I was lost.

Descending the rock-strewn slope, dropping deeper into the dark cedar forest of Mount Yokomine, the trail looked the same as all the other mountain paths I had been trying in hopes of finding one that would lead me back to the valley town of Komatsu.

After leaving Yokomineji Temple, I somehow wandered off the pilgrim route instead of sticking with my fellow pilgrims -- Yukuo Tanaka and Shuji Niwano and his son, Jun. We made the long climb to Yokomineji together in the morning, but I wanted to do the return hike on my own, thinking it would be pleasant to stroll through the cathedral-like silence of the forest. But I had committed the cardinal sin of long-distance walking -- not paying attention. So now I was somewhere on the side of a mountain, wandering through a criss-cross maze of logging clearcuts and farmers' tracks.

Considering how urbanized Japan is, you might not think it has any wilderness left. Yet there are still places were forests prevail. The mountainous island of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, is one of those places.

I looked at my watch: 1:44. I had plenty of daylight left, lots of time to get off the mountain before nightfall. I glanced up at the slit of sky showing through the cedar canopy, grateful to see a cloudless blue sky. I found a half-rotted log on the edge of the trail and sat down to look at the pilgrim map that for the last six weeks had guided me two-thirds of the way along the 1,400-kilometre Shikoku no Michi. The ancient pilgrimage path encircles Shikoku, following the legendary footsteps of the Buddhist saint Kobo Daishi. The route includes 88 temples strung like prayer beads around the island.

At 709 metres above sea level, Yokomineji, Temple 60, is considered "the single most difficult temple to reach," as my guidebook put it. It wasn't wrong: The hike was a lung-aching thigh-burner, and if I'd had to climb the mountain in the early days of my pilgrimage, I might not have made it. But after six weeks of walking, I was in much better shape physically. Judging by the unused notches in my belt, I had lost at least 20 pounds. Sure, I was huffing and puffing after the four-hour climb to the temple, but it took only a few minutes' rest for my breathing to return to normal. I was pleased with myself; I felt like the Energizer bunny, ready to keep going and going.

Yokomineji itself was worth the climb. Hidden in the forest, the 1,300-year-old temple possesses a haunting sense of isolation and timelessness. It was pleasant to sit in the courtyard and eat lunch and look out across the ridges of mountains and valleys in the distance.

I liked the swept courtyard, the hard-packed ground showing the scratch marks of the twig brooms used by the temple priests, and the curving lines of raked gravel swirling around the large boulders in the rock garden. I thought of the generations of priests who had spent the last millennium trying to maintain order and beauty in their small world.

When we finished lunch, Shuji said he had something he wanted to show Tanaka-san and myself. "A special place," he said. Tanaka-san begged off. The morning's climb had not done his ankle any good. He was going to head back to our hotel in Komatsu. I wasn't enamoured of the idea of more climbing either, but I figured I owed Shuji the courtesy of interest. So I followed him and Jun up a narrow path above the temple to a small plateau in a forest clearing. On one side of the plateau, set in a copse of trees, was a stone grotto containing apron-wrapped statues of Buddha and Jizo. The wax of guttered candles, vases of flowers and piles of oranges lined the rock shelves on which the statues stood. The shrine was clean and tidy, a place where you would be pleased to pray. Beyond the grotto, the ground sloped across the plateau to the edge of a cliff overlooking a cedar-thick valley. Near the edge of the precipice stood a Shinto Torii gate.

Torii are a common sight in Japan. Traditional Shinto gates are composed of two pillars topped by curving crossbeams. They are usually made of wood and painted a brilliant vermilion, a colour that reflects "the sense of brightness and life always associated with Shinto," as British scholar Ian Reader puts its. You find Torii in front of Shinto shrines or overarching lanes that lead to a shrine. They tell visitors they are entering the dwelling of kami, of spirits and gods. To walk through a Torii is to enter sacred space. I liked their elegant lines and graceful simplicity. But they always gave me a lonely feeling, as though they were the last sentinels of a lost cause, guardians of a treasure that nobody remembered having lost. Many of the Torii that I saw on Shikoku had fallen into disrepair. Maybe that explained the sadness.

