Zen gardens

AN E-MAIL MESSAGE just came in from Clare G., with a link to an article at a site called Pro Traveller (”Travel hacks for the savvy traveller”). As you can tell from the title, the site provides information on tourism and travel. The article Clare brought to my attention is titled Top 20 Zen Gardens from Around the World, which you’ll find here. The title is a bit misleading–19 of the gardens are in Japan, with the sole exception located in Portland, Oregon.

Don’t let that stop you from checking out the article, however. The photographs are excellent, there are links to more photos, and there is an informative paragraph describing each of the gardens. The one I want to visit is the moss garden at Saiho-ji in Kyoto. Thanks to Clare for passing along the link!

Working the salt beds at a Shinto shrine

IF YOU’VE SEEN A SUMO MATCH, you know that the rikishi, or wrestlers, usually spend more time on the preliminary rituals than it takes to decide the winner of the match itself. Those rituals last around four minutes, while many matches are over in a matter of seconds seconds.

Those symbolic rituals are deeply connected to Shinto, the Japanese folk religion, as are many aspects of sumo. Even the referee is dressed as a Shinto priest, and the canopy over the ring, called a yakata, resembles the design of shrine roof.

Apart from the belt-slapping and the staredowns, the most recognizable of those preliminary rituals is the tossing of salt into the ring for purification. Indeed, as an agent for purification, salt is an indispensable part of Shinto.

Where does all that salt come from? Certainly not the supermarket. In fact, at the Mishiodono Shinto shrine in Ise, Mie, they make it themselves in a traditional method using salt taken from a nearby salt bed. The connection between salt and the shrine is so close that the shrine’s name, mishio, is derived from the word shio, or salt, preceded by an honorific. (Note that the shrine calls itself Mishiodono, but the people in the neighborhood call it Mishioden.)

As you can see from the photo, the people at the shrine consider this serious business, and that attitude extends even to their work clothing. The shrine produces all the salt used for its activities during two periods, one in March, which is just now ending, and one in October. Both last for about five days.

The rough salt taken from the bed (in a process that extracts it from seawater) is packed in a three-sided earthen container using a wooden ladle. It is then baked in an earthen oven until it hardens into a block. Each of the sides is about 10 centimeters long, and one block weighs about 800 grams. They make about 20 blocks a day.

The man in photo, named Kitai Noritada (I think), commented, “I put my heart into the work to make good salt”.

Don’t pass up the chance to see these excellent photographs. The first is of the shrine’s salt bed. Notice the torii, or Shinto arch, at the far side. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen one permanently installed anywhere other than at the front entrance to the grounds of a shrine. The second is of the building where they bake the blocks.

Japan is not the only place where salt is used in religious ceremonies, by the way. In the Catholic Church’s traditional Latin mass, the priest mixes salt with holy water, blesses the mixture, and sprinkles it on the altar.

Cleanliness–or purity–is next to godliness, after all!

Buddhist baths on the first day of spring

SUNDAY WAS SETSUBUN in Japan, which was both New Year’s Day and the first day of spring in the old solar calendar. And since winter is over and spring is getting started, what could be more natural than having a spring cleaning?

That’s exactly what they do every year at the Kyo’o Buddhist Temple in Kagoshima City, except there the monks strip down to loincloths and take a bath outside with cold water instead of washing the windows. Their goal is to purify their mind and body while praying for the health and safety of the parishioners.

In Japan, when people douse themselves—or are doused—with cold water in mid-winter according to the modern calendar, it’s usually associated with a Shinto event. But the Buddhists in Kagoshima are not to be outdone—in this century-old ceremony, they bathe three times a day: morning, noon, and night.

The morning low in Kagoshima City yesterday was 7.1° C, or 44.7° F. That’s not intolerable, but I’m sure the men were clenching their teeth as well as several other body parts. They steeled themselves to the task by chanting sutras first. I hope it helped.

That’s not all that happened at the temple. Since it was Setsubun, they also stood outside and scattered beans (usually soybeans) to drive away the demons, chanting “Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi”(Out with demons, in with good luck).

Why is it that both the Shintoists and the Buddhists like taking cold baths in the middle of winter while insisting it’s actually spring under the old calendar? I wonder…

We all know what they say a young man’s fancy turns to during spring. And many health experts recommend cold showers for increasing one’s sperm count.

Hey! If those guys weren’t monks, I’d say they were a bunch of sly devils!

