Myoshin-ji

Outside the walls of Kyoto the great grid of imposed right-angled avenues turns into that maze of alleys which have always more naturally fitted both the Japanese landscape and the character of the Japanese people. Here, in the suburbs, remains something of the rustic native spirit of those upon whom the Chinese pattern had been so early set.

From early on, the rural temple with its massive gate sat in a field among the buckets and the clutter of the suburban farm. Visiting it, as seen in the poetry and paintings of the Heian period and later, were processions—city folk going out to rusticate.

We see them, brightly colored, lurching in their lumbering ox carts over the tilled fields, disporting themselves under the blossoms, having come from their proper straight avenues to the open labyrinths of lanes which still remain the natural home of these folk who built their houses under the hems, as it were, of this imposing but imported Chinese garment.

Sei Shonagon, seeking solace during the rounds of her days, all circumscribed in rituals intended to keep the aristocracy busy, found especially delightful the week of winter when the courtiers went out to pick the young herbs which had sprouted green under snow. She writes in her pillow book, the Makura no Soshi, that it was amusing to see their excitement when such plants were found growing near the palace, a place where no one expected them.

The Japanese have made much of nature. So have others but none perhaps with more dedication. Nature was early and permanently woven into habit and language. Not only were the spatial facts of spring fields and autumn orchards rendered obligatory in writing and in talk, but also the temporal facts of rain and sun and the daily temperature were so ingrained that even now—so late—it is still impermissible to leave out of note or fax or e-mail some reference to the weather and its possible ability to alarm or delight.

What, one wonders, could have so motivated so early such an enormous concern. Perhaps, just as the Egyptians so loved living that they constructed the pyramids, those titanic containers of the dead, so the Japanese, aware of gossamer life, of this short respite before the setting of the sun of late summer, enameled onto all their words and thoughts these colors of eternity—the world of nature which lives but to die and dies but to live.

One such rural temple was Myoshin-ji, but over the years as the city grew it lost its rustic air and eventually became a complex of temples and, like the medieval cathedrals of Europe, a center of learning. It was here that the retired emperor Hanazono (who had reigned from 1309 to 1318) studied his Buddhism.

He had trained under the Master Shuho Myocho, the Zen master now popularly known as Daito Kokushi, the founder of Daitoku-ji, and he had been diligent. Now, after some time having practiced the disciplines of Zen, he believed that enlightenment might be his, and so wrote his master a verse—the toki nogosho which disciples wrote to their roshi when they believed they were ready.

In it the cloistered emperor said that for twenty years he had persevered and that lately, in this coming summer, he had begun to believe he might finally have been successful. He just ate his meals and drank his tea, he said. He seemed to live in a world where everything was quite clear but wouldn't his teacher please test him. To this, Master Shuho answered by addressing him as distinguished priest and added that he had already been tested.

With such a diploma from such an authority the retired emperor decided to turn his own detached palace into a home for Zen teachings, and thus the Shobozan Myoshin-ji (The Temple of the True Dharma and the Miraculous Heart) came into being. To serve as founder and high priest, Hanazono chose Kanzan Egen (1277-1360), the only teacher whom Shuho thought worthy of such a position.

A man of elegant simplicity, Kanzan was noted for a somewhat luxurious artlessness. His robes were expertly woven from a fiber made from the common wisteria. On his desk was nothing literary or priestly. It contained only a receptacle into which he put his letters from the unhappy emperor Go-Daigo, Hanazono's successor.

Yet he was also very strict. Holding that study was not enough, he said that a master must be so rigorous as to approximate the transience of life itself. Only in this way—by enduring the worst as it were—could progress be made. He must have been a terror and a salvation to his student. One of them, his own nephew, he kicked out more than twenty times. The perserverant lad always returned, though to what eventual end history does not tell us.

Perhaps, like Spinoza a few hundred years later, he understood that everything happens through necessity—and that once one achieves this embracing perception, one is close to harmony and happiness—by-products of what Zen calls enlightenment. This late seventeenth-century Dutch Buddhist wrote that our passions prevent our achieving this harmony and happiness, and yet we can still come to realize that everything is related, that everything is one.

The fact that Myoshin-ji was run like a very strict religious school might account for its layout, odd among the big Zen temples, though the customs of Zen construction were followed faithfully enough. It is enormous but not compact in that linear way of most Japanese temple complexes: telling a story and starting with the fact of the grand front gate.

It covers nearly seven acres, has its great Sanmon, its butsuden, lecture hall, and so on. But it also then extends to form a small city with a main street, side alleys, all in neat rows, dormitories systematically arranged on the east and west sides of the larger buildings. It is like a university town, a campus. Even today it contains nearly sixty subtemples and has nearly four thousand affiliated temples throughout the country.

Eventually, however, it lost its authority and came under the control of Nanzen-ji, its more powerful neighbor. Still later this entire college town was destroyed in the Onin Wars. Restored and rebuilt by its ninth abbot, Sekko Sojin in the late fifteenth-century, it remains an important branch of the Rinzai sect of Zen, still filled with teaching priests and earnest acolytes.

And right next door is the hill, Narabigaoka, where Yoshida Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness. Though his house faced Ninna-ji, he often used to listen to the great bell of Myoshin-ji. "The sound of the bell is precisely the tone of oshiki," he wrote (this being standard pitch used to tune the instruments of the imperial orchestra, the gagaku)."The pitch naturally rises and falls according to the temperature... so this tone evokes the atmosphere of transience."

Some commentators, however, have said that he must have meant another bell since the original and ancient Myoshin-ji bell, said to be the oldest inscribed bell in Japan (the twenty-third day of the fourth month of 698), had disappeared long before.

Real or not, the sense of evanescence, the slow decay of the mighty stroke in the air of an evening as its vesper roar flattens to a whisper, a mere vibration, then silence—this is real.