Self-Realisation on the Kumano Kodo
by William Searle
From the Wayfarer Archive, 2014
More and more I realize mountain forests are good for efforts in the way. Sound of the valley brook enters the ears, moonlight pierces the eyes. Outside this, not one further instant of thought. —Zen Master Dogen
Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present to him, though yet hidden from his sight. —Lama Govinda, ‘The Way of the White Clouds’
Japan, May 2014
I walked the Kumano Kodo. The trees were tall, the path narrow, waters clear and cool. For one week I lived a shrine at a time, gathering humility, patience, progressing towards a truth I had always felt homesick for. I wanted my footsteps to become as light as blossom and my breath to become the breeze that barely sounded through the cedars, to dissolve and merge into the breath of the greater life. The blue sky shining between the highest branches I had ever seen was the purpose, no more than that, of my walk. I did not want to become more than the things I saw, heard, touched on the Kumano. I wanted to become them, I did not want to reach after something more because so far such reaching had brought about no lasting good. I entrusted myself to the path that would bring me no further than the simple abundance of the tall trees, the fragrant woods and birdsong that echoed to the moon. This way was the beginning and the end. Outside this, not one further instant of thought. After that, the Spirit would take over of which mere thought could not grasp. I released from ‘I,’ free to surrender to an unwavering obedience to the freedom Tao. Thus writes Lao-tzu:
Before heaven and earth
There was something nebulous
Silent isolated
Unchanging and alone
Eternal
The Mother of All Things
I do not know its name
I call it Tao
*
Day One
Off the bus at Takijiri I craned my neck up at the steep woods of the Kii Mountains and was taken in by a deep and silent green that smoked with an early morning mist. The bus crunched on the lay-by gravel as it u-turned and grumbled back over the iron and wood bridge, lurching away around the long bend of the narrow road, disappearing into the slow avalanche of mist that was curling and sweeping down, covering the bridge, the river but not the river’s sound; I held onto that sound in my ear as I adjusted my heavy pack and walked towards the beginning of the Kumano Kodo, listening to the river below and hearing my heavy heels clunk on the road.
Eager to walk off this heaviness that cloaked me I bought a bamboo staff from a small tanned man who couldn’t stop bowing and stepped off the road onto the path made soft by a carpet of pine-needles and crisp leaves. A stone-trough of clear water gurgling out from a bamboo pipe was full of faded copper coins, shimmering like sleeping bronze minnows. I washed my hands and paid my donation, bowed and turned towards the arch-shrine that loomed above me into the tree canopy. The path ran beneath it and veered up into the dense woods out from which birdsong I had never heard before thronged. Here I was at the threshold of a journey. The mist thickened, this world was quiet. I walked beneath the great stone arch and entered the woods alone. At the first worn step I turned back towards the arch, gave a slight bow and looked up into the tall trees that seem to rise higher the longer I gazed into their upright reach; shadowy towers in the mist that seem to hold in the keep of their branches, secrets.
Steep sections of exposed, twisted roots and broken layers of stone made up the first leg of the walk. The day did not brighten but it warmed. A black butterfly painted with silver streaks was a distant fan falling and rising aloft on its own accord, jinking about my head then dancing a yard or so in front. It stayed with me for a while, this black butterfly like a paper thin bird noiselessly heralding me onward along the path that, by a hot and foggy noon, swerved up onto a plateau, breaking up out of the trees and into cloud. At that point the butterfly fluttered away, prancing to and fro over the edge into nothingness. What did I feel here? What did I truly see? Habits of feeling, habits of sight. Thoughts drifted in to the moment and out to back home, other places. A deep breath focused my mind on the moment of mist, mountains and trees, the Kii air, the larger life. This was why I was here: to see and feel anew, to be what I am not what I think I am or wish myself to be. These mountain woods and its life would be the guides to that realization. I entrusted myself to the power of Kumano.
The way rises abruptly
Into cedar mists,
Strange birdsong,
Water breaking here and there.
