3:
The only word of Japanese I knew was sayonara. It had entered the global vocabulary thanks to the recent hit film of that name, starring Marlon Brando. The word meant ‘goodbye’, and since I was keen to stay in this country for a while, I would have to acquire some more vocabulary pretty quickly. But I realised, as I stood on the bitterly cold quayside of Yokohama in January 1963, that I was going to need some help. In every other non-English-speaking country I had visited, I could read the letters on the public notices even if I did not know what they meant, and paying attention to the signs was a good way of picking up words. There was no such possibility here. Aside from some Roman lettering up the side of a steel lattice tower that looked like a theme park attraction, but was in fact an immense lighthouse, the only familiar marks on any of the signage around me were numerals.
My first task was to find my way to the railway station. On the quayside, I walked up to man in a business suit to ask if he spoke English in an elaborately polite manner, even attempting a little bow, which I hoped approximated to Japanese customs. Whether it did that or not, I was patiently directed to the station, where I managed to buy myself a ticket for the relatively short journey along the industrialised bay to Tokyo.
Arriving in the capital, I checked into a cheap hotel for a couple of nights to try to orient myself to my new surroundings. On my first day, I walked until my knee screamed. There was nothing ancient or picturesque to see. Most of the city seemed to be a jumble of knocked-together buildings, with an oasis of clean modern towers at the centre. But it was no less interesting for that. The whole place was crowded but disciplined: the armies of neatly-dressed businessmen filling the pavements all seemed to be going in the same direction, and the city felt hectic but somehow efficient at the same time, like a finely-geared machine. It was striking that mine seemed to be the only Caucasian face. The war was now nearly twenty years in the past, but Japan was still a pariah nation where few outsiders wanted to come, and few of the inhabitants had ever left. In those years, Japanese citizens were not allowed passports unless they had a bona fide reason for travelling abroad on business, and even then, they were granted a one-trip document which had to be given back when they returned.
Everything was an adventure for me, even the most basic tasks, such as feeding myself. Fortunately, the cheap restaurants provided menus which included photos of the dishes, at which one could point. Once I was presented with the food, I then had to work out how to get it into my mouth equipped with only a pair of chopsticks. This required a level of manual dexterity I did not yet possess, but hunger was a powerful incentive and I attempted to study the grip used by other diners. I took comfort from the fact that it seemed perfectly acceptable to lift the bowl to one’s mouth and slurp soup or shovel food down in a way that would have horrified Nursey.
I could have carried on exploring for weeks, and although I knew that my friend Koichi’s introduction to his abbot was unlikely to expire, I nonetheless wanted to travel to Mount Koya as quickly as possible. That was the real purpose of this long journey, and getting to know the rest of the country could wait.
It was a whole day’s trip by train from Tokyo to Osaka, through wooded mountains punctuated by wide plains on which rice fields were planted in dead straight lines. That was followed by a further rail trek into the mountains to Mount Koya. The monastic complex sat in a high valley surrounded by eight peaks. Here, in the ninth century, a Japanese monk known as Kobo Daishi had established the Shingon-shu or ‘True Word’ school of tantric Tibetan Buddhism; he reputedly chose the spot because the landscape looked like a lotus flower. The complex had grown over the centuries to become the world headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, and it now contained more than a hundred individual temples: some very large, others tiny. The one I was looking for, named Shino-In, was in the latter category. It was supposed to be the oldest, and dated from 813 AD.
It was much colder up here than it had been in Tokyo and Yokohama, with nearly two metres of snow covering the ground. A sacred pilgrimage path led from the foot of the mountain to Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum, with the way shown by engraved stone markers in the trees, each of them built in the symbolic five tiers of a Buddhist pagoda. But the whole place was also a functioning town, with a university, schools and shops, and there was an ordinary road from the railway station too. I discovered that my destination was one of the most remote of all the individual temples. Pulling my woollen hat down low and wishing I had an even warmer coat, I trudge on, eventually arriving at the snow-bound gates of a small wooden building complex – Shino-in, its pointed roof curving into an upturned brim like a hat. I paused before knocking. I had come a long way to reach this point, but now that I was actually here, I had no clear idea what lay in store for me. I could only hope the abbot really would let me in without requiring me to lie for a week in the snow.
