Part 7: Five years ago, Citizen writer Robert Sibley walked the 800-km Camino de Santiago. Last spring, he walked Japan's oldest Buddhist pilgrimage -- the 1,400-km Shikoku no Michi

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Update: In the previous episode, the writer found himself spellbound by the beauty of Katsurahama Beach, and left his travelling companions behind.

The rain came down like doom, so hard it ricocheted off the asphalt to form a curtain-like spray two feet above the ground. I walked through walls of water. My pants were soaked. So was the rest of me. My Gore-Tex-lined jacket proved useless as the wind blew the rain into my face and the water found any little crevasse. I could feel cold rivulets running down my chest and back. I wondered if the gods were punishing me for abandoning my pilgrimage companions.

For the first time since I had started the Shikoku no Michi, The Way of Shikoku, the 1,400-kilometre Buddhist pilgrimage trail that circles the Japanese island of Shikoku, I was without the company of Shuji Niwano and his 25-year-old son, Jun. I had met them on the second day at the ninth of the 88 temples that pilgrims are obliged to visit as they follow the legendary footsteps of the route's founder, the ninth-century Buddhist saint, Kobo Daishi.

Now, nearly three weeks and 27 temples later, I was walking by myself. I had left them earlier that morning at the Tosa National Lodge, where we had stayed for the night after having reached Temple 36. Shuji had told me that Jun was ill. They were going to catch a bus to Temple 37 in Kubokawa. Was I willing to do this, too? I could see Shuji was reluctant to ask; in the last couple of days we had taken trains and buses several times to accommodate Jun's fatigue and bouts of illness. Our purity as walking henro, or pilgrims, was suffering.

Shuji had little choice, of course. He had explained shortly after we met that Jun had suffered some kind of mental breakdown -- we referred to it as "Jun's condition" -- a few years earlier. He'd retreated from the world, stopped attending school and, unable to hold a job, continued to live with his parents. Shuji hoped that by walking the Shikoku, one of the longest and most arduous pilgrimage routes in the world, Jun would recover his pride and self-worth.

I had come to like Shuji, admiring his stoic endurance and gentle patience with his son. If I walked and they caught the bus, we were unlikely to hook up again. I was certainly tempted by Shuji's offer; I'd been sick in the night -- a case of bad clams at supper -- and still felt wobbly. But I also knew that after nearly three weeks on the Henro Michi, as the Shikoku pilgrimage is also called, I was, finally, hitting my stride, physically and psychologically. The blisters and aching legs were gone. I wanted to walk. To surrender to sloth and weakness now would lead to future surrenders.

Almost impulsively, I told Shuji, no, I was going to walk. As I tromped toward the highway I looked back at Shuji standing at the door of the lodge. He bowed. I returned the bow, and then walked away feeling prissy and perverse and selfish.

Two hours later, I was all but convinced the deities -- Kobo Daishi perhaps? -- were taking perverse delight in punishing me. Highway 47 winds along the southern edge of a 15-kilometre peninsula that parallels the main Shikoku island like a tine on a two-prong fork. The road eventually connects to Highway 23 at the base of the peninsula, about eight kilometres east of the town of Susaki. I walked about halfway to the highway intersection before I was ready to admit I had been foolish. It started to rain half-an-hour after I left the lodge, coming down in sheets. The wind whipping off the Pacific Ocean didn't make it any easier. I felt I was in a carwash that had been converted into a wind tunnel.

I hiked about seven or eight kilometres, climbing mostly, when I came to a roadside rest area that overlooked the Bay of Tosa. Two small wooden huts squatted beneath a line of pine trees at the far side of the parking lot. They looked like fruit-and-vegetable kiosks. Both were shuttered, but their overhanging eaves offered shelter from the rain. I dropped my pack, pulled off my rain gear and sat on a bench under the eaves. The rain thrummed on the roof's cedar shingles.