The Torii on Mount Yokomine looked well-tended, the paint fairly recent. We stopped on one side of the gate, dropped our packs and bowed before walking between the pillars toward the edge of the precipice. Across the valley was the grey mass of Mount Ishizuchi, the highest mountain in Western Japan at 1,982 metres. While Jun scrounged through his pack for cigarettes, Shuji walked to the edge of the cliff to stare in silence at the mountain. I followed him. We squatted on the ground.

"When I was young, Jun's age, I climbed Ishizuchi," he said, gesturing at the mountain.

"Alone?" I said.

"Hai, hitori de noborimashita." "Yes, I did it myself. It took me ... " He paused, not knowing the English word. "San nichi." "Three days."

"Before you were ... " I searched for the word for married, but could only remember kekkon for marriage.

"Hai, mae ni." "Yes, before."

"Never again?"

Shuji shook his head. He lapsed into silence, sitting cross-legged with his palms on his knees, back straight, staring at the mountain, glancing occasionally at Jun, who had stretched out on the ground nearby for a nap.

I left him to his silence and his memories and wandered back to the grotto shrine. I took the orange I hadn't eaten at lunch and set it at the foot of one of the Jizo statues, a small offering. I looked back at Shuji. He was still sitting at the edge of the cliff beyond the Torii. I walked back to stand beside him. He looked up at me, but for a moment I had the feeling he was seeing something else. Then, with a startled look in his eyes, he wrenched himself away from whatever inner vista he'd been staring at to focus on my presence. I had the feeling he wanted to say something, but he shook his head, stood and bowed and walked away. It occurred to me that I was watching a very lonely man. I watched as he went to the grotto and stood before the statues, his head bowed and hands held palm to palm at his breast. I recognized a prayer mudra known as Gassho that is used when seeking the Buddha's forgiveness. I wondered what Shuji had seen looking across the inner landscape of memory, what he needed forgiveness for.

When he finished his prayers we walked back to Yokomineji. I dawdled, letting Shuji and Jun get ahead of me. I wanted to walk alone. About a kilometre below the temple, I turned off the road leading back to Komatsu and plunged into the forest. An hour later I was studying my map and trying to figure out where I was.

The map showed two pilgrim trails leading from Komatsu to Yokomineji, but not the logging trails or farmers' tracks. I replayed the last hour's hike in my head, following the map to where it indicated a fork in the trail: one path -- the shorter one -- went almost due north down the face of the mountain directly into Komatsu; a second path turned west about three kilometres from the temple to descend another side of the mountain and loop around to the southern outskirts of the town. We had taken the shorter route on our climb, and I couldn't recall seeing the fork at that time. I could only assume I'd inadvertently turned onto the second longer path on the way down, and then, not paying attention, walked onto some side trail. I had two choices: Retrace my steps back to the fork in the trail or go on. The prospect of climbing the mountain again had no appeal. I decided to stick with whatever trail I was on, figuring that sooner or later it would reach the valley floor and I'd find either the pilgrim route or a road back to Komatsu.

On such vague decisiveness did I have the most memorable day of my Shikoku pilgrimage.

I had been trekking the Shikoku no Michi, The Way of Shikoku, for just over six weeks. In another week-and-a-half, I would reach Okuboji, Temple 88, the last temple on the Shikoku circuit. It was hard to believe the end was in sight. The pilgrimage had taken over my life. That was as it should be: Walking 20 to 30 kilometres a day for several weeks produces more than physical consequences. Perceptions of the world shift. Psychologically, my sense of time had changed as the pace of walking literally forced my mind to slow down. The landscape of cedar forest and distant vistas, the downpour of sun and rain, the shower of birdsong and prayer instead of freeway traffic, television and radio, had worked an enchantment. I now watched for more important things -- sunlight in the trees, flowers in a ditch, birds in the bush.

So it was on this day, too. I might have been lost in the geographic sense, but I was also lost to the sensuous: Mountain air pungent with damp cedar; trails edged with blue wisteria, azaleas in pink and yellow and red and purple iris; slabs of sunlight dropping through gaps in the trees; shuffling ankle-deep along leaf-thick paths; nightingales chanting ho-hokekyo, ho-hokekyo.

