Groping in the Dark

Daisho-in sits atop a rise at the west end of Miyajima village, which stretches along the shore of the best-known island of the Inland Sea. Below, at water’s edge–in fact floating on the waves at high tide–stands Itsukushima Shrine, whose great ceremonial gate is one of the most photographed sights in Japan. Twenty-seven kilometers to the east, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima sixty-six years ago this August.

Curving up the slope to the left of the temple’s main lower gate commences a trail to the top of Mt. Misen. In about ninety minutes you can walk it to a small hall just down from the peak, in which a fire smoulders that was first lit in the eighth century by Kobo Daishi, the wide-roving saint who brought Shingon Buddhism to Japan. It’s hard in central Japan not to cross Kobo Daishi’s many paths; he was the founder as well of the eighty-eight temples that ring the island of Shikoku with a 1000-kilometer pilgrimage route.

A stone staircase ascends from Daisho-in’s entrance to its upper gate and main court. Turning ranks of prayer wheels mounted beneath the banisters, you gain the merit of reciting the sutras embossed on their cylindrical surface. Further stairs lead from the central plaza to more shrines and halls, including a resting place of Kobo Daishi himself. The sound of chanting to a rapid, regular drumbeat reverberates from one of these, and from the loudspeakers that broadcast it to the whole complex.

In the Kannon Hall, a large ritually displayed photo of the Dalai Lama belongs here by virtue of his status as the living incarnation of Avalokiteshvara-Kannon. It also attests the temple’s solidarity with Tibetan Buddhism in its struggle for survival against the Chinese government's campaign of cultural genocide, as does the sand mandala made by visiting Tibetan monks, displayed beneath an acrylic shield.

Prostrating myself before the photo of His Holiness, I attract the attention of a middle-aged woman with a broad smile and an enthusiastic rapid-fire delivery. The only word I catch in her entire speech is roshi, “teacher,” but it’s clear from her gestures that she wants me to descend a staircase cut into the floor below the hall’s central entrance.

I have some idea of what’s below: a pitch-black course through a narrow, winding corridor, emerging up a flight of stairs opposite these that go down into the earth. Another Kannon temple, the Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, has a similar arrangement. To descend is to enter the womb of the Boddhisattva.

At Kiyomizu-dera the beads of an enormous mala strung along the wall serve as guide through the labyrinth. Here, there’s nothing but an uneven floor and walls that fall away from my blind groping on one side, then reappear on the other. I half-consciously intensify the sound of my breathing, in part to reassure myself, in part to signal my position to those ahead of me or behind.

And then out of thick darkness, limned in dimly glowing lines of gold on backgrounds of pale rose or blue or purple, a rank of boddhisattvas materializes on my left, each coming into view just as a partition I only perceive as an absence of light obscures the last. I can’t distinguish one from another by details of their dress or gesture. This is no time for detached analysis, even if I could. To identify and catalogue would accomplish nothing. They float here to light the darkness of a mind poised on the narrow ridge between calm and rising anxiety.

As the last of them disappears behind me, the darkness thins near the curtain that veils the exit. When I’ve ascended, I’m greeted again by this woman whom I can’t understand at all, and whom I understand , and who understands me, perfectly. At last, the words that only divide us fall away. Bows and a final smile are enough.

A few minutes later, I leave by the temple’s lower gate, where a sign in English reads, “It was prayed well today. Please return carefully.” I start up the mountain.

A few hours later, about 3 p.m. on Friday, 11 March, out beyond the protective barrier of Shikoku, a tsunami will claim thousands of lives.

Pilgrim's Progress

The Senso-ji in the Asakusa neighbourhood of Tokyo is one of the city's few sights still recognizable from the mid-nineteenth century--albeit by way of a reconstruction from the 1960's. The southern gate, Kaminarimon, in which hangs the largest--and most celebrated--paper lantern in Japan, leads to an avenue of shops whose ramrod-straight perspective lines call Hiroshige's masterpiece woodcuts immediately to mind. Another gate at the promenade's north end opens onto the temple forecourt.

On the Sunday of the Tokyo Marathon, the compound teems with devotees and sightseers, the distinctions between them blurring in a way they haven't for many generations in the great churches of Europe; or maybe, more accurately, people are simply more animated and having more fun. For an offering of 100 yen, you can shake a numbered stick out of a metal cylinder while you pray your petition, then open a corresponding wooden drawer and retrieve a prediction of the outcome. I'm glad I wasn't praying very earnestly or for anything of real import, because I drew Number 74: "Your request will not be granted. The sick patient is hopeless. The lost article will not be found. The person you wait for will not come. Building a new home and removal are both bad. Marriage of any kind, to start a new trip and new employment are all bad." (Clearly, I might as well have been praying for social democracy in America.)

The Senso-ji is a Buddhist shrine to Kannon. Her tiny golden statue was miraculously fished from the nearby Sumida River in the seventh century. Set back to the right of the main temple stands a Shinto shrine commemorating the discovery. A fountain offers purification for devotees of both holy places: ladle the limpid water over your left hand, then over your right, then rinse your mouth and spit into the sluice below the great basin.


Centered in the forecourt below the temple steps stands a great roofed incense burner of cast bronze. Visitors fan the smoke toward their faces and over their heads and shoulders. A devout man holds up his bundle of incense sticks, bowing to the four directions before adding them to the plethora already offered. Smoke partially obscures the faces of those leaning in from the far side. Less piously--but who can tell?--another man takes a photo of his girlfriend as she stands with one hand on the rim facing his camera.

Atop the temple steps, worshippers fling coins from three or four yards back, sometimes over the heads of those standing further forward, into the slat-topped coffer set before the inner sanctuary, then raise their hands palm to palm in reverence.

Repair to the Yagoda Hall west of the main temple and you can commission a calligrapher to commemorate the date of your visit in an accordian-fold book you've brought with you; or can buy a book at the stall for the purpose.

At the far west side of the precinct you can graze on street food for lunch--grilled squid balls, or a rice-gluten cake topped with seaweed and glazed in tamari, or a flattened dumpling of sweet red bean paste deep-fried at a cart parked in front of a plum tree flowering riotously on a bright afternoon at the end of February.

Everywhere you turn, piety shades into fun, and fun into piety, while Western Christianity mostly lost track of such gradations five centuries ago. Creeds intermingle between Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple in ways unthinkable to most monotheists. Kannon herself not only offers an image of the feminine Divine, but in the historical progress of her cult opens the door to the transsexual Divine. Often referred to as the Goddess of Mercy, she is more properly the Boddhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara according to his Sanskrit origins, who in descending the Himalayas into China with the spread of Buddhism underwent an MTF sex change to become Kwan-Yin. She is Ocean of Wisdom and Mother of all who pass through these precincts, whether in laughter, curiosity, hope, or prayer.