Update: In the previous episode, the writer found a sense of enlightenment as he ended the first leg of his pilgrimage - understanding the mind starts with taking care of the feet.

I was tramping past the police station on the outskirts of Mugi Town when a woman in a green hat rushed up to me. Her Japanese was incomprehensible. I could only grin and nod and repeatedly say, "wakarimasen," "I don’t understand." I noticed a couple of Japanese policemen looking at us from a window. Had I broken some obscure law? Was it illegal for a gaikokujin, an out-of-country person, to pass a police station in Japan without saying hello? Was this woman waving her hands and gesturing for me to follow her, supposed to fetch me inside?

For one panicked moment, I thought maybe there was an emergency back home in Canada, that the RCMP had contacted the Japanese police to be on the lookout a foreign pilgrim?

Luckily, my pilgrimage companions, Shuji Niwano and his 25-year-old son, Jun, with whom I’d been walking the past week, rescued me from my ignorance. They’d been a few hundred metres behind me all morning as we hiked from Hiwasa, where we’d stayed the previous night. As they approached, the woman turned with obvious relief to them. I had no idea what was going on, so I just followed Shuji.

Instead of hauling me into the police station, the woman led us into parking lot behind the building where a couple of picnic benches were set end-to-end beneath a large awning. The tables were stacked with bananas and apples and oranges. There were plates of crackers, nuts and candy. A propane stove kept a pot of water bubbling. I headed for a cooler filled with soft drinks, fruit juice and water.

"O-settai," said the woman, whose name, as I learned, was Asaka Teruko. She ushering us under the awning where two other women - Tomida Fusako and Yukõ Juyako - waited.

O-settai refers to the tradition of giving food, money, clothing and even a bed to those who walk the Henro Michi, the 1,400-kilometre pilgrimage route that encircles Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. The pilgrimage, which is also known as the Shikoku no Michi, the Way of Shikoku, entails visiting 88 Buddhist temples strung along the route like prayer beads on a rosary. The route was established in the 19th-century by Japan’s great religious figure, Kõbõ Daishi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism.

According to tradition, to give o-settai is to earn merit with the Daishi since pilgrims embody the saint’s spirit. For their part, henro are obliged to accept the gifts since in undertaking the pilgrimage they carry "a trace of the Daishi’s aura," as Oliver Statler writes in Japanese Pilgrimage, an account of his pilgrimage in the 1970s.

Shuji explained that the women were members of a local group dedicated to serving walking henro. We were the only pilgrims so far that day, except for one other. Stepping beneath the awning, we were greeted by Goki Sayama, a retired banker from Sendai, a city north of Tokyo. We hadn’t seen him on the trail for a couple of days. He was sitting at the table with his boots off, drinking a cup of tea and peeling an orange. I noticed he had tape wrapped around the balls of his feet.

I pointed at his feet and asked him how he was doing.

He looked at his feet and shrugged. "Okagesama de. Sochira wa?" he said, popping a wedge of orange into this mouth. "Very well. And you?"

I shrugged. "Mã, mã." "So, so." I showed him my ugly new shoes. He laughed.

The women urged us to eat and drink. I noticed a can of coffee on a shelf and begged for a cup: "Hotto kohi, kudasai." I must have made some sense. A few minutes later I was enjoying my first cup of fresh-brewed coffee in more than a week. I was glad we’d stopped.

We had covered nearly 20 kilometres since leaving Hiwasa about 8 a.m., and the walking had been good. I still limped from my slowly-healing blisters, but my new shoes were not creating more blisters. I had purchased the Nike Air the previous day to replace my expensive, but too-small boots that had given me nothing but blisters. It was such a relief to be walking without constant pain that I had sometimes forgotten about my feet.

I had almost forgotten about Jun, too. For the last couple of days he’d been having difficulty coping with each day’s long hike. "Jun’s condition" was the phrase Shuji used to explain his son’s fatigue and need rest periods. The previous day Jun had been sick and we’d taken a train. Today, he was still feeling weak, so we planned to walk while he was able and then, if necessary, take a train or bus to Kaifu, where Shuji had booked rooms at the Saba Daishi temple. I glanced up from my coffee at Jun lying down in the shade of a nearby fence. After downing a bowl of miso soup, he told Shuji he wanted to nap for awhile.