But the day's real gift was the inward journey. I seemed to float above myself, watching as my body did the hard work of sweating up a slope or scrambling over rock while, at the same time, my mind made its own psychic sojourn. Images from the past six weeks replayed in my head: the green glow of a sunlit river; black-bellied clouds far out to sea; a parade of low-lying clouds floating through a mountain valley; a village street silent save for the rain gurgling in the gutters. My mind was a pilgrim mind now. I had not forgotten my "real" life back in Canada, but after weeks of walking, that life seemed oddly distant and abstract. Home was too distant, psychologically and chronologically, for me to start anticipating my return. There were even moments in the silence of the forest when I was willing to believe, as Buddhist tradition claims, that I was never alone, that Kobo Daishi and Jizo were my constant companions.

As it turned out, it was Jizo, the bald-headed deity who protects children, the souls of the dead and, it seems, inattentive travellers, who restored me to the pilgrim path. I was following a farmer's trail that consisted of two rutted tracks and a line of grass running down the centre. High grass and bush edged the trail and a wall of trees loomed overhead. I didn't know where I was, only that I was heading north and, presumably, would reach civilization sooner or later. Rounding a corner, I came to an intersection with three trails leading off in different directions. I squatted in the middle of the intersection, looking up one path and then another. I had no idea which one to follow. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of colour. And there, at the edge of a track, poking above the grass like a child playing peek-a-boo, was a small statue of my pilgrim hero, Jizo. Bless his tiny red tuque.

Always follow the Jizo, I told myself. Where there is one Jizo, there has to be more. I practically pranced down the trail, singing "Jizo loves me, this I know, because the Buddha tells me so." Jizo would surely lead me in the right direction. I straightened Jizo's tuque and splashed him with a generous share of my water bottle. If I was hot and thirsty after a couple of hours on the trail, he must be parched after a millennium of watching out for lost pilgrims.

Two hundred metres down the track I came to another Jizo and another intersection. This one, however, turned on to a two-lane asphalt road with a beautiful yellow stripe. I splashed more water on Jizo by way of thanks.

But the god wasn't done with me yet. The road dropped steeply around a sharp turn. Trotting down the hill, I saw below me on the right side of the road, through a gap in the treetops, the roof of a temple set in a narrow gorge. I could hear a waterfall. At the bottom of the hill was a small gravel parking lot and a pathway that disappeared into a copse of cedars. I looked at my watch. It was nearly 3:30. I hesitated to stop, uncertain how far I was from Komatsu. Yet something -- Jizo demanding his due? -- told me not to pass this temple without offering a prayer. So I crunched across the gravel and down another tunnel of trees, and entered the most peaceful place on Shikoku.

Koonji Temple is a bangai, an unnumbered temple that isn't counted among the 88 temples that make up the official Shikoku pilgrimage circuit. It is used primarily by Buddhist ascetics performing suigyo, a meditative technique that involves standing under waterfalls or dousing yourself with buckets of icy water as a form of spiritual discipline. Suigyo has a long tradition in Japan, and reflects the belief that rigorous physical exertion is a means to greater spiritual awareness. The essential idea of suigyo is to push the body to its limits in order to break down the barriers of reason and logic and interrupt the incessant chatter of everyday consciousness. The hope, ultimately, is "to achieve the 'dropping off of body and mind,'" as Ian Reader explains in Religion in Contemporary Japan.

I had no such expectations as I followed the footpath toward a shoro, or bell tower. Next to the tower was a wooden building. I peeked inside -- the door was unlocked -- to see benches and neat lines of plastic flip-flops on a slat floor. Beyond the tower was a small courtyard. High cliffs enclosed the compound. A gurgling creek ran through the courtyard on the right. Benches, statuary, incense urns and candle holders were set against the rock face on the left. At the far end of the courtyard, guarded by three statues, green with age, was a waterfall.

The place was empty and silent save for the cascade of water falling into a pool beneath the falls. The cedars on the cliffs formed a canopy overhead, filtering the sunlight to give the courtyard a green glow. Shafts of sun falling through gaps in the trees formed pillars of light on the grounds. Mist rose above the creek, floating in the cool air like new-minted souls. I thought I'd stumbled into some secret retreat of the gods. I rang the tower bell to announce my presence, just in case.