The door was opened by a shaven-headed monk in a simple black linen robe, which contrasted starkly with my heavy winter clothing. He looked about ten years older than I was.
I bowed.
I had of course memorised the abbot’s name, and I had gleaned the polite way to address a member of the Buddhist clergy from a phrasebook on the train.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for Nakamura Jushoku.”
The monk returned my bow and gestured for me to come inside.
The interior walls of the temple were of plain whitewashed plaster, and the floor was made of old cedar planks. To my dismay, it was no warmer inside than out, and I could still see my breath in front of me. The monk indicated that I should follow him into a tatami room, where a tiny man of about seventy, in a similarly simple – but white – robe, rose to greet me. We bowed at each other.
I began trying to explain myself in some artificial phrases I had pieced together from my phrasebook. But a small woman in similar garb to the men shuffled forward and saved me the effort.
“You are the Englishman who wants to study Buddhism?” she asked. “We are expecting you. Welcome.”
“Rhodesian, not English. But yes. My name is Michael. And thank you.”
There were just five people living in the monastery: the elderly abbot, who had been there since he was four years old, the monk who let me in plus two other monks, and our interpreter, a Japanese nun, who had been born in Hawaii and was the abbot’s housekeeper. She was the only member of the community who spoke any English. I learned later that I was the first Westerner to have been accepted in its almost 1,200 years of existence.
Fortunately Koichi’s introduction had been effective, and the good news was that I could stay without having to prostrate myself on the doorstep first. I was allocated a tatami room with paper windows, where a daytime temperature of minus four or five degrees was normal in the winter. The next morning the remains of the tea I had left in a cup beside my futon (foldable sleeping mattress) had frozen solid. I also discovered that if I spilled water on the floor it would be sheet ice within a couple of minutes, and that I could not write for more than five minutes without warming my hand on a little brazier which was the only heating permitted in the building. Shino-in prided itself on the fact that it had never installed electricity, and that everything was as it was since it was founded nearly one thousand two hundred years ago – fortunately the only exception to this was running water, which provided the one luxury in this temple of extreme austerity – a hot communal bath.
In simplistic terms, the whole monastic tradition is designed to minimise, and ultimately lose, the ego, which, according to Buddhism, is the part of the self that has desires, such as concerns with form, or wanting to be loved or happy. The idea, as I was to learn, was to cut all that off, as if with a scalpel. This applied to all aspects of daily life. The food I was offered on my first evening was minimal. We sat on the floor to a meal of watery rice, rock salt that was meant to be eaten separately, and pickled roots. There was also seaweed and tofu, but that was it – and it all came in tiny rations. This was not poor hospitality, so much as evidencing the whole ethos of the place: food was meant to fuel the body engine but no more, and one was not expected to take pleasure in it.
Originating in India two and a half thousand years ago, Buddhism is a belief system focused on cleansing the mind of agony and suffering, and is therefore fundamentally about human knowledge rather than idol worship. Tantric or esoteric Buddhism (based on a tantra or mystical text, system of learning) is concerned with the situations and meditative practices that lead to enlightenment. The Shingon doctrine expounded by Kobo Daishi holds that enlightenment is a very real possibility, based on the spiritual potential of every living being. If cultivated, it manifests itself as innate wisdom, and with the help of a genuine teacher, via proper training of the body, speech and mind, one can reclaim and liberate this enlightened capacity, for the benefit of oneself and others. But for centuries the doctrines of Shingon had been secret. No book had been published about the sect’s teachings and rituals anywhere in the world until some twenty years before I arrived.
As well as choosing a secret sect, I had, entirely by accident, chosen one of the strictest temples in the complex. There may have been others on Mount Koya where monks had wives and children and drank saké every night, but not Shino-In. Even today it is the only temple not to have electricity. Nakamura, who, I was to discover farted and belched without any inhibition, was proud of it. “This is the way it was nearly twelve hundred years ago, and this is the way it’s going to stay,” he told me through his housekeeper.
