Fiona’s Reviews > Riding the Trains in Japan > Status Update

"There was once a novice who boasted of his master's accomplishments as a monk. The monk replied that his master was also capable of astonishing feats. For instance, when he slept, he slept, and if he ate he ate.' Mikao smiled. Whatever you do, make it a meditation. A gardener like me learns to focus. Then the world will move moe slowly for you.

The Hinjo-no-itō or Jikyō, poor woman's candlelight is the oldest continually burning flame in human history. It is the most revered of a trinity of lamps called Jōmyō-tō, the everlasting candlelight. It remembers the life of a poor woman called Oteru who offered a lock of her hair for the consolation of the souls of her parents in 1016.

We tend to regard dark water as hostile. Indeed, at the top of Nakano Bridge in Oku-no-in there is a well, Sugatami-no-Ido, where it is said that if a person cannot see their reflection they will die within three years.

In late summer you are lost in a cooling maze of mossy statuary and dripping trees, but now in winter, the season in which I had come to see a very old candle in the depths of Oku-no-in, you are enveloped in a white world of snow and swathing mist.

The most beautiful cemetery I have ever walked through is the vast 1200-year-old Buddhist cemetery at Oku-no-in ( The Inner Sanctuary), high in the sacred precinct of Danjo Garan on Kōyasan in Wakayama Prefecture, Southern Japan. Mount Kōya is the centre of the esoteric Buddhist sect called Shingon, founded around 840 AD by the priest Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi (Great Saint)

The lack of focal points in a straight line of replica tract houses, the one vanishing point in some distant nowhere, makes a person feel as though replica pre-planned lives must be lived there, as though life, like the street holds no possibilities for adventure.