Enko-ji

Down the hill from the elegant and secular Manshu-in sits this Zen (Rinzai sect) temple, a small white cloister with a smaller garden which attests to the modestly continuing religious role of Buddhism. It was founded in 1601 by the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu himself, who might have had no use for emperors and their courts but who did have a use for a religion which could be turned into a means of discipline for otherwise inactive samurai.

These members of a now-idle class (the age of war over for the time being) were now to interest themselves in such arts as calligraphy and poetry, and such exercises as mock-duels. The sword, now that it was no longer to be used, became an aesthetic object to be revered. In all of this religion—particularly Zen—could assist.

Thus Ieyasu had an interest in temples, particularly small and inoffensive ones. Enko-ji, after having been moved about, as most temples eventually are, came to rest in its present location in 1667, and there it has remained, modest, unknown, dedicated to good Buddhist work.

"Where is Enko-ji?" This I asked climbing the moated paths among the hills. An old man in a new pink jogging suit pointed vaguely at a parking lot.

Over there, he said, then: "Where are you from?"

In the fall sun his bald head shone like a stone. He, lonely in his morning exercise, wanted to talk.

And so we did but he knew nothing of Enko-ji.

I persevered, however, and eventually found the entrance, modest, white, black-tiled, leaning into the customary garden of the small temple—half ornamental, half edible.

There I located the office and stood, giving my greeting, until an old woman in an apron appeared, stared, then told me that the abbess was out and indeed they were closed but added that I could look around if I wanted to.

I thanked her and thought that it was indeed somehow meaningful that I come to my last temple, the last of a long line, and found it shut, empty. Mappo, I reminded myself, is upon us. But I did look around.

Enko-ji has had a long and worthy history of printing Buddhist tracts and the wooden print types used are still stored there, some forty thousand in all. In addition there is the modest treasure, a thousand-armed Kannon (not on public view—she so seldom is in her more intricate manifestations) which is said to be the work of the renowned Unkei.

Since the door to the hall of the Buddha was not locked, I pushed it open and went into the incensed dark. At the altar two candles were burning and I could just make out the lacquer and the cloth of gold, shining in that dim light.

I suddenly remembered Sei Shonagon at Hase-dera and how affected she was by the Buddhist ceremony. "The lamps burned with terrifying brightness and in their light the Buddha glittered brilliantly... I was overcome with awe and wondered how I could have stayed away for so many months."

Here in the dim light of two candles I felt a faint stir of the emotion which had so overwhelmed her a thousand years before. Was it not, I wondered because of nature of the religion itself?

In the Western mystical experience (Judaic, Christian, Islamic) the meeting is with a personal god. Someone is standing there. In the Eastern (Hinduism, Buddhism, the religions of China), however, the mystical experience is a total and impersonal fusion. Only you are standing there. And you are facing nothing human.

I imagined this small, provincial temple hall filled—filled with women. Until recently Enko-ji was a nunnery and it remains (in the large concrete building on the ground) at least in part an educational institute for nuns.

The temples of Kyoto now perform their religious function for the relatively few. (The hordes of old are still around but they now patronize Soka Gakkai and the more up-to-date beliefs.) Buddhism died and with it went the sense of religion as a part of daily life. Only in places such as Enko-ji, small, unknown, unvisited except by the nuns and other believers, does Buddhism still play its ancient role.

Outside in the cool brilliance of an autumn noon, I walked among the bamboo surrounding little Seiryu Pond and admired the vegetables growing nearby in neat rows. So near that there was no telling if the bamboo shoot sticking a late nose from the cold ground belonged to the grove or to the garden.

And I looked out over the terraced hills, down the gentle slopes to the distant capital, hazy in the sunlit noon of late fall, and thought of those who had lived and had died in all these temples—the famous from whom I have quoted, those who had strayed into my sight, small lay-figures, and those to whom I have not given a thought and of whom I know nothing.

It is a populated landscape, these rustic palaces and provincial temples standing from the farmland, people busy in between, living in that easy proximity with the gods which is Japan's great gift.

"You find that temple?" I was asked and turned to look at the old man in the pink jogging suit, now on his way back to home and lunch.

"Yes, I did," I said.

"That's good," he said. And just then came the stroke of an accommodating temple bell, far away, the sound dying, leaving behind its shape in the empty air.