Cemeteries are negative images of the cities they belong to. Every devotee of cemeteries (I avoid the term taphophilia, with its suggestion of morbidity) perceives this otherworldliness – the reason we prefer to walk in them at twilight, when the hard edges of the city dissolve and the sense of escape into some strange marchland is heightened.
Cemeteries typically possess three beautiful negatives which, for all our acquisitions, we of the 21st Century run very short on: space, stillness and silence. And to that triptych I would add a fourth intangible: reverence. I was raised on doctrines of materialism, progress and, at university, avant-gardism. As a tertiary student of the arts, irreverence was the subtext to everything I was taught. Strangely, the irreverence was always reserved for things no one seemed to revere any longer: religion, marriage, humility, poverty, motherhood, age, civility, high art, sound craftsmanship – any tradition that had stood for more than a century. But when we despise tradition we are apt to fall prostrate before fashion, as I did. At age twenty I thought that art that was not irreverent, that did not break utterly with the forms of the past, indeed all form, was not worthy of the name. It is natural for us to rebel against our early teachers. Even so, I am still a little surprised to discover that I have become a traditionalist, and a devotee of tradition is compelled to become a devotee of cemeteries, where people’s traditions are writ in stone. And yet, and yet … nowhere is 21st Century man’s desire to forget the past so clearly in evidence than in his manner of interring the dead.
According to recent policy and practice throughout the English-speaking world, lawn cemeteries are the way of the future. In lawn cemeteries there are no vertical monuments, only small, standardised plaques to mark the places where the dead lie, invisible to a person walking until they are about to step on them. For the devotee of cemeteries, as troubling as the absence of monuments is the absence of trees. Without shade it seems the dead must be baking, especially under the Australasian sun. When we are conscious of them at all, the dead interred in lawn cemeteries seem utterly neglected, uneasy. But we are rarely conscious of the dead in a lawn cemetery. The lack of timber and statuary means lawn cemeteries are places people rarely walk; and, as recent additions to the landscape that require large plots, they are often located on suburban outskirts. Instead of walking through them, we drive past them. And their flat and featureless aspects make little impression on drivers-by. For those who would keep death firmly out of mind, the lawn cemetery possesses the happy ability to be confused with a golf course.
Recently in the western Queensland town where I grew up, a friend was refused permission to lay flowers at her husband’s lawn cemetery grave. The local council told her that flowers and other commemorative offerings were dangerous – they might be tripped over. Given that there is little encouragement for people to walk in lawn cemeteries, and that one would be far more likely to trip over flowers in a botanical garden or park than in a cemetery, the woman suspected she had been lied to. When pressed, the council revealed that the ban had been imposed by the groundskeeper himself. The man was unwilling to negotiate flowers on his ride-on lawnmower. The flowers meant he could not ride his machine directly over the graves.
The 21st Century seems determined to forget an over-long and burdensome past. A lawn cemetery glanced at from a car window does not give of time. Yet to glance across a traditional cemetery, say Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane, is to sense – by the colour and decrepitude of the stone, even by the size and type of tree in the yard or the lie of the stands – that the cemetery has absorbed centuries. In the case of Toowong, native hoop and bunya pines and flooded gums grow in stands and to sizes not seen so near the city since the days of colonial logging.
