Hawaii’s first Japanese immigrants came to Kauai in the late 19th century to labor in the sugarcane fields. In a new environment and under harsh conditions, they found ways to keep alive their traditions and cultural life. In the Lawai Valley, in a place long considered sacred by Native Hawaiians, they created a most extraordinary example of this.

Beginning in 1904, Japanese workers built along a high, steep hillside a miniature version of the 750-mile Shikoku Pilgrimage, associated with the Buddhist saint Kukai (774–835), honorifically known as Kobo Daishi. The Shikoku Pilgrimage comprises 88 temples, and its course symbolizes the journey to complete enlightenment. The path snaking up the Lawai hillside has 88 small shrines, stone images—often hybrid, sometimes playful—of buddhas and bodhisattvas. One can traverse the path in as little as half an hour, but one might well feel drawn to take time to stop along the way to admire the shrines and perhaps offer a bow or quick chant as well.

Over the years, as workers moved away, the site fell into disrepair. But beginning in 1991, under the leadership of a diminutive dynamo named Lynn Muramoto, and with the work of hundreds of volunteers, the Lawai International Center has refurbished the site and provided it with a renewed vision as a place of contemplation and healing open to all.

The post Sacred Sites: Lawai Valley appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It was a crisp Sunday morning in late January. I stood with a group of pilgrims lined up before a village shrine at the base of Mount Ontake. Our white robes pressed down fleeces and bulky jackets that threatened to spill out from their cotton sleeves. Suddenly, we were ordered to prostrate and bow our heads to the ground. I felt grateful to have worn ski pants as I rested my knees on a footpath of uneven cobblestone and snow. A shrill voice pierced the air, and we listened with rapt attention. This was the first oracle of the day.

The group comprised young men and women, couples, friends, and elders. We shared deep bonds forged out of neighborhood parish gatherings, chartered bus rides to Ontake, and strenuous ascents up the mountain. This and other séances over the course of the day would provide us with close encounters with Buddhist divinities and departed loved ones. Having left behind our ordinary lives in the metropolis of Nagoya, we were assembled here for another day of shared miracles on one of Japan’s most sacred peaks.

Oracle and séance are not rituals that readily align with modern notions of Buddhist practice. Those notions, however, were conceived by 19th-century intellectuals, many outside the tradition, who put forth a narrow vision of the Buddhist path. Amidst the harsh environment of a winter mountain, the pilgrims in this group were proving just how narrow that vision is.

Rising above 10,000 feet at the southern end of Japan’s Central Alps, Mount Ontake is massive in terms of elevation and surface area. It is also an active volcano, a trait that hikers and devotees were tragically reminded of when a deadly eruption killed sixty-three people there on September 27, 2014. It would take several years before pilgrims felt safe returning to the mountain.

But today’s group had been visiting the mountain long before the eruption. While some members had recently joined, others were carrying on a tradition that stretched back generations in their families. Today had begun with quiet, individual prayers at Shusshō Motogumi, the group’s temple in Nagoya, shortly before 7 a.m. Boarding a chartered bus, we journeyed several hours along highways and roads that eventually led us along a broad river valley rising into the mountains. 

The first dramatic event I witnessed that morning occurred at the village of Satomiya, which serves as the traditional entrance to the Ontake massif. In this familiar ritual, a lead guide acts as a vessel for a deceased visiting spirit or mountain deity, and an assisting guide orchestrates the encounter to ensure the safety of the spirit medium. On this particular occasion, the mythological Shinto deities Izanagi and Izanami entered the body of our lead guide. They welcomed us and noted that the weather would be calm for the day. Assisting guides performed rapid-fire mudra signs, dialogued with the visiting deities, offered saké, and instructed us on when to prostrate, rise, and so forth. Throughout this séance, our lead guide stood bolt upright and held a festooned paper wand (gohei) in front of his face to conceal the deities from the human world. 

Witnessing the presence of the divine, everyone in the group bowed and listened intently. The encounter seemed to take us out of our mundane reality and into intimate proximity with the sacred. After the deities’ farewell and the medium’s return to consciousness, life resumed. Jokes, banter, smartphone selfies, and stumbles across an icy road back to the bus.

The next event was equally dramatic, if not harrowing. Above the road were narrow steps leading to a waterfall flowing through curtains of ice. Our lead guide stripped down to a loin cloth and submerged himself under the waterfall, a regular practice in Japanese pilgrimage but not so common in the dead of winter. As one element in a regiment of ascetic cultivation (shugyō), it is intended to purify and align the practitioner with the gods (in this case, the wrathful Fudō Myōō, known in India as Acala). 

As our guide locked hands in prayer, the group vigorously chanted the Heart Sutra and other incantations to ensure his protection. Afterward, he was embraced with towels and escorted to an outdoor changing stall. 

Lunch was followed by an ascent up snow-laden steps to a cluster of memorial stones. The lower slopes of Ontake are populated by thousands of tall memorial stones dedicated to the spirits (reijin) of former guides. They provide a contact zone for meetings between the living and the dead, or in Japanese, this realm and that realm. As we gathered around one stone and adorned it with flowers and photos of a deceased member, a séance began. In an instant of transformation, our lead guide was washed over by the gentle voice and mannerisms of one of their departed guides. She came in kindred spirit, delivering messages and counsel to dear friends. Some wept, others smiled in reassurance. A few laughs erupted when she offered a word of welcome to the visiting foreigner (“Gaijin-san”). An assisting guide discreetly whispered an introduction into our lead guide’s ear to acquaint us.