I stared through the curtain of rain down the steep slope to the grey water crashing on the rocks below. In the distance, half-obscured in mist, the black finger of a headland thrust into the ocean. Every once in a while a car or truck whooshed past on the highway behind me, the tires making a ripping sound on the wet pavement. Nobody stopped. The rain fell harder. I looked at my watch. It was just after 9:30. I still had 15 to 20 kilometres to go to Susaki. Normally, that meant four hours of walking, plus several hours for lunch and breaks. I knew I should get moving, get up, shoulder my pack and hit the road, rain or no rain.

Yet I lingered. Not because of the rain and the prospect of six hours trudging through it. I had been wet before and would be again. Nor, for a change, was I feeling sorry for myself. True, part of me regretted turning down a warm bus ride. I missed Shuji's and Jun's company. But something else held me.

I was suddenly aware that for the first time in nearly three weeks I was utterly alone, without the company of others. There was only myself and the rain and the pungent smell of wet cedar, the heaving water below and the grey-bellied clouds shredding themselves on the tops of the surrounding hills. And quiet, but for the thrum of rain. The sheer reality of being alone in the rain on a hill overlooking the ocean in an obscure corner of a Japanese island was, somehow, extraordinary. I lingered to let that sharp, sweeping sense of thereness, that humming awareness of the moment, saturate me in a kind of osmosis-like absorption. It was as if the barrier of the body had given way and I had become part of what I was seeing and hearing and smelling, as if there was no veil of self-consciousness separating my awareness from the experience.

I remember those few moments as kind of minor epiphany, one of the best times of my two-month pilgrimage. And for that I was grateful; you've missed something in travelling if the journey doesn't have you exulting at least once at the sheer strangeness of your presence in a foreign place. For the first time since starting on the Henro Michi, I felt like a real pilgrim.

My bladder reminded me that the physical often takes precedence over the spiritual. I draped my raincoat over my head and ran to a convenient tree at the edge of the parking lot.

As I jogged back to the kiosk, a Toyota van swerved off the highway and stopped beside my shelter. The driver, on the right side of the van -- the Japanese drive on the left side of the road as in Britain -- rolled down the window. I was looking at the bright, black eyes of a jowly, middle-aged woman with cropped, greying hair. Beside her in the passenger's seat was a tiny, bird-like elderly woman. They looked to see that I was a gaikokujin, an out-of-country person. We exchanged greetings, but then I was out of my element as the driver spoke in rapid-fire Japanese.

"Gomen nasai. Nihongo ga sukoshi dekimasu. Watashi wa henro desu." "I am sorry. I speak a little Japanese. I am a pilgrim."

The woman said, "Chotto matte," "just a minute," and turned to speak to someone in the back seat. Another window rolled down and I was looking at a young man in glasses with sleep-messed hair.

"You are a foreigner," he said.

I agreed. "Eigo o hanashimasu ka?" "Can you speak English?"

He did. Then he spoke to the driver. I stood there getting wet while the three of them launched into conversation. Finally, the young man stuck his head out the window.

"You ride to with us, neh?" he said. "No rain for walking."

How could I take a ride now, after having refused to take a bus with Shuji and Jun? "O-settai desu ka? Kubokawa e ikitai desu." "Were they offering o-settai? I want to go to Kubokawa." O-settai refers to a tradition on Shikoku of locals giving gifts -- food, money, lodging -- to pilgrims, who are obliged to accept the donations since those offering them are thought to be giving to Kobo Daishi himself.

I must have made sense because the driver smiled and said, "Hai, o-settai."

A couple of minutes later, my pack was stashed in the back of the van and I was scrunched in the front passenger seat with my kneecaps jammed near my chin. Despite my objections, the elderly woman had been assigned to the back seat. "You are bigger," the young man explained. "Longer legs." Faced with typical Japanese politeness, it would have been rude to protest.

To my surprise, the van driver was a Buddhist nun by the name of Miko Kamino. Her Buddhist name was Misiun. The young man was her nephew -- I think his name was Joji -- and the elderly woman was her mother. They were driving around Shikoku visiting temples along the way. They had spotted me from the road and assumed I was a henro in need of help. That I wasn't Japanese was a surprising twist of karma. All this was related to me by Joji, who translated his aunt's questions -- Who was I? Where was I from? What was I doing on Shikoku? Was I a Buddhist? -- and then delivered my responses to her in Japanese.