Arriving in Takahara for my first night’s rest I sat upon a round rock with my back pressed against an old cedar, and looked out over the Kii Mountains whose tops were almost peering up through bulks of cloud. Down from the woods beside the first house an elderly lady, the first person I had seen all day, was bent low over her vegetable patch, rummaging and sifting through the soil. Frogs thrummed from the edge of rice-terraces that were neatly cut and set into the side of the mountain where the village dwellings petered out. I listened, with eyes closed, to the songs of the frogs and could feel, in that peace, the slightest of all breezes carefully dry the sweat upon my forearms and brow. Standing, taking a copper yen coin from my pocket and placing into gently into a small wooded casket that was used to prop up a weathered holy figure sheltered by a stone housing no bigger than a shoe-box, I then bowed three times, breathing out as I bent down, breathing in as I lifted, thinking upon my heart in this ancient place. Stepping backward down from the shrine and hauling up my bag, I made my way, bamboo staff in hand, down the long tarmac lane towards the inn. Swallows, countless many, darted and flicked in the air, diving and shooting a million ways, some alighted for a brief moment on the single sagging wire than looped around the few roofs of Takahara, then dropped, swooped in long arcs with the evening mountains looming up out the dark mist behind them.
I slept well that night, deep, and woke before dawn to meditate on the wood bench outside my room. I hummed the Heart Sutra as the frogs and cicadas, too, hummed and thronged. I watched the mist rise and the mountains stand out green and big and ragged, a sea of them, catching the pale-gold and watery-rose dawn glow, but grey cloud cover descended in an hour or so, resuming the land with promises of rain.
Frogs laugh in Takahara.
Sickle-shadows glide
Over water fields.
Who is not thousands of years old?
*
Day Two
Soft, soft rain loosely fell through the tallest, straightest trees I had walked through so far. The narrow path of mossy stone followed the curve of the mountain, taking me deeper into the forest, further from Takahara. The mists thickened the higher I climbed, the rain thickened too, a pour of drizzle that cooled my body’s sweat. I rested beside a still pond that reflected the green branches of the tree, a frog leapt from beneath the rock upon which I sat and crashed into the water, making ripples that fanned all the way across the pond, silently lapping against the banks. A swig of water from my bottle and I was walking again, keeping the bamboo staff in my right hand as I climbed higher into the mist and the silence. What secrets live here? What stories? I was making my own one, part of the stories of pilgrims that walked this route through histories of self-discovery. The silence of the forest stopped me in my tracks. I had to take it in, the arresting silence that beckoned me on and yet did not let me go. What was it saying? My soul knew, that’s why I came here to hear again my soul knew and what this place, Kumano, spoke of in its graceful and holy silence that cascaded around me like the mist, the rain, the sweet aroma of the May woods.
Rain on the Kumano Kodo
Is a hundred bamboo staffs
Clicking on path-stones.
Who holds this one?
I resisted the temptation to wear my waterproofs, the rain-shower cooled the air and added peace to bare moments of walking and breathing, walking and breathing. The woods moved with me as I moved, stopped when I stopped, sat when I sat but they did not daydream or think of other things beside here, that error of straying was on my part alone. But as soon as thoughts drifted they were tugged back to the moment by the Kumano forest and in that moment my thoughts were dissolved, erased. There was no need to think anymore, no need to dream of other places, things, people. All that I needed was here, the true gift found whilst simply walking to the beat of a heart and breath that was the beat of the bigger heart and breath of Kumano.
Now and gain the same birdsong would thrill the air, then die away into the mountain. Was it the same bird, had she been following me, guiding me with her song? I listened to her as I walked, clambering up and over wet roots of the cedars that erupted here and there along the path like entrails lithe and groping towards the rich midnight of the earth.
After hours of waking in the falling veils of rain and mist I arrived at Chikatsuyu, a village tucked between mountains, hidden from time. Hioki river, grey and shallow and wide, ran on through Chikatsuyu towards the Pacific, undergoing a pilgrimage of its own, in its own time. Down out the green mountains that met to form a deep cleft, the river spilled and flushed onward down the wide valley floor.