Ontake has a long history of Buddhist itinerants frequenting its slopes to perform ascetic rituals, including seclusion and fasting, chants under waterfalls, and prayers to the mountain’s pantheon of buddhas and local gods. Ordinary pilgrims did not venture up its higher reaches until two ascetics guided their followers up the mountain in the late 18th century: Kakumei (1718–1786), traveling from the Kansai region in 1784, and Fukan (1731–1801), arriving from Kantō in 1794. Generations of pilgrims have since traced their roots back to them. Over time, they formed pilgrimage associations that collectively worshiped the mountain and its resident deities. Under the leadership of pilgrimage guides (sendatsu), they conducted services at neighborhood temples and on the mountain. It is important to note, here, though, that women were historically barred from climbing many sacred peaks, including Ontake, as misogynistic discourse over notions of female impurity led to fears of invoking the mountain gods’ wrath should they enter. Although the government banned these restrictions in 1872, ideas about impurity, especially menstruation, continue to surface, and religious institutions remain androcentric.

Worship at Ontake has typically blended Buddhism, Shinto, and Shugendō (Japan’s premier mountain-based tradition). Ascetic priests and itinerants historically performed services on behalf of various deities and spirits centered on appeasement, gratitude, and teachings of the Buddha. They prayed to divine embodiments of the natural world (boulders, waterfalls, trees, mountains), ancestral spirits, numinous dragons, and even vengeful ghosts (who required pacification). In doing so, they brought local deities and those who worshiped them into the Buddhist worldview. 

Local mountain deities were believed to dwell in symbiosis with the Mahayana pantheon of awakened buddhas and bodhisattvas. Collectively, they provided water to the plains below via the mountain streams, and when summoned by the spiritually advanced, they granted mountain priests heightened abilities in divination, healing, and merit accumulation. As pilgrimage to sacred peaks became widespread in the 18th century, more and more people ventured to higher elevations to meet and pray to the divinities themselves. 

Then, religious sites in Japan underwent a radical transformation in the late 19th century. The Meiji government (1868–1912) promulgated the separation of Buddhism and Shinto in 1868, a policy that had sweeping effects on religious communities nationwide. In response, the Ontake pilgrimage associations nominally became Shinto organizations, but this did not stop them from engaging in Buddhist practices and beliefs. In their parish temples and on the mountain, they continued to invoke buddhas and bodhisattvas in prayer, chant sutras, perform mudras, and wear prayer beads. In the subsequent century and a half, pilgrimage continues to encompass elements of Buddhism and Shinto. Because neither tradition is maintained by a strong sense of personal, communal, or institutional identity, the majority of practitioners do not see this type of synthesis as problematic.

In the early 20th century, the Ontake pilgrimage rivaled that of any other mountain in Japan, including Mount Fuji, drawing tens of thousands of pilgrims from Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, and beyond every summer. That said, annual government survey statistics reveal a long-term decline since at least the 1970s, which can be attributed to the country’s aging population, occupational shifts away from self-employment and small businesses (operated by many devotees), and disrupted community and family networks as younger generations gravitate from towns and villages toward the major cities.

My introduction to Ontake worship had come from vivid, if not unsettling, accounts dating back to the late 19th century. As visitors from Europe and the United States landed on Japanese soil with increasing frequency, some chronicled their explorations for a Western readership captivated by the Far East. These impressions provided illuminating windows into Japanese ritual life but, at the same time, eerily placed their subjects in realms of the exotic and nonmodern. The Bostonian businessman, author, and astronomer Percival Lowell began his famous book Occult Japan: or The Way of the Gods, an Esoteric Study of Japanese Personality and Possession (1894) with a description of a “strange” and “ungodly” séance on the summit of Ontake. He summed it up in sweeping fashion: “There proved to exist a regular system of divine possession, an esoteric cult imbedded in the very heart and core of the Japanese character and instinct, with all the strangeness of that to us enigmatical race.”

Two years later, Walter Weston, a British Anglican minister celebrated as the founder of modern alpinism in Japan, offered another account. While many of his writings portray mountain worship in Japan in respectful terms, he, too, mused on the “weirdness” of a series of Buddhist mudras performed on Ontake in a similar séance: “Each twist, each knot, has its own meaning, and resembles a sort of dumb alphabet, spoken with all the expression that physical action can put into it. For language it is really meant to be addressed to those invisible powers of evil against whose malevolence the pilgrim is appealing for protection.” At first glance, the accounts of Lowell and Weston reflect a sense of cultural superiority and Orientalism common at the time. On a deeper level, however, they represent formative ideas about what constitutes acceptable forms of religious faith and what gets excluded. 

