I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
—MARTIN BUBER
I found my way back to Rajgir during the first school vacation, this time with my parents’ permission. It was not as simple as that sounds. I planned, lobbied, and argued my cause for weeks in advance, with all the diplomacy I could muster. I was persistent but careful to avoid fireworks. I didn’t want to provoke my father’s anger or renew his threat to deport the monks.
In the end, they conceded. It was a pattern that would repeat for almost every school break of sufficient length to travel. Rajgir was my Christmas, my Dussehra and Diwali, and every return was a homecoming. Each time I arrived, the tension that I had been carrying for months—the defensive stance that became second nature against my parents’ relentless press, and the sadness at always being wrong in their eyes—all fell away and dissolved in the breeze as I hiked the last mile of the stone staircase up the hill.
That first trip back I wasn’t sure who I would find there; as far as I knew Nabatame was still in Nepal. From the bus station I made a beeline “upstairs.” I wanted most of all to pay my respects at the peak. I was intercepted, however, by one of the laborers who brought me “downstairs” with instructions to report to mataji—“mother”—as he called her.
“Mother” was an elderly Japanese nun who was so tiny, so polite, and so dignified that it’s hard to explain how intimidating she could be when the occasion demanded. She wanted to know who I was. I tried to explain myself. The laborer was put on the spot to translate, but his Japanese was no better than mine. Finally, we had a breakthrough. She was pointing at my hand drum, repeating her question. And I understood. “Nabatame-shounin,” I answered. She responded with a beaming smile and signaled for me to sit and wait. The next thing I knew we were having lunch. It was unusually convivial for a temple meal, with actual conversation mediated by her son, Reverend Okonogi, who spoke Hindi as fluently as any native. I learned that he was in fact the abbot of the temple, that his mother had lived there since it was first built, and they had only been away on a trip when I first came, with Nabatame looking after things for them.
From that point on, I was one of the family. Anju-sama, or “reverend nun” as I learned to call her, would become as close to me as a grandmother. My parents eventually came to understand and accept how central she was in my life. I doubt they realized how often she urged me to be kinder to them. Okonogi became a big brother, a lifelong friend whose lessons were so woven into the fabric of daily life and so humbly presented that they were almost imperceptible.
Our routine was simple. Every day began in darkness. Anju-sama slept near the shrine room and was always the first up, fresh and ready by three-thirty in the morning. The beat of the drum, the chanting and the recitation of the sutra welcomed the dawn, and we circled the stupa as the rising sun washed it in a glow of pink and gold. At the edge of the terrace we would bow to Vulture Peak where the platform atop the hill was visible below us. Then on to Fujii Guruji’s room, where prayers would conclude, followed by breakfast. Right after breakfast we would go into cleaning mode, then more recitation, chanting, beating the drum. After another break, there was more of the same, and again into the evening.
All of our meals were very brief and spartan, but prepared and served with the utmost care. Anju-sama could make a dish of plain rice and a single vegetable taste like the most elegant offering. Every breakfast of chai and chapatis was a heartwarming feast.
Sometimes I would hike with Anju-sama to the terrace at Vulture Peak. She was as tiny and delicate as a little bird, and the wind sweeping up from the plains below threatened to lift her away in a sudden gust. I held on to her to keep her safe. I was big for my age. Even as a child, I was more substantial than she was. There, on the clearing at the rocky promontory surrounded by a vast view, that same feeling of vibrant calm that had mesmerized me on my first visit returned every time. When the wind dropped, as if suspended for a moment in the sky, my breath would almost stop, I so wanted not to shatter the perfect clarity of the sheer light. I pictured the Buddha speaking to the circle of monks who sat listening intently. I could almost hear words and phrases, the language familiar, a voice resonating inside my bones.