When we walk into old cemetery grounds and begin reading headstones we become aware of a plethora of individual histories, all converging at this nexus in time and space (time’s straight line collapses in a cemetery: ahead might lie the 20th Century, and beyond it the 18th). Reading the headstones, we may intrude into as many histories as we care to investigate. The stones make their silent, seductive appeal to us to keep wandering, to keep travelling through criss-crossing arcs of time … down that dark stand of cypress and hoop pine we see in the distance, where it seems the city’s founders must lie, or up that knoll where a marble angel holding a Celtic cross above the grave of a little Irish girl crumbles against the darkening sky …
One of my earliest and sharpest memories is of a woman playing the violin in an outback cemetery. The cemetery was at a place called Tiger Scrub, between Injune and Roma. It was a small rusted iron-railed affair, long years untended. The yard was overrun with Mitchell grass. At every footfall there was the cold snap of twigs. The stones were faded and mildewed. And above the stones were beautiful red gums bleeding sap. It is estimated that along the inland slopes and plains of the Great Dividing Range there were originally sixty-five million hectares of temperate woodland. Those dry eastern native woodlands, especially the box woods, have largely vanished but for what remains along little-visited creeks, stock routes, rail easements and outback cemeteries. It is a curious truth that cemeteries in outback Australia have remembered the landscape as much as they have the people who lived in it.
The woman of my memory played her violin beneath the bough of a red gum. I cannot remember what she played, perhaps I did not even hear. But on reflection I hear Bach’s partitas. I was walking past with my father and saw the woman at a distance. I will never know if she was playing for a departed loved one interred in the yard, or if she was simply inspired by the romantic atmosphere. But her violin playing seemed to fit the landscape. It may be that that woman’s violin sounded the first musical notes heard within miles since the days Aborigines camped there. Yet the music seemed inevitable and its presence illuminated a truth for me: that a cemetery was a place for music as well as silence. When walking through silent old cemeteries, it is worth recalling that almost every stone has been sung over.
Since that day of the violin and the outback graveyard I have travelled to many countries of the East and in every city and town I have sought out cemeteries, trying to understand the beguiling spell they cast upon me, to understand the symbolism of cemeteries, their lights and darknesses, their sounds and reverberating silences.
The most beautiful cemetery I have ever walked through is the vast 1200-year-old Buddhist cemetery at Oku-no-in (The Inner Sanctuary), high in the sacred precinct of Danjo Garan on Kōyasan in Wakayama Prefecture, southern Japan. Mount Kōya is the centre of the esoteric Buddhist sect called Shingon, founded around 800 AD by the priest Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi (Great Saint). As well as introducing a secret and magical form of Buddhism to Japan, thus changing the entire spiritual and cultural landscape of the Heian period, Kukai was an engineer of dams, a pioneer of a meditative form of calligraphy, and author of more than fifty volumes of poetry and religious philosophy. Legends of Kukai’s exploits abound: he came to the holy ground of Oku-no-in having followed a two-headed dog; he invented hiragana and katakana after the inky forms of a dream; he threw his ceremonial mace after a lightning bolt in China and rediscovered it in the branches of a pine tree in Kōya-san … Some of his story is verifiable. When he was thirty-two years old, Kukai lived in China, at what the Japanese called the Shōryûji Temple in the capital Chang’an. There, he participated in esoteric initiation (Kanjō), which required him to toss a lotus flower upon a mandala painted with Buddhas. This was said to establish a karmic bond with the Buddha the flower fell upon. Kukai did this twice, and each time his flower dropped upon the Cosmic Buddha. He was then sprinkled with the Water of Wisdom, in order to gain a light for those who wander in darkness (the darkness of worldly passions). Then the eyes of the Buddha nature within Kukai were opened and he was released from sin. He returned to Japan in 812 AD. Oku-no-in is his resting place.
It is the largest cemetery in Japan, and Buddhists from around the country are buried here in accordance with their desire to lie close to the tomb of the great sage. If a full interment is not possible, as little as a lock of hair may be interred. And it is possible to be in Oku-no-in in absentia. The White Ant Memorial pays the respects of a pesticide company to the insects they have been forced to destroy over the years. Another memorial recognises the fallen soldiers of Japan, Australia and New Zealand in the battle for Borneo in 1945.
According to the scriptures of Shingon Buddhism, the ghosts of Mount Kōya must wait 5,670 000 years before the ‘Buddha of the Future’ arrives to redeem them. To pray for departed souls near the tomb of Kukai, to leave a little ash from a cremated body, is to ensure the saint remembers them on that day.