I walked over to one of the incense urns and candle stands. The candles were spent and the incense sticks reduced to stubs. I couldn't find fresh candles or sticks, so I lit several remnant stubs, along with a couple of the longer pieces of incense I extracted from the ashes in the urn. Then I sat on a nearby bench to listen to the waterfall and absorb the green peacefulness. The waterfall was hypnotic and I could easily have fallen asleep.

I shook off my fatigue and strolled to the pool to look at the statues. I recognized the one sitting on a cairn at the top of the waterfall as Fudo Myoo, the fierce-faced protector of the Buddhist faith. Below him, beside the pool, were his child servants, Kongara and Seitaka. A line of stepping stones stretched across the pool from the edge of the courtyard to a flat rock shelf under the waterfall beneath Fudo Myoo.

According to legend, Fudo Myoo once appeared to a ninth-century priest named So-o, a Grand Patriarch of the Tendai sect of Buddhism, as he stood under a waterfall. The shock inspired So-o to establish Tendai Buddhism's main temple on Mount Hiei, near Kyoto, and begin an ascetic discipline known as kaihogyo -- "the practice of circling the mountain" -- in which practitioners try to transform themselves into the living embodiment of Fudo Myoo. These disciplines are extreme. As John Stevens recounts in his book, The Marathon Men of Mount Hiei, after years of initiation, a would-be Tendai monk is required to complete the hyaku-nichi, the 100-day practice, in which he runs 40 kilometres a day for 100 consecutive days, repeatedly circling Mount Hiei. He sleeps maybe two hours a day, and eats little more than a couple of rice balls and a bowl of miso soup. With only straw sandals on his feet even in winter, he runs at night on the mountain's rough trails, enduring blisters, frostbite and fever. The point, as American scholar Robert Rhodes explains in an essay, "The Kaihogyo Practice of Mt. Hiei," is to die to this world and become a living god. The kaihogyo symbolizes the monk's willingness to withdraw from the community of the living and recast himself as a wanderer in the land of the dead.

The 100-day practice is basic training, however. There are more rigorous 700-day and 1,000-day practices. The few monks who have undertaken 1,000-day marathons and survived are "considered to be a symbol of a living Fudo Myoo," says Rhodes. They also acquire amazing perceptual powers. I had read about Gyosho Uehara, a senior monk at Mount Hiei Temple -- and one of only 50 or so monks who have successfully completed the 1,000-day kaihogyo in the last four centuries -- who claims that "some marathon monks are able to hear the sound of ash falling from an incense stick."

Standing in the courtyard at Koonji Temple, staring up the statue of Fudo Myoo, I envied those Tendai priests their possession of a self-discipline and faith I could only imagine. How did the monks go beyond their physical limits? Did they enter a kind suspended animation, a kind of sleepwalking existence, in which their metabolism slowed to such an extent that their bodies needed little sustenance?

Compared to the Tendai priests, I was a spiritual dilettante. Beyond the walking, I had not imposed many austerities on myself. If pilgrimage is a symbolic act of death, I'd chosen to party hearty. I took advantage of vending machines and convenience stores to indulge in bottles of Pocari Sweat and cans of Georgia Cafe au Lait. And don't forget the beer and shochu. I had gorged on sashimi and udon. True, everybody else did much the same, but that's hardly an excuse. Was I on a religious pilgrimage or a gastronomic holiday? Isn't a pilgrim supposed to die, at least a little?

My questions might explain what I did next. Hustling to the bathhouse, I stripped off my shoes and clothes, donned a pair of blue flip-flops and toddled back across the courtyard clad in a small white towel. I stepped gingerly on the stone path across the pool, trying not to lose the too-small flip-flops. I slipped only once but Kobo Daishi -- my walking stick, that is -- saved me from an embarrassing plunge.

There's probably a technique, a mental discipline, for plunging yourself into ice water, but I didn't know what it was. As I stepped forward I could hear my doctor back home saying, "You idiot, you'll give yourself a heart attack."

