2001-07-28 - 5:12 p.m.
You are requested to refrain from using portable telephones inside the temple building

Sylvia is full.
I do not want her noodles.
They will go to waste.
-Haiku by my brother

Well, we've got a lot of catching up to do and only about an hour and a half to do it. Wednesday, I was going to come down here and tell y'all that (among other events) while I was loving and protecting all creation at the temple, some of creation bit me, which of course is the risk you always run. I have nasty mosquito bites punctuating both my legs, and to a small extent my arms.

I hear that mosquitoes are sacred in at least one Eastern religion, because apparently In The Beginning, all the animals held a council and decided that humans were too much trouble and should be gotten rid of. Only the mosquito spoke up for us--we:re so tasty, after all.

Hi ho.

Wednesday we went to another astoundingly beautiful temple, which it seems I won:t have time to tell you about, as I:m interpolating this paragraph at 6;18 and my time runs out at 6:30. Remind me to tell you about it next time. I did take notes, as I:ve been doing all along (if you couldn:t tell0.

Also on Wednesday, we went to the large shopping complex near-ish to the hotel, where I saw some of my favorite Engrish t-shirts ever ("Give me a sing and I will show you/Open your hears--let me come in/MY LOVE YOURS TO KEEP"), heard a fabulous cover of "Billie Jean" by some female J-Pop artist, and was thus so distracted that I almost became an inadvertent shoplifter (the electronic security thing didn:t go off when I walked out without realizing I had a CD in my hand, but it went off when I went back in to return it). Also, there:s a cemetary there. No, I mean it:s right there, in the mall. You go past the racks of Engrish products, like duffel bags that say "ABNEGATE," and take a left at the beer vending machine, and there you are in the cemetary. I am utterly beguiled by that.

So the next day, we went to Nara to see the giant Buddha. Again, for those who are not familiar with this, I feel the need to be a little redundant. We:re talking GIANT BUDDHA here. It may, in fact, be the largest Buddha, or the largest one made of whatever it:s made of, in the world. The structure in which it is housed may or may not be the largest wooden structure in the world. And it is in a Japanese sense a very old structure, although they have to replace the wood periodically, so to a Westerner it is not the "same" building.

My parents visited Nara almost exactly 20 years ago when they came to Japan on the Shoestring Newlywed Package (when my mother was pregnant with me, though she didn:t know it yet). At that time, they saw perhaps one other Westerner there. Some elderly gentleman with a kid in tow took them aside because he wanted the child to have the experience of touching a gaijin.

Things change.

I thought I:d been seeing a lot of other gaijin on the streets of Kyoto, but it was nothing like this, our first *major* tourist attraction of the trip. The place was crawling with European faces. I even heard a tour guide explaining one of the temple artifacts in Spanish (which I listened to rather attentively, since it was the only information on that particular work of art that was in a language I could understand). For my part, I did my best to be as reverent and inconspicuous as possible. I did wash my hands in the running water provided before entering the temple; after brief consideration, I did not pay my respects in any of the other ways provided--mainly the lighting of candles and incense--since I am not actually affiliated with Buddhism. It would be akin to my taking Communion, or participating in a Seder.

Speaking of the ceremonial cleansing water, though, here:s another reason that Japan is cool: Everywhere I turn, I see the mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. For instance, the elegant stone structure with conduits of bamboo to transport the water--and the soaking wet, cheap red t-shirt wrapped around a spout on the side to keep it from leaking. And the ugly plastic pipe carrying the water into the structure.

Westerners hide these things. We don:t think they:re decorous. Buddhists know better.

Anyway. The GIANT BUDDHA. There is not much that I can say about this that would be adequate, or even helpfully descriptive. I approached it slowly--the main Buddha is flanked by two other, not quite as huge, Buddhas, and there are various other guardian spirits and unfinished artworks in the temple, so I made a circuit of the temple starting with one of the side Buddhas before coming face to face with the central one. I did this by accident. I entered the rightmost of the three doors and found that from there, I had to go around to get to the centre. I looked up at the large golden statue above me and only then, out of the corner of my eye, glimpsed the sheer size of the central figure, and realized that I would have to work up to that.