Our hostesses hauled out a register containing the names of passing pilgrims. I couldn’t read the Japanese, but flipping through the pages I noticed that most henro were in their 50s or 60s. The oldest I saw was 81, while the youngest was 19.

I asked Sayama-san how old he was. "Watakushi wa nana-ju san." "I am 73."

"Why do you walk?"

Sayama-san said something I didn’t understand. Shuji translated: Sayama-san was walking the Henro Michi to think about his family. "He has trouble at home," Shuji said, struggling to find the English words. "Family trouble. He prays for his family." I never found out the exact nature of Sayama-san’s troubles - something about one of his sons - but his reasons fit those of other pilgrims I encountered during my two-month trek. Indeed, author Oliver Statler writes of a temple priest he met who told him that many people undertake the pilgrimage for psychological motives. ‘‘These are times of strain and mental illness, and so today the benefits of pilgrimage are even greater.’’

By the time I finished my second cup of coffee, Sayama-san had put on his shoes and shouldered his pack. He bowed to us, and then, dignified as ever, walked back to the road and out of sight. I never saw him again. We left a short time later, after thanking the women and adding our names to the register. I was the only non-Japanese name in the book.

We walked for maybe an hour, following the highway above the ocean on our left, when Jun pleaded for another break. We found a path that led down to a strip of beach. We dropped our packs on a small knoll beneath a copse of palm trees. Jun curled up to sleep. Shuji sat near him and took out his notebook. Someday, I thought, I had to ask Shuji what he was writing. I trundled down to the beach and stretched out on the sand.

A kite rode the air above a distant headland. Watching a freighter move slowly across the blue horizon, I suddenly remembering another ship on another horizon - an afternoon in the fall of 1970 sitting with Nilla Brown, a woman I had been dating, on the rocks below Point-No-Point on the western coast of Vancouver Island. We’d watched a ship churn through the Strait of Juan de Fuca Strait toward the Pacific. The memory surprised me; I hadn’t thought of that afternoon for years.

I woke to the sound of my name. For a second, until the world snapped back into place, I didn’t know where I was. I heard my name again. Shuji and Jun were on their feet, packs on their shoulders. Standing beside them was Tamotsu Hasegawa, the man who had urged me to buy the new shoes.

"How are your feet?" said Hasegawa-san. A metallurgist who worked for Toyota, he spoke excellent English.

"Good. Thanks to you, I can walk," I said.

As we climbed to the highway, I looked back to the beach. I wanted to remember the place where I had recovered a long-lost memory.

We reached Kaifu about 4 o’clock. A stone henro marker sent us down a narrow lane to Saba Daishi temple.

Saba Daishi is one of dozens of bangai, or unnumbered temples, scattered across Shikoku. While they aren’t officially part of the 88-temple circuit, they still attract pilgrims. Saba Daishi is one of the more famous. Twice a year, the temple stages an outdoor goma, or Fire Walk ceremony, during which the priests, and visitors, walk barefoot the length of a five-metre pit of hot coals. Statler describes the goma as "one of the great rituals" of Shingon Buddhism. There was no fire-walk scheduled during our stay, but after supper - kelp soup, bonito sashimi, mushroom-and-shrimp pudding, vegetable tempura - Hasegawa-san asked if I wanted to attend an indoor goma ceremony the next morning.

I did, of course, so he took me to see a temple priest. With Hasegawa-san translating, the priest asked if there was anyone I wanted to commemorate in the ceremony. My father, I said. I selected a narrow strip of cedar known as a prayer stick and spelled out my father’s name, Albert Sibley, in katakana, the syllabic script the Japanese use for foreign words. The priest dipped his brush into an ink well painted the words on the prayer stick. Hasegawa-san also commemorated his father. The priest added our prayer sticks to a pile to be burned with prayers for the souls of the departed.

We bought two cans of Kirin beer from a vending machine in the lobby of the shukubõ and went to my room. Sitting on the tatami at the low table, Hasegawa-san explained that he and his father had planned to walk the Henro Michi, but his father had died two weeks before they were to leave.

"Now I am walking alone in his memory," he said.

I told Hasegawa-san that my father had been dead for 20 years, but there probably wasn’t a day go by when I didn’t think of him. "You will always miss him," I said.

Hasegawa-san nodded. "Hai. Itsu mo." "Always." He lifted his beer in a toast. "You and me, the same. No father." We drank to our dead fathers.

