Having made it

to Osaka by plane, I took the rest of the way home (which took nearly all day) by trains along the shore of the Seto Inland Sea. This sea has come to hold a lot of memories of this country for me. I gazed at the path I took during a ridiculously long bike trip to Himeji (from Osaka) on the way to Hiroshima over three years ago. I remember having stopped then at the entrance to the Seto Bridge crossing into the south island of Shikoku, which at the time seemed distant and mysterious to me, thinking, ‘I wish I had the room on this trip to go there...I promise I will someday,’ bowing to the island before continuing on along the shore. I now live on that island... I guess I fulfilled the promise after all, however unintentionally. I smiled as the train approached the the turn to cross the bridge.

It was just turning 6:30 when I got home, collapsing on my unmade futon in the middle of the room, leaving my bags in the doorway. My good Japanese friend, M---, had mailed me while I was on the trains, reminding me that we had a promised arrangement to visit Konpira-san, an old mountain that features shrine a bit south of the city, for our traditional New Year’s shrine visit and prayer, called hatsumode (初詣). I had nearly forgotten it was New Year’s Eve. I slept for four hours in my clothes before my alarm sounded to go to the station to meet him.

We talked nearly the entire train ride, my brain on Japanese auto-pilot while the rest of me fought to wake up. Things around us grew darker and darker as the train wound its way into the rice paddy acreage toward midland Shikoku. We arrived in Konpira welcomed by red candle lanterns that lined the sides of the river and streets. People shuffled excitedly in small groups in all directions, trying to decide where to be for the midnight climax or how to get there in time. M--- and I headed upriver of the majority of the crowd toward a temple set at the foot of the mountain that still had a good view of the valley town. The toll of the temple bells began ringing just as we neared the long flight of entrance steps, and I immediately began counting them.

By tradition, the bells are rung 108 times. I have heard different explanations for why, but the one I have found the most interesting (and is probably the most accurate) is that it is derived from the Buddhist notion of shikuhakku (四苦八苦). The shiku part directly reads as ‘four sufferings,’ standing for life, old age, sickness and death (生老病死, shouroubyoushi), which after seeing in four different men is what drove the Buddha (Shakyamuni, or the Gautama Buddha) to seek enlightment and thereby realize his Buddhahood. They are the four attributes to living that characterize our humanity and from which we can never hide or run away from. The hakku part reads as ‘eight sufferings,’ symbolizing four more sufferings that accompany and thereby magnify the four base sufferings, being the suffering from separation from those we love (愛別離苦, aibetsuriku); the suffering from the meeting of people toward whom we grow bitter (怨憎会苦, onzou’eku); the suffering from the inability to attain what we desire (求不得苦, gufutokuku); and the suffering from our inescapable attachment to the five elements comprising us physically, mentally and emotionally (五陰盛苦, go’onjyouku). In a more colloquial use, shikuhakku has come to mean being in a really painful or stressful situation.

But the really neat part is how one gets 108 from this (and this part was actually explained to me by one of my junior high school students). You see, ku is also one of the readings for ‘nine’ (九) in Japanese, and so shikuhakku can also be read as ‘four nine eight nine’ (四九八九), from which we get 4 * 9 = 36, and 8 * 9 = 72. Finally, 36 + 72 = 108, which is apparently congruent with the number of earthly desires described in Buddhist texts. I have no idea who thought this all through, but it reminds me a little (though perhaps not on the same scale) of the word-embedded mathematical relationships in the Hebrew language. Anyway, the bells are thus rung 108 times in respect and mindfulness for those in suffering, including (to a far lesser recognized extent, I think) ourselves.

I used to approach the concept of suffering in Buddhism with a lot of skepticism, feeling that it did little else but denounce life as just a grand play of suffering and pain, as nearly all religions do to some degree or other. In recent years, however, I have to come to recognize that, outside of the stricter sects (again, found in just about any religion), the suffering mentioned in Buddhism seems to point at more than anything a potential for suffering. Life is not inherently a world of suffering, but can be made one, inflicted by others or (perhaps most importantly according to the teachings) by oneself. It is therefore less about that there is sickness and death and so on, but in how we approach these fundamentally human events. That is how the Buddha died (in Gautama Buddha form) even in having become the Buddha, for he recognized the illusion by which we paint the event as ‘death’; thus, the Buddha died and did not die (-- recognize any parallels with Christianity here?...). It still leaves a lot to consider about those countless around the world who have been victimized and made to suffer by political decisions and big corporation money scheming, maintained by residents and consumers in ignorance of their day-to-day decisions. (Coincidently, the Chinese character chosen to represent this past year of 2007 was 偽 [gi], which basically means ‘deception’or 'fraud,' in response to these very violators of the country and world’s peoples.) Some of the truly mindful, I think, see suffering as a product of the mind yet nonetheless a substantially real and embodied matter of infliction by interaction with internal and external forces. Thus, ‘illusion’ or not, we are still all obligated to be mindful and do something about this suffering mess we have created or are in the very least perpertuating throughout our daily activities.

I thought of this as I stood at the edge of the temple grounds overlooking this quiet marginal region of the Takamatsu area. The final bell tolls sounded and left us in several minutes of silence.