So. The place was chock full of tourists, Japanese and gaijin. It is a tourist attraction. Mostly they took pictures. Of the statues, of each other standing next to the statues. When I:d admired the giant Buddha for a while (which wasn:t easy to do, with all those tourists standing in the doorway taking pictures), I sat down. I had to sit for quite a while, because it was very hot and I was feeling an odd mixture of awe and serious physical discomfort. So I watched the people for a while. They took pictures, and talked in Japanese and English and Spanish and German. Japanese college students led tours and practiced their English. Two people, a young woman and an older man, several minutes apart, stopped when they entered to show religious reverence for the huge presence before them. The woman bowed several times in the familiar way, raising her hands and then pressing them together at her chest to bow down. The man tucked his hat under his arm and bowed once, simply. As the woman moved away from the statue, she dabbed at her face with a shawl she was wearing--she was crying.

It was shortly after that that I felt a shiver, and it wasn:t a sense of the numinous so much as a continuation of the ill feeling I:d had before. I realized that I really wasn:t crazy about the whole standing up thing. My brother felt my forehead and agreed I felt even warmer than one would normally be in this weather. We were about ready to go anyway, so we decided to skip the planned walk through the park to feed the local deer (we get plenty of deer at home, although none of them bow, which one did to me as we left the temple) and trudge toward a taxi.

By the time we:d gotten back to the hotel and I:d taken my temperature (about 100 degrees F, though it took us a while to figure it out since thermometers here are, of course, celsius) and a nap, I realized that some of creation had given me the flu.

Hi ho.

So yesterday was basically a wash. I stayed in bed basically all day, slept a lot, drank lots of water, and didn:t really do anything else, which is how I get rid of the flu, and it worked just as well here as it does back home. Which meant that today I was well enough to go see two more temples. The first, Myoken-ji (don:t quote my spelling on any of these, btw) is actually a temple complex containing, I believe, 22 temples, 8 open to the public. I spent the whole time in Zuihoo-in [double vowels indicate a longer sound, not a different one], "A Zen Monastery with its Gardens dedicated by a Christian FeudalLord." It contained two Zen gardens that interested me much more than the more famous one at Ryoan-ji (which we also saw, and I won:t have time to talk about today), "The Garden of the Cross" and "The Garden of the Blissful Mountain," both combining Christian and Buddhist themes (the booklet I was given when I went in said of the second that "The motif may be 'The Sermon on the Mount' if the ocean be taken as the vast sea of sinful humanity").

But the strongest feeling I got there was just how much I was Not From Around Here. The place was full of locals talking among themselves, inside and outside the temple buildings. I really was almost the only gaijin. I wasn:t sure where I was allowed to go, what I was supposed to be doing. So I kept quiet and contemplated the gardens. I wasn:t actually too bothered by the fact that I was conspicuous and ignorant.

When I moved on looking for another temple, I stopped and looked around in a doorway, and an old lady going past me turned to me and said, "Tea ceremony?" I sort of mumbled something, and she pointed to where she was going and repeated, "Tea ceremony?" I said no thanks, I was just wandering around, but thank you, and she went on. After a minute, I thought, yes, actually, tea ceremony, so I followed where she had gone. I saw from the side a gathering of people, mostly women in old-style kimonos, talking among themselves. No, I thought, no tea ceremony after all. I am Not From Around Here. Wouldn:t be proper without a little more preparation.

But the funny thing was, again, I didn:t feel badly about it. It usually upsets me, perhaps disproportionately, to be an outsider. But here, I was voluntarily stepping away from the proceedings, and it was no problem. That just wasn:t what I was going to do right now. There were other things I could do instead. So I went and did them.

Boy, did I want to write about Ryoan-ji, and the Silver Pavillion from Wednesday. Guess you:ll all have to tune in tomorrow. I:m more than out of time.

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