Normally, it would have taken an hour, maybe an hour and a half at most, to reach Kubokawa if we'd followed Highway 47. But Misiun took it upon herself to be both tour guide and spiritual instructor, frequently turning off the highway to drive through some of the smaller villages: Susaki, Nakatosa, Kageno, Kaminokae, Hondo. She insisted on stopping whenever there was a nice view of the ocean. We stopped quite often. I remember one place that offered a sweeping view of the Pacific beyond a curving, grey-sand beach pinched between two rocky, anvil-like headlands.

When we clambered out of the car, Misiun brought a bag of oranges. She pointed to a line of Jizo statues on a ledge behind a low chain-link fence between the parking lot and the edge of the cliff. Joji translated: In the old days parents threw unwanted babies or those they could not support off the cliff into the sea. There was about a dozen red-bibbed statues of Jizo, the Buddhist deity who looks after souls of children in the afterlife, as well as protects travellers. Misiun prayed and placed an orange at the foot of each statue. Her mother followed, setting 100-yen coins -- about $1 -- on top of the oranges.

I had adopted Jizo as my pilgrimage guardian a couple weeks earlier on my first really hard climb to Temple 12. Was he watching over me now? Had he arranged this ride? I shook away the irrational notion as I followed the mother's example and emptied my pockets of change. Not knowing what else to do, I genuflected before each Jizo as I place the coins at the feet of the statues. Misiun seemed to approve, offering a mudra, the one of the many stylized hand movements used by Buddhists as a symbolic spiritual gesture, when I finished.

She made the same offering on the road, too, blessing the driver of an oncoming car with a mudra. Those who spotted the gesture would bow their heads in thanks. I wondered what passing drivers would do if I offered mudras back home. They'd probably think I was making an obscene gesture. I laughed at the thought, conscious of how much I was enjoying myself.

We ate the rest of the oranges as we drove. The van filled with their smell. It was pleasant to be warm and dry, watching the green hills and passing through the hamlets tucked into the folds of steep-edged valleys, the cluster of grey-tile roofs shiny in the rain. The windshield wipers were a metronome to my mood. I was near to nodding off when Misiun-san spoke and Joji translated: "My auntie asks do you know the Hannya Shingyo?" Joji said. All henro should know the Hannya Shingyo."

The Heart Sutra is the best known sutra in Japanese Buddhism and is regarded as a summary of its sacred literature, encapsulating the essence of Buddhism. As one scholar, Hiroshi Tanaka Shimazaki, puts it: "To chant the 262 characters is to chant the Buddhist scripture." The constant recitation of the Heart Sutra, or Heart of Transcendental Knowledge, whether chanted alone or in the company of others, is supposed to open your mind to its Buddha nature, and help free you from the suffering of this world. It takes only a few minutes to recite, and most pilgrims perform it at the temple shrines.

My exposure in the last three weeks had embedded fragments of the sutra in my mind, although I had made no effort to understand what I was hearing. Now, it seems, I had to make the effort, even if only to be polite. Perhaps it would do me some good. As Kobo Daishi wrote: "This mantra has a marvellous power. When we chant it, our ignorance can be removed." Buddha knows, I could benefit from less ignorance.

I told Joji to tell his aunt that I would be pleased to learn the Hannya Shingyo.

"Anone," Misiun said. "Listen."

And so for the next hour, as we drove through the rain to Kubokawa, I followed Misiun as she chanted the sutra: "Sharisshi shiki fuiku, kufuishiki, shiki soku ze shiku ... Gyate, gyate, haragyate, harasogyate boji sowaka. Hannya-shingyo." I later found an approximate English translation: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is also form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness ... For those who seek the way, strive, strive constantly towards enlightenment and peace of mind."

Japanese Buddhism asserts that the universe is always changing its form, nothing remains as it was. Flowers blossom and then wilt. But they also bloom again. We suffer so long as we cling to the "forms" of existence -- possessions, health, friends and even love. We only attain enlightenment, know the true nature of our minds, when we stop trying to hold on to the things of the world and learn the joy of living in the moment and letting go that which we cannot hold.