Hasegawa-san rattled the shoji panel of my room at 5 o’clock the next morning. By 5:45, I was sitting cross-legged on the tatami-matted floor with 21 other pilgrims in the near-darkness of the Fudõ hall.

The service began when four priests in their burgundy robes silently entered the octagonal room. The head priest climbed a raised dais and sat facing a black-and-gold statue of Fudõ Myõõ, the fierce-faced deity who defends the Buddhist faith and represents "fatherly strictness."

In front of the priest, below the dais, was a hearth. The other priests took positions around the altar. One stood in front of a kettle-drum and a gong hanging from a rope. Others lit sticks of incense and candles in the small urns that encircled the altar. Light from the candles bounced off the hundreds of foot-tall statues of Ashura the Guardian that lined the walls. Silence settled on us.

The chime of a bell startled me. The sound seemed to take so long time to fade. Then the gong sounded, its echo filling the room. The priest on the dais began to chant, spreading and folding his arms over the smouldering fire as if gathering the smoke into himself. The other priests joined the chant. The head priest started dropping thin sticks into the hearth. The fire began to build. As the flames grew, the drumming became steady and insistence, louder and louder, the chanting fast and urgent. The vibration of sounds filled my chest and head.

As the fire leapt high out of the hearth, the priest inserts the gomagi, the prayer sticks, one by one into the flames. With each stick, he read out a name. If I had understood Japanese, I would have heard my father’s name. I watched the thickening column of smoke, imagining the ascension of souls. I glanced at Hasegawa-san beside me. The candlelight caught the gleam of tears on his face.

When the last of gomagi had been surrendered to the flames, the priest allowed the fire to die. As it subsided, so did the chanting and drumming. The congregation chanted the Heart Sutra, the Hannya Shingyõ, the short prayer that is said to encapsulate the entirety of Buddhist teaching. For the past week, I’d been hearing pilgrims chant the sutra at temples. Even if I didn’t understand the words, the phrasing was increasingly familiar: "Gyate, gyate, haragyate, harasogyate boji sowaka …"

When the prayers were done the priest gave a short sermon - I caught only the phrase "gambatte kudasai," "do your best" - after which our group was invited to walk around the smoking fire. Most imitated the priest by waving their hands through the tendrils of smoke and rubbing those parts of their bodies they believed needed divine blessing. I rubbed my head.

Leaving the goma room, I took a last look at Fudõ Myõõ, the light from the fire and candles playing across his fierce face. His hostility is directed against those who live a life of arrogance and ignorance. He carries a sword to smite those who surrender to delusion and evil. But he is also worshipped for his willingness to take on the sufferings of humans. A good model for a father, I thought. Offering a final nod to the deity, I followed my fellow pilgrims down a 60-metre tunnel back to the shukubõ. The dim-lit tunnel was lined with pictures of pilgrimage temples. Beneath the pictures were small statues of each temple’s principal deity, or honzon.

Shuji and Jun were waiting for us in the foyer. Or rather Shuji was waiting, looking apologetic, while Jun slouched half-asleep beside his backpack. Jun was not up to walking today, Shuji explained.

In my less charitable moods I sometimes thought that Jun was goofing off, that he lacked the will to overcome his weaknesses. I squatted beside him. "How do you feel?" I said.

He looked at me, making an effort to focus his attention. "Tired."

The thought came unbidden: What would Fudõ Myõõ do? Smite the weakness or make allowances. It was clear from the vagueness in his eyes that Jun wasn’t faking. When I first began walking with Shuji and Jun a week earlier, Shuji told me that his son had had a nervous breakdown when he was in school. I heard more details over the next few days: For a long time, Jun refused to leave the house or, sometimes, even his room. His mother, Ikuko, left food for him outside his bedroom door.

Months later, I would read about a social phenomenon that is apparently unique to Japan: young people isolating themselves from society, including friends and parents, refusing to leave the house and sinking into self-isolation. This can last for weeks, months and even years. Japanese psychologists have labeled the phenomenon hikikomori, or, social withdrawal.

According to one study, as many as 1.2 million young people - about one per cent of the population - suffer from hikikomori. It is especially prevalent among males in their late teens and 20s. Typically, they live a kind of reversal of normal life, sleeping during the day and watching television, playing video games or surfing the Internet at night. For the most part, they aren’t violent. However, there have been reports of hikikomori sufferers attacking family members, including parents.

