The Temple of 1000 Steps

 A Hundred Odd Years Ago

The Outside Inn was not the strangest drinking establishment in Hokkaido, but it was definitely up there.

Bluefoot sat at the wooden bar nursing hot Saké against the cold, except he wasn’t Bluefoot, not yet.

That it was cold inside the bar was because it had literally been built with its outside facing in. The owner, an oval faced Japanese man with the disconcerting habit of slapping the side of his head when his English failed him, had gotten the idea from a strange book about fish that he’d found in the bedside drawer of a cheap hotel room while trapped in London a few years earlier.

He’d miscalculated the tides and found himself between ships.

Yoshimura, as the owner was named, had spent a fateful month in the United Kingdom, during which time he decided that round-eyes were the human equivalent of drunken polar bears with bad headaches and chronic hearing problems. Bluefoot, or Everest as he was then known, couldn’t argue with Yoshi and so had countered with the observation that Asian folk sounded rather like seagulls that, in large enough numbers, could the conjure sound of waves crashing on a stony beach.

Yoshi could not argue with this either and so he exchanged Everest’s Saké bottle in silence.

It was rude to drink Japanese rice wine from the bottle, but Everest had long since gone past caring about rude. In fact, he’d long since gone past caring about anything, because Everest had had his heart broken.

And so he’d fled.

But broken is a silly word to use because obviously if he was sitting at a bar drowning his sorrows on the other side of the world, then his heart was still pumping, pumping away. Beaten to a bloody pulp would be a better way to describe it, cast down onto bitter-sharp rocks: cold unfeeling daggers upon which hearts do not fare well.

The Outside Inn

Everest’s tenure as Barfly at the Outside Inn had degenerated into an endless debate as to the actual and specific number of Japanese phrases an outsider, or gaijin, needed to get by in the ‘Land Of The Rising Sun’, or ‘Land That Goes Beep’ as it would be known in the Twenty First Century.

But it was not the Twenty First Century. It wasn’t even the Twentieth. It was the last bit of the last part of the last portion of the Nineteenth and as the days counted down to that big reset of decades, debate raged at the Outside Inn.

The issue, if such a thing could be called such a thing, had boiled down to the exact number of minor pleasantries a traveller needed to successfully navigate Japanese society.

Everest insisted that there were only three.

Yoshi, for his part, could never quite explain just how many ways there were to be polite, thankful and apologetic for, of and about almost everything in Japan. So if one were going to use more than just sumimasen, a ubiquitous concept covering everything from ‘excuse me’ through ‘sorry’ to ‘get the hell out of my way’, argued Yoshi, then the bare minimum for the eternally forgivable, wide-eyed traveller, was eleven. But Everest, against this seemingly wise local counsel, insisted that there were only three.

This is why polar bears and seagulls do not generally hang out.

Usually, and by usually it is meant at the end of every night, the list stood like this:

1) Excuse me (sorry, get the hell out of my way, etc.)

*insert problem here*

2) Please

3) Thanks

*and here*

4) Thankyou

5) Thankyou Very Much

6) Please Give

7) My apologies

8) Please Take

9) Good Morning

10) Good Afternoon

and

11) Good Evening

According to Yoshi, everything else was just pointing and place-names.

All of this would be rather off topic if not for the fact that on the night before the day before the turn of the century, sitting at the bar of the Outside Inn and arguing with a now somewhat sore-headed Yoshimura, a bright orange pamphlet somersaulted over the roof of the place and wrapped itself around the back of Everest’s head.

The Flier

“Temple of One Thousand Steps,” explained Yoshi.

“What about it?” asked Everest.

“This is what pamphlet says.”

“Oh, I see…okay…what about it.”

“Temple of One Thousand Steps?”

“Yes…that.”

“Ahsoo,” said Yoshi; who then grinned, nodded, blinked heavily and looked back to the pamphlet with a furrowed brow.

While Yoshi read on, Everest observed his surroundings listlessly.

A tiny squall of powder snow danced alone in a corner.

Yoshi looked up from the flier, his face orange in the reflected light.

“It’s competition.”

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow morning, Temple hostu competition,” explained Yoshi.

“That doesn’t sound very Temple-like.”

“Temple-rike?”

“Yes, Temple-rike,” repeated Everest, taking another long, hard swig of the bitter wine.

“What is Temple-rike?”

