Update: In the previous episode, the writer, struggling to reach Temple 22, learns an object lesson: Park your ego at the start of this pilgrimage, make no excuses or complaints along the way - just simply walk.

I was parked on a bench beneath the cherry trees at Yakuõji Temple, admiring my ugly new shoes - blue and grey with splotches of iridescent yellow - when a man approached wearing a white peaked cap and carrying a little girl. He said something in Japanese, which, of course, I did not understand. But with a camera in one hand, the child in the crook of an arm and the sakura in full blossom, it wasn�t hard to figure out his request.

"Gomen nasai. Nihongo wa sukoshi dekimasen," I said, employing my minimalist Japanese. "Wakarimashita." "I�m sorry. I speak only a little Japanese. I understand."

I took a couple of pictures of them posing beneath the cherry trees. The child looked to be about three years old and, like many Japanese children, she was extraordinarily pretty, doll-like. He asked in passable English if I was American.

"Kanada-jin desu," I said, explaining I was a henro, or pilgrim. I was walking the Shikoku no Michi, visiting the 88 Buddhist temples strung like beads around the circumference of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan�s four islands. Like many Japanese I met during the two months it took me to complete the 1,400-kilometre route, he was surprised and even impressed.

The Henro Michi, as the pilgrimage route is more traditionally called, was established by the ninth-century Buddhist saint Kõbõ Daishi. It is the most popular pilgrimage in Japan, attracting 100,000 pilgrims a year. Most, however, travel by bus or car. Only a few hundred walk. Even more rare are foreign henro. I didn�t meet any other non-Japanese pilgrims on my trek.

"Ah, henro-san," the man said. He spoke to the little girl. She didn�t look impressed. She was trying to grab the swaying cherry blossoms. "I have been to Canada," he said. "I visit Vancouver, Banff and Calgary. Very beautiful."

I complimented him on his English and tried to say how much I liked Japan. "Nihon wa totemo utsukushii desu," I said. "Japan is very beautiful."

We continued like this for a while. He was a retired schoolteacher from Osaka, and he and his wife were driving around Shikoku Island with his son and daughter-in-law, visiting the temples. The child was his mago musume, or granddaughter.

He set the little girl at his feet and spoke to her. She clung to his leg, staring up at me, her dark eyes suddenly wide. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a 1,000-yen note - about $12 - and handed it to me. "Dõzo, o-settai," he said.

O-settai refers to the tradition of giving gifts - anything from food and clothing to lodging and money - to pilgrims walking the Shikoku no Michi. I had received o-settai before so I did not protest. Tradition obliges pilgrims to accept donations. Those offering o-settai think of themselves as giving indirectly to Kõbõ Daishi. Thus they share in the merits of the pilgrimage. I bowed and thanked him, touching the bill to my forehead in the proper gesture. From my pilgrim pouch, I took one of the narrow name-slips I deposit at the temples I visit, signed my name and address and gave it to him - again, in accordance with proper henro conduct. Then the man startled me.

"I tell my granddaughter you are Kõbõ Daishi," he said. He bowed, smiled and picked the child up. She was staring at me.

I was too startled to respond. It was the second time that day I�d been linked, even metaphorically, to one of Japan�s greatest religious leaders, the founder of an esoteric school of Buddhism known as Shingon. As the man walked down the flagstone path, the little girl watched me over his shoulder. I couldn�t resist: I raised my arms, waggled my hands with my thumbs in my ears, and stuck out my tongue. Her eyes got even bigger. I imagined that for the rest of her life she�d be puzzled by a childhood memory of a hairy-faced saint making faces at her.