Not only Vulture Peak but all of Rajgir seemed to contain memories of the past glowing just beneath the surface of the present. I learned that the caves I had discovered below the peak when I first arrived were indeed where the monks went to meditate, and there were many other caves in the hills around us that had also sheltered the monks as they practiced. The cave I had chosen for myself was special to Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and attendant whose remarkable memory helped to preserve so many of the teachings. It is his voice, so often, that echoes in the opening words of the sutras, Thus have I heard…
The downstairs temple was surrounded by what once had been the bamboo grove, Venuvana, where the monks’ huts became the first beginnings of something like a monastery. It was the haven where they gathered for the monsoon. Whenever it rained, but especially in that same season when heavy curtains of water swept across the plain, I imagined how they all settled in for three months of quiet and meditation under the dripping leaves of the bamboo grove, going nowhere till the monsoon ended for another year.
Tak! The sound of the wooden block that punctuated the recitation woke me. I sat bolt upright, thinking I had overslept. Tak! But no, it was still the middle of the night, the moon high. Who was reciting at this hour? I could recognize phrases, it was the same sixteenth chapter of the sutra that we had been reciting earlier…Isshin yoku ken butsu…“with one heart, single-minded, longing to see the Buddha…”
At breakfast, I asked Okonogi if there had been some special ceremony. Why the chanting so late at night? He laughed, then exchanged a few words in Japanese with his mother. They both looked at me. Anju-sama was beaming. “Very few people have heard that,” Okonogi said. They had both been sound asleep.
“So I imagined it?”
“No, you probably heard someone.”
“You mean there really was someone reciting in the temple last night?”
“There are all kinds of things that happen, and sometimes you just encounter them.” Okonogi guessed that it was probably Fujii Guruji. An elderly monk who knew the venerable teacher well had heard the same chanting late at night when he stayed at the temple. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Whatever I had heard, clearly Anju-sama and Okonogi were both quietly pleased.
When we did our cleaning in the temple, Anju-sama would talk to the statues as she polished them, and every morning she would sit for a while in front of the scroll painting of Nichiren and share her thoughts with the great Japanese Buddhist teacher who lived eight centuries ago. She chattered softly in tones that were affectionate, intimate, as if she were talking to a dear friend, but also deeply respectful. The statues and paintings were not inert objects for her, nor even mere symbols, but somehow doorways through which one could catch a glimpse of the enlightened beings they represented. Just as a photograph can unlock a store of memories from the way an expression flickers across a familiar face, these images had captured qualities that one could learn from.
The fact that she spoke only Japanese didn’t matter. She would talk to me much as she talked to the statues, and I responded as best I could with gestures and facial expressions. The stream of gentle sounds seemed precise and exquisitely polite to my ears. Languages come easily to me. Between the frequent moves the family made for my father’s job and our summers in the village, I could mimic the Bengali I’d heard on the streets of Asansol and Kolkata, or the Gujarati of Ahmadabad. I was at home in the Angika, Bhojpuri, and Magahi of my family’s base in Bihar, and of course Hindi and English were a given. Japanese was unlike any other language I had attempted, but I had been listening intently for months to the chanting of the sutras. A familiar name or phrase would offer a brief foothold here and there, but for the most part I would wade into Anju-sama’s burbling stream, and let the sounds wash over me until somehow the current would carry me and her stories would start to make sense.
When Anju-sama and her husband, Okonogi’s father, first encountered the Most Venerable Nichidatsu Fujii, they were stunned by the sheer intensity of his presence and the single-minded extremity of his determination, as much as by his humility. It was during the years of poverty and humiliation that followed Japan’s defeat in the war, and he was no longer young, though age never slowed him. He was almost seventy then, and he would yet live to be a hundred.
He seemed utterly fearless. He had chosen to become a monk at a time when Buddhism was being suppressed and discredited by the Meiji government. He walked a path of radical pacifism, speaking out against war even as Japan’s national pride was pouring itself into military expansion. Though he had studied deeply with many different schools, he put aside books and sought experience in ascetic practices, fasting strictly and chanting for days under waterfalls. His main practice was simplicity itself: He walked the city streets and country roads, beating his drum, and chanting the prayer that contained the essence of the Lotus Sutra. His method was to reach out and touch hearts, one by one, in unshakeable faith that the foundation of world peace was for each of us to hold all others in deep affection and respect.