“Temple-esque…?” suggested Everest.

Nothing.

“Temple-y…?”

Nothing.

The Japanese could be infuriatingly polite.

Everest shot Yoshi a frazzled smile and thought for a moment how to explain what he meant. Finally he settled on: “So, you can just enter this thing?”

“Ahh, no, sorry, I am working.”

“You as in me,” sighed Everest.

“Ohhh, Ha Ha Ha, I see, hai, you can enter,” replied Yoshi grinning as if he and Everest were sharing some fantastic inside joke that no one else at the bar got. That there actually was no one else at the bar made not the slightest difference at all to Yoshi and his joy at having experienced this random little pronoun confusion.

 And so, for the first time in a long time, Yoshi shuffled Everest to the front door of the rest of the world without having him ranting about seagulls and polar bears.

Twilight 

The morning came with less of a dull thud than Everest was used to, perhaps because the sun had not yet peeked over Little Fuji[1] or perhaps because he could, for once, remember getting home.

“Oooh,” he marvelled, then stretched, hitting both sides of the building in the process. With a wriggle of his toes he snapped upright on the futon.

A memory…!

He squinted and blinked and peered out the window. Indeed, Little Fuji was still just a silhouette.

“Odd,” he muttered. ‘Hang on…there’s more,’ he realised.

‘Now that is a curious number!’

He closed his eyes, cast his mind to evening before and set about trying to find the picture that the number one thousand might fit into.

Backtracking towards the Outside Inn, he lodged for a moment on a lamppost and the glary poster wrapped around it.

‘One Thousand Yen Phone Card’ screamed the disembodied, grinning head.

No, that wasn’t it.

He drifted further, back down the narrow ice-caked streets, back past the ramshackle wooden buildings that lined them, or where ramshackle wooden buildings didn’t line them, back past house-high snowdrifts that the ice-caked streets were etched through.

He stopped, mentally, in front of one of these and began to count lines in the ice, then stopped, mentally, after realising that the memory he was searching for was definitely not a blue one.

The next building along was a restaurant, or so it seemed from the sign dangling out front. ‘Six Gyoza + Green Tea ~ One Thousand Yen.’

That wasn’t it either.

Behind the sign, wedged into a tiny garage, sat a balding old Japanese man in the rear compartment of a crude and battered motorcar; a raggedy band of sewn together underwear jerry-rigged the engine to a large round whetstone, upon which the man was diligently sharpening a clutch of knives, one by one.

He did not look up from his work.

From the garage, a broken spider’s leg of staircase twisted up and around to the door on the first floor. Steam curled warmly from a bent little pipe in the roof above, pale against the night sky.

Thousands of orange sparks flew off the sharpening stone…they reminded Everest of something…

With a start, he awoke again and salt bolt upright in his bed­–for the first time in a long time, he had somewhere to be.

Go

Japan, unlike any other culture in the world, has more of its own tourists inside itself than abroad. Had Everest known this then the entire following series of events might have been avoided. He did, however, not, so when he came upon the grounds of the temple mentioned in the bright orange flier and saw a large, well-organised camp at the bottom of what he supposed were the one thousand steps, he didn’t have any way to know that it was merely a geriatric tour-group from Osaka preparing for a very special Hatsushinode.

In fairness, they did look very much like they were preparing for some kind of sporting event, dressed as they were in their bright orange, matching tracksuits and he was not to know that the Japanese were quite mad about all the things one does for the first time after a New Year, seeing the New Year’s dawn for example: Hatsushinode.[2]

Even more fairly to Everest, having risen earlier than he ever had in the Land That Would Go Beep, he had no way of knowing that it was routine for eighty year-olds to get up at the Crack of Dawn, don their jumpsuits and perform callisthenics in it.

All things considered, it’s not hard to see how he began to form the notion that Yoshi’s competition was a race up one thousand steps, so when one particular routine called for a series of stretches that, to the western eye, looked peculiarly like ‘Ready…Set…’ Everest, not for the first time in his life, leapt to entirely the wrong ‘Go’ and made a mad flailing hooting dash for steps, leaving a startled and somewhat bemused group of octogenarians in his wake.

They, for their part, had no way of knowing what this crazy gaijin was up to, thought it made an uproariously funny sight, which indeed it did was, and erupted with rounds of clapping and what would have sounded to a polar bear something uncannily similar to seagulls cheering.