The strictness of the regime included ablutions. For the first few days I was too embarrassed to ask the housekeeper-nun where the toilet was. Instead I took myself discreetly into the forest and attempted to move my bowels in the snow, risking frostbite to my rear end. Eventually I noticed one of the monks moving at a faster than normal pace; on a hunch that he was answering a call of nature, I followed him, and he did indeed lead me to the proper place. However, I also discovered by observing him that there were particular rules to be obeyed even in the lavatory. Freezing cold as it was, we were supposed to strip off completely in order not to sully our robes. This meant standing naked on below-freezing tiles, and it required a major effort of will just to put oneself through the process.
That was symptomatic of the whole experience of living at the temple, where I came to realise that I had been stripped down to nothing in many other ways. While I was treated with unfailing politeness – which made a pleasant change after the attempts to bully me at the logging camp – there was no likelihood of my developing friendships with the other monks. If I hadn’t incurred the obligation of the abbot, as the lowest monk on the totem pole, I would have been very harshly treated as part of the training. In the Buddhist belief system, friendship is about ego, so the focus was on detachment, and my hosts’ only interest in me was whether I would learn and make spiritual progress by following their direction – and they were not particularly tolerant of slow or incompetent learners.
I was taught to chant the teachings, which came in the form of sutras – Buddhist aphorisms, to meditate and to practise my daily duties. These involved sweeping the butsudan, or shrine containing the sculpture of a Buddha figure, cleaning the inside of the temple and presenting offerings in the form of tea, pastries, candles or incense and cleaning the outside areas. A great deal of time was also spent meditating. For me, trying to sit in the lotus position was excruciatingly painful because of my broken femur and ankle. Then there were other bodily tests that were specifically designed to be brutal for everyone. There was one practice called dai-kan shugyo or ‘great, cold aesthetic experience’. This involved standing naked under a waterfall, still in the depths of winter, and chanting sutras. It was so cold that getting any words out was physically difficult.
The real point of that kind of ordeal was to get the body under control, and obviously these practices would have been tough for anyone. For me, as a Westerner, there was an added set of difficulties to overcome. Everything I saw, tasted, smelled, heard and touched was alien. I had no one I could talk to in any common language except the housekeeper, and I could not stop her from performing her daily duties with my idle chatter, for which she had no inclination anyway. There was nothing to read and nothing to do with my mind, except try to adjust to this situation of massive cultural and sensory deprivation, while coping also with the cold and hunger. I prided myself on being independent-minded and resilient, having endured all kinds of indignities and hardships on the odyssey that had brought me here from Rhodesia. But here I discovered loneliness of an order that I had never imagined, even in my apprenticeship in the cabin on Vancouver Island. As one week became two, and two weeks became three, there was no escaping back to the crude conviviality of the logging camp. Not that anyone was stopping me from leaving. I could have walked out of the temple anytime I wanted. But if I did so, I knew I would be passing up an opportunity that I might never have again, and I would also be failing the greatest test I had ever set myself.
I had walked away from plenty of things before: in Ireland I had bailed out of my trek to Belfast, enduring ridicule in the process, as well as giving up the degree studies for which I had crossed a continent. I was therefore more than capable of swallowing my pride and acknowledging that I had chosen the wrong path. But my present circumstances felt very different. Undergoing mental and physical trials in this freezing baptism of fire was precisely the path I wanted to follow. It was too important to allow myself to be defeated. I did not know precisely what the benefits of staying the course would be, because the whole experience was designed to take the initiate on to a spiritual level of which they could not previously conceive. But that alone was goal enough for me. I wanted to see for myself what it felt like to reach that point.