I took a train down to Kōya-San from Osaka and stayed the weekend at a monastery called Haryo-in, where I seemed to be alone but for three Japanese: one limping and stuttering old monk who was perpetually laughing at an obscure joke; a nun in her late thirties who was just as austere as the old monk was jovial; and a businessman newly arrived from Tokyo who passed me in a corridor, nodded and disappeared.
I set my bags down in a spartan room in the monastery’s guest wing and caught a bus that climbed through fog toward the cemetery.
The visitor to Oku-no-in walks from Mount Kōya town centre and crosses Ichi-no-hashi (Number One Bridge), which lands at a long, winding cobblestone avenue of cedars, and lands at the world of spirits. Japanese tradition says a bridge is more than a way of getting from one side of a stream to another. It may mark a crossing into the unknown, else the passage of the soul to a higher spiritual plane. Ancient Taoism propagated the myth of ‘The Isles of the Blest’, a Chinese ‘Paradise’ akin to that of Christian myth. In their earliest representations in Japanese gardens, The Isles of the Blest were not linked by bridges, yet over the centuries bridges appeared, suggesting that, after all, if one was very patient, observant, careful, then a transcendent spiritual plane, even immortality, was achievable.
Having crossed the bridge, the visitor to Oku-no-in wanders amidst two hundred thousand stone tombs and statues. It is cold here. The warmer seasons reach the top of the mountain late, and winter is never far away. The cherry blossoms appear a month later than in the surrounding lowlands. Even in August there is a chill in the air. The frosts come in November and the snow in December and the snow lies thick on the ground until February. It collects on the cemetery’s yukimigata (snow viewing) lanterns and gathers on the crests of wings and at the feet of stone bodhisattvas. In late summer you are lost in a cooling maze of mossy statuary and dripping trees, but now in winter, the season in which I had come to see a very old candle in the depths of Oku-no-in, you are enveloped in a white world of snow and swathing mist.
I approached a striking Buddhist angel, taller than a man and bearing a mighty stone sabre. He had peered at me from between the dark trunks of cedars. Behind the angel was a mossy staircase that led me to a well. I ladled water over my hands in a ritual of purification and looked around and realised with pleasure that I had lost the way back to the road. I walked without direction – the mist and canopy were so thick there was not even the position of the sun to guide me. I came upon a natural rock table, about the size of a bistro table, covered by small cairns of rocks and pebbles. The foundation stones of each cairn varied from the size of a golf ball to the size of a human fist. A few of the cairns rose to a foot high. The last tiers were thin shards of stone nestled perfectly into the grooves and hollows of the stones below. Tiny pebbles sat precariously atop the cairns that threatened to topple at the slightest gust of wind. But they did not topple. I added a stone. Only later was I to discover what the stones meant. I imagined I was participating in a communal artwork.
A cool breeze rose and gently rustled the cedars and lifted mist up from the ground. By turns, the mists of Oku-no-in veiled and unveiled the cemetery. I watched a stone staircase appear at the edge of an avenue and then vanish in a moment. ‘Here is the way,’ spoke the mist; then, ‘but you may not pass now.’ The conspiracy of stone and mist here was entrancing. Stone symbolises eternity, permanence, certainty, truth. (It is no accident that Yahweh wrote the Commandments on stone, though God knows – as does any frequenter of cemeteries – that words inscribed in stone need not last very much longer than words spoken into the air, and may even have a much shorter life … ‘Blessed are the poor’). And mist is the material that is barely matter at all. Vaporous floating condensing air, more a relationship between air temperatures than a thing itself, mist is the inevitable symbol of the ethereal, the spiritual, the transcendent, and so the fleeting and ungraspable. It is an exhilarating thing to witness stone at the mercy of mist. Some strange intuition told me not to seek the vanished staircase once the mist had claimed it.
