I did as I was told and sat upright in front of the stone which lay on the top of my desk. Down the hall I could see other students using the break to do the same. I positioned my fingers and hands carefully so that the first fingers of each hand stood straight up and the tips touched. I placed my left thumb softly across the right one while my other fingers were crossed inside the palm. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the stone.
I was silent, but I heard the other students chanting the special prayer the teacher had told us to chant: Hito-Futa-Mi-Yo-Itsu-Muyu-Nana-Ya-Koko-No-To .
The chant was simply counting from one to ten in Japanese. It is supposed to evoke the moments surrounding the creation of the Universe.
As I sat there concentrating on the stone, I felt myself absorbed in its essence. All my disparate parts—my body, my mind, my soul—went into the stone and became one with it. I stared back at it with an empty mind. I became aware of my breathing, which connected me with each inhalation to the stone and thereby to myself. For a second I sensed Creation itself, the moment when all matter came from the nothingness, and I relaxed.
After the break, we returned to a class that described the Shinto pantheon in detail. The teacher for this subject was a kindly, elderly man who was renowned for his skill as an archer. He explained that at the center of the pantheon is the supreme kami—Ameno-Minakanushi-no-kami—a force so sacred and mysterious it lives well beyond our normal senses. It is too subtle to manifest itself, and is said to live in a heavenly world situated near the North Star. It seemed to me that this God was very much like the biblical one: omniscient and omnipotent.
A Shintoist, however, doesn’t limit the universe to only one God. The second in command is Amaterasu-Omikami, the Sun Goddess, who is the direct ruler of the solar system. She has the divine world inside and a fire outside. The emperor is believed to be a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess.
Under her there are 181 classes of kami, and each kami has its own name, character, and world. Each has discrete abilities and power. For example, Okuninushi-no-kami rules the earth and judges where a person goes after death. Its up to this kami to determine if a person goes on to be part of another kami, or a part of something of little value, or simply to be reborn as a human again.
Furthermore, he explained, the astral world is divided into a white kami world and a black kami world. He explained that evil as a fixed or constant entity as we know it in the West doesn’t exist in Shinto. The white or good kami are pure, inspire noble deeds, and make a person happy and rich. Black or bad kami are simply impure, and black kami can also bring luck or healing. Nothing is fixed or dogmatic. The gods, like humans, have free will.
The higher the spirit is in the pantheon of gods, the more information or knowledge it has, as well as power. It is therefore important to choose carefully to which god a question should be addressed.
“After all, you wouldn’t bother a high god with a simple question that could very well be answered by a lower spirit,” the teacher said.
I really liked one of the last things the teacher said before the class ended. “The kami world is very busy. The gods help men of wisdom and courage, but it is often better to do something by ourselves, without asking for help.”
The final lesson was about ancestor worship. “All evil comes when ancestors are forgotten,” explained our teacher, the one who had entered Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped.
He went on to say that all our strength, weakness, and courage come from those who passed before us and gave us life. If proper funeral and memorial rites are not performed for a dead person, it is believed that the dead spirit will wander through the human world and haunt people. Only special rituals, which were described but not taught, could correct this condition.
“Think of the family lineage as a river,” he said finally. “Clean water travels downstream. But if someone upstream pollutes the water then somewhere along the way someone must do the cleaning.”
He explained that there were many different ways for this cleansing to take place. But always, when the cleaning first starts bad things happen. Their severity depends on how polluted the river has become. The more pollution, the more difficult the cleaning.
As he went on to describe various purification rituals, it occurred to me that the Sword of Heaven project was one huge purification ritual for the earth. It also occurred to me that the project was a way for me to both honor those before me and perhaps make things easier for those to come.
chapter 19
The teacher speaking to us on the morning of the Fire Ceremony.
“This religious nuclear-age story is far from over. It may be that spiritual response to Hiroshima is just now beginning.”
—Hiroshima in America, A Half Century of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton & Greg Mitchell
On the morning of the fire ceremony, Hakuryu Takizawa, the White Dragon, arrived from Osaka accompanied by several of his congregation. They had prepared for the ceremony on their own, adhering to the special diet and praying.
I didn’t notice any tension between him and the other teachers, but soon after he arrived the group from Osaka, including me and a few of my classmates, found a room in one of the smaller buildings and spent the morning gathered around our teacher, apart from the others. Our vow of silence was over and the room was full of happy conversation.
The first thing the teacher said when he saw me was, “You look younger!” Kazz, as usual, translated.
Then the teacher asked me how the classes had gone.
“Really well,” I answered, mindful that he had paid for my week at the monastery. “I especially liked the classes on Oto-dama and Chinkon-Ho. They helped me relax, and, yes, they made me feel younger.”
The teacher then asked me if I had found my power.
I didn’t answer quickly. I had opened up to the spirit world, I had learned to bring my mind and body together, I had relaxed. But I knew something was missing, and I hadn’t pulled everything together yet.
“I’m getting there,” I said smiling.
My answer seemed to satisfy him, and he turned back to the others, giving them final words of advice for the evening ceremony.