Little Hats

He was off.

He was very badly off.

A complete lack of exercise, poor diet and regular over consumption of rice wine had seen to that. He did however make it slightly more than a tenth of the way up the mountain before his lungs failed him.

The steps, being long and large­ — more like platforms really — ensured that even one tenth of the way ended up being some few curves beyond the line of sight of the camp below.

Here Everest collapsed and lay sprawling, his head swimming. His vision came in and out of focus and through the pounding in his ears he had no way of not hearing the crowd who were not following him hastily up the path.

That a bright orange wooden ceremonial gate straddled each of the landings did not help in the slightest; the path behind swooned like a seasick good-luck dragon.

Still gasping outrageously, he rolled over and somehow managed to twist into an upright position only to find himself at a juncture in the path, beneath a signpost.

Fate was having a good old laugh this day for the signs directed the reader — those who could decipher the Japanese lettering known as kanji — in two opposing directions.

The first was to the temple proper, which sat at the very top of the hill and from which one could take in a rather spectacular Hatsushinode over Little Fuji. This temple contained a very large gold statue of a very fat, bare-chested man sitting cross-legged, also having a good old laugh.

This was Buddha, not Fate, although some might argue the distinction.

The other sign, which pointed in completely the opposite direction, was to a small, private water-garden nestled deep in a fold of the mountain over a stream of crystal fresh water.

Where Fate kicks in is that the kanji that indicated the water garden looked very much like a little temple.

Well, it had a hat.

And let’s be honest, half the Japanese characters out there have little hats, so perhaps Fate is not the right word, perhaps Stupid is, and as Stupid would have it, the character pointing to the actual temple did not have a hat.

Everest’s vision, dehanced as it was by the blood pounding against the backs of his eyeballs, closed in on that little hat like it was the last wasabi pea in the bowl.

With a haphazard lurch to the vertical he staggered into the sign and eyeballed it momentarily before spinning violently around to make sure he was not being followed, which he was not, but he was not to know this because he had assumed that the eighty year olds were making a complete hash of the race.

They were not.

Nor would they have been had they been racing him, which they weren’t. 

He twirled violently in the other direction in a vain attempt to get his vision to stop spinning and with a ferocious shake of his head stumbled chaotically in not at all the correct direction, up the steps towards the water garden.

Strange…

…are water gardens.

Peaceful too, with the sound of a hundred fountains all gurgling and splashing to their own particular design.

Strange too that water has this effect. Even waves smashing on a beach with enough force reshape continents sounds peaceful from not too great a distance.

Bizarrely, the western world has managed to contrive the single known instance of unpleasant sounding water — the lavatory.

Private needs explaining too.  

The water garden was not private in the ‘trespassers will be decapitated’ kind of way, but rather in a ‘keep your thoughts to yourself’ one.

Anyone could enter.

Anyone could reflect.

In fact, anyone could pay the attending monk to erect a shrine in the name of whatever it was they wanted a shrine erected in. He was not a judgemental monk, as the prayer vending machine in the temple testified.

You would choose your totem, generally a dragon or a monkey or a little stone construction with words engraved upon it, but specifically whatever you wanted, and soon enough water had itself a new little contour to trickle and splosh through.

There it would sit for as long as time decreed, dragons growing mossy purple beards, monkeys growing fuzzy orange afros and little stony shrines gradually being carved away by the meandering streams running through them: all slowly receding into the surrounding forest as nature slowly and surely wrapped her damp arms around them.

This place, this water garden, sat quietly, as mentioned, in a fold of the surrounding hills, shrouded from the rest of the world by a blanket of mysterious mountain air.

Paths lead to it.

Paths lead from it.

Polite trees surrounded it, indeed, invaded it, albeit politely, bathing it in neat and mottled sunshine.

Here and there some very impolite trees spread their gnarly limbs through it, like the giant hands of crazed magicians.

They cast unruly shadows.

But they were very old and so were expected to be as rude as they liked. There were nooks and crannies and other more oddly shaped spaces and it was from one of these that the monk, the non-judgemental one, sat impossibly still and listened.

Air

It was not ‘til long after the orange ceremonial gates had sputtered to an end, not ‘til long after the patiently carved steps had given way to patiently trodden earth, not ‘til long after Everest was utterly and thoroughly lost, that Everest realised that he was utterly and thoroughly lost.

