Day 2: T1-T6
Apologies for the shorthand, but I think of most days as going from place A to place B - in today’s case, temple no. 1 to temple no.6. They do have names in addition to numbers, but Ryozen-ji, Anraku-ji etc are harder for me to remember…
I slept reasonably well on a very hard futon last night, but woke up too early again, took a piss and found a second pillow, and managed to more or less stay asleep until a reasonable time.
Breakfast was outrageously good, a huge spread of all kinds of delicious things from Japanese omelet to whitebait to rice, pickles, and tea. I’m fairly certain there was grilled fish as well, plus a small green salad and a strawberry for dessert. Yum.
I walked across the street to T1 before the stamp office opened, figuring I could find time to reflect at the temple (or pray, or worship, or recite the sutras although I didn’t do the latter, technically speaking), hoping that I would remember to do all of the things in the correct order (wash hands, mouth, make donations, light candles and incense, deposit name slips, offer thanks, and of course take the time for some introspection). It all went well enough - well, hopefully the camera crew that was filming a bunch of I think university students didn’t get much of me on film (I was trying to stay out of the picture). I found it hard to truly - again I’m not sure what word to use here: worship? think? reflect? if only because I was so consumed with the minutiae, but you have to start somewhere.
The lovely Dutch couple from yesterday appeared, I shared my candles and incense with them, and then I tried to find the stamp office… surprise, it would have been obvious if you’d parked in the parking lot, but it isn’t if you walked there. The elderly monk who stamped my book three times and then wrote something calligraphic in it smiled and said “have a nice day” in English, which was charming. So! I figure I must be doing this okay enough, even if I haven’t bought proper pilgrimage clothing yet (I’m waiting for a shop near T10 to do that).
I still haven’t got the hang of my new backpack; it’s somewhat uncomfortable and not as big as I’d like, but it generally seems OK-ish. I also still haven’t figured out what clothing works well and where everything goes; I don’t have a lot of options (hiking shirt, wool T-shirt, synthetic T-shirt, cotton T-shirt, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts) but finding the right combination at the right time of day is tricky. Thankfully, I was never too hot or too cold and the rain gear I brought worked fine last night, yay.
I don’t remember T2 at all - I must have been logistics wrangling, sorry. Same for T3. Wow, talk about an unreliable tour guide! The walk veered off of city streets a bit before T4, which was nice for a change (and I think I saw my first snake!) - unlike the Kumano Kodo, 90% of the Shikoku 88 is on pavement. T4 was kind of funny in that there was a lot of English language signage that mostly seemed designed to guilt-trip anyone who just wanted a stamp into actually worshiping, which I did find basically appropriate - I’ve kind of side-eyed a few other Western tourists who seemed to go pretty light on the basics (e.g., only lighting some incense without reflection, or skipping the second Daishi hall at every temple), but you know - not my place to say how other people decide to worship.
T5 was interesting in that I accidentally wandered in the back entrance, which led to a hall of 500 arhats - curious stuff. It felt lonely and unvisited up there, so I made sure to spend some time at the main altar there; I greatly enjoyed standing there for a while, smelling the sandalwood incense I’d bought, and thinking about stuff.
Now, if you’re my parents, or if you’re a high school classmate of mine, feel free to stop reading here because I’m going to take a detour into some personal stuff that might make you uncomfortable; if you choose to continue, just know that this is all part of who I am as a human being.
Two years ago I met a handsome bear at a pool party in Palm Springs; we hit it off and spent the next day mostly canoodling in a different pool together. We quickly moved into a friendly Dad/son sort of relationship; this is something I’ve found myself doing seemingly spontaneously for a few years now. I seem to fit the role, others enjoy it, and just to be clear, I’m not talking incest fantasies or anything like that; I like the dynamic of teacher/student, father/son, older/younger, experience/innocence, whatever you want to call it. If anything, it seems to be a shorthand or alternative to the kind of friendship/companionship/fraternity that so many men crave but don’t often get in their lives - there’s a kind of distancing effect, I find, that results from using a sort of fetishized language to express things that are too personal to say outright. When I tell another man “you know, son, I’m damn proud of you” or “you sure know how to make your Dad feel good”, it’s both deeply personal and also ipso facto insincere to a point, because what I’m saying cannot literally be true - but the sentiment very much is.