I came to a dark stream and an arch bridge: Mimyo-no-hashi. The stream that flows beneath Mimyo Bridge is the Taku River, or Takugawa. The Takugawa flows darkly and quietly and makes a sacred border between the Lantern Hall grounds at the heart of Oku-no-in and the rest of the cemetery. Water was everywhere here in the centre of the cemetery: in deep, narrow-mouthed wells you almost tripped over, trickling out of stone walls and pooling in natural stone receptacles. I took my first steps onto Mimyo Bridge and watched the dark water trickling below and felt like I was standing in the dusky outskirts of paradise.
We tend to regard dark water as hostile. Indeed, at the top of Nakano Bridge in Oku-no-in there is a well, Sugatami-no-ido, where it is said that if a person cannot see their reflection they will die within three years. It is said that man’s fear of dark water stems from the long memory of it being impure – simply, bad for drinking. But anyone who has spent time in wilderness and deserts knows that a cup of crystal clear water is not always easy to find – and this was certainly so for our nomadic ancestors in the sub-Sahara and Mesopotamia. Most untreated fresh water in the earth’s wild places contains soil, tannic acid from decomposing plants and certain harmless algae; and clear water may contain harmful bacteria as readily as brown water. Water’s transparency is far from a perfect indicator of its health.
I do not know why black water pleases me. Psychologists and phenomenologists say we see our deaths in dark water, and that that part of us called the ‘death instinct’ is tantalised by the vision (to ‘not see’ your reflection in Sugatami-no-ido you would first have to be looking – inviting the non-reflection). Horn describes this trance beautifully when she suggests that the appeal of dark water lies in the thought of the water extinguishing one’s body completely – just as blackness extinguishes line and colour – all form. In which case, dark water continues to fulfil the primary symbolic function of water, purification – albeit in this case a kind of malevolent purification. There may be much truth in this assessment, certainly for the morbid mind. But the spade does not hit bedrock here. There is another side to the dream of dark water.
Physics cannot describe water coursing through a natural stream. It is, in so far as our instruments cannot measure it, chaotic – like both noise and silence, in which composers of music2 often enter in order to lose themselves, to emerge as something new after the immersion. And the absence of light adds another degree of chaos – light is a marker of path, a gauge of distances, vital to what we understand by the words ‘space’ and ‘place’.
It is no accident that the ancient poet (or poets) who composed Genesis had the Spirit of God move across the face of the deep in that eternity when the Earth was ‘formless and void’ and, crucially, ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ Here we are confronted with what Pseudo-Dionysius called ‘The Divine Darkness’. There is no more satisfactory symbol of what we dream when we dream of a creative chaos, nebulosity and infinity, than dark water. The poet of Genesis is inspired not to entrap his water. He does not have the spirit of God soaring above a ‘river’ or ‘ocean’, and thus restrict the God that encompasses the chaos; that unknowable creative force that transcends the verse’s river without banks. Darkness, for the Judeo-Christian, however frightening it seems, is holy. A thing that the overlit cities of what might be called post-Christian Western societies, along with their Oriental counterparts, have utterly forgotten.
The blackness of the water in the stream at Oku-no-in comes from a dark moss and the dark of polished granite in the bed, also from the darkness in the canopy and the grey clouds that sit upon the mountain. But this, so far as a dreamer is concerned, is an ex post facto explanation: it is easier to imagine the darkness in the water is the same pristine thing that inhabits the space between the stars; the darkness Ovid saw in the Styx, that purified a man of his memory; the darkness that lay upon the waters of the universe at the beginning of Genesis … To meditate upon the dark running water of Oku-no-in is to countenance the infinite and incorrupt.