Defining religion as a distinct component of the human experience, 19th-century Western intellectuals naturally drew from their Protestant values and Enlightenment ideals, privileging textual authority over lived religion, belief over ritual, and spirituality over materiality. Popular practices outside formal institutions—divinations, exorcisms, and séances like the ones on Mount Ontake—were deemed superstitious and needed to be expunged from religion. 

Under this thinking, theologians like Edwin Arnold, Henry Olcott, and Paul Carus attempted to “correct” contemporary Asian Buddhism, promoting their vision of a rational, ethical, and scientific tradition at its core. In Japan, interlocutors like the cosmopolitan Zen priest Shaku Sōen joined this movement at events like the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. As scholar Donald Lopez puts it, there was no place for superstition and unenlightened behavior in this new convergence of Buddhism and science.      

Protestant Buddhism and its paternalistic impulses do not die quickly. Nor does its bedfellow, Orientalism. And long after the dismissive remarks of 19th-century visitors to Japan, there has still been little attempt to understand the ritual life of Ontake pilgrimage. As I witnessed on Ontake firsthand, however, these practices and the surrounding communities reveal a broader, more inclusive scope of how we might understand the Buddhist path.

The culmination of the Sunday in January came at a goma temple in a series of powerful rituals. The goma is an empowering fire ritual that traces back to ancient India, where it was adopted into Buddhism. Our lead guide, taking bundles of wooden sticks purchased by parishioners and dedicated to themselves and their loved ones, sat cross-legged before the altar and built a lurching Jenga-like tower that rose to his eye level. Flames spiraled into the air, higher with each successive build, licking the ventilation shaft in the ceiling. On two occasions, flaming sticks pitched off the tower and dropped onto his lap and between his seat and the altar. Smoke encircled the room as the group vigorously chanted sutras and mantras, rattled bells, and blew conch-shell trumpets to help control the fire while enhancing its efficacious benefits. One parishioner collected our prayer beads so he could wave them through the fire, purifying and emblazing them with healing powers that we could rub onto aching limbs and joints.

As the fire dimmed, all fell quiet. A deity had once again taken over the body and voice of our guide. Springing from the seat cushion in a deft 180-degree turn, Nyoirin Kannon faced us and announced her presence. Typically female in Japan, Nyoirin is one form of the bodhisattva Kannon (Ch. Guanyin, Skt. Avalokiteshvara). She is especially popular among women and parents for fertility, childbirth, and healthy children. Embodying her, our guide sank into the form of a tender, feminine figure gracing the room with her divine presence. All leaned forward in quiet anticipation.

We were tapped to line up to commune with Nyoirin Kannon one at a time. She spoke to each person with the compassion emblematic of a loving bodhisattva. Each encounter brought an intimate exchange of soothing whispers, healing rubs to arms and thighs, and responding nods of recognition and gratitude. As a participant observer, I felt somewhat uneasy when called forward myself. I politely nodded through most of her counsel, yet was taken off guard when she informed me of my grandmother’s presence by our side. Nyoirin’s departure was sad and protracted, like a parent saying goodbye to a child. She thanked me for making the trip from Fukuoka and invited me to return for the group’s summer ascent of Ontake.

I reflected on the day on my return home. Its events were not simply empty rituals passed down from the previous generation and now upheld out of familial obligation. They did not feel like superstitious forays into the strange and exotic, as earlier Western intellectuals would have us believe. Instead, this brief Sunday pilgrimage conferred simple, if not powerful, touchstones of joy. The chance to reconnect with a departed loved one, to pray for an auspicious year, to be surrounded by a caring community, to share a delicious meal—as well as several gifts rare in this world—visits from distant deities, healing hands, and for a few, the ability to host spirits of the divine in their bodies. 

The post Reimagining the Path: Buddhist Séances and Oracles on a Japanese Mountain appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For 50 years, Pico Iyer has been traveling the globe, seeking out sacred sites from the hidden shrines of Tehran to the funeral pyres of Varanasi. Iyer believes that travel can help us confront questions that we tend to avoid or bypass when we’re at home, forcing us out of our usual routines and bringing us into contact with the “crisscrossing of cultures.” In his latest book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, Iyer investigates how different cultures have understood the notion of paradise, recounting his travels to places of religious conflict as far flung as Jerusalem, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Ladakh.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Iyer to discuss the risks of the commercialization of paradise, the power of not knowing, and how we can find paradise in the midst of impermanence.

James Shaheen (JS): To start, what is the half-known life?

Pico Iyer (PI): For me, the half-known is the source of everything essential in life: when we fall in love, when we’re terrified, when we have an epiphany. We can’t begin to explain these things, and yet they determine our lives much more than the things that we seem to be on top of. We might tell ourselves we’re masters of the universe, but I think we’re really servants of the universe. I almost imagine us living inside a tiny lighted tent in the middle of a vast darkness under the stars. We steady ourselves by holding on to the little that we know. But really, we’re defined and shaped by this vastness we can’t begin to understand. And so I suppose the book is a call to humility and a reminder to address the things we can’t hope to know because that’s where the substance of our life takes place.

JS: The second half of the title is “In Search of Paradise.” What is this notion of paradise that we’re searching for?