Around the back of the Chikatsuyu shrine a buckled staircase led down to the river bank where I plonked my bag down and sat by the water looking back at the steep mountain woods where I had been immersed for the whole day. It was good to be out of the woods, to see the sky even though it was overcast, close, grey and raining. There was a large freshness about everything, even the round white stones smoothed by aeons of running water seemed new, only days old. Here, in this river, is where they said the pilgrims bathed to purify their sould for the next leg of the journey, to lighten their minds and hearts yet again, to gradually cleanse the caked on filth of self-delusion, egotism, that constricts every pore and nerve as they yearn to flourish and breath in communion with all life, not the life the ego needs, wants, to feed its greed. I imagined a warmer brighter day for this but that’s what imagination does, puts of here and now for elsewhere. Make peace with me, the real I feel the river say as it runs between my fingers and bulges up and around at my elbow as I submerge my right arm into the folded stream. Grey crystal, illuminated by the white stones that lined the bed, the water flurried up my arms as I waded out to the center of the river. A biting wind kicked up from nowhere and riddled my flesh with a chill that was curbed only by dipping my whole body, slowly and patiently, into the water, burying my head in the cold depths, every part of me not truant from the immersion, the solitary baptism in Hioki river.
Breathless, taken back, I vaulted back up out the water, the wind clothing me in its cold clasp, and waded back to the bank to warm myself on the stones. I waited, shivering, for the profound renewal, the vital cleanse of my being. I looked back at the waters and at the green mountain forests and sensed a dim power that was beginning to show itself to me like the growing strength of a light, a sun emerging through old cloud. More of a deep feeling than a thought or a vision, that power subsided, the light gone again. The river had washed me clean to apprehend the presence of something great and necessary, the home of my soul that up until now was a mere pipe-dream. Is this how the pilgrims felt all those years ago? How did they thank the river? What did they see here in their soul’s eye?
I said my vows, the Shi-Gu Sei-Gan, to the river, trying to let the water set the tone of the chant, its flow and timbre. As I spoke my attention was taken from the water to a bird on the other side of the river nestled in deep, green grass. To make it out I stood tip-toe and peered, flushing it from its secret spot with the intrusion of my eyes. Big, heavy, gold-brown underwings striated with black lines, dark talons, its smooth sharp beaked head titled upward toward the sky, into the oncoming wind and rain. I was dwarfed by it, huge and gnarly, eagle-like with the hooked beak and precise eye, its feathers shimmering bright and sleek even though there was no sun to light him, I watched him and watched as he lifted, climbing the air in great oar-strokes and heaves of its wings until it found, to its relief, a thermal way up above me. Then, it drifted in one long straight line up, following the river back to the deep cleft in the green mountains, gone into the mist and rain without a trace, without a sound. He carried my vows upon his wings, my meager ‘self’ struck dead through in its talons; a sacrifice to Kumano.
River eagle at Chikatsuyu.
Empty village of quiet stone.
Dripping water washes bitter
dust from hardened cares.
*
Day Three
Hot bright day, the mists, clouds and rain seemed like a dream that faded away with each waking second more in the mountain sun. The deep green slopes vividly glimmered, a crow shone like a black jewel as it tumbled down through the maze of cedars catching the rays of sun and the rays of shadow.
Three liters of water were packed. I was sweating in the shade an hour or so after dawn. There was a definite lightness to my step and I seemed to see and hear the things in the forest, on along the path, a little more clearly. Was that the effect of yesterday’s cleansing? Did that eagle deliver me to the Spirit?
Miles of road walking from Chikatsuyu pounded my heel but by mid-morning a soft and constant breeze blew which brought relief to the heat and my being. It was one of the most beautiful winds I had ever been touched by as it glided from the south and entered the mountain forests, releasing the dormant scents of the spring flowers whose color and fragrances were lost in the darkness of the forest floor. Sweet wind, I breathed it in deeply, closing my eyes now and gain to let the wavering light play about my closed eyes and the wind felt more like a light, or if the air itself became light, a blowing light some organ deep inside rejoiced to feel. There was a point in those moments of joy in the forest, wind and light when the road ran out to the narrow path that snaked up the mountain side I could of stopped there forever cradled in that bliss with nothing more than the wind, light, the rustling cedars and flash of crow feeding me, my most inner me. It was difficult to keep walking at those moments, walking even at the slow and deliberate pace I was going was too much of a rush but I learned to uncover that inner stillness so receptive to that world.