But if the child was disconcerted, so, too, was I at my improbable spiritual elevation, even if made in jest. Another tradition of the Henro Michi - and another reason why o-settai is both offered and accepted - is the belief that Kõbõ Daishi walks with each pilgrim as a spiritual guide. This belief is reinforced symbolically by the white robe a pilgrim wears and the staff he carries. Both the robe and staff bear the ideograms "dõgyõ ninin," meaning "We Two - Pilgrims Together." The unsaid message is: Be careful when you meet a pilgrim, you might also be meeting the saint himself, an encounter that could decide your karma for millennia to come. I was, as I well knew, a most unlikely candidate as a budding Bodhisattva. Still, a central tenet of Shingon Buddhism is that anyone can discover their Buddha-nature if they undertake the rigorous discipline necessary to achieve enlightenment. Everyone is a potential Kõbõ Daishi.

With the man and his granddaughter out of sight, I turned the thought aside and returned to my bench to enjoy the late afternoon sun. A breeze occasionally shook the cherry trees, scattering blossoms like confetti around the red-and-white pagoda. I had a bird�s-eye view of the town below.

Yakuõji, Temple 23, is perched on a hillside overlooking Hiwasa, a harbour town halfway along the coastline toward Cape Muroto on Shikoku�s southern tip. From the terraced courtyard, I gazed across the red-and-grey tile roofs, following the river as it emptied into the harbour and the Pacific Ocean. Green-hulled fishing boats moored along the seawall. The breeze carried the smell of salt and kelp.

A pretty, if ordinary view, I thought. Yet it felt extraordinary. But then the entire day had had an of out-of-the-ordinary feel. Not that anything spectacular happened. I had not attained satori, much less Buddhahood. Yet, for some reason, the very ordinariness of the day�s events was imbued with heightened significance. Mundane occurrences, serendipitous situations, banal circumstances; all were brushed with a patina of meaning and portent. Such a sensibility is a common psychological tic of many pilgrims, who often project a special significance onto the most ordinary events.

Ian Reader, a British anthropologist who has studied Japanese pilgrimages, writes that pilgrims often come to regard the most ordinary events as miracles and personal messages from Kõbõ Daishi. Behind this interpretation, he says, is a mindset predisposed by the symbolism of the pilgrimage to see a spiritual presence in the everyday. "For many pilgrims, their pilgrimages and relationship with Kõbõ Daishi are highlighted by smaller, less dramatic events that are pregnant with meaning for them alone," he writes.

Was I slipping into a spiritual solipsism? Western scientific rationalism, the faith of instrumental reason, had taught me it is anthropomorphic folly to regard stars and planets, turf and trees, as the material manifestation of an underlying spiritual order. The cosmos, I had been taught, was contingent, without purpose, devoid of ultimate meaning. Yet it was difficult not to be perplexed by the string of coincidence and beneficial occurrences I had experienced of late. The day I spent walking to Hiwasa - including how I acquired my ugly new shoes - was a good example.

It was 7 a.m. when my two companions, Shuji Niwano and his 25-year-old son, Jun, and I left the minshuku in Aratano where we had stayed the night. The two, who were from Tokyo, had been my companions for most of the past week. We had met at Temple 9 a few days earlier, and now, having reached Temple 23, I sometimes felt I had been with them for longer. On this day, we had planned to head south to Fukui Dam, and then hike through the maze of rice paddies and rural lanes to the coastal road that leads to Hiwasa and Yakuõji. It was a better alternative than following the old pilgrim path, which had been buried beneath the asphalt of Highway 55 and was choked with trucks and tractor-trailers.

It looked to be perfect walking weather - hazy and cool, without the threat of rain. But our plans started to unravel almost immediately. Jun was not well. Normally, he was chatty and eager in the morning. We usually walked together for the first hour or so in the morning, letting Shuji walk by himself. As we hiked, we swapped words in our respective languages for things we saw along the road. As Jun endlessly repeated: "I am your Japanese teacher." When he wasn�t providing a language lesson or asking me about American movie stars, Jun trudged ahead, sometimes disappearing from sight as he wandered off the pilgrim route.

Shuji regularly had to double back to find his son since Jun, despite his age, showed little ability to read maps and, inevitably, got lost. While I waited with the packs, Shuji retraced his steps, questioning passersby who might have seen his wayward son. He performed his searches with fatalistic good humour, one of the burdens of fatherhood. Almost inevitably, Shuji found Jun sauntering along with a can of pop or an orange he had cajoled from some shopkeeper as o-settai. For all his waywardness and lack of forethought, Jun�s cheeriness and eagerness to please gave him a certain charm that made you tolerate his irresponsibility and inattentiveness. This morning, though, Jun was withdrawn. There was no language lesson.

But then neither Shuji nor I were doing well either. I still had a bad case of blisters and wasn�t so much walking as lurching. Shuji looked haggard and puffy-eyed, as if he hadn�t slept. Jun, he said, had been sick to his stomach most of the night.

We managed to walk five kilometres to the village of Awafukui before Jun gave up. Oddly enough, it was one of the loveliest walks I�d had on the pilgrimage. The path wound along the edges of rice fields that were slowly turning green with newly planted seedlings and meandered down country lanes lined with copses of bamboo. Maples and oaks grew so close to the sides of the road it was like walking in a green tunnel. I liked how tendrils of moss struggled across the roads using cracks in the asphalt as passageways. I was careful to avoid stepping on the cracks. Nightingales held conference calls in the trees, competing with a chorus of cicadas.

We were approaching the intersection where our lane crossed Highway 55, when I heard Shuji shouting behind me. I turned and saw Jun kneeling on the shoulder of the road, his pack on the ground beside him.

"Jun is very tired," Shuji said. "He needs to rest."

Jun�s face was slack. His eyes, usually bright and animated, were glazed with fatigue.

"Kibun wa dõ desu ka?" I said. "How are you feeling?"

"Watashi wa fukutsu ga shimasu." "I feel sick to my stomach."

Clearly, Jun wouldn�t be walking very far that day. Shuji and I studied our maps. We were about a kilometre from Fukui Dam, where there was a large picnic area.

Ten minutes later, Jun was stretched out on a picnic bench, sleeping in the morning sun. There was a playground, a water slide and, to my great relief, a bank of vending machines. I bought a couple of cans of hot coffee. Shuji and I found a wall where we could sit out of the wind and enjoy our drinks. I didn�t like to admit it but it was pleasant not to be walking, pleasant to sit with my legs stretched out, the coffee hot in my hands, the sun warm on my face and chest.

"Robert," Shuji said. "You have been a good friend. Walking with us."

"Dõmo arigatõ," I said. "You are tomodachi, my friend." I tipped my can of coffee at him.

Shuji smiled. Then he said he thought Jun needed to sleep for a couple of hours. "I am sorry," he said in his halting English. "Jun is not strong. He cannot walk so far today. I am sorry for upsetting your walking."

I almost laughed. His son was feeling bad, but Shuji was worried about messing up my walking schedule. I shook my head. "No need to apologize."

"Perhaps you want to walk by yourself," Shuji said. "You do not need to wait for us."

I wondered if he was trying to get rid of me. But as I looked at him I knew it was an unworthy thought. He was genuinely concerned that Jun�s difficulties were interfering with my pilgrimage. I thought back to a couple of days earlier when I met them and Shuji telling me that Jun had suffered some sort of nervous or mental breakdown a few years back - he was never clear on the specific circumstances and I wasn�t going to ask - and had never fully recovered. He�d had to leave school, was able to hold down a job and was still living at home. Shuji hoped that walking the Henro Michi would help his son recover. Recalling that conversation, I now had the distinct feeling Shuji was worried about how I would respond to Jun�s latest collapse. Watching my companion�s worried face, I realized how much I had come to like him. I remembered a scene from Oliver Statler�s Japanese Pilgrimage, one of the few books I was carrying on this trek.

Statler recounts that on his pilgrimage in the 1970s a woman offered him a cup of coffee in her home as o-settai, and then begged him to look at her daughter who was ill in bed. Statler knew the tradition behind the woman�s request: Kõbõ Daishi had miraculous powers of healing. Henro who follow in his footsteps effectively associate themselves with the Buddhist saint and, thereby, take on "a trace of the Daishi�s aura." In being asked to look at the daughter, Statler was being asked to live up to his self-chosen association. He wrote: "As a man with hair grey enough to imply some wisdom; as a stranger - there is a mystery in that word, the mystery of a person unknown unexpectedly appearing from a world unknown - and doubly a stranger, a foreigner; and above all as a henro. I am being asked to minister to a sick girl."

Statler panicked and refused the woman�s request. "I have no religious power, I tell this woman. I am wearing a henro robe but I have no religious power. I have no ability to diagnose an illness or to cure it." Statler later regretted his response, realizing that he�d been thinking about himself, his own presumed inadequacies. Even if he believed he lacked any healing power, they did not. But he succumbed to the selfishness, the egocentrism, of his skepticism. As he put it, "I failed and the failure still weighs on me."

I remembered how Shuji and Jun had looked out for me, a stranger and a foreigner, when I was having difficulty walking. They could easily have left me to my own devices. At one temple, Jun brought me a bottle of Pocari Sweat when I was near to fainting from dehydration.

"Shuji please, I do not want to be a burden to you. If I am, tell me. But I think of you and Jun as friends now. We began walking the Henro Michi together. I would like us to finish together. Wakarimasu ka? Do you understand."

Shuji took off his glasses, looked at them in his hands and then replaced them. "Hai, wakarimashita," he said. "Dõmo arigatõ gozaimasu, Sibley-san." "I understand. Thank you very much." He put out his hand. "You are Kõbõ Daishi."

I shook his hand, dismissing any association between me and the Buddhist Bodhisattva. "Iie. No, not Kõbõ Daishi. Tomodachi."

As we settled back with our coffees, I thought about Japanese attitudes toward religion. According to scholars, many Japanese, perhaps most, are not particularly religious, and even describe their society as one in which religion has largely died out. Yet, at the same time, the Japanese generally demonstrate high levels of religious activity and behaviour. They might deny a religious sensibility, and even be ignorant of Buddhism and Shintoism, Japan�s indigenous animistic religion, but each year millions take part in hatsumõde, the traditional New Year�s custom of visiting temples and shrines to pray for good fortune and happiness. During the summer festival of o-bon, millions travel to be with their families to visit ancestral graves. As Ian Reader writes: "Whether they are merely going along for social and cultural reasons, everyone does join their hands in prayer and making offerings." They also buy talismans and amulets by the truckload, as well as the o-mikuji, the written divinations sold at shrines that foretell the future.

The popularity of pilgrimages - there are more than 100 pilgrimages in Japan - reflects this religiosity, too. Those who undertake a pilgrimage, whether by car, bus or on foot, don�t necessarily do so for conscious religious reasons, at least initially. As Reader says, pilgrimages also serve "as a mode of escape from modernity and from the pressures of urban life."

I heard several variations on this theme during my two months on the trail. Several pilgrims I met told me they did not set out thinking of their trek in religious terms, but as a time-out from their everyday lives, an opportunity to reflect on their lives. The religious sensibility, the awareness of a spiritual dimension to their pilgrimage, seemed to develop later. I would eventually see this shift in Shuji.

As we waited for Jun to wake, Shuji told me that he had grown up on Shikoku and only moved to Tokyo in his late 30s to find work after Jun had been born. He had always wanted to return to Shikoku after he retired. Walking the pilgrimage was his way of introducing his son to his family�s heritage. His son�s psychological health, not religion, was Shuji�s motive for pilgrimage. Indeed, neither Shuji nor Jun wore any of the traditional pilgrimage garb such as the white vest and the conical straw hat or carried the kongõ-tsue, the walking stick that is the surest sign of the walking pilgrim. Nor, I noticed, did Shuji recite the Hannya Shingyõ, the Heart Sutra, the most popular Buddhist sutra, which is believed to contain the essence and power of Buddhist doctrine. The only "pilgrimage" gear Shuji had was the nõkyõ-chõ, the stamp book in which henro collect the seals of each temple they visit.