PI: Like happiness or peace or calm, paradise is not found by looking for it. Instead, it comes upon us, or we put ourselves in the right place where it can visit us. In fact, our notions of paradise can often keep us from paradise. Paradise, by definition, has to be open to everybody. This is at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism. And so the notion that I have a paradise that excludes you is already an expulsion from paradise. I was writing this book in response to an ever more divided world in which each group has its own, often strict notion of the paradise that awaits them but that excludes almost all of us. And so in that sense, to think that you know what paradise is and that other people don’t know is a great obstruction, which is why I’m happier to say I don’t know. It’s what we don’t know that really brings us together more than what we know.

At the very heart of this book is the framework that His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes in his book Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. My sense is that he has witnessed so much violence and dogmatism perpetrated in the name of religion that he wants to rescue us from some of the doctrines or imprisoning notions that religion can bring. He’d like to take us back to a human reality of responsibility and kindness and interdependence where, freed of our notions of paradise, we can see that we belong to everybody else.

JS:  In the book, you write at length about your travels to Varanasi. Can you say more about what your time in Varanasi taught you about paradise?

PI: Urban India can be like a psychedelic Hieronymus Bosch painting with all the world and its contradictions put together, and nowhere more so than Varanasi. There are bodies burning and people performing Hindu ceremonies and everything in human existence compacted in a very small space. I’m a Hindu of Indian descent, but I didn’t know what to do with Varanasi’s chaos and intensity.

One day, as I was walking down to the ghats by the Ganges River, suddenly there appeared two monks in Tibetan robes. One of them said to me, “Isn’t this glorious? Isn’t this wonderful? This is what life is all about. This is human existence.” Both of them were just exulting in this human swell. It was like a wake-up call: Don’t run away from this reality. This reality is where we have to find our paradise. This is what we have to work with. And this is what I have to train my eyes, my mind, my soul, and my being to appreciate as the best possibility I can find.

One thing I found in Varanasi was that the City of Death is a city of joy. As devout Hindus are carrying dead bodies to be burned by the Ganges, they’re not despairing. They’re in a state of exaltation and gratitude that they have the chance to commit the decaying body to the holy waters.

E. M. Forster said, “Death destroys a man but the idea of death saves him.” In other words, we have to make our peace with death. And so Varanasi, the City of Death, seemed the appropriate place for me to find what I could trust as a viable paradise, not on the far side of reality, but right at the heart of it.

I suppose my feeling is not just that paradise has to be in the middle of life, but it also has to exist in the face of death. I don’t trust a paradise that writes death out of the equation because, as the Buddha taught, death is the one inarguable fact of life. During the pandemic, living so close to death made me ask, How do we live in this world of uncertainty? This was the koan that the pandemic presented to us, but it’s also what life presents to us. This state of uncertainty is the only home that we have on Earth—and therefore the home we are obliged to make comfortable. How can we turn the life we know, with all its difficulties and its impermanence, into the best kind of paradise we can have here on Earth? It’s almost a pilgrimage into real life. How can we affirm life and throw our arms around it, even as so much is falling away?

JS: At the end of the book, you say that you decided to stop seeking out holy places and instead let life come to you. Can you tell us more about this decision?

PI: That was the culmination of the book. Six miles from the mad intensity and carnival of Varanasi is Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first discourse. When I was in Varanasi, the Dalai Lama was giving a series of talks in Sarnath on Shantideva’s The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. I went to go hear him speak, and it struck me that the bodhisattva, by definition, is somebody whose life project is to walk away from paradise back toward the rest of us to help us in any way she can. Once, when I was sitting in on an audience that His Holiness was having with a Korean man, the Korean man was so moved to see the Dalai Lama that he said, “You will go to the Pure Land!” The Dalai Lama replied by quoting the First Dalai Lama and said, “I don’t want to go to the Pure Land. I want to serve where I am needed.” And of course, the Dalai Lama lives that in every breath.

To go to Sarnath in the middle of the chaos of Varanasi and hear about the bodhisattva committing himself to return to the real world was really the lesson I needed to hear. It taught me that paradise is the place we find when we’re no longer longing for paradise. And so I was so grateful that in the great Hindu holy city, I chanced to hear a Buddhist teacher reminding me, “Don’t look anywhere other than right here, right now, for whatever you want to find.”

♦

Listen to the full interview below.

The post Let Life Come to You appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week and next.

Aung San Suu Kyi Sentenced to Four More Years in Prison

On Monday, Myanmar’s deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to four more years in prison, on top of the two years she had previously been given for charges of incitement and non-compliance with COVID-19 restrictions during the 2020 election campaign. This time, the military charged Suu Kyi for the possession of walkie-talkies and for violating COVID-19 restrictions when she failed to wear a face mask when walking through a crowd of supporters, even though she was wearing a face shield. According to the New York Times, Amnesty International said that the walkie-talkie possession charges “suggest the military is desperate for a pretext to embark on a witch-hunt and intimidate anyone who challenges them.”