By noon the sun was at its most strong, its stinging heat felt between the protection of the trees. The path left the valley floor and winded steeply up, eventually bursting out of the tree line and into the dazzling blue sky that arced over and spread on forever at Iwagami Pass.
A dull yellow snake flecked with short lines of brown slithered into a perfect S and curled across the path then dropped down left into a low cover of thorn. Even though the view north was an awesome ocean of green mountain ridges lifted up into the wide heaven, I was glad to re-enter the cool dark of the woods with its fanning breeze whispering comfort through the shaking leaves of the cedars.
Taking rest at Waraji Pass, hanging my wet t-shirt on a branch that pointed up from the base of a squat and ancient tree at I took hesitant gulps of my water and lay back on the bare ground and stared up into the towering canopy, letting my eyes drift with the wind-swayed tops. With the deep earth holding me and the trees aiding my eyes into the infinite sky everything seemed to come together in a single exultation of bliss and all the petty worries and anxieties of the smaller life one gets entangled in dropped away like dead leaves or rotten parts of a web, and vanished leaving this enormous welcoming space wherein I, not ‘I’ but more than I, floated as on a golden, boundless sea, rocked by waves of one-ness.
Such a spell did not last for long, broken by a pang of thirst for the dregs of warms water in my flask. I am not sure how long I laid there on that high circular clearing at Waraji Pass but time stopped and another kind of time took over, a time of expansion, a time wherein everything has time, given time, not the time that takes time away, that constricts.
I am in these mountains.
They find me, they lose me.
The search is a taking shape
Of an invisible cloud.
Leaving the Pass I head clumsily down the rough path of root and broken stone that suddenly brought me out into a clearing as it leveled off at the mountain base to the a clear river that brushed over smooth stones and slid on like a continuous pane of blue glass, smashing silently against the stones. I watched the shadows of red and gold chequered butterfly dance on the surface of the turquoise stream. That grove was so quiet I could almost hear the butterflies wings rasp against the air as I entered the cool arms of the water, stripped of all my clothes, naked to Kumano. To think that this river ran on down to the Pacific filled me with that excitement preserved only for thoughts and views of the vast oceans that fill this planet and break patiently upon unknown shores. As I bathed in the waters, every fibre of me surrendered to the gentl push, coax and break of the water patterned with shadows and light, the image of this Kumano stream rolling on through wood after wood, reflecting the things it passed, shimmering and curving, then widening, meeting and blending into the other rivers, other streams then all of them, all the water of the Kumano, as one moving on like the Pilgrim’s cloud, towards the Pacific, the sea, the destination of its wandering, became the picture of my inner journey.
Over I fallen trunk I sprawled myself, my legs and arms dangled down either side of the tree, lightly touching the fleeting touch of the water. Once I had cooled down enough and got my fill of stillness and silence of the heart I stepped lightly out of the river, put on my clothes and kicked back up the bank and strolled onto the path. An oji-shrine, no bigger than my rucksack, was camouflaged amongst the undergrowth I patiently parted. Bowing, vowing, passing over a bright copper coin, I moved on gathering the healing power that each oji bestowed on me as I paid my dues, my puja.
With each small oji-shrine I passed something, some burden hidden from my sight over the years fell from me and died amongst the dead leaves of the forest floor. Lightened with each shrine, the hours, moments became brighter, more real, more a part of being like the air, the pine scented incense of the oxygen that exhaled from the million and one lips of the trembling leaves. In the those moments the boundary between myself and Kumano faded away like a weak mist, leaving in its wake a clear and bright circle wherein all things were woven together by ribbons of light, danced to the silent music of the Universe the Buddha smiled to hear. Was it me walking or was it the woods and light and wind, all one body walking towards the greater, boundless life that shines beyond every horizon, beyond every line of measurement the merely human eye tries to encompass it with? Where was I going, not the place-names on a map, but the destination that has no name, the soul’s home, the Spirit’s world?
I am brought to Life
By the sight and scent
Of purple blossom whirling
around Minashaku shrine.