We didn’t get a chance to play - and for you straight people out there, this is a widely used euphemism in my circles for have sex - until later that year. I had a work trip out of state, he lived nearby with his husband… no, scratch that, his Sir. I wasn’t aware of it, but the man I was calling son is a boy to a Sir who’s also his husband. This… was wildly intriguing to me. All the way back in high school, I stumbled across a few books that contained BDSM content - think Story of O or Naked Lunch - and it spoke to me immediately, profoundly, and deeply. Freshman year of college I felt adventurous enough to read things like The Leatherman’s Handbook, but I never spoke about it to anyone, not even to my husband Dan. And now, finally, by chance alone, I’d met a couple who had no issues whatsoever with kink, BDSM, leather, whatever you’d comfortable calling that.
I finally started speaking openly about who I considered myself to be, the man I always felt I was but was unable to acknowledge for a number of reasons, thanks to that man. And then, much to my surprise, he introduced me to his Sir, who was generous enough to invite me to spend some time with Him in His dungeon.
That afternoon was a profound experience for me - truly, I felt myself for the first time in my life. Hooded and shackled to the ceiling, Sir flogged me, and all found my mind finally emptying. Everything felt right in the world; I just was. Just meat, temporarily here.
I felt that again today standing before a Buddha image, head down, thinking quietly to myself. I have not memorized the Heart Sutra, the Shingon Buddhist text that is recited at these temples, save for the final lines:
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha (गते गते पार गते पार संगते बोधि स्वाहा)
In my mind, that reads ‘gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore, enlightenment’ but of course I don’t read Sanskrit. And that’s what I’m thinking about when I’m standing at shrines here, now that I’ve managed the paraphernalia and logistics and can just concentrate on being.
Submission - and in case you need it spelled out for you, in BDSM or leather-speak, I’m a submissive, a sub, is also something that I feel is at the center of a few religions (Islam particularly comes to mind, of course). Is it Buddhist? Maybe? In a sense? It seems to me that is because there’s something very Buddhist about finding a way to accept things as they are, realize that so much of ‘reality’ is constructed by humans (as an aside, Wittgenstein’s Die Welt is alles was der Fall ist is another mantra of mine, as it were), and letting go of all of that to find peace, calm, enlightenment.
A lot of the business of being at these temples seems also design to be of service to others - you’re funding these places with donations, the candles and incense smell beautiful and make the atmosphere special for everyone, and so on; you don’t come here and do these things for yourself, I don’t think! You do it to show gratitude (ugh, I hate that word due to gratuitous overuse by annoying influencers recently, but it’s the best one), to express awe and joy and somehow having made it this far in life. And I’m definitely doing that as well; I’m 55 and have somehow been fortunate to have a wonderful husband, a rewarding career, good health, and the time and resources to be here in this place. It’s verging on slightly ‘fig jam’ (fuck I’m great, just ask me!) but I’m gonna go with it regardless - I don’t know how or why things have gone so well. When I was a teenager I thought I was going to die from AIDS before I turned 30; now, I’m 55 and modern pharmaceuticals mean that just isn’t a worry of mine any more (thank you, PReP). I’m in a place where I’m able to finally be my true self with people who respect and appreciate that, and let me tell you… it’s fucking awesome.
OK, back to Japan. Did I mention cats?
I was joking with a good friend of mine that I wanted to buck the Instagram trend of spirituality (when I was at Borobudur many years ago, there were dozens of influencers doing yoga on the temple at sunrise - yark) and endless thirst traps (I’m pretty good at those, but c’mon, dadbears are legion on Insta) and just post a bunch of pictures of cats. I was hoping that every temple would have temple cats somewhere… and that turned out to be absolutely not the case, damn it.
But I made two wrong turns on the trail today; one of them had a cat! And the other had a beautiful temple, not one of the 88, that was tranquil and peaceful, so yay! My feet hurt due to the extra walking, but SO WORTH IT because CATS!
In the early afternoon I rucked up to T6, had a black sesame soft serve ice cream cone, bought a container that holds incense, candles, and a lighter (very useful!), and checked in to my temple lodging room for the night. Had a nice long bath downstairs, reflected at the temple, got another stamp. All good things. And now it’s just before suppertime so I have to get going; afterwards, there’s a religious service I’ll attend that involves offering prayers for our dead ancestors. For me, it won’t be someone I’m literally descended from, but a man who meant a lot to me at one point in my life who left us many years ago. I hope that will suffice.