72-Year-Old Thai Monk Nears the End of a 1,500-Kilometer Barefoot Trek

Luang Ta Bun Chuen, a 72-year-old Thai monk, is nearing the end of a 1,500-kilometer barefoot pilgrimage across Thailand from Phuket to his home province of Nakhon Phanom. The monk arrived in Nakhon Ratchasima province on Tuesday morning, where people had waited on the roadside to receive his blessing. Those waiting described Luang Ta Bun Chuen as a monk who was devoted to doing good deeds and had renounced all material possessions—only accepting gifts of water during his journey. In accordance with the Buddhist monastic code, Luang Ta Bun Chuen undertakes a pilgrimage every year.   

Buddhists Pilgrims in Japan Test Use of a Robotic Suit That Assists Walking 

Buddhist pilgrims in Zentsuji, Japan recently tested a new robotic exoskeleton called Walk Mate to see if the gear could support religious pilgrims traversing rough terrain. According to Yoshihiro Miyake, a biophysics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who created the mechanical exoskeleton, the Walk Mate can add power to a person’s limbs in sync with their pace and gait through a control device on the back and motors on the shoulders and waist. The outdoor walking experiment took place in mid-December on a sloped road that connects the Mandaraji and Shusshakaji temples along the “henro” pilgrimage route, which traces the footsteps of Kobo Daishi (774-835). A priest at Zentsuji temple described the suit as a “modern technological version of the walking stick,” and a pilgrim in her 50s who climbed a 500-meter slope in the suit called the technology “marvelous.” “I was worried about my weak right knee, but I could walk just like healthy people do,” she said. 

Psychotherapist Mark Epstein’s New Book Comes Out 

Psychotherapist Mark Epstein’s new book, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, came out on Tuesday.  The book traces a year of therapy sessions and the Buddhist themes that arise. Epstein also appeared on Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s monthly podcast featuring leading voices in the contemporary Buddhist world, this week. Listen to the episode below. 

Coming Up

January 14-17: Dharma Centers—including the Zen Studies Society in New York, the Winding Path Sangha in Iowa, and the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts—host online retreats honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. 

January 26: Sharon Salzberg and the Holistic Life Foundation host a workshop titled “Mindfulness for Families” where they’ll teach simple, fun techniques that you can use with your kids—in the moment—to release stress and difficult emotions while promoting relaxation and resilience. Register here.

January 31: To conclude Tricycle Meditation Month, meditation teacher Myoshin Kelley hosts a live Q&A at 1 pm ET where participants can ask any questions they have about their meditation practice. Register here.

The post Aung San Suu Kyi Sentenced to Four More Years in Prison appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Paolo Coluzzi, author of the recently released Buddhism and Pilgrimage: A Journey to the Four Sites, has been interested in Buddhism since he was 17 years old. Growing up in Italy, he became unsatisfied with aspects of Catholicism at an early age and was immediately drawn to Buddhism after discovering a book by Christmas Humphreys, the founder of the London Buddhist Society, in the library of his secondary school. From there, he read as much as he could on the subject, took up meditation, and explored other traditions, including Hinduism. But it wasn’t until he moved to Brunei to teach and started backpacking around Asia that he reached a deeper level of connection with Buddhism. “Everything changed,” Coluzzi recalled of this time in his life, “because for the first time I could really touch Buddhism.”

Now a professor at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Coluzzi recently transformed a manuscript from his travels into the latest installment of Mud Pie Book’s “Buddhism and” series. Buddhism and Pilgrimage, which came out at the beginning of September, focuses on the four sacred sites in Buddhism: Lumbini, where the Buddha was born; Bodhgaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where the Buddha began to teach; and Kushinagar, where the Buddha died. Each chapter begins with an introduction, putting the pilgrimage site in context with a story about the Buddha, and then leads into a journal entry from the author’s travels to the site. Tricycle caught up with Coluzzi to learn more about the writer behind the diary entries and how practitioners can make the most of a time when pilgrimage remains challenging for most. 

Why is pilgrimage important to Buddhists and why did you want to write about it? It’s not an obligation. You can be a very good Buddhist without ever traveling to India. But I think in general pilgrimage has been such an important part of the spiritual path because the effort to get there gives you a kind of strength. For me, it gave me so much energy when I was in Bodh Gaya, for example. The meditations I had there were so amazing and so deep. Even now when I feel a little bit down for some reason, one of the ways I cheer myself up is thinking about my travels, especially to India. If you manage to take it easy and just enjoy what you’re experiencing, be open to everything, and not try to be too much in control, it’s an amazing way of traveling.

Do you have a regular meditation practice? I do Transcendental Meditation because I see it as a practical thing that gives me energy and it’s only 20 minutes. But I also do Buddhist meditation when I can take more time. I’ve done all-day retreats. I love both. I remember a few years ago I had a chance to talk to [meditation teacher] Ajahn Brahm and I asked him about Transcendental Meditation and said, “I practice it every day. Is that OK?” He said, “That’s fine, if that works for you.” Then he stopped and looked at me and said, “However, learn Buddhist meditation as well. Then you have two different tools instead of one.” 

Travel remains difficult for most of the world due to the pandemic. What do you suggest to people whose ability to embark on a pilgrimage is limited these days? What I’m trying to do is make the most of it, to take advantage of it, and to use it as an excuse to think about things a little bit differently. Of course I miss traveling a lot but at the same time, I had time for this book and for reading. I walk more around where I live. There is a good side to this as well. 