Misiun was pleased I could follow along so readily. She said something to Joji. "My auntie says this must be karma. A gift from Kobo Daishi," Joji said.

I had to wonder. What are the odds of being picked up by a Buddhist nun who wanted to teach me the Heart Sutra? I would not have met Misiun if I hadn't left Shuji and Jun. But then, I thought, I wouldn't be walking by myself if bad clams from last night's supper hadn't left me in a foul mood this morning. My mind spun along a mental Mobius-strip of what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. Was someone trying to tell me something? I wondered even more after what happened in Kubokawa.

Iwamotoji, Temple 37, the Temple of

the Rocky Root, huddles amidst a cluster of stores and shops just off Highway 56 near the railway station. Misiun parked down the street and the four of us walked in the drizzling rain to the temple gate. I made sure to bow before I stepped through the gate into the temple compound.

I was conscious of Misiun's presence as I performed the henro rituals. I wanted to do them right -- a payment both for the ride and for her instruction. I was careful to wash my hands and rinse my mouth at the cistern. I rang the waniguchi bells on the veranda of both the hondo and daishido. Since Temple 37 has five Buddhas as its honzons, or deities -- Fudo, Kannon, Jizo, Amida and Yakushi -- I genuflected before each. Then I dropped coins in the offering boxes. And for the first time, with Misiun beside me, I chanted the Hannya Shingyo. Or, more accurately, I tried to keep up as she recited it.

"Kekko desu," she said afterward. "Very good."

"Goshinsetu o makoto ni arigato," I said. "Thank you very much for your kindness."

After getting our nokyo-chos stamped at the temple office, we walked across the courtyard toward the gate. It had stopped raining. I decided to call it quits for the day even though Misiun invited me to continue with them to Temple 38, another 80 kilometres away. As comfortable as that would have been, I knew I couldn't take another ride. That would have been too unhenro. I was going to find a room at some minshuku and have an early day.

But as we left the temple, I was given more evidence that the gods did, in fact, exist and liked to play mind games with mere mortals. How else could I explain the sight of Shuji and Jun coming up the street? They were just as surprised, and judging by the Shuji's handshake and Jun's chattering, equally pleased to see me.

"Kobo Daishi, neh?" Shuji and I said in unison, laughing.

I tried to introduce them to Misiun and Joji but my Japanese was inadequate. They did a better job themselves. Later, Shuji explained that he and Jun didn't leave the lodging house until late in the morning, taking a taxi back to Tosa City to catch an afternoon bus to Susaki. From Susaki, they had taken the train to Kubokawa and had only just arrived.

"We shall walk together again?" Shuji said.

"Hai," I said, "minna de." "All together."

Before Misiun and her family left, we had lunch at a nearby udon shop. Misiun and Shuji were soon deep in conversation. Misiun glanced occasionally at Jun, who was oddly subdued in her presence. I was content to be out of the rain and slurping the fat noodles. Afterward, we walked back to the van to say goodbye.

"Taihen osewa ni narimashita," I said to Misiun. "You have been very helpful." It was inadequate but the best I could do.

"Gambatte kudasai," she said, offering the traditional exchange between passing henro. "Do your best."

Misiun looked at Shuji for a moment in silence and then offered him a final mudra. She extended her right arm out the window, with the arm bent at the elbow and the palm of her hand toward him, like a policeman halting traffic. She held that pose for a few seconds, while Shuji bowed deeply. Then she drove away.

That night, as Shuji and I plotted the next day's walk, I asked what Misiun's mudra had meant. Shuji explained that she had offered him the Semui-in, the fearlessness mudra, by which the Buddha tells us not to fear suffering and death because nobody can avoid either. We must learn to accept that everything is transient, that suffering is born of desire, if we are to overcome our fear and gain peace.

That struck me as a strange thing for Misiun to tell Shuji, even if only symbolically. But then I didn't know what they had talked about. Besides, Shuji seemed to derive some benefit from his brief encounter with the Buddhist nun.