A month passed, and then two. I stopped counting the days, because that defeated the purpose. The goal was to achieve inner change, rather than to hit some external target in the form of a length of time served. I came to see myself as metaphorically clawing my way up a mountain covered with impenetrable trees and brambles. The roots and thorns scratched and grazed me, leaving me sore and tired at the end of every day. But eventually I learned to find my way, hardening myself up as I manoeuvered up the slope, and finally I arrived at the top, to find myself standing on an immense plateau. In the far distance I imagined another set of mountains representing the voyage of spiritual evolution which would perhaps take many lifetimes to achieve. That was when I saw how worthwhile the struggle to get there had been. For I now discovered I was physically capable of standing at the edge of this plateau, without all the baggage of the past. I could sit in the lotus position; I could eat and survive off the minimal food. I had also managed to make loneliness my closest friend, by confronting my solitary state head-on and accepting it as a benefit rather than a problem. That latter achievement alone was a remarkable breakthrough, for which I have had cause to be grateful throughout the rest of my life. I have been in a solitary state many times since then, but I can honestly say I have never been lonely for a minute.
The whole experience had been a deep-end immersion from which I emerged stronger and with a different outlook on life, and I found that I had genuinely moved to a different plane of being. I had heard that phrase many times before and I understood it in principle. But to experience personally what it meant was a true revelation.
I had also been trying my best to learn Japanese. It was not easy, because people so rarely spoke, but I knew the chants I had repeated so often, and I could function in a basic way. My bigger problem was that I still struggled to make sense of Shingon Buddhism. I did not really understand the teachings, and I could not see myself coming to understand them in my present situation, without enough language skills to follow any sophisticated explanation. So, once I decided that I had mastered the most daunting physical challenges, I began to think that it might be better if I moved on to another monastery or another temple.
Parting was a peculiar experience. I had undergone an intense experience in the company of Nakamura and the others, and I was profoundly grateful to them for what they had taught me and shown me, as well as for their hospitality. But we knew very little about each other, and there was an odd lack of personal attachment – because not forming such emotional bonds had been the point of the whole exercise. I felt cleansed, chastened and wiser as I returned down the mountain, but I did not feel the sadness one usually feels at parting from friends.
Arriving in Japan three months earlier had been a culture shock because everything was so alien and impenetrable. But now, as I made my way back down to Osaka, I experienced a new form of disconnect. My surroundings no longer seemed alien because they were Japanese. Instead, it was the bustle of everyday life – the kind of life that is common to towns and cities in any part of the world – that threw me. I had become used to the devotional silence of monks, and I had to re-accustom myself to how ordinary people went about their business in the real world.
That was true in every sense of the phrase. On arrival at the central railway station I discovered I was bursting for a pee and had no idea where the toilet was. I was still incapable of reading the signs, and passers-by did not seem to be able to help, either.
“Habakari! Kawaiya!” I pleaded. These were the two words I had learned in the monastery that related to a toilet. I was also hopping from one foot to another in a manner that I thought left little to the imagination.
But people just shrugged their shoulders.
Finally, an old man, bent over and supporting himself with a stick, seemed to grasp what I wanted.
“Eh, habakari-ka, ah toirei dai yo!” Ah, habakari, it means toilet.
He burst into a cackle, and now some of the other people I had asked dropped their frowns of incomprehension too and broke into smiles.
It was only later that I properly understood what had happened. I had learned my Japanese from a seventy-year-old monk, who had spent six and a half decades sequestered in a monastery devoting himself to thousand-year-old teachings, so I had picked up an antiquated vocabulary. Imagine a Japanese tourist approaching commuters on Waterloo Station and saying, “Prithee, sirrah, guide me to the privy-stall.” That was pretty much what I had done.