And you can read my book! Or anything about Buddhists sites in India and Asia. And start planning. Everything is impermanent right?

Do you think you’ll stay in Asia or return home to Italy or somewhere else one day? I wouldn’t mind finding somewhere else in Asia or if I had the chance to go to Europe either and try to do something for Buddhism. There are a thousand different spiritual paths and that’s fine, but I would be happy if people knew a little bit more about Buddhism because I think it can give so much to society and to the world. It has to me. I think if everybody followed even the very basic five Theravada precepts, I think we would live in a different world. The very fact that Buddhism tells you that you should not base your happiness on your material things, on possessing or attachment, if that was put into practice in some way, it would change society.

♦

To learn more about Buddhism and pilgrimage, read about why Buddhists go on pilgrimage, the four sacred sites of Buddhism, the climate threat to Buddhism’s holy sites, and an interview with Stephen Batchelor on his book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, which is all about pilgrimage.  

The post Journey to Buddhism’s Four Most Sacred Sites with the New Book<i> Buddhism and Pilgrimage </i> appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites:

• Deaths in Bihar caused by the June 2019 heatwave: 184
• Percentage population growth in Bodhgaya from 1961 to 2001: 450%
• Cost of an 8-day Buddhist tour on the Mahaparinirvan Express: $1,155-$1,305
• World Bank funding for new visitor facilities in Sarnath, India: $13.5 million
• Percentage of India’s population projected to be exposed to extreme heat waves in 2100: 70% (up from 2% in 2020)
• Annual visitors to the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, Bihar, India: 4 million

View past installments of Buddhism by the Numbers: COVID-19, The Economics of Mindfulness, Hawaii, California, Virginia, Kentucky, South Korea, and the African Great Lakes Region. 

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Data from India Today, Bihar Urban Development and Housing Department, Times of India, MIT News, IDN-InDepthNews, and Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation Ltd.

The post Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Just as religious tourism has emerged as an economic force in poor regions of India and Nepal, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a chill on the Buddhist pilgrimage circuit. But the question about tourism’s return may be a matter of if rather than when, because another danger threatens to forever alter the holy sites: the devastating effects of climate change.

On his deathbed, the Buddha told his followers about four places “that a pious person should visit and look upon with feelings of reverence” (Digha Nikaya 16.5): his birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal; the site of his enlightenment in Bodhgaya, India; the site of his first sermon in Sarnath, India; and his place of death in Kushinagar, India. The call to this sacred journey, which nearly died out in the 12th century with the decline of Buddhism in India, was revived during the colonial era and further invigorated from the mid-20th century to the present. National and state governments have embraced the route to boost the area’s economic prospects, developing the circuit to attract more visitors, and millions of domestic and international pilgrims have visited the four sites in recent years.

But as global warming accelerates, these four Buddhist pilgrimage sites—all inland, in low-lying developing areas in subtropical climates—are expected to face higher temperatures, floods, and droughts. Several scientific studies have predicted that climate change will have an outsized impact on the Himalayas and the Indian subcontinent, where temperatures will warm faster than the global average despite the region’s low emissions. Residents and pilgrims alike have been already forced to adapt to changing conditions. As warming trends continue, they may reshape pilgrims’ visitation patterns, destabilize agriculture, limit food and water availability, bring new pests and diseases, and threaten the livelihood, health, and lives of local communities.

But there is some good news: the four landlocked pilgrimage sites are not directly exposed to cyclones or rising sea levels.

“The primary climate impact [on these areas] will be changes in temperature and rainfall,” which are both predicted to increase and become more variable, said Dr. Mandira Shrestha, a civil engineer and the program coordinator of climate services at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Global average temperatures have risen approximately 1.1°C above preindustrial levels, and radical steps to curb emissions would be needed to keep warming below 1.5°C by 2100, according to the UN; “business as usual” scenarios forecast a devastating rise in temperature to 2.6 to 4.1 degrees of warming by 2100. But even in the best-case scenario of a 1.5°C rise, “in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region it would be likely at least 0.3°C higher,” Dr. Shrestha told Tricycle.

This disproportionate impact is compounded by the limited ability of developing nations to cope with the tremendous challenges of climate change. The region’s already hot climate cannot warm much more before its warmest days become deadly for humans and other living creatures. During heat waves, the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity) could reach fatal levels with much greater frequency—100 to 250 times more often in the tropics and subtropics by 2080, according to a 2017 Columbia University study, which also found Northeast India to be one of the regions most at risk.

Hotter temperatures are already a fact of life on the pilgrimage circuit. In June 2019, India, Nepal, and Pakistan saw record-breaking heat waves with highs of 113°F, killing 184 people in the state of Bihar, home to Bodhgaya and the ruins of the ancient Buddhist university of Nalanda. [In May 2020, temperatures in Bihar reached 110 °F.]

Rainfall has increased but become more variable, a trend expected to accelerate in the coming decades: periods of drought are interspersed with bursts of intense rainfall that inundate low-lying areas of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the onset and duration of the annual monsoon are becoming increasingly unpredictable. The recent boom in development along the circuit is expected to exacerbate the situation, with nonabsorbent pavement intensifying floods and an increased demand for water contributing to greater droughts. Flooding and drought in turn reduce annual harvests, a dangerous scenario in densely populated and heavily agricultural states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Visitors should be aware of their “impact on these fragile places” and make “mindful choices.”