Matsuri da! (66): Mist, mystery, and myth in a Japanese festival

THE MOST WELL-KNOWN JAPANESE FESTIVALS are conducted outdoors with audiences that can number in the tens of thousands watching participants provide the world’s best free entertainment by reenacting offerings to the divinities in ceremonies hundreds of years old.

Other lesser-known festivals arise from traditions just as old, if not older, but are performed late at night in the dead of winter with only a few villagers and visitors present. One of these is the series of Shimotsuki festivals held by 11 different shrines that started on 1 December and continued throughout the month in remote parts of the Toyama area in southern Nagano.

These festivals have been designated important intangible cultural treasures of the nation. The ceremonies are said to be at least 800 years old, and there are reports the content of the festivals is even older. They feature traditional Shinto dance and musical accompaniment, specifically the Yutate Kagura, or Boiling Water kagura. (A kagura is a Shinto dance.)

Shimotsuki literally means frost month, and it is the old name for November in Japan under the lunar calendar. Nowadays that’s December, which has the fewest hours of daylight during the year. The ancients thought this symbolized the waning of life, so the festival is held to summon the divinities to bathe in boiling water. Their aim is to seek the regeneration of the spirit by having the divinities convey their own spirit to the water, giving it exceptional potency. It is then splashed or sprinkled on those in attendance for their regeneration in the coming year.

One of the festival sites is Kami-mura, a village of roughly 1,000 with little flat ground for rice cultivation. The Yutate Kagura there is performed with a juzu, or Buddhist prayer beads—yet another example of the older mixture of Buddhism with Shinto—to worship the mountain divinity, who has dominion over hunting, forestry, and farming on the mountain slopes.

Village legend also has it that this ceremony is performed to propitiate the spirits of the Toyama family, their former feudal lords, against whom they revolted almost 400 years ago and killed.

The local shrine parishioners build a fire in two specially constructed stoves, boil the water, summon the divinities, and perform several dances and ceremonies. After their bath, the divinities rise up as steam. The parishioners dance with them, offer a prayer for a bumper crop and good health, and allow the divinities to depart.

The other dances and ceremonies include:

• Tasuki-no-Mai (Ornamental sash dance), formerly a ritual at the Imperial Court
• Hazoroe-no-Mai (Fan dance), another court ritual in which men dance in women’s kimono
• Kandayu-Fusai-no-Mai (Mr. and Mrs. Kandayu’s dance), based on the tale of an aged couple who founded the shrine. They perform a comic dialogue with ad-libs. The woman playing the part of the wife holds a branch of the sakaki, the sacred Shinto tree/bush, hitting the residents with it to bring good health.
• Yomote-no-Mai (Dance of the Four Gods), performed by people representing the divinities of water, earth, fire, and wood. The divinities of water and earth splash out the boiling water with their bare hands to purify those it touches. The ritual is said to come from India.
• Tenpaku-no-Mai (Tenpaku dance): The Tenpaku divinity is also known as the Golden Monkey divinity. The last dancer to appear, he is dressed in golden hunting clothes and wears a mask representing the god. He shoots arrows in the four directions, into the sky, and into the ground to drive away evil spirits.

The festival ends with the Asobi Nusa, or nusa game. The nusa is a sacred wooden object for prayer made in the shape of a cross. The villagers throw it up into a square-shaped decoration suspended from the ceiling, where the divinities waited above the stoves during the Yutate Kagura performance. It will bring good fortune to the thrower if the nusa hangs on the bar.

Where else will you find a single event that blends ceremonies and objects from India, Shinto, Buddhism, Japanese Imperial Court rituals, animism, regicide, and a carnival game with a divine dimension, performed as it has been in small farming villages since the 13th century?

Sutras for the insects

ONE OF THE DEFINING TRAITS OF BUDDHISM is the respect for all life, not just human life. Yet our existence as human beings requires that we sacrifice the lives of other creatures to survive from day to day.

One example of Buddhism’s reverence for this sacrifice of life is a prayer service performed every September in Agui-cho, Aichi Prefecture. Held since the Heian period (which makes the practice more than 1,000 years old) the Chita Insect Memorial Prayer Service originated in the chanting of a nembutsu (Buddhist invocation) for the insects sacrificed in the paddies and fields while farming.

As happens every year, a group of 32 people chanted this September for two hours in front of four hanging scrolls, including one of Amida Sanzonbutsu (Amida with two attendants). The responsibility for the service, now an intangible cultural treasure of the prefecture, rotates among the 13 districts of the municipality. When the chanting is finished, the scrolls, taiko drums, and other Buddhist implements are handed over to the group responsible for the following year’s service.

