Drove over to Chojuji temple in Ishibe-cho in the mountains across the lake to see the oni bashiri (devil running), which I'd expected to be thronged and peppered with neck-craning tourists and diluted with that sense of urgency and unrealness that tourists impart, but there were only locals there, mostly grandparents and their grandchildren, the new parents apparently not so interested in passing on to their children what is about to be lost, the parents themselves maybe never having embraced it enough to value, so it was all the more poignant to see this time-alloyed excitement of the aging soul, this modern-age pointing out by the elders to the exceedingly young the basic truths of life as manifested in devils and masks, ritual and chant, bell and drum, fear and redemption.
It was a small building as temples go, built near a thousand years ago and roofed in cedar bark, far off to one side of the main highway artery, close to the heart of things. All the doors were closed, and after the cradling lull of the sacred chant, when the drums began to boom and the bells to clang, the heart and the blood did the same, no matter what one's religion; for truth has little to do with religion, it has to do with blood and bone, eyes and time, rhythm and memory in those rising through an entire life on the cusp of now; both the future and the past were there in great measure, devilish and otherwise, with respect, awe, humor, and a touch of practiced disdain from the teenage oni with their bleached hair, who nevertheless did their best and it was none too bad, clearly they had dallied with deviltry before; but it was a revelation to see it all without a mass of tourists, it was like another country, so simple still, so pure, as to give me some hope for the ancient heart of Japan, that it may yet beat into the coming century, when some new hearts will take it up and make it their own, and that what is good about devils will go on.
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