Until they met Fujii Guruji, what Anju-sama and her husband had held in deepest affection and respect was each other. And so the couple decided together to dedicate their lives and their still-young marriage to this work. Fujii Guruji ordained them both, and because Anju-sama was already pregnant with a little Okonogi at the time, a third person was ordained that day. Whatever the rules might say, the child in her belly was not separate from her when she took the vows. In any case, her son was born and raised among monks and nuns in the small temple that they made of their home in Chiba, and he never knew any other life outside the order.
Okonogi, all grown up now, stood in the doorway, dumbfounded. “Why do you just sit there nodding? Can you understand what she’s saying?”
“Sort of. She’s talking about Fujii Guruji and how she and your father were ordained together, and then you were born…”
He shook his head in amazement.
The devastation that Fujii Guruji witnessed in the war, and especially the unspeakable suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so moved him that he made worldwide disarmament his mission. He had never been daunted by impossible tasks; there was simply no way not to act. “The time has come,” he said, “when we can no longer contain the urge to do something, but rush out of our houses. The time has come to look up to heaven, prostrate ourselves to earth, to voice our grief, and to share it with everyone.” Walking and chanting was not enough. He decided to build stupas to serve as beacons pointing a path to peace; they would be outposts of the Buddha’s pure realm superimposed on this sad earth.
The first stupa was built on Mount Hanaoka in Japan in the aftermath of the war, and took eight years of labor, his own and that of a handful of followers and war orphans he recruited. They used hand tools and worked barefoot, on rations barely a notch above starvation. When it was finished, many tens of thousands of people came to the opening for a ceremony that marked a renewal of hope. The second stupa was the marvelous structure that had surprised me here at Rajgir, on the hill called Ratnagiri—Jewel Peak—overlooking Vulture Peak.
Fujii Guruji had first come to India in 1931, determined to fulfill the prophecy that Nichiren had made seven centuries earlier: that Buddhism would return to India from Japan, after having been erased from the land of its origin for centuries. When he met with Gandhi face-to-face, two kindred spirits recognized each other. The lack of a common language was no barrier to easy laughter, tears of joy, and expressive silence. It was Gandhi who first addressed him as Guruji—“respected teacher”—and the title stuck, though Guruji came away from his stay at Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha a little humbler than when he first arrived. He learned that India was not as primitive as he had assumed, and had not entirely let go of the thread of the Buddha’s teachings of ahimsa. As Gandhi spun his cotton while they sat together, Guruji witnessed a sublime light radiating from the wooden wheel, and he understood how Gandhi was spinning a new fabric of independence from ancient principles of nonviolence.
Gandhi delighted in Guruji’s drumming and incorporated the Japanese chant of namu myoho renge kyo into the twice-daily interfaith prayer meeting at his ashram. Fujii Guruji’s big drum also laid a rhythm at meetings of the Indian National Congress. When the Japanese army had already won Burma and offered to join with the independence movement in ousting the British from India, and Subhas Chandra Bose was recruiting an army with a call for blood as the price of freedom, it was the Japanese monks who pleaded with Gandhi. They felt that Japan, with its militant drive and dictatorial ambitions, had lost its way and was not to be trusted, and the monks helped to sway the decision against inviting the Japanese army into India.
Fujii Guruji visited Rajgir when he first came to India. Animals grazed where the large temple now stands and tigers roamed the hills where he climbed through the brush in the dark each morning to watch the sun rise at Vulture Peak. He made a vow: This spot was where the Buddha’s teaching would begin to find its way back to India. After the war, when India had won independence and travel restrictions on the Japanese were eventually lifted, he returned, and Prime Minister Nehru asked him to help with plans to restore Rajgir as a place of pilgrimage. The construction of the stupa at Rajgir was only marginally easier than the first stupa in Japan, though there were many more people helping. Every bit of cement and gravel, and the water to mix them, had to be carried by hand the three miles up to the site. And the chairlift, which Nehru had specifically requested, also had to be built.