Some authorities link the phenomenon to Japan’s economy; there aren’t enough jobs or university places for the young, and the competition is too hard for those few that exist. Perhaps, but I like the point made by novelist Ryu Murakami in his essay, "Japan’s Lost Generation."

Japanese youth, he wrote, "could not afford to be socially withdrawn if their parents were not affluent enough to provide them a home, meals and extras that have come to be thought of as basics - audio and video equipment, software, mobile phones, computers."

Was Jun a victim of hikikomori? He didn’t seem to shows symptoms of "social withdrawal." His gregarious behaviour, his desire to befriend others, seemed almost desperate at times, a sign of immaturity more than social pathology. True, he took no responsibility for planning each day, and he smoked incessantly, lighting up a cigarette when we took even the shortest break. But he was always friendly and helpful when called upon. He was always offering me something to drink or eat. And the only aggressiveness I saw, at least to that point, was the occasional shouting match with his father.

The pilgrimage was Shuji’s attempt to get Jun to take more responsibility for himself, to recover a sense of pride and self-worth. But he was also afraid that if he pushed too hard, Jun would give up.

Crouched beside Jun, the cynic in me considered striking off on my own, or, glancing up at Hasegawa-san, continuing with my new friend. For all my aches and pains, the walking was beginning to absorb me. Buses and trains marred the purity of the pilgrimage. But I couldn’t abandon Shuji. I had come to like him, admiring his stoicism, his patience with Jun. I remembered my own words from the previous day: We had started the Shikoku no Michi together and we would finish together. Wasn’t that what Fudõ Myõõ would do?

Looking at Shuji, I said: "Can we take a train or bus part way and walk when Jun feels better?"

The relief on Shuji’s face was palpable. "Yes, that would be good," he said, bowing. "Thank you."

To my surprise, Hasegawa-san said he would like to join us. "I could use an easy day," he said.

The four of us walked to Kainan and caught the 7:51 commuter train to Kannoura, where we boarded a bus to Cape Muroto and Hotsumisakiji, Temple 24.

We reached the cape about 9:30. In less than an hour, we covered a 55-kilometre stretch that would have taken us two days to walk. I felt guilty, and relieved. I wasn’t being the purest of pilgrims, but my feet were grateful. I had also enjoyed the bus ride.

Highway 55 is carved into the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. The two-lane road winds through fishing villages, across forested hills and plunges into shadowy gorges. The ocean appears in sudden gaps. Occasionally, you see a sandy beach, but for the most part the shore meets the sea in a confrontation of rock and water. The eastern side of Cape Muroto is especially rugged, a long scarp of serrated rock diving into the sea. From my window seat, I could stare straight down on the white froth of water-lashed rocks as big as houses.

When we reached Cape Muroto, Shuji had the driver drop us at a bus stop across from the caves where, according to tradition, Kõbõ Daishi holed up between the ages of 19 and 21 as he struggled to attain enlightenment, the true nature of his mind. The caves are set at the back of a horseshoe-shaped cove. Inside, they are damp and claustrophobic, the sound of the ocean muffled. The rock presses down. There is barely room to stand upright. Small shrines at the back of each cave are surrounded by piles of stones.

I tried to imagine what it was like for the young Kõbõ Daishi - still known then by his family name of Mao - to live alone for months in these caves, seeking something my western mind, trained to regard the world as spiritless matter to be manipulated to satisfy human desires, denied as real.

In 791, at the age of 17, Mao left his home in northeastern Shikoku to attend university in Nara, which was then the political and cultural centre of Japan. His family expected him to become a court bureaucrat. But after meeting a Buddhist monk, he abandoned his studies and fled to Cape Muroto.

In his first book, Sango-shiiki, written when he was 24, Kõbõ Daishi described climbing the hill where Temple 24 now stands and deciding he would not leave until he achieved enlightenment. "Gradually I came to hate worldly success and wealth and longed for the mist-hung woods," he wrote. "When I saw the lives of noble people with their fine, light clothes, fat horses, carts as fast as flowing water, the transience of it, like lightning or illusion, made me sigh. Everything I saw urged me to enter the priesthood. No one could stop me, just as no one could chain the wind."

One morning, after three years in the caves, Mao was watching Venus on the horizon when he was filled with the spirit of Kokuzõ Bosatsu, the deity who represents the wisdom of the Buddha. Enlightened, the young man took the name Kukai, which means "sky and sea together."

I slouched out of the caves and down the sloping frontage through the palm trees to the ocean. The sea was perhaps 300 metres away. The waves roared and grated on the shingle. Cape Muroto is where many typhoons come ashore at their most violent. It must have taken immense discipline - as well as immense longing - to disappear from the world, to live in a dim cave while nature howled just metres away, hoping to hear that inner voice of the divine. I had to admire Kukai. And envy him. I picked up a stone from the shore and returned to the cave to add my contribution to the shrines.

The path to Hotsumisakiji, Temple 24, is a short distance from the caves. It climbs steeply 165 metres above sea level to the temple compound. While the view was panoramic, I was disappointed in the temple. I expected a monument more in keeping with the place where the founder of Shingon Buddhism attained the ultimate wisdom. But the Temple of the Cape reminded me of a house in need of renovations. The courtyard with its gravel-and-flagstone paths was neat and tidy, but the pagoda’s red paint was faded to a dull pink.

The wood walls of the hondõ and daishidõ are grey and weatherworn from the storms that lash the cape. But then maybe Ed Readicker-Henderson was right when wrote in The Traveler’s Guide to Japanese Pilgrimages that only by accepting the conditions imposed by climate and geography can the temple hint at the insight Kukai gained from his years in the cave, namely, "the power of nature, the futility of clinging to illusions."

As we left the temple, descending a series of switchbacks toward Muroto City, it occurred to me that the view of the green fields and the vast ocean would have been familiar to Kõbõ Daishi.

Beyond Cape Muroto, the coastline of southern Shikoku loops for 300 kilometres in a crescent to the black-rock headland of Cape Ashizuri. The crescent is scalloped by numerous indentations of beaches and fishing villages all the way to Kõchi City. But just beyond the cape there are two temples: Shinshõji, Temple 25, in Muroto City, and Kongõchõji, Temple 26, which is on a hill farther west off the highway. Shuji had booked rooms for the four of us at shukubõ attached to Temple 26. It was 16 kilometres between Temple 24 and Temple 26.

Weaving through the narrow streets of Muroto City, we passed a lumber yard. The sharp tang of fresh cut wood reminded me of my grandfather’s workshed at the bottom of the garden at his house, where I spend summer afternoons as a boy. The memory was so sharp and vivid that, for the briefest moment, I smelled the fresh pine boards and saw the curled shavings covering the dirt floor. I hadn’t thought of that shed, or my grandfather, for years.

Pilgrimage produces many psychological phenomena, but one of the strongest is its "out-of-time quality," as anthropologists describe it, in which seemingly forgotten events resurface.

It is as though by reducing your life to walking, eating and sleeping, your mind finds time to relax and rummage through the memory’s nooks and crannies. Recollections of long-ago girlfriends and long-dead grandfathers meant I was slipping into the pilgrim mind. This is as it should be. As the poet Bashõ wrote, on a pilgrimage, "the body walks while the mind wanders." Or, perhaps, Kõbõ Daishi was being generous.

At Shinshõji, we added another member to our henro community, Harumi Nakatsuji. She was a nurse from a town in Nara Prefecture near Osaka. I guessed her to be in her early 30s. She was resting in the temple garden with its miniature pagodas and little red bridge across a pond. She’d just finished her devotions when the four of us showed up. Shuji and Hasegawa-san introduced me.

"Hajimemashite," I said. "How do you do."

She said something I didn’t understand. Hasegawa-san translated, explaining that that Harumi-san was surprised to see a foreigner on the Shikoku pilgrimage, and even more that I could speak Japanese.

"Sukoshi," I said. "Nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasu." "A little. I understand only a little Japanese."

Harumi-san walked with us for the next three days. She was between nursing jobs and had spent the last two weeks on the pilgrimage route as a break before finding another job. We all liked her. She was very patient, willing to listen to Jun’s chattering for hours as they walked. Shuji later told me that she’d given him good advice about Jun. Sometimes, she walked with me even though we couldn’t speak each other’s language. I asked her why she chose the Henro Michi.

"Kokuro ga, yasuragimasu," she said. "Wakarimasu ka?"

