a room at the back of Reverend Tani's house, where he served us green tea while we sat around a hibachi (a traditional form of heating). Almost his first words were: "How long do you think you will stay in this village?"
I answered him honestly, that I never tried to plan too much ahead in my life but rather preferred to wait and see which direction it tended toward. After a few more minutes of general conversation he suddenly asked: "Do you think you can live in this village?"
My reply, in the affirmative, seemed to please him, because he extended an arm across the hibachi and warmly shook my hand with a broad smile on his face. Then Mrs. Tani silently slid open the karakami and announced that dinner was ready.
We were shown into a large, long room with three low, lacquered tables placed end to end and covered in dishes containing various kinds of vegetables, shellfish, meats, and fish. Already sitting at the tables were Mrs. Tani's uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Shinde, who live in the fishing port town of Ushitsu some thirty kilometers up the coast from Sora, and her father, Reverend Terakoshi, also a Shingon priest.
We introduced ourselves in the traditional, formal Japanese manner, kneeling on the tatami and bowing deeply to each other. It was explained that Mr. Shinde worked in a senior post on the Ushitsu District Council and had played a key role in preserving and promoting interest in a large Jōmon period (Neolithic) site close to where he had also been in charge of the founding of a hot-spring spa (onsen), to which we were later to become frequent visitors. Reverend Terakoshi had a large and beautiful temple in a nearby town.
Seated on cushions (zabuton) at the table, we first toasted each other with chilled Japanese beer before commencing the feast that was set before us. I had hardly lifted my bowl of miso soup, however, when Reverend Tani turned to me and said: "I want you to come and look after this temple and live in it rent free. We have to go to another temple in Nakai. Do you think you can do that?"
We had been in the temple little more than half an hour, and already we were being asked if we would take care of it. I was so taken aback that without any space to think about it I immediately agreed, saying we would be very pleased to do so. Later, Reverend Tani told us he too was taken completely by surprise, as he had had no idea of making such a request. To add to the strangeness of the circumstances of the offer, Reverend Tani, at the time, had no idea that I had been a Buddhist for nearly twenty years, albeit of a different school from the Shingon sect. Or that I had on two previous occasions in my life, been on the point of taking ordination as a Buddhist priest.
Only one thing concerned me, and that was how the people of such a small conservative village would accept the idea of a foreigner moving into their temple. This had obviously occurred to Reverend Tani also, because a few days later he asked us not to mention it to anyone until he had had a meeting with the temple elders, since the unexpectedness of his asking us had preempted any plans that would need to be made.
Some weeks later, we had gone for a walk through the village at night, when suddenly there were voices up ahead of us in the dark, coming from the temple end of the village. Against the only street lamp at that end of the village, the silhouettes of a group of people could be seen coming toward us. As they drew close and we greeted one another, they recognized us and one of the men detached himself from the group, while the others carried on down the street.
Approaching us in the dark, the man bowed and said to Masako, "We are delighted that you are going to take care of the temple and we would like it if your husband would use one of the rooms over the temple to work in. But I'm sorry, we do find it a bit difficult to think of anyone but a priest living there because all our ancestors are there."
We explained that we understood their feelings completely and thanked them for their generosity in allowing me to work there, while promising to do our best in looking after the temple.
As we continued our walk, it dawned on us that they must have just come from a meeting with Reverend Tani, and we hoped they would not think that we were already on our way to the temple on some prearrangement with him to be informed of the outcome of the meeting.
By the end of the year, the barrier to our living in the temple had dissolved, but by that time I had found that cycling or walking to and from the temple each day, and dividing the hours between working at my desk and working in the temple and its garden, a very agreeable rhythm.
All spring and summer long and well into the autumn, I worked upstairs in the temple, and during breaks, cleaned the hondō (the main hall containing the image of the Buddha or Buddhist deity to which the temple is dedicated) and weeded the garden. In the winter, however, it became too cold to remain in the temple without heating of some kind, and I took to working at home and visiting the temple daily just to burn incense and make a daily check, particularly if there had been bad weather, or to make things secure if a typhoon had been forecast.
On arriving at the temple at any time of the year, I often found small offerings left either inside the hondō before the main altar or outside in front of the images of Jizō, Kannon, or Fudō-myōō. These offerings ranged from rice left at the main altar in brilliantly colored silk bags made from the remnants of old kimono to small balls of rice, wildflowers and grasses, hundred-yen pieces, candles and incense placed where someone had prayed on their way to their fields in the early morning.
From my workroom window at the temple, overlooking the road and the sea, I often saw that the old people still retained the custom of bowing to the temple as they passed by either on foot, bicycle, or tractor.
Not being involved in farming or fishing, but remaining in the village and working at my table while everyone else worked in the surrounding fields or at sea, at first made me wish for a boat or a field. But I soon realized that making ourselves available for driving our neighbors from one place to another and caretaking the temple meant that we could at least offer something to the community, which helped make us feel a little more integrated.
The sun's dying
slowly
dims the village,
but the cackle of
an old crone
suddenly
gifts the dusk
with gold!
♦ Ao-Daishō (Great Blue Snake)
One spring morning when I was still working at home, I was sitting at my worktable when for some reason I turned my head to the left toward the window on that side of the room. There, pressed up against the glass, was the head of a huge snake. I got up from the table and went over to look at it. It seemed to be staring straight into my eyes. I spoke to it for a while, more in the way of expressing surprise to myself and wondering aloud what it might be wanting. Then, slowly sliding the window open, I found that its body extended the length of the wall to the right of the window and then out of sight somewhere around the side of the house. The snake was quite obviously over six feet in length, with a strange green-bluish hue, reminding me that this was a snake someone had described to us. It is called ao-daishō, or "great blue snake," is harmless and seen as auspicious—it is a guardian snake. Snakes are often understood as messengers of a kami or indeed a manifestation of the kami itself.
Ao-daishō remained staring into the room for fifteen minutes or more without moving a scale. Then it slowly moved back down the windowpane and entered the house through a hole in the weatherboarding just beneath the sill and into the space between my workroom floor and the room below containing the Buddhist altar. From this time on, the house, which had been overrun by a plague of mice, became entirely mouse-free.
Often, in the early hours before the village had woken, I would hear a sound in the house that was different from the sparrows stirring under the eaves or the contact-sound of the feet of a heron or kite on the roof. It was the sound of footless walking—ao-daishō moving through the interior of the house on a dawn glide.
♦ Koyasu Jizō (Bodhisattva that protects women in childbirth)
I had been examining a stone which was standing to one side of the toni gate at the foot of Helmet Mountain one afternoon and noticed that carved on the stone was a Sanskrit character, known in esoteric Buddhism as a "seed syllable" (bija),