“Be careful of your state of mind!” he said. “The astral world is like a mirror making an instant reflection on this side. To be a spiritual soldier for good, the mind must be pure and strong.”
At noon of that day we assembled in the courtyard. There were about a hundred of us, and we took a group picture. Four wooden boxes of different sizes and shapes containing sacred objects were transferred carefully from the large shrine at the compound. Then a procession began at a smaller shrine near our classroom. We walked single file. The mountain was steep but the path that we followed was winding and gradual. We walked slowly and no one lagged behind. Every 30 minutes or so the packages were ritualistically passed between masked bearers.
Several hours later, at the top of the mountain, we rested. A light supper was served, and we adjusted our kimonos for the final ceremony. We wrapped a narrow piece of cloth over our shoulders and across our chests, making an X in the back. Everyone, including me, covered the tops of their heads with a white headband. Some of the men took out their long samurai-like swords. I had only the small dagger, the replica of the original Sword of Heaven that Kazz had given me a few years earlier. The rest of the people carried a leafy branch called tamagushi. “The tamagushi becomes a sword,” Kazz said. “It is used just like the sword to push away bad spirits. We push them away, not cut them. We don’t want them to become two. After the ceremony the tamagushi is offered to the fire.”
One by one we filed into a small clearing in the woods near the main shrine. The night sky was filled with stars. Someone used a spark to ignite a large fire in the middle of the clearing, and as the fire consumed the stacks of wood the people around me softly chanted. One of the participants pounded slowly on a huge wooden drum that was strapped to his chest. The sound reminded me of a pulsing heart. The wooden boxes c
ontaining the sacred objects which had been so carefully carried up the mountain were paraded around the fire. Bamboo was tossed on the fire, which crackled and spit like an angry serpent. A woman stood in the middle of the circle and read from a scroll. I recognized Japanese words such as stone, gate, and open, and I understood she was asking the gods to let us in. The fire glowed on everyone’s faces, and I could tell they looked as though they were slipping into a deep trance. I pulled out my camera, knowing I needed something to remind me that this was really happening. After I snapped a few frames, I put the camera down. I didn’t want picture taking to interfere with my experiencing the ceremony.
On cue from the ceremony leaders, the participants began chanting archaic Japanese words. Then, as in Osaka, they began swinging their swords and leafy branches in front of them. I looked over and saw that Takizawa had no sword or tamagushi. He was waving his hands and arms. I turned my head and saw Kazz waving his huge sword, oblivious to my stare. After a few moments, I raised my dagger and began waving it and chanting as deliberately as everyone else around me.
I had no idea how long the ceremony lasted. I felt time had become elastic. Although it was past midnight, I felt no fatigue. Finally, after several loads of wood burned down to embers, we stopped chanting, and one of the teachers began to speak. Kazz didn’t translate, leaving me with no idea what the teacher was saying. Takizawa was silent, and I wondered what he was thinking. After the speech was over, we slowly walked the short distance to the nearby shrine. There was a brief ceremony, which included chugging a cup of sake, and then we walked in the dark down the steep road toward the school and our mats. There was just the hint of a new moon and just enough starlight to see the road.
I walked alone feeling comfortable in my long robe. I was passed by several people before I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Kazz and Takizawa. We walked together for a while before I asked Takizawa the first question that popped into my mind: Why didn’t he bring his sword?
Kazz answered for him, “The teacher always carries the mental body of a sword. It’s not important for him to have the actual sword.”
Then I asked if Takizawa had experienced another vision, perhaps like the one two years earlier in Osaka of the Kremlin collapsing.
“For many years, at the fire ceremony,” the teacher answered, “I felt God falling down into the fire. Always God goes into the fire. But not this time. This time God stayed in the high place and tossed ashes from the sky into the fire. The fire pushed the ashes back into the air where they dropped again on the fire. The fire pushed the ashes back. This happened three times. The last time the gods stayed in the ashes and went all over the world, covering all the bad and evil spirits. It will be difficult for war to start now, with the earth covered in ashes.”
“Because of the project?” I asked. “Because of the stone gods?”
“Yes,” he answered. “However…” We passed a group of silent participants. When they saw the teacher they stopped and bowed reverently.
“There is a problem,” the teacher finally said after we continued down the hill. “We are missing two important places.
“We need gods in South Africa and the Amazon.”
It was Kazz who asked, “Do you know anyone going there? I can’t.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m finished traveling for a while.”
“No problem,” said Kazz quickly . “We’ll find a way.”
Then I heard myself say, “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
Back in Tokyo, several days after the fire ceremony, I lay in a tub at my hotel. My body ached from a sudden flu, and I couldn’t move. The mineral salts relaxed my muscles but I was overheated. “What have I done?” I thought. “Why have I accepted more gods? I don’t have the power yet. I’ve stretched way too far, too fast.” I pulled the plug and watched the water slip over my chest and legs on its way down the drain. Drifting into a delirium, I saw myself flowing into the drain along with the water. I saw a windmill, the blades spinning round and round until they turned into a waterfall cascading into the tub. Then the bow of a ship appeared. A Viking ship? The vessel became a funeral pyre, drifting aflame. Was it my funeral I was witnessing? The ship changed into a myriad of shapes and forms. Then there was a huge storm. A hand from the burning ship reached into the swirling water and grabbed me just before I sank through the drain.
I slowly pulled myself out of the tub. Then I lay on my bed, mentally kicking myself. South Africa? The Amazon? What the hell was I thinking?
chapter 20
At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
Walls
Man is
a great wall builder
The Berlin Wall
The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem
But the wall
most impregnable
Has a moat
flowing with fright
around his heart
A wall without windows
for the spirit to breeze through
A wall
without a door
for love to walk in
—Oswald Mtshali, South African poet
The gods hit my cold bedroom floor like tombstones. Kazz had given me three gods, one for South Africa, one for the Amazon, and one to place anywhere in either Africa or South America. I dropped the rest of my luggage, which smelled of jet fuel, nearby. No one was waiting for me this time. Juan Li was off doing his Tai Chi. There was a terse letter from Donna. “Please don’t write or call. It’s too painful for me.”
The years of working on the Sword of Heaven stretched out into eternity. “I’ll be dead from old age before this project is finished,” I thought. South Africa and the Amazon are so far away. Maybe I could do one trip in the winter, another in the spring. South Africa wouldn’t be easy with all the trouble there. But again, nothing had been easy. Why should this be any different?
For the next month, as the winter holidays approached, I felt as if the stone gods were tied to my arms and legs. I went dully through my assignments taking uninspired pictures, wondering if the power I had felt in New York and Japan would return.
Yet unlike the winter that Donna and I returned from Japan, the world was a friendly place: there were no car accidents, no death threats, illness. Instead the phone rang constantly with prospects for work, and unlikely people offered words of encouragement.
At a Christmas party I ran into Don George, the editor who had published my first Shinto article several years before. He was now the San Francisco Examiner’s travel editor, and suggested that I call Varig, the Brazilian airline. “Use my name. Tell them you’re writing a travel story.” George couldn’t help with South Africa, which was an off-limits story to most travel publications because of the international boycott.
Then one day my landlord, Doug DeVries, stopped by. I told him about my dilemma, the problem of organizing two major sojourns below the equator. He suggested doing both at once. “Have you ever looked at a map to see how close Rio de Janeiro is to South Africa?”
As my plans shaped up, I wrote Kazz to tell him the good news. I would travel by Varig to Rio, then catch a flight to Johannesburg. I would first place a god in South Africa, then on my way back, I would place two gods in South America. Varig discounted me a three-week, unlimited plane pass so I could fly to the Amazon as well as to Iguaçu Falls, where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet. My landlord had told me that Iguaçu rivaled Niagara in both size and beauty. It sounded like a perfect place for the third god.
Kazz wrote back saying to be especially careful, that the teacher had warned him that South Africa and the Amazon were powerful places. He reminded me of the special chants I had learned at Iwakiyama and not to forget to take the replica of the sword with me. He wished me good luck, and said that the group would conduct a special ceremony to protect me.
The trip began on the 28th of February, 1988, the first day of the Chinese New Year. It was the Year of the Dragon, the same legendary animal under which
both Kazz and I were born. In my growing excitement about the trip, I imagined a dramatic ending to the project: I would be arrested as a danger to the state by a South African goon squad:
“No, no, don’t take him away,” a voice would cry from a crowd that had gathered to give me a hero’s welcome. “He was only doing it for our good. For the world. Don’t punish him!”
Finally, after a worldwide outcry I would be released. “No, not the Nobel Peace Prize!” I’d say humbly. “I really don’t deserve it. But my Japanese teacher, it was his idea.”
Or maybe I’d be captured by a wild Amazon tribe. I would impress them with a few tricks I had learned from the teacher, and they would revere me as their wizard. Then I would be found by a group of California ecologists who happened to be on a safari to protect the rain forests or something.
Or, a romantic ending: I’d meet a beautiful woman who’d think that placing Shinto gods was heroic, that I was a brave warrior fighting for peace. She wouldn’t question my motives. She wouldn’t argue with me. She would support me (and she would be rich, of course). I wasn’t clear what would happen after I met her, and we fell in love. Maybe the ending should take place at an airport, like the final scene in Casablanca. A kiss and goodbye? Hello? Should I go or should I stay?
It was all good fantasy. In real life, the closure I craved would come—but not as I fantasized.
For a few moments, at the Johannesburg airport, I thought one of my fantasies had materialized. She was standing alone, reading a map. She had long dark hair, pulled gracefully back, and she was wearing red-framed glasses. Even with travel-worn clothes she looked urbane and sophisticated. When the downtown bus pulled up she got on first, so I followed and sat next to her. She was French but spoke good English. We had been on the same plane from Rio, it turned out. I asked if I might look at her guidebook. I told her it was impossible to find a guidebook on South Africa in the States.
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