Driven into the Takugawa were wooden tablets bearing very old Chinese characters that I could not read. On the banks, small moss-covered Jizōs sat watching the flowing dark with patient eyes of stone.3
I recognised the nun from Haryo-in. She was kneeling, ladling water from the stream and pouring the water over a nearby Jizō. I made myself inconspicuous, pretending to read gravestone inscriptions, while out the corner of my eye I watched the woman’s quiet and beautiful ritual. When it was finished I introduced myself. She remembered me from the monastery. I asked her what the ritual meant. She told me the water of the river was sacred, and that to pour it over the stone Jizō brought good fortune to the living and the dead.
‘Mizu no Inori … A prayer in water,’ I said, happily remembering the Japanese word for prayer from my student days. So my intuition had been right: the dark water of the Takugawa could baptise.
The woman smiled.
‘Hai! … A prayer.’
She told me she had been a Buddhist nun for ten years. In her late twenties she had married a young man who only months after their union died in a car accident. After the man’s funeral (he was not buried here, but in Osaka) she came to Oku-no-in to pray and make offerings. She decided to stay. It was for this man she had been praying with water and stone.
I told the nun I was a writer – no, not famous, not remotely so. This seemed to put her at ease. I got the feeling that if I had intimated a sense of self-approval she would have run from me. I told the nun that I hoped one day to write something about cemeteries, though I had no clear idea what. All I knew was that I loved such places, and loved this one as much or more than any of them. Her eyes became friendly.
She pointed to the dark stream, to the wooden talismans in the water. She said these remembered aborted babies and the drowned. I pointed to the banks.
‘Why so many stone Jizō-san? And why do they wear bibs?’
The Jizō were the small (rarely more than a foot high) stone Buddha-like deities that lolled, slept, and kept watch about the cemetery. They do so in many of the gardens and grounds of Japan’s traditional sacred sites. At Oku-no-in people tied small coloured scarves around the Jizōs’ necks. A few wore hats. These ‘doll’s clothes’ seemed fresh. None more than a year old. Most, I guessed, had been replaced in the last few months as cloth must rot quickly in such a moist environment as Oku-no-in’s.
‘They, too, are for dead children, especially aborted children. Children in the grey area.’
‘The grey area?’
The nun described a Japanese purgatory – a spiritual marchland.
‘There is a legend,’ said the nun. ‘Many years ago a little boy died, but his spirit was unable to cross the river to the other side. The woman went to Jizō-san –’
So far as I knew, that term referred only to statuary. Apparently the little statues had an ancestor.
‘A monk? A living Buddha?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘An angel?’
‘A bodhisattva. The woman went to Jizō-san and asked him to seek out her son and take him across the river. “What does the boy look like?” asked Jizō-san. But the boy was so young it was hard even for the mother to give a description that would distinguish him. “Here,” said the mother, and she handed Jizō-san the little boy’s bib and told him to smell it. That way Jizö-san would recognise the child in the beyond.’
‘The bibs all look quite new,’ I said. I pointed to an assembly of Jizō wearing them on a nearby knoll.
‘Yes. Many children are lost in the grey area these days.’
I asked about the piles of coins and stones I had seen set before Jizōs and on rock shelves and even in the hollows of trees. Were they also offerings?
‘The coins,’ said the nun, ‘pay for the boat across the river to be judged. All souls must pay.’
‘What is on the far bank?’
‘Ata. The spirit world. You say Heaven. When there are enough coins the dead person can cross.’
I thought this was a strange form of Buddhism they practised up here on Kōya. Different to any I had read of in the classic texts.
‘And this,’ I pointed to the quickening water, ‘represents that stream of the other world?’
The nun shook her head.
‘This is the stream.’
Two rivers flowed in the same bed: the symbolic and the physical.
‘But, of course,’ said the nun, ‘the bodhisattvas do not need coins.’
‘So why offer them?’
‘Because we need to give them up. The coins must be given up, just as the world must be given up. Only then can the soul pass to Ata.’
So the piles of coins were akin to the petitionary prayers for the dead in the Abrahamic faiths.
But I had seen piles of stones as well as coins. I told the nun about the rock table I had chanced upon earlier.