"A gift from Kobo Daishi," he said.

The next week of walking was a time of gifts, too. It took us three days to walk to Cape Ashizuri and Temple 38, and another two days to Sukumo City and Temple 39. There was only one day of rain. The rest of the time was bright and sunny without being too hot. I didn't get any more blisters. I would be weary and footsore by the end of a 30-kilometre day, of course, but after a good night's sleep -- and I slept well -- I looked forward to each day's hike.

The pleasure of those days was also due to the landscape. From Temple 37 to Temple 38, the henro path pretty much follows the coastline to Ashizuri, a distance of 85 kilometres, and for much of that we were in sight of the Pacific Ocean. In several places the path cuts across beaches or along headland heights that offered stunning views of the sea. Approaching Ashizuri-misaki, the mountains confront the sea in a ceaseless clash of water on rock, a conflict that has carved strangely shaped shafts of stone, distorted arches and deep furrowed inlets. I could see why Cape Ashizuri is infamous for attracting suicides: The pounding water swirls savagely across the black rocks before falling back into quiet grey pools. As Oliver Statler relates in Japanese Pilgrimage, "The contorted rocks seem to beckon; the endless breakers offer surcease."

The trek from Temple 38 to Temple 39 took us along the west coast of Cape Ashizuri through small towns -- Tosashimizu and Misaki, Otsuki and Kozukushi -- before turning inland across the green mountains to Sukumo, a small town a few kilometres before Enkoji, or Temple 39. The Temple of Emitting Light is half-hidden in the forest at the foot of a mountain slope. It is a lovely, quiet temple with a pond of turtles and a symbolic stone turtle in the courtyard that pilgrims stroke as they wish for a long life.

Following the green-tunnel roads that twisted along the Ashizuri coast, climbing the mountain paths and descending the valley slopes, I knew there would be moments in the months to come when I would remember vignettes of what I had seen. A woman in a red bonnet digging for clams on a beach; thickets of bright red camellia on the mountain slopes near Otzuki, a leisurely lunch on a riverbank: Commonplace scenes, perhaps, but I felt I had been vouchsafed a glimpse of yamato-damashii, "the soul of Japan."

My reaction to the Shikoku landscape was not unusual. As one scholar, Fosco Maraini, puts it, if Japan's ancient soul is to be found anywhere, it is in nature. Nature is "the point from which all avenues of thought depart, and to which they finally return." Once upon a time, forests of sugi and hinoki, cedar and cypress, covered the mountains and hills that make up 70 per cent of the Japanese islands.

Sadly, nature is not what it once was in Japan. Coastlines, hills, rivers and fields; they all reveal a human presence. As Ian Buruma writes in Inventing Japan: "Japan is now full of unnecessary tunnels, roads that go nowhere, lifeless rivers, bridges that nobody crosses, half-empty museums, and theme parks that few care to visit." Only a handful of Japan's 30,000 rivers and streams remain undammed. It is a rare river that hasn't been channelled into a tunnel or had its banks buried in concrete. Logging, pollution and acid rain have devastated much of the forest.

Only in the national parks and the more remote regions such as southwestern Shikoku do you glimpse the glory that was once Japan's forests. Climbing along some steep-sided mountain ridge or through a narrow gorge thick with old-growth trees, I could see why the ancient Japanese believed in the existence of kami, spirits-in-the-world. Along the coastlines, too, where the forests are hard to reach, pine trees cling with talon-like tenacity to cliff sides or perch like contorted birds on the rocky islets that jut from the sea.

I could easily believe, as Fosco Maraini writes in Japan: Patterns of Community, that nature is the source of Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto, the Way of the Gods. Watch the trees on the Shikoku coast long enough and you begin to think they are dancing, that in the swaying of their gnarled and twisted branches you see the kodama, the spirit of the trees.

