Buddha Of Suburbia*

3 April 2010
Today we caught the train to Nara (and before anyone asks – no, it wasn’t a nara gauge railway). We think we’re getting quite good at using public transport in Japan despite the language difficulties and the exceptionally complicated maps there are of the railway system. On the way to Nara we saw several huge bamboo groves and understood how the bamboo shoots we saw in the market yesterday could be so big. The area is famous throughout Japan for its high quality tea and we saw a few plantations of carefully trimmed bushes growing under shading. There were also several fields of tiny rice plants up to their armpits in water and we also noticed that several of the smaller towns and villages have huge communal allotment sites where residents were cultivating their crops – perhaps we should start an allotment-twinning association?
Nara was the capital of Japan from 710 to 784, lending its name to the Nara period. The original city, Heijō-kyō, was modelled after the capital of Tang Dynasty China, Chang'an (present-day Xi'an). According to the ancient Japanese book Nihon Shoki, the name "Nara" derived from the Japanese word narashita meaning "made flat". In 2010 Nara is celebrating its 1300th anniversary as the previous capital of Japan and seems to have adopted the figure of a young boy with antlers to market this event – quite a strange image, there are even soft toys made to look like him.

On the edge of the town there is a sprawling park, Nara-koen which merges with the mountains and forests that surround the town. The park is home to about 1000 deer, which in olden times were considered to be messengers of the gods and today enjoy the status of national treasures. The park is just jammed pack full of temples and shrines as well as thousands of Japanese tourists and pilgrims (and we thought they were all in London) – obviously it’s not Easter Bank Holiday in Japan it seems to be some sort of holiday (Cherry Blossom Festival?) and today’s sunshine bought people out in their hundreds. A charming man in the tourist office had kindly given us a walking route that took us through a forest of trees with gnarled roots, bamboo groves and gushing streams so we avoided most of the crowds on our way. We looked at so many temples and shrines we cannot begin to bore you with details of them all but the one that everyone comes to see is Todai-ji. The gate to the temple is vast and contains two huge 13th century wooden sculptures, which are truly magnificent but are behind wire-mesh so their impact is diminished. Todai-ji’s Hall of the Great Buddha is the largest wooden building in the world and the great Buddha within is one of the largest bronze figures in the world and was originally cast in 746 CE, it stands 16m high and consists of 437 tonnes of bronze and 130kg of gold. The entrance is covered in clouds of incense and towards the back of the Buddha statue in one of the huge wooden pillars supporting the roof there is a hole at the base. Popular belief maintains that those who can squeeze through the hole, which is exactly the same size as one of the great Buddha’s nostrils, are ensured of enlightenment. The queue to try and squeeze through wound around the temple which only left us wondering why quite so many people wanted to be a Buddha bogey. Another of the temples has thousands of lanterns (stone, bronze and gold) which on two days each year are lit – it probably takes them six months to get all the tea-lights from IKEA.


G, who takes a much greater interest in these things, is quite confused by the huge number of different Buddhist sects that exist in Japan – all of them hold the basic tenet of enlightenment but all of them seem to have made the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas into gods to which prayers and wishes are addressed and the whole belief system is confused by folk religion which includes good luck spells and fortune telling – all so far removed from the original teachings of Buddha. In Japan the hotels don’t have Gideon’s Bible like every other hotel in the world instead they have a copy of ‘The Teaching Of Buddha’. An example of different extremes of two of the Buddhist sects here in Japan: the Tendi sect believes that the route to enlightenment lies through chanting, esoteric ritual and extreme physical endurance. The most rigorous of these practices is the “thousand day ascetic pilgrimage” in which ‘marathon monks’ as they are known, are required to walk 40,000km through the mountains and streets of Kyoto in a thousand days. The thousand days are split into hundred-day periods over seven years (so that’s about equivalent to 142 marathons a year for 7 years!) During each period the monk has to go out every day in all weathers regardless of his physical condition. He must adhere to a strict vegetarian diet and, at one point during the seven years, go on a week-long fast with no food, water, or sleep. Not many make it – in the good old days they were expected to commit ritual suicide if they had to give up, nowadays they become football coaches. The other extreme is the Jodo Shinshu sect which asserts that merely chanting the nemutsu “Praise to Amida Buddha” can lead to salvation. Not surprisingly this sect is very popular – as Eddie said in AbFab “Darling, I am chanting as we speak”.
By late afternoon we were templed-out so we revived ourselves with green-tea ice cream (G) and cherry-blossom ice cream (C), cups of green tea and made our way to a couple of traditional gardens, which, after all those places up the hill, many with the hustle bustle of hundreds of people, were pure tranquillity. They are beautifully laid out with abundant greenery, water running throughout the garden into ponds with large ornamental carp, cherry trees in bloom as were the magnolia, camellia and plum, each had a traditional tea house or two as well as boulders placed in contemplative patterns in the midst of moss gardens.

In one of the moss gardens we were amused to see a gardener of advanced years on his hands and knees carefully picking out grass that was growing there – exactly the opposite of what happens on British lawns. All we wanted to know was how, at his age, he was still able to kneel down and garden. Next to one of the gardens was a small museum with a lovely display of ceramics, some from China and Korea.