On the road leading up to the 10th temple, we ran into a toothless old man, who beckoned us over. He was wearing a dirty base-ball cap and a torn track-suit, and looked to be well into his eighties. He made a gesture to indicate that he wanted a pen and paper – and when I handed him my pilgrim name-cards, he proceeded to write the following story on the backs of 14 of them.
“There once lived a girl around here about one thousand and two hundred years ago. Because a poor old man asked her for some food and some piece of cloth to get warm, she cut some cloth without any hesitation. After his staying at her place, he revealed himself “Kobo Daishi.” And then, KOBODAISHI transformed her into Senju KANNON and founded this temple. And you could see a beautiful statue by the main hall. It has a pair of scissors and stands for cutting off. A lot of visitors could enjoy the statue.”
The old man spoke almost no English. He had memorized how to write this entire story, so he could explain the name of the temple, “Kiri-Hata-Ji,” to foreign pilgrims. “Kiri” means “to cut”; “Hata” means cloth – “temple of the cut cloth.” He continued by writing the following question:
“Could you understand the meaning of the letters on your white jacket you are wearing now?”
He was talking about the eight characters that ran down the backs of our white pilgrim uniforms: “Na-Mu-Dai-Shi-Hen-Jo-Kon-Go.” He wrote out their meaning: “I believe in a great leader, omnipresent, omnipotent.” Then we noticed, on the top of the bill of his dirty base-ball hat, were the following words: “Omnipresent! Omnipotent!” He motioned us further up the hill and pointed to six statues of Jizo Bosatsu:
“When we leave this world, we should take one of these six ways by our behaviors. The best world – heaven. The last world – hell. The six Jizos stand for the way we will take in reincarnation: hell, hungry ghosts, insects, animals, humans, or heaven.” He asked us, pointing at himself – “which one would I like to be reborn into?” We both said heaven.
The old man chuckled and shook his head. It was a trick question.
As a Buddhist, he did not want to be reborn at all, and if he had to be reborn, he would want to be reborn not into our universe, but into the Pure Land, another universe under the compassionate rule of a Bodhisattva, where there would no longer be any conflict between worldly desire and moral good, and where the true teachings would be promulgated by the wind blowing through trees, the rain, the opening of flowers
On the underside of the bill of his baseball cap were written the following words:
“How long will I last?”
When we pointed this out, he chuckled again, and said, in Japanese, that he had written these words there so that he could be reminded of how precious each moment of life really was, because he knew he would not be alive much longer.
Here is a site with some nice pictures of Kirihataji:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/willmatheson/sets/72157614493668324/
Here is another nice site with information on the pilgrimage itself:
