Across the lake,
around the neck
of Sleeping Buddha Island
the houses gleam
like a necklace
in the last of the sun

OKIJIMA II: Seeking the Far Shore

When we entered the temple grounds there was much carpentry going on; we called into the open doorway of the priest's house next door in the compound, and a young man came out who was the son of the priest; he would be the next priest. He was now studying at a Buddhist University in Kyoto. When we began to ask questions about the Rennyo connection, he took us inside the temple, which was being refurbished, and into a side room at the front of which were three scroll altars and two long brightly colored scrolls hanging on a side wall, divided into different 'panels.' They told a story, which the young man related to us.

Back during the Muromachi Period, when civil war (in this instance, likely the Onin War) raged throughout Japan, several defeated warriors were exiled to Okijima, which was then uninhabited.

The warrior of our story, the ancestor of the fellow who was telling it to us, thus left the trappings of war behind and became a fisherman, taking a local fisherman's daughter as his wife. Sadly, she died soon after giving birth to their only son, but death did not bring an end; instead her unhappy ghost kept returning each night to breast feed the child. Her ghostly presence night after night was not only very personally disturbing to the man, but the anguished spirit of his beloved wife was unable to move on to the Pure Land, where she would be at peace.

One night in this time of misery a god visited the man in a dream and told him to await the arrival of a very wise individual, who would come to the island. Every day thereafter the fisherman went to the beach and waited. One day during a great storm, when arrivals were least likely, a boat that had been on its way to Katata across the Lake was forced to seek shelter at Okijima; the boat's passenger was the renowned Rennyo Shonin.

The fisherman invited Rennyo to stay at his house till the storm had abated; during that time he told the monk his tale. That night they waited up for the ghost of the woman to appear; when at last she appeared and reached for her infant son, Rennyo told her that to free her spirit from its earthly tether and gain entry to the Pure Land all she had to do was chant namu-amidabutsu (I take refuge in Amida Buddha). But she didn't believe him; she refused to chant, saying that she was but a woman, that mere prayers would not work for her. Rennyo assured her that this prayer would, if she'd but try it; to make it easier, he wrote it out on a scroll for her to read. She did so, over and over until her voice became a chant, under whose power she entered the Pure Land, never returning to haunt this troubled world again.

The original scroll written by Rennyo in the 'dancing tiger' calligraphic style still hangs in the temple, which that very warrior-fisherman founded as a result of these events. The young man telling us the story was the 19th generation of the family begun by that man, and the 18th generation of a boy who had been suckled by a ghost. At that point the sun suddenly disappeared behind some clouds and it got very chilly inside the unheated room.

When we went into the darkening day pondering this tale, we hadn't far to go to reach the other side of Buddha's neck; from there we walked the long walkway that traced Buddha's shoulder, pausing now and then to gaze out into the air in search of our mountains and our home, but they were not there. Where they should have been was a dense haze, beyond which might be mountains...

We walked past all the lakeside gardens to the very end of the windy pathway, and there clambered up the steep slope into the lee shelter of a grand old gnarled tree, where we sat amid the small mountainside gardens and ate our lunch, looking often into the distance for some small sign out there of where we lived, but it was all impenetrable whiteness...

OKIJIMA I: The boat in the forested cove, signs of the Pure Land

This morning a Monaco-type drive over a lakeshore distance we thought would take an hour-- Okijima always unreachable in the far offing from our house windows, had grown so far away in our minds-- the last stretch, 6 twisting kilometers beyond the little village where 808-step-stairway Chomei-ji Temple is located (and where I used to buy the great traditional black cinnamon candies the local grandmas make), along an old and twisting narrow peninsula shore road overhung with long festoons of blooming cherry tree branches, a tunnel of pink cherry blossoms in the early morning sun, we had the pedal to the metal so arrived early at the boat in the forested cove.

Every two hours the boat leaves for the island, just a small passenger busboat for maybe 30 or 40 folks (only 400 yen one way!), it was half-full this morning, a few tourists, mostly island farmer ladies coming back from early shopping in the big city for among other things fine quality plastic buckets, we sat outside on the back deck to see the island as we approached it like the other side of the moon, we never see this side from our house, and as the island loomed there were ducks on and above the water, hawks, seagulls and cormorants in windy spray as the boat headed straight for Buddha's shoulder. Then a quick turn and reverse, few fillips of the helm and there we were: on Okijima.

The first thing we did was wander the very narrow streets on Buddha's neck (alleys really, on most of them you have to turn sideways to pass another person), trying to tend toward the opposite shore of the neck whence we could see the range of mountains where we live, view our usual here-now-there from our everyday there-now-here. It was wonderfully difficult to move on, though, the alleyways beckoning this way and that along the sea and up the slopes, many of the sudden buildings still richly aged, with walls like elderfaces grown in wisdom and character to the essence of beauty in response to the weather, but fading nonetheless, may not be there next time, so had to be looked at carefully, the way we used to look at Kyoto before it disappeared...

As we walked up and down the alleys and stairways that led to temples and forests, stopping every here and there to look at something of interest, the while hunting for the minshuku (a kind of B&B; there are two on the island), I felt something niggling, something unfamiliar, something slightly irritating, like a pointless gesture repeated endlessly, then I realized what it was: there were no cars or trucks on the island! Not even a motor could be heard! Even in those narrow alleys I had been listening and sensing behind me as we walked, being cautious of approaching vehicles to no point whatsoever; the silence and quietness, the rambling folks and rich air were other clues my deeper mind had noted but my surface mind had overlooked in traveler's distraction. Smiling grandmas cruised by, going to and from their gardens on three-wheelers.

Another thing I noted (and envied) from the casual and open way of the gardens, and as I later confirmed by talking to one elder fisherman sitting on a seawall in the sun making fish traps, the Okijima islanders are blessed with a blissfully complete lack of monkeys. No deer either; their biwa trees and spinach thrive in the freedom sought by all living things. Crows love their cabbage, though; the islanders' scarecrows are old rubber gloves on sticks, rising from the earth among the swelling cabbage-heads like resurrecting gardeners... A bonus of the fisherman's generous conversation is that now I know how to make fish traps.

As we tended toward the other shore for the here/there experience, wandering down one alleyway and taking a couple of turnings much as if in a maze, we came upon a small temple named Seifuku-ji, before which stood a wooden sign that spoke of the temple's strong connection to Rennyo Shonin! Amazingly, and by sheer coincidence, our trail had crossed that of the renowned Pure Land monk of the 15th century, who as it turned out played a key role in the little-known Okijima ghost story we were about to hear, to be told once more in Part II...

TO OKIJIMA

Off early this morning for a one-day exploratory excursion to Okijima, that island out there across the Lake that I've always wanted to visit. Details of reasonable length upon my return.

THE SLEEPING BUDDHA

Out there on the Lake, directly west across from us at the edge of evening lies Okijima, the Lake's largest island. Okijima is known locally as The Sleeping Buddha for its very close resemblance to the stretched out form of the Sleeping Buddha when viewed, for example, from our deck. There's Buddha's head to the right, then the neck, shoulder, waist, elbow, hip-- then the gown, tapering off into the lakebed.

There's a small village on the island, that bands the Buddha's neck and turns into a diamond necklace at night; there's another bright light just about where Buddha's third eye would be: a dock light that stays on well into the night in summer, to direct those still on the water in the dark when most of the necklace has gone out. People go to sleep early on the Sleeping Buddha. There's another notable light at Buddha's navel that is sometimes on all night. I like to think it's a temple, and not some forgetful person's garage light.

On clear Summer and Autumn evenings I sit and watch the sapphire phases of the Lake as the setting sun's light slides out across the water on the edge of the mountain shadow reaching toward the always sleeping figure, when the island seems to glow all the more as the darkness darkens around it until for the last few moments of the day, as the only bright object on the darkling horizon the island takes on a deep emerald light of its own; backed by the pearl gray vistas of the further and further mountains it glows with such eminence, almost from within, it's no wonder that so many centuries of lakeside eyes have seen there the radiant Buddha, deep in dreams of what we know as time.