The Nepalese monk Ven. Metteyya Sakyaputta, vice chairman of the Lumbini Development Trust, told Tricycle that during the last few decades of construction in the area Lumbini’s “tree cover disappeared very quickly, [and] wetlands and water bodies were reduced.” And in the summer of 2019, he said, “most of [Lumbini’s] taps ran dry and the local government had to impose a water ban for irrigation.” Tap water is no longer potable, so the town is littered with disposable water bottles. (This situation led to a new initiative: employing local women to recycle these water bottles and other plastics into meditation blankets.) Meanwhile, at Tergar Monastery in Bodhgaya, monk Karma Timmi observed that the water table has dropped and fluctuated noticeably in recent years, forcing the monastery’s residents to dig deeper wells. Scientists believe the water table changes are due to water overuse, land use changes, and drought.

A hallmark of climate change, experts have warned, is the onset of simultaneous and cascading disasters. For instance, warming seas trigger more frequent and more powerful storms, like cyclone Amphan, which in May 2020 killed at least 106 in eastern India and Bangladesh and put survivors at risk of contracting the coronavirus in crowded shelters. To make matters worse, Amphan and other tropical storms create ideal breeding conditions for locusts, like the massive swarms that originated in Yemen this year and devoured crops across northwestern India.

What does the circuit’s vulnerability to climate change mean for potential pilgrims? Ven. Metteyya Sakyaputta thinks that visitors should be aware of their “impact on these fragile places” and make “mindful choices” (searching out ethical travel agents and hotels, for instance). He hopes that the pilgrimage sites will “become a source of inspiration for people in this region to seek a sustainable and peaceful way of life.”

♦

Related: Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites

The post The Climate Threat to Buddhism’s Holy Sites appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhist pilgrimage usually entails the renunciation of our familiar, comfortable world to encounter an environment infused with blessings. In this series, however, we’ll explore how to frame our ordinary, daily lives within a context of sacredness and openness. By unpacking the Himalayan Buddhist understanding of how we move through and interact with sacred spaces, Lama Elizabeth Monson reveals how to experience each moment of our lives as an opportunity for transformation and awakening.  

Lama Elizabeth Monson, PhD., has studied in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism for nearly 30 years. She is a dharma teacher in the Kagyu tradition, Spiritual Co-Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, and Managing Teacher at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in New Hampshire. She holds a Doctorate in Religious Studies with a focus in Tibetan Buddhism and Ethics from Harvard University and has lectured at Harvard Divinity School.

The post Pilgrimage Unbound appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One early morning last November, pilgrims sat shoulder to shoulder in a small ritual hall at a Buddhist temple on a remote mountain in Japan. As the presiding monk, dressed in black and yellow robes, tossed pieces of wood into a fire pit and chanted a mantra to three sculpted guardian figures in the front of the room, another monk in the corner beat a taiko drum with increasing intensity. The Buddha burns away the root of our suffering, we were told, as we pray for our wishes to come true. My wife, Liz, and I prayed that our baby wouldn’t start to cry.

Our prayers were soon answered. Our one-year-old daughter, Lila, was transfixed but not afraid. Often squirmy, here she sat completely still as the energy in the room rose. I could see the flames flickering in her wide eyes as she rocked her head to the rhythm of the drum and the chanting, entranced by an ancient ritual.

“She seemed to understand that as well as anyone else,” my wife said after we returned to our room.

We were seeing something, something both strange and compelling, for the first time. Like how Lila must see everything.

My family was staying in Koyasan, a small mountain town in southeastern Japan considered by Shingon Buddhists to be a Pure Land on earth. Founded over 1,200 years ago by the monk Kukai (known honorifically as Kobo Daishi), one of Japan’s most significant religious figures, the town of Koyasan sits in the middle of eight mountain peaks at a site selected because of the geography’s resemblance to a lotus flower. The town is tiny—you can walk across it in less than 30 minutes—but it is home to 117 temples, 52 of which are shukubo, or temples that offer overnight lodging to pilgrims. While we were there, a monk told me that two hundred years ago there were more than two thousand temples on the mountain, but most of them had burned down.

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Koyasan was the farthest we traveled from Tokyo during our two-week family trip to Japan. My wife was in Tokyo attending an anime conference for work, and Lila and I were tagging along. Zen literature, art, and practice had been the North Star in my personal meaning-making journey for more than a decade, and I had jumped at the opportunity to give deeper texture to the experiences that Zen had fostered in my life. I wanted to walk through the temples of Kyoto and, though Koyasan was Shingon and not Zen, visit a sacred Buddhist mountain.

It felt good to be so far away from home. The previous year had been a time of returning, settling down, bringing things full circle. After buying my childhood home from my father, I was back living in Portland, Oregon, this time as a dad myself. Depending on the memories that I was drawing on, I was either stuck in a very specific samsaric cycle, or I had just completed the hero’s journey. Either way, since the birth of our daughter I could sense that the opportunities for adventure were fading. 