By mid-afternoon, the dirt path widened into a broad stone that that brought me, suddenly, out of the wood and onto a road that curved down around the round the mountain side towards my place of rest for the night, Yonumine via the grand Hongu Taisha shrine, all of which were hidden from my sight by the sloping walls of mountain woods. At the first bend in the road a strong wind blew, bursting up from the valley, colliding in the tree-tops, flushing a big raven from a branch. Flustered by the wind’s rude awakening, the raven called three times in that stomach-deep way of theirs, tipped its bright black wings left to right and swished down the road, swerving up the left and taking its perch on a branch that stuck out over the wooded ravine. Throwing its baggy bearded head and throat back as it called, another wind came rollicking up the ravine, shaking the raven’s perch but this time, feet sunk tightly in the bark, it stood its ground and called again, three times, out of triumph. Wind and raven were at war, clamoring…but for what? Walking beneath the raven that paid no attention to me, I was reminded of the local Kumano legend of the tree-legged raven, Yatagarasu, which guided Emperor Jimmu in his dream to establish Japan’s first Imperial Court at Yamato. I would do nothing as grand and founding as that, but the idea that this raven maybe a guide hooked me. He flew on, dipping and diving down the road, too quick for me to pursue. Would I see him again? Would he lead to my dream of breaking out of myself and into the boundless Sea of Being that glittered with numinous wave-crests?
The three-legged crow
Flies towards a three-fold moon.
It is time to awaken
From a two-fold world.
Passing through Fushigami vallage I watched a small boy run down the hill from his house to hold his mother while she dug at a rice terrace with an iron L-shaped tool. They were the first people I had seen all day and their actions, the boy and the mother, seemed a fluid part of the landscape, not at odds with t but quiet in their ways like the trees themselves that overarched the giant staircase of the rice-terraces. Late-afternoon sunlight paled to a ghostly gold hue giving off a heat that was on the brink of being lost to the cool of evening. A badger tottered towards me on the path immediately after leaving the tarmac road, quite happy and busy in its gait, then slunk stealthily into high thick grass. I parted the grass with the end of my staff but saw no happy black and white figure glaring back at me. The path snaked through fields, rising to a ridge down which an ancient staircase led towards Hongu Taisha Temple that was hidden from my sight by the dip and rise of the land. I took a moment on the quiet of the trail to bring myself back to the simple motion of my breathing, clearing the mind for the image of Hongu Shrine.
Not to think beyond what things most immediately affected me on the trail was my mantra, to abide with immediate things as they rise and fall through my senses was the mean and end of my walk. It was through such obedience to the simplicity of the moments that pass as I walked I would enter into a fuller, richer, humbler order of being that was, in fact, my most natural state but which, over the years, had been smothered out by those things, those petty things that seem important and urgent but, when compared to the simple profundity of the natural state, (Buddha-nature) are nothing. To think, experience no more than what the raw moment dictates, became more and more important to me over the days and evenings of walking the Kumano. At that ridge gazing down towards Hongu in quiet awareness of the place, the air, my breathing, I knew – but could not put it into words – that I was edging towards a truth that would change the sense of who and what I am for good.
Eager to see the shrine I paced on through the village and came to the high bank of the Kumano River that was four hundred yards or so in width. Heaps of slick grey stone lined the shores, trees brushed the surface, writing the leaves names in the blue water in an inkless calligraphy. From the bank-top where I stood, looking down the valley, Hongu shrine loomed up in the distance like a mountain, dwarfing the few people that ambled in its shadow. Transfixed by its majesty I stood for a while admiring its shape, its beckoning grace daubed with the weakening widening rays of the sun that was slipping behind the mountain sky-line. A calm darkness suffused through the valley like the shadow of a mist exhaled from the mountains, blurring the columns of the shrine into a silhouette that rose up towards the first star like the gateway of a destiny.
A blossom-shower of egrets
drifts through Hongu Shrine.
I am a wing of white petals
As I bow, fold, then rise.