But now, with Shuji�s joking linkage of Kõbõ Daishi and myself, I wondered if he was starting to discover other motives and meanings in his pilgrimage. It would not be uncommon if he did. I had done enough long-distance trekking to know that the journey you start out on is not necessarily the one you complete.

We let Jun sleep for another hour and then trudged back up the road to Awafukui train station. We had decided to forgo walking for the day. We would take the train instead. While we waited, Shuji and I ate bowls of udon noodles in the fly-blown café next to the station. Jun napped on a bench in the waiting room. We woke him to catch the 11:56 to Hiwasa.

I felt guilty about not walking, but it was very pleasant to sit in a train car as it clacked and creaked through the green valleys of coastal Shikoku. I told myself that a day�s rest would give my feet a chance to recover. The car was mostly empty, with only a couple of girls in their dark blue school uniforms and an elderly woman carrying a bag of onions.

Just before Yuki Town, I got my first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. The sight of the ocean seemed an auspicious way to mark the completion of my first week on the Henro Michi. Two weeks earlier, I had been parked in my cubbyhole at the Citizen, anticipating my trip to Japan. Now I was on a train overlooking the Pacific. The two images jostled in my mind. I felt displaced, or rather, I felt like I was in two places at once. The person staring at the ocean did not seem to be the same person who had been daydreaming in the office two weeks earlier.

But before I could tie myself in metaphysical knots, the swaying of the train lulled me into a nap. I woke up just before 1 o�clock, as the train pulled into Hiwasa. What would have taken us most of the day to walk had taken an hour on the train. A few minutes later, we dropped our packs in our rooms at the Ryokan Funatsuki.

It was too early to check in, but the okami-san, a tiny woman wearing big black horn-rimmed glasses, let Shuji and Jun take their room so Jun could sleep. I left them to find a post office. I wanted to shed some excess weight from my pack by shipping a few items to a friend in Tokushima, David Moreton, who would keep them for me until I returned at the end of my trek. I also wanted to use the post office�s automatic teller to restock my supply of yen and find a pharmacy to buy more tape for my feet. Afterward, I returned to the ryokan, disposed of my lightened pack, and headed for Temple 23, about a kilometre away.

On the way to the temple, I stopped at a bar in the square near Hiwasa Station. "Biiru o kudasai." I said, ordering a glass of cold beer. The half-dozen tables were empty; I was the only customer.

It was a sunny day and I was happy to sit by the window, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the coldness of the beer. Maybe I should take other days off, too, I thought. I pulled off my boots. I wrote a few postcards. I drank another beer. Then I squeezed back into my boots, paid the bill, bowed to my hostess, and stepped into the street - where I spotted another henro crossing the square. It was Tamotsu Hasegawa, the metallurgist I had met at the minshuku in Aratano the previous night. He had given me some tape for my feet and that he spoke English well. I called out and hobbled toward him.

"Your feet are bad?" he said.

"Not too good." I shrugged.

Hasegawa-san had just checked into his ryokan. While we had been dawdling at the Fukui Dam, he had walked from Aratano. Now he was heading to the temple for his devotions. I was welcome to come with him. We started walking, but I couldn�t keep up.

"You need other shoes," he said, after having stopped to wait for me a couple of times.

I agreed. It was an obvious solution, but one I had been resisting. Long-distance walking swells your feet; boots that aren�t big enough in length and width produce blisters. My boots were a half-size bigger than my normal shoe size; they should have been a full-size bigger. I had spent a a lot of money on them - thick soles, ankle-high uppers, Gore-tex lining - and was reluctant to admit it had been wasted. I had hoped my feet and boots would find an accommodation. But after a week it was clear there would be no reconciliation.