‘The stones are for children to cross the river,’ said my companion.
‘Why not coins?’
‘The piles of coins are for men and women. Children do not have money, so people pile stones instead. And they pray at each stone – at each stone that stays. When the stones fall it is because a devil has knocked them down. When the stones are high enough the child can cross.’
‘What is high enough?’
The little nun shrugged.
I remembered that I had added a stone to the table myself. I wondered if it was possible to pray without knowing it. In Japan, very fine lines separate art, ritual and prayer. So the practice can be as important as, even more than, the final product; a vastly different view of art to the modern West’s (though not to contemporary painters of ikons). An example of this from Kōya-san is shakyo, the copying or tracing of the Hanya Shingyo (Heart of Wisdom) perhaps the most famous of Japanese Buddhist sutras. By writing, the copyist achieves a meditative state, becoming a bridge between the divine and earthly realms. Afterwards, the sutra may be kept or respectfully burnt.
The higher the cairn on any table of wood or stone in Oku-no-in, the more delicate the order; the more thoughtful and precise the placement of the later rocks and then pebbles must be as they reach up toward a vertical destiny like the flame of a candle, matter vanishing into the ethereal as it purifies. The strength of the structures at Oku-no-in could not be measured by scale or ruler or other physical test, but by their paradoxical fragility as the form approached perfection, the degree of human care …
When the stones are high enough.
The mist was condensing. The nun left me. I crossed over the stream to the Toro-do, the Lantern Hall.
Beyond the waters of the Takagawa no photographs may be taken. I read the plaque that told me so with disappointment, as by far the most beautiful places in Oku-no-in lay across the water. For some reason that I did not immediately comprehend, the picture I most wanted to take was of a gazebo-like tomb just beyond the bridge. The stone floor of the tomb had been recently swept and a monk’s twig broom leant against railings at the top of a small flight of stone stairs.
In the precinct of Kukai’s tomb monks chant sutras while other monks bring the saint his meals; according to Shingon he is not dead but, rather, reposed in eternal meditation, as he has been now for over 1,100 years.
The Toro-do follows the design of classic Heian period temples. I climbed a flight of a dozen stairs, walked onto a kind of veranda and looked down to the inner sanctum where the esoteric monks (O-bō-san) knelt chanting. The chant was a monotone responsorial that recalled the solo sections of Allegri’s Miserere. I leant over the polished cedar balustrade and caught a glimpse of the lanterns for which the hall is named. One lamp’s vigil here has lasted a millennium. The Hinjo-no-itō or Jikyō-tō, Poor Woman’s Candlelight, is the oldest continually burning flame in human history. It is the most revered of a trinity of lamps called Jōmyō-tō, the Everlasting Candlelight. It remembers the life of a poor woman called Oteru who offered a lock of her hair for the consolation of the souls of her parents in 1016. The second part of the trinity of lamps is the Shirakawa-tō or Chōja-no-mantō (Shirakawa Candlelight or Rich Man’s Candlelight) that Emperor Shirakawa offered in 1088. The last and newest member of the trinity is the Shōwato (Shōwa’s Candlelight) that Japan’s last Emperor, Shōwa, offered in 1948.
The monks sat before the lamps making them difficult to see. But finally I found a place that afforded an unbroken view. I attempted to still my mind and meditate upon the lamps as the monks did. I tried to isolate the Poor Woman’s Candlelight. I wondered that here at the heart of the cemetery amidst all the centuries-old stone was the one ephemeral thing that had begun its existence before nearly all of it and would outlive both the monks and the monuments and perhaps even the unhewn stones of the yard, and that a child’s breath could extinguish. A monk came in from a hidden room and sat with his back to me and the flames were gone from view.
I walked outside into the fresh cold. Snow fell on the steps. The stone lanterns were lit. I thought I should begin walking before it became too dark to see.