*
Day Four
I meditated in the dark before dawn at Yunomine in the moonlit cell of my ryokan. A full moon, distant and pinched, yellow-white and surrounded by her stars, was the point of my focus, letting each part of me flow into her glow that filled the inn-room, the night-sky, my eyes, with a ghostly light of peace my breathing became a part of, my breath not my breath but the Spirit that circulates through every pore of Being, igniting the essence of every living thing.
In the black heart of night
Cicadas creep amongst stars.
The ship-world’s timbers creak.
Kumano moon lights the Way.
I left the inn before breakfast and walked up the cool morning road to the temple where a service was being held. Invited in, I took my place quietly at the back, mouthing the Heart Sutra as the priest and the devout students chanted, filling the air, the mountains, Kumano itself with the pure sound one would expect to hear when true contentment takes over one’s heart. Lasting thirty minutes, I thanked the priest, bowing as I walked backward out of the temple, down around the burbling onsen whose heat scorched the windless air with a sour tang, then jogged back to the inn to attend a breakfast of onsen-porridge and raw fish laced with soy and lashings of green tea suspended in a delicate ceramic cup decorated with galloping horses and gnarled bonsai.
Black-kites sailed in the hot air against the backdrop of the sky as empty and as vast and wonderful I knew, in my heart of hearts, was the very essence of myself: empty, wonderful and vast. After three hours the path climbed steadily up out of the tall woods onto a plateau upon which stood a small oji-shrine, guiding the eyes out toward ‘’Kumano Sanzen Roppyaku Po,’’ the ‘’3,600 peaks of Kumano.’’
I reached Koguchi village by early afternoon, spending a while lazing inthe clear blue waters of the river, toeing the rapids and floating in the deep baths of lagoons margined by mica-glinting rocks. As I floated on the swirling waters, letting the current turn my body like a mother’s careful hand, mirroring the slow spin of the Black-Kites as they wheeled higher and higher, taking my breath, my being with them as they sailed up into the sky in the infinite blue that, the longer I stayed in that cacoon of stillness, expanded became as vital as my own heart and blood. The stillness and silence became the critical fuel of my soul that was not my own property but an expression of the Spirit of Kumano, the boundless light that animates all life that this Way, this Pilgrimage, was leading further and further into.
The illusion, the mirage, of an individual ‘I’ tagged with a name became a palpable realisation, as palpable as the river soaking my limbs, as palpable as the warm wind that rippled the surface. What, then, is left when there is no I? Everything and nothing. Life becomes miraculous, even the most ordinary tasks become charged with significance that collapses the boundaries and barricades that one normally builds up between oneself, others and the universe.
The Way blows along.
Who am I to say
The wind does this,
My breath does that?
*
Day Five
Pine-needles, the curve of a single leaf budding into complete shape, the sunlight upon a tree, even the sound of my own feet scuffing up the steep and tiring steps of the Ogumotorigoe path came together in a single rhythm within which each thing had its right place and could flourish into the fullness of its being in concord with the rhythm within which it participated. Where was this rhythm, this harmony moving toward? Does it even have a goal? Why should it have a goal? Having a goal is a linear mode of thinking made by the type of thinking that has to control the world. Such thinking I yearned to wash my hands of, to be purified, cleansed by this journey.
With each step I moved deeper into the moment, lending a strengthen clarity and vividness to the things around as though a light shone upon them or, more accurately, from within them, blending with the sunlight. What was happening to me? With each step, too, I felt relief as though I were rising out of a darkness that had so long claimed me. Not exhausted but coming up for the true air of the spirit, I was renewed, revivified, reborn.