And now, hearing Hasegawa-san�s sensible solution, my stubbornness cracked. I was grateful. It later occurred to me that if I hadn�t met him I might have continued walking in too-small boots, stubbornly enduring the pain until my feet became so bad that I would have been forced to take a few days off or, worse, quit the pilgrimage.

Hasegawa-san led me to a shoe store where, after listening to his instructions - which, for some reason, seemed to entail pointing at me and laughing a great deal - the clerk hauled out half-a-dozen pairs of running shoes. Hasegawa-san waited patiently, if humorously, while I tried on several pairs. I finally settled on the Nike Air. They were really ugly - blue and grey with sickly yellow insets and that stupid "swoosh." Normally, I wouldn�t have been caught dead wearing something so gaudy. But they were wide and comfortable, and for the first time in days my feet didn�t suffer needles of pain when I took a step. They were still sore and tender, but the Nikes, unlike my expensive all-weather, go-anywhere boots, didn�t make matters worse.

I have read how people unexpectedly cured of chronic pain feel liberated by their relief. Taking my first steps in my new shoes, I had an inkling of what that relief might feel like. I knew my feet would heal. I would limp for days to come, and would still feel footsore at the end of each day�s walk, but I also knew I would complete my pilgrimage. That alone was a huge relief. I had been given a gift.

There was more to come. The shoes were 8,000 yen, about $100. I handed the money to the clerk. He shook his head. I thought he meant I needed to pay more, so I started to hand over more cash. He waved this off, too, and handed me back 3,000 yen.

"O-settai," he said.

I thanked him and bowed very low. I gave him one of my signed name-slips. Then Hasegawa-san and I walked to the temple. I kept up with him this time.

Yakuõji is well-known in Japan as a yakuyoke temple, that is, a temple for warding off bad luck and ill fortune. Each year during the first two weeks of the New Year, thousands visit the temple to pray for good fortune in the coming year.

As my Awa Henro guidebook explained, the Japanese traditionally believe there are certain critical ages when men and women need to take extra care with their health and conduct. One of the most dangerous ages for men is 42. For women it is 33. Kõbõ Daishi supposedly visited the temple when he was 42, and enshrined a statue of Yukushi Nyorai, a Buddhist deity possessed of wisdom and mercy, in the main hall in hopes of avoiding misfortune.The temple has since become the place to go for "danger banishing prayers." Inside the main gate are two flights of stairs, or yakuzaka - danger hills - leading to the hondõ. One set of stairs has 33 steps, while the other has 42.

I wasn�t taking any chances. I was beyond the 42-is-dangerous age, but there are always more dangerous ages ahead. I sprinkled coins as I climbed. I also performed my regular pilgrim rituals with extra diligence. I dropped extra yen in the donation bins at the main hall. And, on the off chance Kõbõ Daishi might have had something to do with the acquisition of my new shoes, I bowed low to his statue in the daishidõ. You never know.

I thanked Hasegawa-san by buying him a can of cold Kirin beer at the bar in the square. He told me he was using two weeks of his vacation time to walk as far as he could on the Shikoku no Michi. He had been on the trail for nearly a week and expected to reach Kõchi City and Temple 31 before returning home. Next year, he would complete another two weeks on the pilgrimage.

"In my job everything is quick, quick," he said. I remembered that he worked for Toyota. "Walking gives me time to think about things that are important to me."

After Hasegawa-san left, I felt restless and returned to Yakuõji Temple, climbing back to the courtyard in front of the red-and-white pagoda, where I met the grandfather and the little girl. After they departed, with the grandfather�s words echoing in my mind, I thought about the coincidences and circumstances of the day, how each ordinary event - Jun�s illness, meeting Hasegawa-san, the shoe-store clerk�s o-settai, the grandfather and child - had by some haphazard chain of cause-and-effect culminated in an extraordinary day.