After her husband died, Anju-sama followed Fujii Guruji to India. Once she reached Vulture Peak, she wanted never to leave again. She would die here happily, she said. Her son followed when he was seventeen, and Fujii Guruji ordained him again, properly this time. Okonogi spent a few years in Orissa, building yet another stupa, until he was appointed abbot at Rajgir. The closeness between Anju-sama and Okonogi, and the loving care of their relationship, set the mood in Rajgir. Seeing them together made me feel even more rooted there.
Okonogi was often busy with the responsibilities of his administrative role. The temple and stupa see a steady traffic of tourists and pilgrims daily, and over the years I have watched him organize celebrations that demanded months of work in advance, with visiting dignitaries and big crowds straining the very limited local infrastructure. But whatever else is happening, he is always there to lead the prayers, in the darkness and solitude every morning before dawn, regardless of how late he has arrived the night before or how jetlagged he is. Punctuality is a particular fetish of his, or more precisely, an expression of mindfulness and dedication. In all the years I have known him, he has never once shown up for a train less than twenty-five minutes in advance. I’ve waited with him on the platform countless times, laughing out loud at this ritual.
In spite of his obsession with the clock, he taught me that practice is not something you do at a particular hour, separate from the rest of your life. It is never just recitation and chanting and drumming. Practice is a container and if done right, everything we do, every waking moment, is held inside that container. Every detail of the simplest act, from folding a cloth to picking up a teapot, is worth doing carefully, correctly, with patience and full attention. I think it was part of Okonogi’s own practice to remain ever so steadfastly patient as he taught me to do things right, including the hours we spent on the teapot. His attentiveness was a gift that meant the world to me. Of all the Japanese monks I came to know, he was the only one who picked up the local language beyond a few words for survival, out of a desire to connect with people. In a culture where silence was the norm, he was willing to talk and comfortable doing so. Without preaching or proselytizing, he made everyone feel welcome.
It was Anju-sama who first gave me a hint of what the words we had been reciting all this time might signify. It wasn’t until three years after my first trip to Rajgir that I was able to come by an English translation of the Lotus Sutra. I had begged the monks who traveled back and forth to Japan to bring me a translation, but they had always declined, politely but without wavering. “Just practice,” they told me. “English will only give you the words, it won’t give you the meaning of the sutra.” And as if to prove them right, when I finally received the precious, long-awaited text, and opened it—after first wrapping it in a silk cloth and placing it on my shrine at home in anticipation of a perfectly auspicious full moon—it still mystified me.
The setting was at Vulture Peak, but it seemed to be a different universe, a cosmic playground of kaleidoscopic multiplicity, where the circle of monks that I envisioned was joined by thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—no, now it’s millions—of celestial beings crowding the sky. Logic circled on itself not unlike the heavenly robes they tossed on high, tumbling over and over, and worlds were measured out in mathematical games of infinitude. There was not just the Buddha who had lived and taught here some two and a half millennia ago, but Buddhas beyond number who had lived through all time. All this was reported in an opaquely foreign English that talked of “timely tactfulness” and much else that stymied me.
Meanwhile, Anju-sama helped. She shared what amounted to the first fragments of commentary that helped me to make sense of what I was hearing in Japanese. She answered my questions, explained a word here, a phrase there. She extracted and retold the passages that were most meaningful to her, and her alchemy turned stories into gold. Her favorite was the Bodhisattva Fukyo, a monk who neither studied nor recited. Instead, he stood at the temple gate bowing in reverence to anyone and everyone who passed by, saying “I bow to you because you will be a Buddha one day.” He made no distinction between monks or laymen, men or women, and he bowed with equal reverence to a dog, a cat, a donkey. For his efforts he was mocked and beaten, but he never gave up, and he bowed equally to those who beat him—though from a safe distance—for they too would be Buddhas one day. As would he, the sutra explains.
Even stranger, the alchemy didn’t end there: That one day was no other day than now. All those future Buddhas, whether dogs and donkeys or difficult human beings, were going about their business here and now. As the language of the sutra became familiar, it felt less like exploring a text and more like discovering a universe that pervaded the very air around us. Right here a perfect, loving, otherworldly harmony rubbed elbows with the mundane and the miserable. There was no pure land of peace in some other place, some future time, that I needed to find my way to. I held it in my own mind, my own heart.