By no coincidence at all, it was at precisely this point that the monk opened an eye.

At first Everest didn’t even notice the garden, camouflaged as it was in the crook of the hill. The well-trodden path took him past the first of the vine-draped gates, around a bend, over a wrinkled wooden bridge, past a second entrance and halfway round the next curve of the hill. There he stopped, as the curtain of black bamboo that had lined the upside of the hill gave abruptly way to a leaf-covered grove of cut trunks of the same.

At the rear of the razed area sat a little wooden hut from which smoke folded smoothly out of a rusty red chimney.

The monk’s eye tracked this new wanderer calmly.

Something had changed, Everest knew it and it wasn’t just the bamboo farm. His lungs were starting to catch up with themselves, his vision was settling into a nice kind of dog paddle and as lost as he was, he knew that in rounding that last bend something had changed, something intangible, something in the air.

No, that wasn’t it, it wasn’t something in the air; it was the air.

But what it had changed from, he couldn’t be sure because — and as it is with things that come upon you gradually — Everest had not noticed the cool electric tingle he’d waded into until it began to recede.

And so, it was the absence of something previously unnoticed that made him stop, and turn and gradually, as the rest of his senses kicked in, the looking stopped and the seeing began. Where before there had only been shadows, shapes materialised.

The monk’s other eye opened.

Tentatively Everest walked back and from the bend of the mountain the soft bones of the water garden emerged, and somehow, from the countless stony eyes now peering at Everest, his gaze settled upon the monk’s.

Two sets of eyebrows went up.

The Big Breath Out

Everest introduced himself but the wizened little figure simply motioned for him to take a place on the cool, compacted earth beside him.

The sleeve of his faded orange robe flapped solidly.

There they sat, the two of them, in silence. But silence is like a nagging invitation to the western mind and slowly, but eventually, Everest began to speak.

At first it was just polite observations.

The monk didn’t stop him, even though any observations to be had in the water garden had already obviously been had been had by the monk.

The observations though, lead to thoughts, which then wandered and inevitably found their way home to the worries and concerns at the heart of Everest — water gardens have this effect.

In what seemed like a single giant, afternoon-spanning breath, Everest explained the course of his life: the decisions and events that had led him to this place. The monk listened patiently as this strange traveller finally recounted the love-letter scam that had brought him to Nippon and then explained all the intangible things that had pushed him to need to believe that some random person in some random land had given a rat’s whisker about him.

“It doesn’t make any sense!”

“How can someone…anyone, make a difference? It doesn’t matter what you do or even try and do, or even think about trying to do; you can’t change anything and the more you try the less you do,” griped Everest.

“It’s a waste of time…trying…bothering at anything…you…I…I mean, it’s…the whole thing’s broken…nothing works like it should…”

And here, finally, the little orange man surprised Everest by interrupting.

And he did so in almost perfect, gravely English.

“You misunderstand thing.”

“Beg pardon?” asked Everest, looking up, startled.

“You misunderstand…”

“No I heard what you said…I…I don’t get…”

“Hehe,” chortled the monk. “You do not…”

“Look I didn’t come here to be mocked…”

“Does anyone?”

Everest didn’t have an answer for this and simply sat looking forlorn.

However, the monk’s demeanour wasn’t cruel and shortly he spoke again. “The thing merely is. You do not understand rules.”

“I don’t like rules!”

“They are already decided…”
“What…who?”

“Self-determining…but you may choose how to understand them.”

“So I’m forced to play the game…”

“Mmh, Hai.” grunted the little man who, all of a sudden, was standing.

“I will bring tea.”

“Do you have Saké?” begged Everest.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why Saké?”
“It helps me forget.”

“Forget what?”

“My troubles, the pain, the world…”

“Ahhh, self-pity. I understand.”
“You’re judging me…”

“Not judge, observe. Alcohol is not problem, your reason for drinking is problem.

Everest couldn’t disagree with this and didn’t respond. The monk stood still for a moment and then said: “Why do you want to forget?”

It was not much of a tilt of his head to look up and Everest did, almost startled, as if this should be obvious to the simplest person.

The monk continued: “Problems will be there tomorrow…Saké not…”

Everest replied: “Maybe they’ll work themselves out…maybe the world will change on its own…maybe I’ll just die and won’t have to worry about anything.”

