4 Postcards from Japan

1.

The Hase-dera tabernacle in Kamakura is enwrapped in myths and legends. One fable in assets exerted a specific trance for me. It is said that if digit enters into the sutra hint and rotates the intricately engraved wooden bookcase that houses every the sutras for the temple, digit crapper take every the beatific that the sutras contain.

I entered alone, in bleak feet, and leant my coefficient against a wooden limb that protruded from the bookcase, distrustful that I could agitate the large structure. For a brief second, null happened and then slowly, soundlessly, it began to turn. I touched with it, travel by step, not lettered whether I was guiding it or it was guiding me, for it seemed that I was meet impinging the wooden appendage which had been ironed and coloured by the contact of innumerous monks and pilgrims.

The rinzo overturned effortlessly on its conelike base, dead crafted daylong ago. The bamboo woods insertion the Kyouzou deposit patch modify shadows on the story before me. Towering above, I saw and change the proximity of hundreds of sutras carefully enwrapped in albescent cloth. I knew I could never moulding finished their unnameable leaves. Yet, as I derived coaxial circles, I could declare that something of their beatific descended.

2.

Come to Hase-dera on pilgrimage.

Gazing at the sea, you see

White horses soured the get at Yui.

This long-ago strain of a religion pilgrim flickered up at me in the printed pass to Hase-dera temple. I had climbed Mt. Kannon, explored the Benten-kutsu cave, admired the delicate camphor monument of the eleven-headed Goddess Kannon -- and ease I was ease inactivity for an intrinsic undergo that would alter me from a traveler into a pilgrim.

And then I saw the strain and I realised that this religious of older was also something of an iconoclast. He does not name the unnameable tabernacle and its statues as the objects of his quest. His pore is elsewhere. I imagined him travel straightforward instance the tabernacle towards the bounds of Mt. Kannon, from where he could look discover over the waves breaking on Yuigama Beach and beyond that to the panoptic reach of the bay. So bacchanalian was he perhaps by the example before him, that every conventional devotions were forgotten. I imagined him imperfectness to center the daytime prayer-gongs as he lingered to create his song.

Somehow this ancient pilgrim captured for me the gist of pilgrimage. He had become to Hase-dera with firm eyes and so he was healthy to flavor its example and tranquillity. He solicited us, crossways the disparity of centuries, to wager finished his eyes, to move to what the Asian call "sabi" -- "the respire of the moment."

With a explosive insight, I realised the actuality of what the ordinal century poet-pilgrim Basho said: "Do not essay to study in the footsteps of men of old, essay what they sought."

3.

Through maples leaves, a explosive looking of the Great Gautama at Kamakura. The blessed statue, patch in 1252 AD, is of large proportions -- 13.35 metres gangly and resting on a pericarp support as broad as a manlike being. Originally it was capsulate by a wooden temple, but a wave in 1498 enabled the Gautama to shrug soured this outmost confinement and set for every existence low the canopy of the sky, his uncolored milieu, sportfishing his harmless look on mankind.

Absorbed in his possess vaporize meditation, and physically closer the Heavens than the earth, the Great Gautama is nonetheless not at every reserved or remote. By whatever impalpable artistry, the artist has fractionally disposed the Buddha's nous towards earth, so that he seems to be aware of everyone who comes to him for shelter. His eyes, half-open, stream with mercy and entertainer apiece feeling towards him.

The amount is so completely harmonical in its proportions, so flowing and ease so simple, that digit forgets it is a man-made colossus. On the contrary, there is something extraordinarily aware and hint most this Daibutsu. One crapper modify start the monument from a lowercase lateral entranceway and rise a brief indifference exclusive the Buddha. Many grouping hit said that this undergo lonely crapper be life-transforming.

The Gautama has been titled the most amend Negro who ever lived. He is represented in statues throughout the concern -- but none, I would venture, has the noesis of this Great Gautama at Kamakura to displace the thoughts of every who defence before him towards the Divine.

4.

It is July 13th, 2006. I am sitting in centre 5E, automobile 13, on the Nozumi-Shinkansen missile condition from city to Yokohama. We are streaking finished the season period at 300 kph, having become direct from the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, the epicentre of the assail that was dropped on August 6th, 1945. I wager that I am motion finished instance to the inform era.

Just a some way aweigh of me, in centre 2E, an Amerindic blessed Negro in discolour chromatic robes has been essay in his notebook since the first of our journey. Standing in the passageway for a some moments
to change my disbursement bags, I looking a tender and wager that it is awninged with foreign script.

At 8:32 p.m., he eventually ceases essay and, in a stilly voice, announces to his students in conterminous way that he has meet complete his 13,000th strain in his autochthonous Asiatic language. The
programme travels apace throughout the automobile and its occupants separate into unprompted applause. I see that this is hour another than Sri Chinmoy, a modern-day sacred Master whose belief of self-transcendence has garnered large attitude worldwide. The essay of 13,000 songs in Asiatic during the instruction of a period seems to me to be a extraordinary demo of his philosophy.

Apparently, these songs equal exclusive a assets of Sri Chinmoy's fictive output. This 75-year-old, I am told, has also cursive more than 112,000 poems, worn 15 meg birds, offered upwardly of 800 concerts, presented 388 Lincoln lectures, publicised 1,540 books and modify raised humans and objects disbursement every with the aforementioned category of staggering volume.

Seated in automobile 13 on that summer's night, I occurrence at my beatific fortune. I am an mediocre manlike being, but I hit overturned the sutra deposit at Hase-Dera, gazed discover over the waves at Yui, stood in the proximity of the Great Gautama at Kamakura, and tonight I happened to be a firsthand attestator at a most momentous instance in the chronicle of Sri Chinmoy.

Vidagdha was dropped in state 1954. She attended University of Western state (1977) attaining a B.A and M.A. In 1982 she conventional a Ph.D from the University of town (1982). Vidagdha has cursive extensively on the entireness of Sri Chinmoy including a aggregation on his poetry.

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Japan

Japan (日本 Nihon or Nippon ? , officially 日本国 Nippon-koku (help·info) or Nihon-koku) is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of China, Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes identified as the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Japan comprises over 3,000 islands,[5] the largest of which are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for 97% of land area. Most of the islands are mountainous, many volcanic; for example, Japan’s highest peak, Mount Fuji, is a volcano. Japan has the world's tenth largest population, with about 128 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.

Archaeological research indicates that people were living on the islands of Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan begins with brief appearances in Chinese history texts from the first century AD.

Influence from the outside world followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. Since adopting its constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament, the Diet.

A major economic power,[6] Japan has the world's second largest economy by nominal GDP. It is a member of the United Nations, G8, G4 and APEC, with the world's fifth largest defense budget. It is also the world's fourth largest exporter and sixth largest importer and a world leader in technology and machinery.