In years to come I would learn more about the different registers of the Japanese language. Mercifully, it does not have the system of tones common to many Asian tongues, where a difference in inflection that is virtually inaudible to Western ears can create an entirely different word, but in much of Japanese communication, it is necessary to understand the context in order to grasp the real meaning, and that context can be defined by a tone of voice, an intake of breath or a facial expression. It is a hard concept to explain, but the Japanese understand the point instinctively, and it is best illustrated by an apparently true story about the investment bank SG Warburg, which wanted to open an office in Tokyo in the mid-Sixties. The partners hired a young Englishman who, they were told, spoke fairly fluent Japanese, and then trained him as a banker to a level where he could represent them. Sir Sigmund Warburg then hosted a big party at a smart Tokyo hotel to celebrate the opening of the new office and introduce the young man to the Japanese client base. He watched the young man move from one group of Japanese guests to the next one, and everything seemed to be going well enough as the Englishman engaged the guests in conversation. However, Warburg noticed that every time the young man detached himself from one group to move on to the next, the guests he had just left broke into laughter. Puzzled and unnerved by this, he pulled aside the chairman of a major Japanese industrial conglomerate and asked him what he thought of the new man.
The chairman looked embarrassed.
“Well, dear Sigmund, very difficult,” he said. “Can I be very frank?”
Mystified even further, Sir Sigmund said of course he could.
The chairman leaned closer and said confidentially: “Problem is his gestures and spoken Japanese are just like Japanese bar girl from Osaka.”
Japanese people found that story hilarious. They understood that foreigners speaking Japanese tended to pick up the idiom, inflection and gestures appropriate to the context in which they had learned the language, and a lot of young Western men acquired it from pillow talk. These Westerners could therefore speak Japanese as fluently as they liked, but what they might never realise was that the original context would be immediately – and sometimes hilariously – obvious to any Japanese listener.
Discovering all that was still some way off for me. All I knew now, as one of the people at Osaka station guided me in the right direction for the toilet, was that I needed to learn some modern Japanese.
I got in touch with a friend I had made on the ship from Hawaii. He lived close to Osaka, and he allowed me to stay for a couple of days with his family. They then arranged for me to teach English at the YMCA in the nearby city of Nara, which had been the original capital of Japan. Packed with gardens, temples and cultural treasures, this was one of the gems of the country, and I jumped at the chance to spend time there. I was advised I could lodge with a member of the YMCA board, a gynaecologist called Dr Tsubomura, who had his own little hospital right in the centre of town. He lived on the premises with his wife and six-year-old son. They put me up in their spare room, and I started teaching English in the afternoons.
After I had been there for a couple of days, a police car pulled up outside. A couple of officers got out and one of them said to Mrs Tsubomura: “Could we please see this young foreigner who is staying with you? We have to take him to the mayor.”
My hostess was understandably agitated.
“I hope he hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said.
I was alarmed by the turn of events as well. I had been just about to go out sightseeing.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
The policeman said: “No, no. The mayor just wants to see you.”
This was some reassurance, but the fact remained that I was expected to get in the squad car and go off to see the city boss, a man named Kagita. He proved to be a huge man with a bull neck, bullet head and arms the size of my thighs.
“You are the only foreigner in Nara,” he barked when I was shown into his office. “What are you doing in my city?”
I had heard already that he was a wealthy man and a landowner, and he clearly had the attitude to go with it.
“I’ve just come out of a monastery on Mount Koya,” I said. “I’m here to see if I can learn more about Buddhism, and about Japanese culture.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling for the first time. “Excellent. You’ve come to the right person.”
I tried to say, as politely as I could, that I had not so much come to him as been summoned.
“True,” Kagita said. “But I am still the right person. You have already studied Shingon-shu. Now it is time for you to study Zen Buddhism, and I will help you. I also want you to study the three samurai disciplines: sword-fencing, flower arranging and the tea ceremony. I have my own private kendo dojo at my home, and I practise with my staff every day. I will expect to see you there at six o’clock next Monday morning.”
Despite the imperious way in which it was delivered, this was a very good offer. I knew that Zen Buddhism was not an esoteric system, and that it was the principal sect that influenced the samurai class, and placed less emphasis on knowledge of sutras, so I had already worked out that this might be a more suitable set of teachings for me to explore. To have a senior figure propose to take me under his wing like this, simply because he had been curious about a rare foreigner turning up in his city, was a great stroke of luck. Without hesitation, I told him I was up for the challenge.