Outside the site is a large wooden memorial tablet for the deceased. Legend has it that toddlers who set foot in the sand in front of the tablet will grow up to be healthy. That’s the reason so many local parents and children attend the service.

If a Buddhist memorial service for dead insects isn’t enough to pique your interest, try this: it’s conducted at the Agui Shinto shrine, which has nothing to do with Buddhism. (There might have been both a shrine and a temple on the site many years ago, but reports don’t mention that.)

As I’m fond of repeating, that’s yet another telling example of Japanese syncretism.

How easy would it be to get a Catholic memorial service performed in a Jewish tabernacle, or to have an Islamic prayer service held in a Mormon church?

Yet the Japanese don’t seem to have any difficulty with that sort of thing at all.

The jigsaw puzzle of Japanese politics

THOSE WHO ENJOY thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles would love the challenge of trying to create a single picture out of the jumble of Japanese politics. Imagine puzzle pieces capable of spontaneously changing shape. One minute they are a frustrating unmatched mess, the next minute they morph into a perfect fit, and a minute after that you find yourself working on a different puzzle altogether.

To give you an idea of what’s involved, here’s some surprisingly straight talk for a Japanese politician from Shizuka Kamei (first photo), one of the leaders of the People’s New Party.

Doing it right at a Shinto shrine

ETIQUETTE BOOKS went out of fashion in the West a long time ago—probably in tandem with the concept of etiquette itself. But books on proper behavior and conduct, particularly for specific times and places, continue to be published and widely read in Japan.

One of those guides is a trade paperback I have for my own edification called Keigo (Honorific Language), which takes 280 pages to explain the proper use of honorifics in speech and writing for the general reader. While the Japanese may be blasé about such things in informal settings, most are still more than willing to follow traditional customs appropriate to the situation.

Another such book that recently appeared is Jinja no Shikitari (Traditional Practices at Shinto Shrines) by Akitoshi Urayama. Shinto is the indigenous proto-religion of Japan, and visits to shrines are a part of everyone’s life. When people go to a shrine, they usually have an ulterior motive—they’re going there to ask for something. So it’s common sense for the visitor to behave properly in front of the divinity who just might make your wish come true. Urayama wrote the book to remind everyone what constitutes proper behavior, and why.

Last Thursday, on 15 November, parents throughout the country took their five-year-old boys and three- and seven-year-old girls to shrines on Shichigosan, which literally means seven-five-three. The visit was to pray for their health and sound growth in the future. Children of those ages are taken because of an old belief that they are susceptible to misfortune at those times and require divine protection. In some places, a child is accepted as part of the shrine parish at age seven. (That’s an interesting parallel with Catholicism; in that religion seven years old is the age at which children are assumed to have the capability to independently distinguish right from wrong.)

Some of the information Urayama provides might surprise Japanese readers. Most people believe, for example, that smaller bells (suzu) are rung to attract the attention of divinities, but that’s not the case. As the author explains, “Enveloping one’s body in the soothing sound of a bell will drive away malevolent influences. People then can present themselves to the divinity with a clean body and spirit.” (And that is an interesting contrast with mantras in Yoga.)

The shrinegoer, before making his request, bows twice, claps twice, and then bows once again. Helpful diagrams are provided to make sure everyone is familiar with each step of the procedure and such details as the proper angle of bowing, as you can see from the illustration on the dust jacket.

Why go to all this trouble? The author explains that the essence of Shinto is to respect nature, respect others, and then respect oneself. Observing the customs is the outward expression of these forms of respect, particularly when one considers the Shinto belief that natural phenomena, such as the wind, sun, moon, water, mountains, and trees, are divinities themselves.

Of course people can overdo it, and the Japanese are aware of it themselves. Recently we talked about noted director Juzo Itami’s film Tampopo. That was his second full-length feature. His first was Soshiki, or Funeral, which, among other things, lampooned this tendency by following a Japanese family over three days as they learned the proper way to conduct a funeral ceremony.

In the movie, however, the head of the house didn’t use a book. He watched a video while preparing food in his kitchen.

UPDATE: In a serendipitous bit of synchronicity, Mark Schreiber of the Japan Times explains why proper etiquette on the telephone is also important. It’s also a nice Japanese lesson for beginning level students.

Nichiren, not nationalism?