I was spared heart seizure, but I certainly got a shock. The icy water drilling into the top of my head and shoulders not only stripped the towel away, but ripped the breath out of my lungs. I lasted all of a nanosecond -- or so it seemed -- before I leaped gasping out of the waterfall. Of course, I could not accept such humiliation. I gritted my teeth and plunged under the waterfall again. I counted to 12 before stepping out. I tried a third time, stretching the count to nearly 30. Not bad, I told myself, trying to ignore my chattering teeth and the eruption of goosebumps. So I did it again. This time I stayed in the icy shower until my shoulders and head felt numb. I stepped away when I could no longer catch my breath.

Fudo Myoo didn't reward my short suigyo with his presence. The only witness to my effort at spiritual discipline was a jeering nightingale. I was probably being an idiot -- catching pneumonia on pilgrimage is not a good idea. I made my way back across the courtyard to the bathhouse, towel in hand, wincing at the sharp gravel on my bare feet after my flip-flops flew off halfway. I was shivering and shaking like a scarecrow on a winter farm field. I used three towels to scrub myself dry and try to restore circulation. I felt light-headed and unsteady walking back across the courtyard. I sat on the bench near the candle stand again, leaning forward until the wooziness passed. In terms of spiritual conditioning, I was seriously out of shape.

I looked at my watch. It was just after 5:30. The sky had turned overcast. Yet, I remained, waiting, listening to the waterfall, the faint stir of the trees. Without the sun filtering through the treetops, the courtyard took on a twilight luminescence, as if the light was rising from the earth itself. The maples and cedars on the cliffs lost their distinctiveness in the absence of light, blurring into a solid grey-green canopy that seemed to descend toward the ground. The sound of the waterfall faded into the background. And through some alchemy of solitude, silence and the day's exertions, stillness settled over me like a blanket. The world fell away and I found myself remembering an incident from my childhood when I fell off a swing and knocked myself out. The memory rose up with hallucinatory vividness.

I was eight years old again, at a playground in northwest Calgary, with a neighbourhood girl named Carol Papworth. We were standing on separate swings, pumping with our legs to see how high we could go. Carol's blond hair flew like a flag. The swing's metal links screeched as we sailed back and forth. The rush of wind pulled at my clothes as the swing plunged downward. I bent my legs to obtain the maximum speed. As the swing reached its apogee, I felt a mix of fear and thrill as I leaned back, legs stiff and straight, arms rigid and pulling on the metal links, to fall backwards, momentarily weightless. Only that day my grip wasn't strong enough or my foot slipped. Suddenly, I was no longer holding on to anything.

I could never recall hitting the ground, but I must have lost consciousness for a few moments because the next thing I remember was looking up at Carol crouched beside me, her eyes wide and scared. It was odd, though, because I wasn't seeing her from the perspective of where I lay on the ground, but rather I seemed to be looking down on the scene, as if I was floating above it all. I heard the metal-on-metal squeak of the swaying swings and felt the grit of sand in my hands. But I also saw myself lying on the ground and felt the sudden swoop of terror at the idea of there being two of me: the boy on the ground and the boy floating overhead.

This psychic bifurcation lasted for a few seconds at most, but I never completely forgot that feeling of dislocation. Or the frightening notion that like a kite lost to an unexpected tug of wind, the floating boy who was myself could easily drift away, never to return. Relief flooded me when the floating boy and the boy on the ground slammed together again like a pair of clapping hands. I was back in my body, back to myself again.

Years later, I read an essay in anthropologist Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey in which he described crawling into a narrow sandstone crevice to encounter the fossilized skull of a long-extinct animal. Staring at it, Eiseley suddenly felt that the skull was looking back. And for a moment he felt himself inside the skull peering out through its eye sockets as the strange creature that was himself. The encounter jolted Eiseley with the knowledge of his own eventual extinction. What I recognized in Eiseley's account was the bifurcation of consciousness, the sundering of self that I had known on the playground.

Staring at the statue of Fudo Myoo, lost to memory, I was that floating boy again, suddenly and sharply aware of the strangeness of my own existence, aware that I existed in some vast space to which I was connected only tenuously and temporarily.