I returned to Haryo-in and, but for the intermittent service of the limping, perpetually amused monk, took my meal alone in an uncluttered tatami mat dining room. The meal was plain yet satisfying: Kōya Tofu4, red beans and rice, a light enokitake mushroom soup, tempura vegetables and mandarins.
A meal was set at the other side of the room and left there without a diner. I remained alone until a thin, grey-haired man arrived, casually dressed as one rarely sees the middle-aged in public in Japan – in shorts and an old pink T-shirt. He sat cross-legged on the tatami mats before the food. I realised he was the businessman I had seen when I first arrived at the monastery. The man looked across the room at me and nodded. Then he spoke to the little monk who vanished and returned with two half-sized, unlabelled bottles of sake. One of the bottles was for me. I could not refuse. I had not enjoyed the sake I had bought in Japanese bars and nightclubs, but this was exceptionally sweet and fragrant, and the sweetness seemed to have been drawn from the rice’s essence, not something tacked on. Shortly I was enjoying the drink immensely, buzzing with warm happiness.
The businessman and I continued to eat together without speaking, even while I drank his sake. Finally I ventured to ask him where he was from. I had not before as he seemed focussed on his meal and quite comfortable in our shared solitude, but when I spoke a little Japanese he became animated. He ordered another bottle. I told the attendant monk to put it on my bill, but the man waved the suggestion away and refused to argue the point. He said he was from Tokyo and that he sold sheet metal. His wife and eenage daughter were upstairs. I was surprised as I had not seen or heard anyone at the monastery besides ourselves and a few religious. I did not even know there was an upstairs. The man told me he came here twice a year, ever since his mother died twenty years ago.
‘Why?’
He swirled his hand in the air.
‘For the silence,’ he said. ‘For the peace. And to pray. To get my spirit in order.’
I nodded.
Mt Kōya and its ancient cemetery were all about order. Death and the wish to remember and keep vigil over the dead were what brought people up here, and there is no chaos more complete than death, when one’s identity is fractured by the destruction of the body. The great Buddhist archangels and deities of stone with their flightless wings and dull-edged swords, the assemblies of delicately balanced stones, the stream whose headwaters were in the next world, the ubiquitous wells where one could ladle the same dark chaotic water that God’s spirit flew across at the beginning of Genesis, the millennial flame in the lantern hall, these kept watch against a devouring cosmic darkness – kept that darkness in its place, so it did not overwhelm – like the Paschal Candles of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Sitting drinking sake in an unadorned room that night, I realised, too, the potency of the image I could only ever record in memory, of that solitary broom at the top of stone stairs freshly swept of lichen, and the monk who swept them nowhere in sight. Chaos abounded in the world, certainly in tremendous Osaka below the mountain, but up here in the stone gardens of Oku-no-in, all was swept, tended, watched.
My newly acquired friend retired. I drank the third bottle of sake alone. I slid open the large front doors of the monastery and walked outside. A cold mist had come down from the cemetery and enveloped all Mount Kōya. All the stone, all the mighty cedars and every man-made structure was lost to the mist and to the dark. At this hour and in winter every solid thing must give up the practised forms of its existence to mystery. One day, I thought, every hard thing will experience this night. Ours is a cooling, disintegrating world. Even the rocks will die. Yet at the heart of it all, though I could not have gone to it tonight through this mist, not have found it in the shadows of Oku-no-in, a tiny flame burned undefeated as it has burned for more than a thousand years, lighting only the faces of a few sleepless, guardian monks who sat chanting with their backs to the outer dark.
2 Arvo Part and William Basinski, for example.
3 Small bibbed statues of Jizō bodhisattvas. Those that wear sweaters are the Sweater Jizō (Asekaki-jizô).
4. A specialty tofu dish whose strict rules of preparation are said to be dictates of Kukai himself. Kōya Dofu has an especially long shelf-life, making it ideal for Mount Kōya’s long winters.