IN A REVIEW WELL WORTH READING, translator and essayist Hiroaki Sato profiles the remarkable 1988 book Kejo no Showa Shi (A History of Showa as a Phantom City) by Daikichi Terauchi in this article in the Japan Times . (Showa is the posthumous name of Emperor Hirohito and is thus the era name denoting the time of his reign.)

Most works examining the history of Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century cite nationalism as the driving force. Terauchi instead emphasizes the influence of Nichiren Buddhism on many important people of the period. Nichiren is one sect of Japanese Buddhism and is itself split into several sects, some of which have widely varying beliefs. It is perhaps most well known in the West for the adherents’ chanting of the title of the Lotus Sutra, its core scripture—Namu Myoho Renge Kyo (”I Take My Refuge in the Lotus Sutra”).

In the modern era, Nichiren’s influence is primarily through lay movements that have formed popular religious organizations. These are diverse; some believe in faith healing, some promise benefit in this life, and some have shamanistic practices. Most of the sects aggressively proselytize. One of the most prominent today is the Soka Gakkai, who have formed their own political party, the New Komeito. This party is the junior coalition member of the administration currently ruling Japan, led by the Liberal-Democratic Party. (In fact, the organization’s ability to mobilize voters has been the critical factor in keeping the LDP in power for a few years now.)

Terauchi’s interest in the sect’s influence in Imperial Japan began when he spotted the phrase Namu Myoho Renge Kyo written on a banner that appeared in a photo taken during a conference convened to create the Manchukuo puppet state in Mongolia in the 30s and 40s. He discovered that one of the men in the photograph, army officer Kanji Ishihara, was a Nichirenist and one of the instigators of the Manchurian Incident.

Other members of the sect were responsible for political assassinations that plagued Japan during the unrest of the 30s. Terauchi notes that the four junior officers who spearheaded the attempted coup on February 26, 1936 (now known as the 2-26 Incident) were also Nichirenists. This coup attempt was an important event in modern Japanese history, as the army gained the upper hand in national politics in the wake of the coup’s failure.

As a reviewer, Sato’s reach exceeds his grasp when he inserts some comments that would compare the Nichirenists with Christians in the U.S. who believe in the Rapture. In a backhand swipe, he claims the latter are responsible for invading Iraq. Despite this silliness, the review is worth reading for the light it sheds on a seldom-explored aspect of the nexus between religion and politics in Imperial Japan.

San Francisco’s Shaolin Controversy

AFTER STUDYING BUDDHISM in Hong Kong for 40 years, Stephen Ho immigrated to San Francisco and decided he wanted to open an American branch of the famed Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of both Zen and Kung Fu.

The temple’s abbot in China gave Ho his permission and dispatched a monk who had trained at the temple for more than 20 years to help.

But Ho—who never trained at the Shaolin Temple himself–thinks the monks from China don’t perform enough sitting meditation or hold enough “philosophical discussion”. He plans to cut them off and find some priests more to his liking.

For their part, the Shaolin monks live in a rundown former rooming house in Oakland, and are presenting some astonishing demonstrations of the effectiveness of Qigong practice, such as withstanding sledgehammer blows to the arm while steel bars beneath are broken.

An aide to the San Francisco mayor says the Shaolin monks don’t know much about Buddhism, but others retort that neither the political aide nor Ho, a retired IBM engineer, know much about Shaolin. The monk’s defenders say Shaolin kung fu is indeed a form of meditation.

Here’s the full report from the San Francisco Chronicle.

For more on the connection between mysticism, the martial arts, and Qigong, here’s a previous Ampontan post about the Japanese ninja master, Masaaki Hatsumi.

And this is apparently the website for the Shaolin Temple in China, complete with photos of a Vladimir Putin visit. They don’t seem to be averse to a little commercialism, but as an article on the site explains, they can’t even use the term Shaolin Temple in Japan because someone else holds the trademark.

Matsuri da! (9) E pluribus Japan

The United States uses the Latin phrase e pluribus unum, or one out of many, on its Great Seal to express the idea that the single nation was created from 13 original colonies, and to symbolize the plurality of its people. The phrase is also printed and stamped on its paper money and coins.

Though Japan is considered by some—including most Japanese—to be a small, homogenous island country, in some curious ways it too consists of a haphazard collection of customs that most people shrug off as a unity they’ve been accustomed to since birth. You won’t see a better example than a series of events that are comprised of two different festivals, in two different locations, using two different elements, at two different kinds of religious structures, but are actually a unified whole.