ドア は しまります。
May. 25th, 2006 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranWe spent two days in Koyasan, which is the name of a mountain and also of the village on that mountain, which is a holy place -- there's a temple every five buildings or so -- established by Kobo Daishi, the monk who founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism. He chose it because the mountain is surrounded by eight other peaks, which resembles the eight-petaled lotus flower, which is a symbol for enlightenment. It is considered a pure-land-on-earth.
(There's a bit of an interesting tension there, because one of the benificent characteristics of the traditional Pure Land, the western Buddha-land of the Buddha Amitabha, is that it's absolutely flat, so that it's never necessary to walk uphill. There are a lot of lotuses there, though.)
Kobo Daishi really was here*, and this is where he died; you can go to the place where apparently his body is, though not actually close to or into the building that houses it. He is said to be in a state of eternal meditation, and to grant boons like a saint; people light lanterns for him, and the monks bring offers of food and clothing to symbolically sustain him. To get to where that is, you pass over three bridges; the first bridge takes you from the village to the World of Death, the second from there to Purgatory, and the third from there to the World of Enlightenment, where Kobo Daishi is (and the temple for his offerings, and some burial mounds belonging to emperors from the Edo period). From the World of Death onward, the whole thing is actually a huge graveyard, the path winding between long dense clusters of ornate burial markers, Buddha statues, and huge evergreen trees, similar in kind to but much older and larger than anything we see in Vancouver, so that it didn't feel so much like home as like some mythic and magnified version of home, our land as the gods know it.
(* This is worth mentioning because we walked three of the eighty eight temples -- #3, #5 and #6 -- on the Shikoku pilgrimage route, when we were in Tokushima. Kobo Daishi is also said to have been the first to walk that, but it's historically impossible for him to have done so, at the time it was credited.)
That wasn't the only beautiful thing on Koyasan, though it was the most striking. On a purely visual level I think that it's my favourite place we've been.
Now we're back in our hostel in Osaka, where I am on the tenth floor using internet that costs ￥100 for 15 minutes. That's a dollar. (A Canadian dollar -- no easy conversion for my American friends. Haw!) All the first times of this trip are melting into this string of last times -- the last place (here) that we'll be, the last time (yesterday) that we'll go formally as a group to some educationally relevant place, the last time (today) that I'll need to do laundry. My flight home is in two days; I'll get there at 11 AM, which will be 3 AM for me, which will be Interesting. I'll be happy to be home for a lot of reasons, but I'll miss this place, and its beauty, and the wonderful cultural idiosyncracies, and the people in our group.
I spent, like, three dollars to write this entry. I hope you like it.
(There's a bit of an interesting tension there, because one of the benificent characteristics of the traditional Pure Land, the western Buddha-land of the Buddha Amitabha, is that it's absolutely flat, so that it's never necessary to walk uphill. There are a lot of lotuses there, though.)
Kobo Daishi really was here*, and this is where he died; you can go to the place where apparently his body is, though not actually close to or into the building that houses it. He is said to be in a state of eternal meditation, and to grant boons like a saint; people light lanterns for him, and the monks bring offers of food and clothing to symbolically sustain him. To get to where that is, you pass over three bridges; the first bridge takes you from the village to the World of Death, the second from there to Purgatory, and the third from there to the World of Enlightenment, where Kobo Daishi is (and the temple for his offerings, and some burial mounds belonging to emperors from the Edo period). From the World of Death onward, the whole thing is actually a huge graveyard, the path winding between long dense clusters of ornate burial markers, Buddha statues, and huge evergreen trees, similar in kind to but much older and larger than anything we see in Vancouver, so that it didn't feel so much like home as like some mythic and magnified version of home, our land as the gods know it.
(* This is worth mentioning because we walked three of the eighty eight temples -- #3, #5 and #6 -- on the Shikoku pilgrimage route, when we were in Tokushima. Kobo Daishi is also said to have been the first to walk that, but it's historically impossible for him to have done so, at the time it was credited.)
That wasn't the only beautiful thing on Koyasan, though it was the most striking. On a purely visual level I think that it's my favourite place we've been.
Now we're back in our hostel in Osaka, where I am on the tenth floor using internet that costs ￥100 for 15 minutes. That's a dollar. (A Canadian dollar -- no easy conversion for my American friends. Haw!) All the first times of this trip are melting into this string of last times -- the last place (here) that we'll be, the last time (yesterday) that we'll go formally as a group to some educationally relevant place, the last time (today) that I'll need to do laundry. My flight home is in two days; I'll get there at 11 AM, which will be 3 AM for me, which will be Interesting. I'll be happy to be home for a lot of reasons, but I'll miss this place, and its beauty, and the wonderful cultural idiosyncracies, and the people in our group.
I spent, like, three dollars to write this entry. I hope you like it.
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Re: My two cents worth:
Date: 2006-05-26 04:33 am (UTC)All the more reason for me to get up there and party. *___*
Re: My two cents worth:
Date: 2006-05-26 06:32 am (UTC)