The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage

3. Blessings

3 Blessings A moss-worn Jizō in a field— pilgrim’s road. —shji niwano I was parked on a bench beneath the sakura, or cherry trees, at Yaku ōji temple, admiring my ugly new shoes, when a man carrying a little girl in his arms approached. He said something in Japanese that I didn’t catch, but with a camera in hand, the child in the crook of his arm, and the cherry trees in bloom, it wasn’t hard to figure out what he wanted. “Gomen nasai. Nihongo wa sukoshi shika dekimasen. Wakarimashita ,” I said, employing my minimalist Japanese. “I’m sorry. I speak only a little Japanese. I understand.” I snapped pictures of them posing beneath the trees. The child looked to be about three years old, and like many Japanese children she was extraordinarily pretty—almost doll-like. The man asked in passable English where I was from. I explained that I was a henro from Canada. He seemed impressed. “Ah, henro-san,” the man said, addressing the little girl in his arms. She wasn’t impressed. She was grabbing at blossoms on the swaying branch of one of the trees.“I have been to Canada,” he said.“I visited Vancouver, Banff, and Calgary. Very beautiful.” I complimented him on his English and tried to say how much I liked Japan. “Nihon wa totemo utsukushii desu,” I said. “Japan is very beautiful.” We continued in this stilted fashion for a bit. I learned that he was blessings  a retired schoolteacher from Osaka and that he and his wife were car pilgrims, driving around the island with his son and daughter-in-law, visiting the temples. The child was his magomusume, or granddaughter. He set the little girl at his feet. She clung to his arm, staring up at me with her dark eyes. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a 1,000-yen note—about $10—and handed it to me. “Dōzo, settai,” he said. I was obliged as a pilgrim to accept the offering. I bowed and thanked him, touching the bill to my forehead in the proper gesture. “I tell my granddaughter you are Kōbō Daishi,” the man said. He then smiled and bowed, picked the child up, and walked away. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at the reference to the founder of the Henro Michi. It was a common, if idealistic, way of referring to pilgrims. As the man walked away along the flagstone path with the child back in his arms, the girl watched me over his shoulder . I couldn’t resist: I raised my arms and waggled my hands with my thumbs in my ears and stuck out my tongue. The child’s eyes got even bigger. I imagined that for the rest of her life she’d be puzzled by this vague childhood memory of a hairy-faced“saint” making faces at her. But if the child was disconcerted, so was I at my improbable spiritual elevation, even if it was a pilgrimage commonplace. It was the second time that day that someone had identified me with one of Japan’s greatest religious leaders. Another tradition of the Henro Michi—and another reason that settai is both offered and accepted—is the belief that Kōbō Daishi walks with each pilgrim as a spiritual guide.¹ The unsaid message is: Be careful when you meet a pilgrim, you might also be meeting the saint himself, an encounter that could decide your karma for millennia to come.Watching the man and his granddaughter disappear down the stairs behind one of the temple pagodas, I wondered at his words and all the other coincidences of the day. Yakuōji, Temple Twenty-Three, is perched on a hillside overlooking Hiwasa, a town halfway along the coastline toward Cape Muroto on Shikoku’s southern tip. From the terraced courtyard where I’d been contemplating the marvel of my new shoes, I had a bird’s-eye view across the red-and-gray-tile roofs of the town to the harbor and the Pacific Ocean beyond. It was pleasant to sit there in the late afternoon, absorbing the warmth of the sun, watching the green-hulled fishing  the way of the  temples boats puttering in and out of the harbor, and inhaling the smell of salt and kelp on the occasional breezes that shook the cherry...