It was to be the beginning of an enormously fruitful relationship. Kagita would beat me black and blue every morning, and then his staff would step in and do the same. I had learned some judo in Rhodesia, but this was kendo – the ancient Japanese art of sword-fighting, in which the sword had been replaced by a shinai (a bamboo cane the length of a sword split into four slats with a leather cap to keep the slats together). The use of shinai, rather than swords, removed the worst of the danger and allowed a much freer exchange of cuts and thrusts. It appeared aggressive and noisy at first, but I soon learned that it required skill and concentration, together with levels of grace and agility that were almost balletic. A kendo-fighter or kenshi wears a keigoki (a heavy cotton half kimono top) and a hakama (a long black skirt). To protect his head and body, he is armoured with a men (a heavily padded black helmet with a full visor, plus a do (ribcage shield), kote (gauntlets) and a tare (mini skirt of thick flaps to protect the groin and front hip areas – imagine Darth Vader from Star Wars with a stick rather than a light sabre. Despite this protective gear I came away every day with bruises on my wrists and a headache. But it toughened me up as I learned to take it. In the meantime, I also began attending the Soto-shu Zen temple just outside Nara, where the master, a man named Minagawa Eishin, was a good friend of Kagita’s. I meditated there regularly, and found this form of Buddhism to be very appealing.
After nine months, I was getting bashed a little less often and had learned to go on the offensive, as well as to defend myself. My regular meditation at the Zen temple also helped considerably. Kagita sat me down for a chat at the end of one of our sessions.
“You have made remarkable progress,” he said. “I am now willing to introduce you to my own kendo master. I’ll take you to meet him and we will see if he will accept you or not.”
This was another immense privilege. Having a good master was the best way to progress, and the only way to meet the best ones was via this kind of introduction. I had done my utmost to justify Kagita’s interest in me, and now all those punishing sessions I had undergone were proving their worth.
This new master’s name was Murata Kenzo. He taught at a university about ten miles from Nara, and we drove over to meet him the following Saturday. Having grown used to fighting a man of Kagita’s bulk, I was expecting to meet someone of similar or even more impressive physique, but the teacher to whom I was now presented was a slight, very calm figure.
Not that he was easily won over. Speaking Japanese to Kagita, he made it clear he was unimpressed.
“Why are you bringing me a Westerner?” he frowned. “Foreigners have no idea of our culture, and I have no time to waste on educating him in basic matters. Besides, he won’t understand anything I say.”
I could see a twinkle of amusement in Kagita’s eyes.
“He does speak some Japanese, and he can probably understand everything you’re saying right now,” said the mayor. “You should seriously consider taking him, not just as a favour to me. I have been teaching him for months and he has shown me that he has discipline. He has already come out of Mount Koya and is now attending a Zen temple. You have my assurance that he has reached a high enough level to be taught by you. If he had not, I would never have been rude enough to introduce him to you.”
Murata considered for a moment.
“If he can answer the following question to my satisfaction I will take him,” he said. “If not, he will just have to continue with you.”
“That sounds like a good test,” said Kagita. “What is your question?”
Murata turned to me. It was the first time he had looked at me properly, and I tried to return his gaze as calmly as I could.
“In the opening position of kendo, if you want to win and you are aggressive, you will lose,” he said. “But if you don’t want to lose and are defensive, you will also lose. So what must you do?”
I had been nervous about what the question might be. But I relaxed when I heard it. I had been taught that a kenshi’s true opponent was his own self. The fighter’s goal was the same as for a monk, namely the state of mushin, or ‘empty mind’.
“The answer is very simple,” I said. “I don’t care about the result, because the only goal I should have is to be in as balanced a state as possible.”
If Murata was surprised that a foreigner with supposedly no idea of Japan’s culture could know such a thing, and could express it in somewhat clumsy Japanese, he did not show it.
“All right, I’ll take you on,” he said simply.
He proved to be a remarkable man. He was modest and kind, yet he was also a hard taskmaster and his mere presence was awe-inspiring. I continued to study Zen at the temple in Nara, Sansho-zenji, and to teach English at the YMCA, but now my kendo practice was at the university with this new guide. The discipline was even more punishing than it had been with Kagita. While Murata might not match the mayor in physical bulk, the level of concentration he brought was extraordinary. I had to work hard to emulate it if I was not to end up as bruised as I had been in my novice days.
