. “How many Zen gardens have you seen Mary King? How many forests have you walked through where the moss has given these places their utmost majesty? Have you gone mad? You’re in a Zen garden for God’s sake.” I felt that I would never be able to forgive myself, to live the moment down that I had pulled up moss?moss that I thought was a weed, but at that moment the Swiss woman appeared to rain down another blow from the Buddha.
“You’re thinking too much. You didn’t take your break. Why not?” she asked sternly.
“’I’m sorry, but I hadn’t finished the work you gave me. I still haven’t finished separating the leaves, rocks and branches. I’m sorry,” I sputtered.
“You don’t understand,” she scoffed. “This work is not about efficiency; this is all about your spiritual growth, and your breaks are important. Please take them in future.”
I had a long way to go, and I knew it, but now on my third visit to the temple I wondered if I truly could pass even the first real test: a week of O-Sesshin.

Another Frenchman, a student for eight years at the temple, who I had met during my weekend stay and who had warned me of the dangers of following the Buddha’s path at that time (“I av been in zis prison for 8 years, I am going mad in zis prison. I want to kill myself; to die. Many, many Zen monks commit suicide. Be careful, don’t believe what they say to you. You will go mad here.”) greeted me at the dinner table with a penetrating look.
“So, zis is your first O-sesshin?” He smirked.
“Yes,” I softly answered, “I am a beginner.”
“You are a beginner!” he exclaimed before bursting into a fit of hysterics. “And, you do O-sesshin? Ah, ah, now you will see. Now, WE will see.” He turned pink with mirth, and my stomach churned over with apprehension.