A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Author:Gideon Lewis-Kraus [Gideon Lewis-Kraus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780957548886
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2014-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

I BOW AT THE MAIN ARCHWAY to T12 and a retiree with a Hubble-lensed camera takes a picture and gives me a milk candy for my efforts. I sit and eat a seared rice ball—little triangles of rice with a filling, in this case pickled plum, they are the staple of my Shikoku diet—in the wide space between the imperial cedars while a monk leads a bus tour group in chanting the Heart Sutra. He keeps a wooden metronomic plock, which along with its rushed, breathless delivery and minor key makes it sound like a martial dirge. I still haven’t spent much time looking at the sutra in Moreton’s transliteration. He hasn’t included a translation, but he has noted that “various English versions can be found on the internet.” I’m not sure how much the translation really matters, though, since the Japanese is apparently only a transliteration of the original Sanskrit anyhow. Moreton writes that this makes it “an all-encompassing sutra that gives no regard to the religious affiliation of the person reciting it.” Besides, he says it’s okay to pray silently, which I take to mean it’s okay to stand there silently for a moment amid the incense and occasional reverberation of the gong. I feel a little free and a little sad as I set off down the hill through groves of rotting early oranges and the first plum blossoms. I pass a young man practically running up the trail toward me, and he stops and says hello in English. It’s not important to the Japanese what order you hit the temples in, and he’s doing it backward, counterclockwise. It’s considered three times as hard, because all of the signs face in the temple-ascending direction. He’ll be back at T1 in a day or two, and I can’t believe he’s almost done. He seems unable to believe it, either.

In a small town below the next ridge, an old man and his pretty daughter invite me to sit in the street and have tea and a coconut biscuit. They ask if I’m going to stay in town, clearly implying they think it’s the right time of day to stop, but I figure lodging will take care of itself later, as it always did on the Camino. Within twenty minutes of leaving town I’m miserable and I think I’m lost, and I’m someone who takes not inconsiderable pride in never, ever getting lost. The Moreton has abruptly switched to a much different scale, and by the time I make my descent from T12 to the valley floor I’ve been walking for nine hours, have seen no signs for kilometers, have had no food besides some unripe kiwis, am cold and tired and afraid and have absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to be. At last there’s a single decal arrow pointing toward T13. Then it starts to rain and I find myself cowering in the dark along a guardrail, a river far below on the ravine floor to one side and speeding cars on the other.

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