Criss-crossing streams, arcing around boulders layered in a velvet green that cushioned my palm as I leaned on them for support as I descended the rough path, occupied much of the day’s walk interspersed with minutes of rest to glug on water, snack and luxuriate in the ringing peace of the forest’s golden bell. Two ravens, wing on wing tacked and swerved around the trees, their calls reverberated down the sloping mountain-side. The ravens circled on down as the path skirted around the mountain, zig-zagging endlessly up to the tallest trees. I thought it was the sky I could see through the trees but it was the Pacific Ocean glimmering in the sun, huge and wild and without horizon. The Pacific stayed on my right as I stomped the path down the last of the steps into the environs of Nachi-San and its holy waterfall, Nachi-Taki, that bellowed and seethed even though it wasn’t yet visible. The falls sounded like storm-waves crashing upon a shingle shore in the dead of night, filling the silence with thunder. After coming out of the trees into the open grass-fields that surrounded the village I could see the massive broke line of water, frayed at its based like a rope whipping side to side, loosely tying heaven to the moorings of the earth. I couldn’t take my eyes away for the falls, the grace and power of the water as it paused at the straight lip of the granite edge hundreds of meters of up, then after the pause briefer than a heart-beat, falling breathlessly, attached to nothing but itself, utterly itself, falling through the hoop of time into the bright ring of eternity that splaying out, spraying wide before the pool, fanning the brave trees that reached out to sup the water, clashing and striking the rocks and rolling onward through the deep pool towards the Pacific, below Nachi-San village. As I stood there in awe of the falls I could feel the water passionately sweep through me, haunt and possess my being. How could I leave this sight behind? Stirred and moved by the released of thousands of tone of falling water from the mountain forests, I sat upon a stone beneath a cedar until dusk as the stars flickered and the waning moon shone upon the white-gold, platinum silver of the falls. That is what bliss sounds and looks like, I thought, that is what enlightenment is: absolute freedom from the illusions this ‘I’ builds up around the essential I, the real me that is a breath of the breathing Way, the Spirit, the Tao.
Ryokan filled with half-light
And the thunder of Nachi falls.
How deep do I exist
In the womb of pure Being?
I woke early after a black sleep and recited the Heart Sutra with my eyes fixed on a point of the falls and my ears on its sound mingled the sound of the Sutra channeled through my voice. After bowing to the world, packing my bag, grabbing my staff, I left the inn to catch the bus onward to Kii-Satsuura where I would catch the train to Osaka, then home. The falls thunder resounded in my ears, echoed through me even an hour or so after I had left Nachi-San and walked the final, pilgrim worn steps of the Kumano, ending the path through the gateway of two enormous cedars stood side by side. I turned and bowed to the end of the path guarded by the century-old cedars that were known, locally, as ‘husband and wife.’
I was not sad to leave Kumano. It did not want that from me, it wanted me to move on, leave the raft behind as the Buddha said, and realize what I had been through into my everyday life from thereon. How could I look back when there is so much to look forward to into the now? My whole way of seeing had shifted, but I was still tentative and unsure about whether I had gone through an awakening. Nonetheless, something vital was set in motion. That was Kumano’s gift: inspiration, the breath of the greater life.
*
Sea-eagles hovered over the harbour waters of Kii-Satsurra, casting their great shadows on the surface. I watched them for half an hour or so in the dim, sea-fog light of noon, glide over the water then lift and take perch on a wire, then shriek across the town, gobbling their fish-prey caught neatly in their scissoring, spiked clench of talon. Save for the wailing eagles as they hunted over the harbor, the town was eerily quiet. A few people on bikes cycled down empty streets that were lined with closed shops and messy houses colored only by lines and lines of laundry. Fishing boats bobbed and clacked, an old man sold octopus from a stall where they dried, flat and spread in rows in the muggy air. I walked out to the farthest point of the concrete jetty, looking back now and again at the distant profile of the Kumano Mountains, and looking forward between the cliff-stacks garlanded with windswept trees to the Pacific Ocean.
The tap of my footsteps and staff echo
in the mountains long after leaving Kumano.
A raven is building her nest
Out of cherry blossom and light.
William Henry Searle, PhD., born 1987, in Dorset, UK, is a writer, poet, and environmental philosopher. He grew up in the New Forest where his abiding love and fascination for the natural world took root.
His first book, Lungs of my Earth: A Personal Ecology, published by Hiraeth Press in 2015, explores Searle's passion for restoring the sacred to people’s relationships within the natural world.
His second book, Threads, published by Penguin Random House in 2019, celebrates the quiet conversations that nourish us, and the everyday patterns of connection that give meaning to our human existence.
He is currently at work on his third book....watch this space!
He divides his time between Snowdonia and The New Forest with his wife, son and two Welsh Collies, walking, exploring, woodcarving and writing. Have a follow of him on Social Media to see what he is up too...