The months went by, and I was feeling more and more comfortable in Japan. I stuck out a mile as a tall, thin Caucasian, but as I immersed myself in centuries-old religious philosophy and cultural traditions, I sensed more than ever that this country that baffled the rest of the world might be my spiritual home.
After I had studied with Murata for a year, he sprang a surprise on me. He told me that he had taken the unusual step of entering me directly for the national shodan black-belt grading examination, instead of obliging me to progress through the six prior stages. In effect, he had put me on the fast track, which was a rare honour for any pupil, let alone a foreign one.
There were about three hundred of us taking the exam, with myself as the only non-Japanese. It was a noisy and physically exhausting day, but I felt calm at the end. I really was beginning to make some progress in attaining the mental balance for which the kenshi strives.
I sat with the other candidates as the head of the examining body made his speech. I could hardly believe my ears when he told the gathering: “There was one foreign student today who demonstrated quite superb fighting spirit. Many Japanese students did not reach the same level, and for this I feel shame. I urge everyone here to study much harder for the sake of Japanese pride.”
I came eighth in fighting spirit and sixty-seventh in the competitive bouts, and now I had achieved the rank of shodan; first black belt. It usually took three or four years. I had been immensely privileged to learn the discipline under Kagita and then Murata-sensei, and I had undoubtedly worked hard. I had been toughened, both physically and mentally, by this gruelling pursuit of inner balance. I was also sure I could not have done it without both those three months being tested to the limit at Mount Koya and the regular meditation at the Zen temple. It was by no means the last occasion in my life when I would come to that conclusion.
I had been at the temple in Nara for a year and a half when Minagawa, my master there, suggested we make a pilgrimage to the head temple of our Soto-shu sect of Zen Buddhism. The monastery of Eiheji was in the forest about fifteen kilometres from the city of Fukui, north of Kyoto, near the coast of Japan’s Inland Sea. The distance by road was not that far, but on a pilgrimage the journey was deliberately difficult: we walked via the summits of mountains rather than valleys, begging for food as we travelled. It would take about three weeks on foot, with overnight stays at temples belonging to our sect along the way, and it would be exhausting. However, it was another step on the road to enlightenment, and there was no way I was going to turn the opportunity down.
We kitted ourselves out in traditional monastic black robes, straw sandals and conical hats, which served as umbrellas as well as keeping the sun off. We stopped to meditate at each peak, and as we sat on one of them, Minagawa told me it was time to choose my Bukyo no homyo, the Buddhist name I would take as a lay monk. I was aware that I was receiving an honour that was an immense rarity for a Westerner at that time.
I had known it might be coming, and I had my answer already. I told him I chose Zenku Eison. The character ‘Zen’ was a mark of my respect for the sect of Buddhism I had learned, and ‘Ku’ as the second character represented both the sky and emptiness. I chose Eison as my forename because the character for ‘Ei’ was the first Japanese character for my master’s own forename, Eishin, as well as being the first character for the old Japanese rendering of England, and the last character being for respect.
My master agreed that it was a suitable name, and when we returned to Nara he formally ordained me in the temple. After two years in Japan, I was now a Zen Buddhist lay monk called Zenku Eison.
I was also still only twenty-two years old. I had learned so much from my ordeals and from my masters, but I also knew there was much more out there in the world that I wanted to explore. Although I would carry the Buddhist teachings with me for the rest of my life and I was now a changed man, I still had the heart of an adventurer, and I was itching to try new experiences, as well as to revisit some old ones. I had a strong sense that my fascination with Japan was only just beginning, and I would make it my business to return to the country as soon as I realistically could. Nevertheless, after all the self-denial I had been though, I really did need a bottle of wine, a girl and a steak. I therefore bade Murata, Kagita, Minagawa and all my other friends farewell and set off by sea for Hong Kong, where I was confident I would find abundant supplies of all three.