I was experiencing a psychological phenomenon common to pilgrimage: ordinary events and situations acquire a significance that belies their ordinariness. Catching a train in the nick of time, having minor aches suddenly disappear, unexpectedly meeting someone who takes care of a particular need; such banal occurrences can seem almost miraculous, encouraging you to imagine that someone is watching out for you.

Sitting beneath the cherry tree, pondering my Nikes for any spiritual significance, I remembered a haiku the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashõ wrote in his travel journal, Narrow Road to the Interior, another book I carried. The journal, a classic of Japanese literature, recounts a journey Bashõ and a companion made in the spring of 1689. They trekked from Edo, or old Tokyo, along the eastern coast into the then-remote and mysterious northern regions of Honshu, staying with the yamabushi, or hermit-priests, before turning inland and walking south along Japan�s western coast. As Jennifer Westwood writes in Sacred Journeys, it was a genuine pilgrimage in that Bashõ sought out the mountain sanctuaries of the yamabushi. But it was also a walking tour in that Bashõ visited historical monuments, temples and places of local fame. In Westwood�s word, "the things Bashõ thought worthy of contemplation on his journey included sights that any ordinary tourist might have wanted to see." But he also travelled "along the narrow road to the deep north as he travelled through his life on Earth - seeking a vision of eternity in the everyday."

Bashõ may have prayed at the temples, but he also enjoyed - and complained about - ordinary things. There�s little overt spirituality in Bashõ�s account. Instead, he tells of his frustration at not finding a certain species of iris in the hills of Asaka. He complains that his "bony shoulders were sore because of the load I had carried." He objects that an inn was "filthy" and of his sleep being disturbed by "the raids of mosquitoes and fleas" and "a horse urinating all night close to my pillow."

I needed to take Bashõ�s example to heart. Like him, I needed to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary, including my ugly Nikes. Bashõ recounts receiving two pairs of sandals as a gift. The sandals had dark blue laces. He was inspired to write this haiku: "It looks as if/ Iris flowers had bloomed/ On my feet." I studied my Nikes and their grey laces. I saw nothing to inspire a poem. But I could wiggle my toes and flex my feet, and when I took a step there was no squeeze of pain. Maybe Kõbõ Daishi had been watching over me. It was a pleasant, if absurd, thought.

Yakuõji is the last of the 23 pilgrimage temples in Tokushima Prefecture, one of Shikoku�s four provinces. According to tradition, Tokushima is the hosshin no dõjõ, the arena for spiritual awakening. In visiting the temples of Tokushima, I was supposed to have discovered my desire for enlightenment, which, as the Buddhist scriptures teach, is "to understand fully the nature of your own mind."

Tomorrow or the day after, I would enter Kõchi Prefecture. With 16 temples, Kõchi is known as the shugyõ no dõjõ, the place for ascetic discipline. It was there that I was supposed to learn the austerities required for understanding my mind. It is also the largest of Shikoku�s four prefectures, which means that many of the temples are a long ways from each other.

For the next week or so, I would seldom be out of sight of the ocean. The pilgrim trail descends the eastern verge of Cape Muroto before rounding the cape to follow the coastline west to Cape Ashizuri. Sometimes the trail cuts inland, but mostly it hugs the coast. In the old days, the path went along the shoreline and pilgrims had to scramble over "jumping stones, bucking stones, tumbling stones," as one account puts it, as well as keep a wary eye out for shifting tides.

Nowadays, though, the pilgrim path often follows Highway 55. Which meant my feet would take a pounding. After Kõchi, there are two more provinces, Ehime and Kagawa. Both are considered arenas, or dõjõs, of rigorous spiritual endeavour. But right then, watching a green-hulled fishing boat chug away from the protection of the seawall, those dõjõs were too far away to worry about. I luxuriated in my ugly new shoes. With 23 temples and about 150 kilometres under my belt, so to speak, I was happy just knowing my feet would get better. Take care of the physical, I figured, and the spirit will show itself, sooner or later.

The next episode of Robert Sibley�s pilgrimage will appear in the June 26 Weekly.