I initially came to Japan because I was interested in getting a firsthand experience of Japanese Buddhism. However, by a strange and fortunate twist of fate I was assigned to teach English at a high school in the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago 1,000km south of Tokyo accessible only by boat. Inhabited only since the 1800s and initially settled by Native and European people from Hawai'i, the island's religious scene is sparse, to say the least. A small shrine watches from the mountainside above the town, quiet aside from the standard Shintō holy days and annual sumo festival. Another, even smaller, can be found on the island's south side. Near it, a seldom-visited Pure Land temple sits nestled among hibiscus blossoms in the hills. A small church, built by the US Army after World War II, hosts a Christmas concert and an occasional wedding.
And that's about it. Though it was a significant departure from my initial reason for wanting to live in Japan, looking at photos of the island's electric blue sea and verdant mountains full of endemic plants and animals, there was no question as to whether I would accept the placement or not. Soon enough I found myself riding the 24-hour ferry to Chichijima, the archipelago's largest island and my home for the next three years.
As the ship approached the island, I noticed a triangular mountain hovering watchfully over the bay. Something about its shape and the way it seemed to shield the town, which stretched out toy-like to its left, drew me to it immediately.
Adjusting to life on the island was the most challenging thing I have ever done. With no Japanese skills, no teaching or fulltime work experience, limited knowledge of Japanese culture, and a thousand kilometers of shark-infested ocean on any side, culture shock hit hard and fast. I spent many nights in the island's bars getting too drunk and making a fool of myself, fueling cycles of self-loathing that sat on my shoulders like a wet quilt. I frequently felt depressed, at times even suicidal.
My house was about a 10 minute walk from a beach called Miya-no-hama. Soon, I found that there was a trailhead into the mountains that started from the beach. Without anything better to do until the bars opened, I spent weekends walking on the trail, a little further every week. Following the path as it undulated between a rocky ridgline with otherwordly views and jungles full of strange vegetation, I eventually found that it led to the summit of Mt. Asahi, the mountain I had noticed when I first arrived on the island.
Sitting quietly at the mountaintop and looking down on the village 300 meters below, surrounded by breeze-blown forests waving in dancelike unison on all sides, I felt utterly apart from the mire of identities that caused me so much anxiety and sadness. The sensation could hardly have been more different from my everyday mental experience; I was, like the mountain, free, resilient, and pure. Visiting Mt. Asahi brought out the best in me, and when I returned to the village, I found that though my anxieties about my surroundings persisted, I was a little less bound by them.
As I visited the mountain regularly, I began to notice its rhythms and responses to changes in weather, when and where certain mushrooms appeared or flowers bloomed, how the dirt smelled and felt on my toes. This noticing provoked study; I learned which flora and fauna were native to the island and which were invasive, which mushrooms and herbs were used medicinally elsewhere and how to prepare them.
As more time went on, I noticed that the mountain seemed to have "moods" that were distinct from mine. Some days, like those before and during hurricanes, were raucous with energy, others, like ones during fog-shrouded island winters, were somber and quiet. In other words, I began to experience and regard the mountain as a being with whom I was interacting, an ancient living entity with physical and emotional rhythms something like my own, who was allowing me in and teaching me about itself...and myself.
This process often provoked confusion; there were times when I felt called to do something for the mountain, which had at one point been heavily deforested and damaged by the Pacific War. There were times when I felt outright unwelcome, and just trusted my gut that it was better to turn around and come back the way I'd come as quick as I could. As far as I knew, I was the only one interacting with the mountain in this way, and my own puny relationship was hardly sufficient to know what to do about these interior experiences. It was clear that my materialist, secular approach to Buddhism was not sufficient to deal with the relationship I was being confronted with.
It was just at this time that I encountered Carmen Blacker's The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, and first learned about Shugendō, Japan's ancient way of interacting with nature through an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and indigenous approaches. Recognizing in mainland Japan's traditions an established way of interacting with and benefitting from such relationships with mountains and entranced by the aesthetics of practitioners I saw in Blacker's book, I decided to move to the mainland to experience the tradition for myself.
When I first met my Shugendō teacher at Chichibu Mandara Koya, a Shugen Dōjō in the mountains of western Saitama, I asked him what I should do to start out with an authentic Shugendō practice. Based on Blacker's book, I imagined some style of ritual or meditation, some kind of magic phone line through to the spirits. His answer was, as I've said elsewhere, shockingly simple: "Even a park or place near you is fine, but go outside and interact with nature. Listen to the wind and birds singing, and just turn your awareness toward what's happening around you." In other words, more of what I'd been doing, more of the problem I'd been trying to solve.
But someting in his advice rang true, and I tried to apply it by regularly visiting Mt. Bukō, which, though heavily defaced by limestone quarrying, hovers over Chichibu in a way that instantly reminded me of Mt. Asahi in Chichijima. As I did so, I learned how powerful sensei's advice was.
In spite of suffering the extraction of hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone, in spite of the loss of more than 30 meters (100 feet) of its summit, in spite of its original beech forests being stripped away and replaced by dark and unkempt cedar plantations, I experienced the same kind of connection to the mountain as a living being of profound wisdom and compassion as I had in Chichijima.
Shugendō teaches that the natural world, and indeed the whole universe, is an embodiment of enlightenment in its unspeakable splendor and original purity. Mountains, because of their incredible durability and insistence on serving as ecological matrices means that they embody both the adamantine strength and motherly tenderness which characterize the universe.
Since we humans are made of the same "stuff" as these giants, even simple interaction with them begins a process of tuning and balancing. In Shugendō this is called rokkon shōjō 六根清浄, "purifying the six roots." These six roots are the five sense-locations (eyes, ears, nose, body, and tongue) and conciousness as the reality that pervades and underpins them. Because we humans habitually act based on greed, hatred, and anger, these six qualities have their original purity obscured, like grime on a mirror. This in turn leads us to more unskillful action, then more obscuration, and on and on in and endless, multi-lifetime cycle of trying to catch our own tails.
Mountains, in Shugendō thought, are beings who have gone much, much farther along the path of resolving this cycle of self-defeat. Thus, interacting with them offers us an opportunity to disrupt the cycle in ourselves. By repeatedly directing our senses toward the mountain and allowing them to be overwhelmed by nature's embodiment of our own original purity, we slowly wipe the mirror of our consciousness clean. In Shugendō this is embodied in the figure of Fudō Myō-Ō 不動明王, the Unmoved Wisdom King; he is the adamantine strength of the earth, naturally giving itself for the awakening of all others. Orienting ourselves in this way, we become both capable of hearing what members of our community, both human and otherwise, truly need, and of acting in a way that is genuinely altruistic and effective.
For Shugenja, mountains are our teacher, our dōjō, our realization, and our model for applying it in the world. Without relationships of trust built with mountains over time on their own terms, all of Shugendō's pomp, pageantry, ritual grandeur, and alluring mystery, are nothing but cosplay and empty vessels. The first step, the middle step, and the last step are always the same: go outside, bring yourself face to face with nature as-it-is, and listen.
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