“The sorrowful mind is a sharp instrument; you blunt it with drink.”

Everest looked away, stung by the words.

“You have given up. But such a man, when sober, cannot long stand himself in the mirror.”

Everest nodded sadly his, for once, clearish mind stubbornly refusing to disagree with the point.

The monk began to move away but said: “Reflect on the water, I shall bring tea.”

Two Weeks

This is how long it took for Everest to sit in the water garden, sobering up, reflecting and gradually coming to the conclusion that he had no good reason to dislike himself so much.           

Only once, on the second night, did the monk take him on a long and circuitous trip to the temple top.

“Is this where you come every night?”

“Hai,” the monk nodded sharply.

“And you carve those statues all day…when do you sleep?”

“Not all day, stone is easy, wants shape, I merely listen to what it asks.”

They sat, cross-legged on a paved, rail-less balcony that jutted from the temple like the bottom lip of a pouting child.

“But why not come here during the day, surely there are more people…?”

“Too many tourists,” he ejected. With a flick of his head he indicated the prayer vending machine in the corner. “Electric Monk does good job.”

But don’t people come here to see you, monks in general I mean…I mean, people…?”

People who come in day, not very interesting.”

“That’s a bit harsh.”

“Truth is.”

“I’m not very interesting,” mumbled Everest.

“Perhaps,” nodded the monk. “But not for me to disagree with path you took.”

 For a while, neither man said anything, just took in the moon-washed view of Little Fuji out beyond the hills.

Eventually, a thought occurred to Everest.

“How come we didn’t come here last night, to watch the New Years’ dawn I mean?”

“We can watch next dawn.”

“But, we missed the New Year…”

“Same sun, same mountain

“But…”

“Some people worship time…I do not…”

That had been their only conversation as they sat there waiting for the sun to rise. For a normally impatient man, Everest found himself thoroughly captivated by his predicament.

Here, for the first time he was confronted by something that felt true, something real, something he could grasp; that it was a crusty little orange-robed stonemason who tended rocks on the side of a mountain on the other side of his world, made not the slightest difference.

He felt that if anything would ever give meaning to his life, a prospect he still doubted, that it would start here, would lay its roots down in the little water garden and perhaps, just maybe, lead to something of which he could make sense.

One Thousand Steps

For two weeks, every morning the monk would wake Everest with green tea and every morning, after the tea, the monk would lead Everest back into the garden and instruct him to sit in front of a different fountain and reflect.

Always that word: reflect.

Thirteen days of reflecting is a lot of light.

And photons are persistent little buggers, just like water.

At first his head hurt, but eventually, gradually, the Saké began to leave his system and that mysterious mountain air began to do its trick and the fog lifted from his mind and inevitably…

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it…the water, the stone…” Everest shouted as he raced to the small quarry where the monk practiced his craft. He almost dragged the little stonemason back into the water garden.

“The water…the stone,” he gibbered excitedly.

 The monk nodded.

“I understand, the water is soft, the stone is hard, but the water shapes the stone…”

The monk looked at Everest, his eyes gleaming, but didn’t reply.

“That’s us, we’re water…that’s what you’ve been trying to show me…each drop on its own doesn’t do anything…doesn’t change anything…but all of them working together…” he trailed off, breathless.

Nodding, the monk indicated for Everest to follow and he led him to the oldest part of the water garden, where the mountain had almost totally consumed the carvings. Here, some statues lay broken, left where they’d fallen, spilt asunder by the work of the tiny winding streams.

Everest’s second lesson was not at all long in coming.

His eyes widened as he saw that where the stone was completely worn away the water simply disappeared back into the earth.

Everest stepped back and looked at the monk in shock.

And it was only then, after those two long weeks, that Everest realised something very odd about the monk.

The little man’s feet were coloured a shiny, crystal blue.

And then

More than a century would have to pass before Bluefoot realised that the thousand steps were not the ones that led to the temple…

___________________________________________________________________________________

[1] There is, believe it or not, and you can check this up, another volcano in Japan that looks exactly like Mt Fuji, it’s in Hokkaido. Not surprising really when you consider it, that the Land That Would Go Beep would make a back-up their most famed national treasure.

[2] Other notable New Year activities include visiting a temple on Hew Years Day: Hatsumõde, and the all-important undertaking of the first shopping trip: ‘Hatsu-uri’.