As Maraini explains, the ancient Japanese had no need to give a name to their ancestral system of beliefs with its braided strands of nature worship, fertility cults and ancestor worship. But after Buddhism was introduced from China in the sixth century, they referred to the Kami no Michi, the Way of the Gods, as distinct from the Hotoke no Michi, the Way of the Buddhas. The word kami is difficult to translate into English, but it roughly approximates the western concept of gods or, more loosely, spirits. More important, says Maraini, is to understand the Kami no Michi as "a warm-hearted, positive cult of life."

Maraini described Shinto as a village religion that appreciates life's blessings and, at the same time, abhors death and defilement. In this regard, it is communal in its focus, while also inherently optimistic, unlike Buddhism or Christianity or Islam. For Shinto, says Maraini, this world is not a pale reflection of a more substantial reality. It is neither a realm of exile for souls migrating through innumerable lives as Buddhism teaches, nor a fallen world where we wait for judgment in the afterlife, as Christian and Islam propound. Shinto lacks the concept of sinfulness. Man is by nature good, and the world in which he dwells is also good. Evil belongs to another realm and comes from outside. Thus, Shinto rites emphasize warding off disaster and defilement by seeking the help of the kami to promote peacefulness and happiness for the individual and the community. And since Shinto regards the material world in all its manifestations as a living entity, a kami can be a deity or a sage, a poet or a pauper, a forest or a field, a thunderstorm or a butterfly. As the poet Motoori Norinaga writes:

All who are called Kami,

You may think,

Are one and the same.

There are some that are birds,

And some, too, that are bugs!

Standing on a mountain ridge, looking out over a dense green valley, I could easily believe it was populated with kami -- if my Enlightenment-rationalist heritage did not preclude such fanciful notions. Surrounded by the haunting forests of Shikoku I might imagine a re-enchanted world, but I could not in all honesty sidestep a skeptical counteraction to such romanticism. I might feel nostalgia for our lost enchanted world, but I could no more believe in kamis than I could recover a childhood belief in Santa Claus. At the same time, though, I was also aware that a world devoid of kamis is a world in which humans cannot feel at home, at least in any deep sense.

As we followed the pilgrim path along the western coast of Shikoku, I kept thinking of Basho's treks around Japan in the late 17th century. The poet, who spent months hiking along the coasts and heights of northern Honshu, the largest of Japan's four main islands, was awed -- and inspired -- by views of rivers and mountains, land and sea. Seeing Cape Ashizuri's panorama of land and sea and sky, I felt an affinity for the long-dead poet. Basho's travel journal, Narrow Road to the Interior, was one of the few books I carried with me and dipped into most nights before falling asleep.

Maybe I had been reading too many of his poems, or maybe the mountain air was overstimulating my endorphins, but there were times -- wandering through some copse of swaying bamboo or looking down some vertiginous cliff to the crashing water -- when I was near to convincing myself of the poet's presence, maybe a step or so behind me, a shadow at the periphery of my vision. I thought if I turned my head fast enough I would catch a glimpse of him.

This sensation -- or hallucination -- was especially strong as I hiked through gorges so narrow that the rock face on each side seemed ready to fall on me. I would suddenly be aware of the echo created by the tapping of my walking stick; only the sound seemed slightly unsynchronized, not quite matching the swing-and-step rhythm of my walking. I swear there were times when, after I lifted up my walking stick, I heard another pilgrim staff. It was spooky. I imagined that only a diaphanous barrier separated past and present, one universe from another, and that, for the briefest of moments, Basho's time and mine were so close that, like some kami wandering the cosmos, he had joined my pilgrimage, haunting my heels.

Surrounded by the play of shade and shadow and silence in a Shikoku forest, it was easily to indulge in such fantasies. This was a landscape for the fantastical, and it occurred to me that my pilgrimage was getting rather crowded with spirits, both real and not-so-real: Shuji and Jun, Jizo, Hasegawa-san, Haromi-san, Basho, Misiun, the odd kami. And, as my walking stick constantly reminded me, there was Kobo Daishi, ever-present, ever-generous, ever-supportive. In those moments it hardly mattered which was real and which unreal. I wondered what other gifts the gods might offer me.

The next episode of Robert Sibley's pilgrimage will appear Aug. 7.