Neighborhood watch
Tree yo self en route to the pure land
The weather is almost too nice out to write. It’s probably more important to be out living life than staying home to write a newsletter no one asked for and whose deadline no one cares about, but really, what is more authentically “living” than adhering to the rules of a self-enforced prison? Anyway, there is a compromise.
Kuhonbutsu Temple is a short walk from my house. Sometimes I roll up on Saturday afternoons in a heated panic about what to write in the newsletter. I recognize that I look a little ridiculous, big sunglasses, big hair, big boots, angry nail polish, sweatpants, college t-shirt with a dumb American pun. Amused by my own performance, I usually look forward to blasting whatever hard lewd music I have on as I walk the grounds, but I barely make it to the second gate before it’s so obvious that “Seduce & Scheme” is going to lose in the rap battle against peaceful nothingness.
I take off my headphones and the sound is like a gentle wash, birds, trees, grannies, grave-visitors. The Edo-period temple was built in 1678, and there’s a kaya tree on the grounds said to be 700 years old. Whatever personality I have is the kind that doesn’t really like to hike the same mountain twice, but when I’m at the temple, I fantasize about a year in which I hike the same mountain every month. Seeing the subtle changes in the density and color of the leaves week after week brings to mind 一期一会, which I wrote about in the ichigo season letter. All encounters only happen once in a lifetime; that includes tree meetings.
I feel as if the trees were planted such that I can just drop in on any given day to get a forecast on what all the trees across the city are up to, although I’m pretty sure it’s not true. The 300-year-old gingko tree is already a brilliant gold, maybe a week ahead of the Meiji Jingu gingko. Right now within Tokyo proper there’s still a lot of green. But today at Kuhonbutsu I saw one of my favorite autumn phenomena, a Japanese maple that’s all green except for the one branch that’s bailed on making food for the rest of the year. It’s like that one friend who’s just so excited for winter that they’re busting out piles of wool hats and socks well before it seems necessary. Caught you red handed.
Growing up, we didn’t go to church. For the very simple reason that we are not Christians. Once a year, on the year’s most hectic of holidays (but which I now over-romanticize, as it’s been four years since I’ve been home for Tết), we went to temple. Crammed into a densely packed schedule of eating, praying, well-wishing, photo-taking, and outfit changing, we drove what seemed like hours to our Vietnamese Buddhist temple.
I could not tell you one thing about the meaning of the hour-long service I went to every year. I remember the overpowering smell of incense. The taut skin of the fat clementines given out for luck, so hard to peel. Using the very shallow women’s bathroom stall in an áo dài was an extreme yogic feat, and the sink water was ice cold in winter. As we got older, my parents became leaders in the community, which meant that the time spent glad-handing got longer, the polite nodding to strangers who knew our names blending into one nonstop head bob. I remember not liking the vegetarian lunch as a kid, but either my taste or the chef changed, because the last time I had the veggie chả giò I was pretty into it.
Although my parents were local celebrities, I didn’t personally feel much community there. But in a way, memory makes another community. The years crowd together in the mind, and the stories and lore and nostalgia cross with my siblings’ memories, and that itself becomes a society. A gathering of stories that talk to each other across the years.
At Kuhonbutsu, I would similarly say I do not feel much community, given that I do not speak to anyone. I did stop by on Tết this year (hopefully I wore something nice and not aggressive homeless chic but I can’t be sure), because it’s tradition, and because I wanted somewhere to put all my well wishes. Also, I just like looking at Buddha. I understand that Jesus died for our sins, and he seems like a righteous dude and all, but I feel a great deal of stress in churches looking up at him on the cross. When I look at Buddha, I find my face actually relaxes.
But if I’m honest, most of the communing that happens here is with the trees.
The grounds of Kuhonbutsu cover 36,000 tsubo, about 120,000 square meters, designed after 極楽浄土, the pure realm. In my extremely basic understanding, according to this Pure Land form of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha Amitabha promised that “all who had faith in him and who called upon his name would be reborn in his paradise and would reside there in bliss until they had attained enlightenment.” Every three years Kuhonbutsu hosts a ritual called omenkaburi, in which 25 people dressed up as bodhisattvas cross a bridge to take deceased believers to this paradise.
“The festival of the welcome to the pure land,” as the English plaque reads, was last scheduled for 2020, but it was canceled because of the pandemic. I find this disturbing. What happened to those hoping to be reborn in the pure land? Did they just drift along, waiting to be scooped up by a smiling Amitabha but finding no anchor or harbor, no warm arms to guide the way? Better luck next lifetime.