Hasegawa-san translated: Walking helped her feel peaceful.

"Wakarimasu," I said. "I understand."

Harumi-san joined us for supper in the dining hall at Kongõchõji that night. She applauded my ability with chopsticks although I suspect she was being polite because she then insisted on teaching me how to hold hashi properly.

It seems I had been gripping the chopsticks too close to the ends. They needed to be held about a third of the way down. My mistake had cost me leverage, which explained why I was having difficulty picking up the smaller morsels of tofu and dried plums.

You’re supposed to set the bottom stick in the crook of your thumb and on the third finger, while the thumb, first and second fingers manage the movement of the upper stick. Spearing food with chopsticks was a no-no. Also, Harumi told me, when food is set before you, it is polite to bow to your server and say "itadakimasu" - "I humbly receive." At the end of the meal, you again bow and say "gochisõ-sama deshita" - "I have been treated."

Harumi-san walked with us to Kõchi City, so I had plenty of opportunity to improve my hashi skills - and my manners.

From Temple 26, the pilgrim trail weaves through forests and farms, suburbs and factories. We trundled past rows of greenhouses filled with flowers and fruit, climbed sun-dappled forest paths and leaned over seawalls to watch fishing boats unload their catch. We trudged past scrapyards and rice fields. We wound through village lanes so narrow I could touch the buildings on both sides.

Normally, because some walked faster than others, we were strung out along the road. At the end of the day, though, we met at a temple or hotel. Shuji handled the reservations - our map books contained hotels, ryokans and minshukus that catered to henro - and phoned each morning to book rooms for the night.

The first two days after Temple 26 were long, leg-aching hikes - 28 and 38 kilometres respectively. The hardest stretch was to the coastal town of Yasuda and Temple 27. Kõnomineji is on a mountain summit about three kilometres inland from Yasuda. It is considered one of the pilgrimage nanshos, or "difficult temples."

On the second day, from Yasuda to Temple 28, Dainichiji, in the town of Noichi, we slogged through farm fields and rice paddies, meeting in the evening at the Hotel Kiraku just below the temple.

To everybody’s relief, especially Shuji’s, Jun walked largely without complaint, although he was staggering with fatigue by the end of the day. We made a point of praising his efforts, but I suspect his willingness to walk had more to do with Harumi-san’s presence than any cajoling from Shuji or myself.

As for myself, despite the aching legs and sore feet, I was learning to appreciate the gifts of pilgrimage - a pretty girl by the name of Yumike Saite who insisted on having her picture taken with me in the sculpted garden at Kõnomineji; the long stretches of seashore with the ocean spread out blue and limitless; the Tokutoku restaurant where I got a pot of fresh- brewed coffee and an hour of Mozart; and those few moments descending the mountain from Dainichiji to a chorus of frogs in the rice fields.

The third day’s walk took us to Kõchi City, with Temples 29 and 30, Kokubunji and Zenrakuji, along the way. By the time we reached the last temple we were so bushed the prospect of walking into downtown Kõchi was too much. We squeezed into a cab for the three-kilometre drive to the Kõchi Hotel No. 1. (I have no idea if there’s a Hotel No. 2 that tries harder.) That night, we had a farewell dinner with Harumi-san and Hasegawa-san, whose pilgrimage time was at an end.

The next morning, Shuji, Jun and I said goodbye to our two companions in the hotel lobby. I gave Hasegawa-san a set of prayer beads I’d purchased at Temple 26. I gave Harumi-san a fan trimmed with black lacquered wood. When the fan spread open it that spelled out the pilgrimage motto: dõgyõ ninin, meaning "two pilgrims together." I tried an awkward goodbye with phrases from my Japanese dictionary:

"Gokurõ-sama. Goshinsetsu o makoto ni arigatõ." "Bless you. Thank you very much for your kindness."

Harumi accepted my fractured Japanese with good humour and gave me a hug. As they left, disappearing around a street corner, I was struck by the strange synchronicity of events that had to have occurred for me to have met them. I knew I was drifting close to the shoals of mysticism - the red flags of rationalism warned me away - but it was tempting to imagine someone - Kõbõ Daishi? Fudõ Myõõ? - was guiding my pilgrimage. I wondered if I would become even more irrational as I continued to walk.

The next episode of Robert Sibley’s pilgrimage will appear July 10.