To get to Koyasan from Osaka we would take a train, cable car, and bus. Navigating multiple modes of transportation in a foreign country with a small child gave our journey the intention—and the suffering—of a true pilgrimage. We started the day in Osaka, where we participated in the local tradition of kuidaore, or “eating oneself into total ruin”—ramen, sushi, and an ice cream sandwich with hot marzipan biscuits. Thus we prepared for our day of asceticism. The next morning, we caught the first train to the last stop on the line: Gokurakubashi, or “Heaven’s Bridge.”

On the train, I settled in with a cup of coffee to read the Wikipedia page on Mount Koya. We’re 21st-century pilgrims, I thought, pleased with myself. Lila promptly knocked over my coffee and then started to cry. To occupy her for the rest of the ride, we read her favorite book, Open the Barn Door, which features animal sounds and corresponding animals that are revealed behind cardboard flaps. Who says moo? A cow! We read it over and over. I thought of the famous koan in which a monk asks the master whether a dog has buddhanature, and the master answers: “Mu,” literally meaning “no” but implying “nothingness.” Does a new father and husband approaching middle age, carrying 20 extra pounds (eating himself into ruin) and worried about becoming a cliché have buddhanature? Moo!

I carried another koan with me on my pilgrimage to Koyasan. For three years I’d been practicing with a poem by the 9th-century Chinese Chan master Linji, a koan given to me (and translated) by the Zen teacher John Tarrant:

There is a solitary brightness without fixed shape or form. It knows how to listen to the teachings,
it knows how to understand the teachings,
it knows how to teach.

That solitary brightness is you.

As an instruction for how to work with the koan, Tarrant said, “I would just hang out with the brightness and see how it changes you.” Although Shingon Buddhists in Koyasan don’t practice with koans, they believe that any spiritual practice is deepened on Mount Koya, making enlightenment within reach for any visitor.

Not much in my life had been a bigger challenge to my equanimity than being a father. As Liz had said earlier on our trip, “Life with a one-year-old seems to be an ongoing series of coin flips. It’s either heaven or hein.” Since Lila’s arrival, hein had become our shorthand for heinous.

After a short but exhilarating cable car ride straight up the mountain, a cramped and curvy 20-minute bus ride delivered us almost directly to the front of Ekoin, the temple where we were to stay while at Koyasan. A member of the staff took us to our room and, upon learning we were from Oregon, exclaimed, “I wish I could have been there for the eclipse!” Everyone wants to take a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, I thought.

The next day, we left Ekoin to check out Kongobu-ji, the head temple of the Koyasan Shingon school. Lila’s patience was tapped by the time we arrived, so we took turns going inside. One of us would take a brisk contemplative walk among rock gardens and screen paintings that told the life story of Kukai while the other stuffed Lila full of cereal puffs, like we were feeding a parking meter.

Back at Ekoin, I abandoned my wife and child to seek enlightenment, just like, you know, the Buddha. Along with about 15 others, I entered Ekoin’s meditation hall, lined with yellow cushions along the tatami mat floor. In the front of the room there was a painting of a mantra in gold: the Sanskrit letter “A” on top of a lotus inside a full moon.

The monks practice a form of meditation technique called Ajikan, which focuses on the sound of the mantra to generate an experience of nonduality, but we beginners were instructed in the basics of calming and focusing the mind by following the breath.

“You can become one with A,” said a young monk at the front of the room. “You can become one with Supreme Buddha. You can become one with this universe. The internal and external can become one.”

My mind wandered to the countless others who had practiced for more than a thousand years on this mountain. What kinds of awakenings were they looking for? Was the energy of their efforts somehow stored in the ground beneath me? Back to the breath.

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After dark, we joined about 30 pilgrims on a nighttime tour of Okunoin Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Japan, with over two hundred thousand graves. Because it houses Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum, it’s considered the most sacred site on Mount Koya.

“Is your mind still a full moon?” Liz whispered to sleeping Lila.

Weeks after our return from Japan, Lila started saying her first words. She had a few favorites that steadily held their shape and meaning—book, ball, hat. It was more difficult to predict her response when she was asked, “Who are you?” Sometimes she was “Lila.” Other times she was “Dada.” As was our dog, Jules. More often, though, she babbled and pointed at things around the house: the fireplace, the piano, and especially her cereal puffs. Hidden teachings in plain sight. As she pointed, I dutifully followed her around the house that I had grown up in. Hanging out with my brightness, seeing how it changed me. I put her to sleep in my old room, the room I grew up in. I was a child again: Fuzzy Kitty licking my hair after a shower, me looking out the window at the moon, feeling my smallness for the first time, again.

The post Changed by Brightness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Itinerant Tibetan nun Ani Rigsang leaves Lhasa with a thirst for freedom from monastic tradition and Chinese surveillance, embarking on a journey across the rural landscape of eastern Tibet in search of initiation into secret tantric practices. At a hidden nunnery she finds an esoteric tradition kept alive through centuries of isolation.

This film was available to stream until midnight on Saturday, August 3, 2019.

To learn more about Gebchak Gompa, visit http://gebchakgonpa.org/

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