Japanese Zen practitioners use the word makyo to describe reaching a point in their meditations where they experience hallucinations, resurgent memories or other unusual mental phenomena -- anything from talking statues and marching Buddhas to ghostly apparitions and feelings of disembodiment. According to Zen teachings, the experience of makyo indicates the emergence of the mind's unconscious elements. Makyo is not enlightenment, but it is generally a good sign because it suggests the hard effort of zazen, or sitting meditation, has finally broken the mind of its obsession with logic and instrumental reason and opened it to unconscious life. But makyo can also be dangerous and illusory, bringing on a kind of psychosis -- Zen madness, it is called -- if not properly directed by a master teacher.

Had nearly two months of walking up and down mountains, reciting sutras and sitting zazen driven me around the bend? My periodic chats with Jizo or bathing with Fudo Myoo might suggest a suspension of normal behaviour. On the other hand, I could not deny the tide of peacefulness that washed over me, the sense that I received balm for the soul, a visitation from a childhood self, a better self, whose existence I had almost forgotten.

I gazed around the temple. In the twilight, the courtyard was retreating into shadow. Still I waited, absorbed in the quiet. I didn't hear the ash falling, but I inhaled the sweet tang of burning incense and heard the rustle of a cluster of pale green maple leaves on an overhanging branch. I caught the grate of gravel beneath my shoes, felt the thudding metronome of my heart. Slowly, the world returned. Or maybe, as I like to think, it was the floating boy returning to the world.

I stood to leave. I returned the flip-flops to the bathhouse. I hung the wet towels to dry. I dropped a 1,000-yen bill -- about $12 -- in the offertory bin. I lit as many candles stubs and incense sticks as I could find. I imagined them burning long after I was gone. Then I shouldered my pack and grabbed my walking stick. At the courtyard entrance I turned for a last look, committing the place to memory. I could swear that Fudo Myoo cracked a smile, but maybe that was another hallucination.

An hour later I was sitting at the window of my room in the Komatsu Business Hotel, wrapped in a warm yukata and staring at the dark bulk of Mount Yokomine silhouetted against the darkling sky. I thought about when I started my pilgrimage six weeks earlier and how I'd assumed it would be an adventure in cultural exoticism. I hesitate to ascribe other motives -- my rationalist heritage was skeptical of spiritual aspirations -- and had tried to avoid thinking about them. But as the days and weeks passed and the miles marched by, a combination of geography, companionship and serendipitous circumstance had produced a much different journey, one that I could not have imagined at the beginning. I had another two dozen temples to visit, but if the real purpose of my pilgrimage had been to arrive at some still-point within myself, some psychological gateway through which I could disappear, however, briefly, then Koonji Temple had provided such a place. On the Shikoku pilgrimage, I discover where I wanted to be.

In the morning, I would begin my seventh week on the trail. But at that moment, watching darkness descend on the mountain, it seemed to me my pilgrimage was finished. Of course, I was wrong in that assumption, too. The Shikoku no Michi still had other things in store for me, and for my companions.

Robert Sibley, a senior writer for the Citizen, can be reached at rsibley@thecitizen.canwest.com. The next -- and concluding -- episode of his pilgrimage will appear Sept. 18.

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The Way of Shikoku series is available online at www.ottawacitizen.com. Previous episodes, all of which appeared in the Citizen's Weekly, include:

A Pilgrim's Lot -- April 24.

Down the Spirit Trail -- May 15.

A Pilgrim Hits the Wall -- May 29.

The Road to Enlightenment -- June 12.

In the Shadow of Kobo Daishi -- June 26.

The Spell of Magic Places -- July 10.

Glimpsing the Soul of Japan -- July24.

A Pilgrim's Confessions -- Aug. 7.

Minor Miracles -- Aug. 21.

THE WAY OF SHIKOKU

Five years ago, Citizen writer Robert Sibley walked the 800-kilometre Camino de Santiago, one of the oldest pilgrimages in Christianity. Last spring, he set out on Japan's ancient Buddhist pilgrimage -- the 1,400-km Shikoku no Michi. Today, Part 10

Update: In the previous episode, Robert Sibley finished his sixth week on the legendary pilgrimage and was preparing to tackle the toughest part of the trail, the perilous path to Temple 60.