First, I am sorry that I have not posted much this week but I have been terribly busy. One of my universities scheduled the final Friday classes on Saturday. Both universities that I work at on Thursdays canceled classes this week so I theoretically had a day off, but a friend of the family had some translation that he wanted me to do for his lab. I spend the morning working with him and then in the afternoon I had to make some exams and lessons. Also I spend the time between classes - 2 and a half hours on Fridays - correcting exams. Today is Sunday and, except for going food shopping, sending a few emails, and writing this, I am just relaxing. Starting tomorrow I will have classes until Thursday evening. Then on Friday Masayo will be back for a little more than a week. When she leaves again, I will only have seven more classes, spread over three days, and then it will be summer vacation. I will be completely free once I finish grading exams and giving students final grades, but that can be done at a leisurely rate.
Now on to my comments about Day 6: In the morning when we went down for breakfast, we had a treat. The place we said, Kadoya, was actually more like a hotel. Breakfast was served in a coffee shop on the first floor. The treat was that for the first time since starting the Pilgrimage we were able to get coffee. It cost us 400 yen (about US$4) a cup and we each drank two cups but it was worth it. Starting out each morning would have been much easier, if we had been able to have coffee every day.
Also I had an embarassing little mishap. There was an egg on the tray and I thought it was hard boiled, like the egg had been the day before. However, when I broke the shell on the counter, a lot of egg spilled on the counter top. It was a raw egg. During the trip, we were served both hard boild and raw eggs. The hard boiled egg was just removed from the shell and eaten. The raw eggs were broken onto a bowl of rice. The egg and the hot rice mixed together and eaten with chopsticks. Actually it is quite good, but it is difficult to decide which kind of egg you have been given.
I think I mentioned it before, but during the day we had a lot of trouble finding our way. The last revision to the book of maps that we used was two years old. In the area that we traveled through on Day 6, they had obviously spent those two years building new roads and tearing up old ones. Many of the roads on our map were just not there and we walked on many roads that were missing from our charts.
A few posts ago there was a picture of Ian and I that was out of focus and then one that was in focus. The reason was moisture on the lens. The pictures were taken by a young man that was traveling with a couple that were closer to our age. He came over to us and volunteered in English to take the pictures. When we left the temple, we walked with him and the couple for a few kilometers. We thought that he was their son, or at least a close relative, but it turned out that he had only some loose connection to them. He lived in the local area and had come out to walk a little way with them. Although I am not sure, I got the impression that he was a college friend of their son.
At Temple #18 Ian and I notice a pretty young lady who was standing around looking extremely bored, which was a very unusual scene within the temple grounds. Ian and I talked about her and how most people in a temple are rapt with interest but she looked like this was the most boring thing she had ever done. We figured out that she was an assistant with one of the bus tour groups. We lost track of her as we moved around the temple grounds, but as her group was leaving we passed very close to her. Because of this, we were able to hear one of the women in the group go up to her and tell her that the two strange-looking foreigners had been watching her. She never even turned around to look at us, but a few minutes later her bus passed us and she looked out the window and with a big smile waved at us.
We had planned to walk 50 minutes and then take a 10 minute break. However, we were discovering that with this scheme our legs tended to tighten up, so we decided to try taking a 5 minute break every 30 minutes. That worked fine in terms of our legs, but the 5 minutes tended to stretch out into 10 or 15 minutes, which slowed down our average walking speed quite a bit.
Ian was carrying so much stuff that he had a bag in his hands all the time. Also I found that I had things that I was obviously not going to need any more - heavy clothes, for example. So during one of our breaks we searched our maps for a post office, and discovered that we would be able to send some things home during the morning of the next day.
We were getting smoother with our chanting of the Heart Sutra and were no longer embarassed. Also we noticed that the version of the Heart Sutra that they gave us during the Shingon service at Temple #19 was different from the one we brought with us. In some places the Japanese phonetic readings of the Chinese were different. This was one of the problems that Ian and I had been having. We thought we were out of sequence but in reality the texts we were reading were different.
That reminds me, we spent the night at Temple #19 and went to a 5 pm service. We arrived early enough that we were able to bathe before the service. This temple had a huge bath, big enough that six or seven men could be in it at the same time. I do not know if the women's bath was as big or not. The size of our bath meant that we could soak as long as we wanted and not interfer with other people who also wanted to bath. It was a wonderful feeling to just relax in the hot water.
There were quite a few people there, in a big shrine room with huge lighted mandalas hanging both to the left and to the right of the altar. The priest bragged about the mandalas and, after the service, asked us to move around a look at them carefully. I was extremely surprised when I got up close and discovered that they were photographs - about 3 by 4 meters, but photographs. Actually they were transparencies. I am not sure where the originals were.
I can sum up my progress best with a quote from my journal, " Walking is getting more and more pleasing in spite of the pain. My inner voice is getting quieter and quieter, or it is concentrated on the moment. Fewer things from the world are intruding."
There is an old tradition that, if the Pilgrim is not mentally prepared to continue on the Buddhist path to enlightenment as represented by the Henro Trail, something will happen at Temple #19 so that the Pilgrim goes no farther. There are a number of stories about people who had mundane or miraculous things happen that prevented them from passing beyond Temple #19, until they were ready. Maybe some day I will try to write some of these in English.
We spend this day walking alone sidewalks beside busy roads, but the next day we knew that we would be heading into the hills again, so we asked for breakfast at 6 a.m. and went to bed early.
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