Chapter 6 Pilgrimage Introduction

Pilgrimage (junrei)

Walking humbly with the power of nature

to arrive at enlightenment

is one kind of meditation practice, is it not?

Diary of the White Bush Clover

My birth name is Hiroko but when I wrote this diary I used the name Suigetsu, given to me by my long-time tea ceremony master. Suigetsu means Moon Water. The moon represents truth. There is only one moon and only one truth. The water represents the heart, which is changeable, sometimes pure, sometimes not pure. The truth is so beautiful that to really see it you must look with a pure heart. The heart must be continuously cleaned because it gets dirty, like water. When you see the truth it will shine on your heart like the moon on water. The pure heart, like still clean water, will be able to reflect the truth clearly. There is a well-known Zen saying, mizu o tsueba tsuki te ni ari, which means, if you scoop up water you hold the moon in your hands. The moon does not plan where it is going to reflect, it just naturally happens where the light falls. Likewise the water does not try to attract the reflection of the moon. They are both naturally there and the process of reflection just occurs naturally. In the same way the truth will naturally reflect from a pure heart.

Everyone’s life is different, nobody walks the same way. Only I can walk my life. Forty-six years of my life had passed when I wrote this diary. The Great Pacific War was over. More than twenty years have gone by. After the war Japan had nothing, we had lost everything. But after twenty years we had everything, we were very rich. I cannot find anything left of the war. We have many things now but we have lost our ki, our spirit or life force. We live in peace in Japan now but we should not forget the war. Many people died wishing for Japan’s development and peace. Men who were conscripted into the military left their hearts with their relatives and died. Many died on Okinawa, the only place in Japan where ground fighting took place. Many more died from bomber attacks and the atomic bombs. Students with big dreams for the future had to go to war. Now we live in peace but we should not forget that many people made great sacrifices for this peace. If those people had lived they might be happy. These days many people do not know about the war. I do not want this story to be forgotten. This is the time to tell others, because I experienced the misery of war. I wrote this diary out of gratitude for my life and for the spirit of the people who died in the war.

After the war I wanted to do something special to remember senshi-sha, the people who died in the war. Perhaps it should be a spiritual journey, a traditional pilgrimage by foot from Kyōto to Tōkyō. But this was a long, hard journey and I could not do it right away. Money, time, family, there were many obstacles, so first I made a plan. I opened the map. It was six hundred kilometers through seven prefectures. I could walk thirty kilometers in a day so it would take twenty-five days. I decided to wait until the right time came.

I waited twenty years. My children grew up and my husband and I moved from Tōkyō to Nara. After we had been living in Nara for some time I had a young friend, Harami-san, who had some trouble in her home so we let her stay in our home. She knew about my plan to make a pilgrimage and one day she said, “I will take care of your family, just go ahead and do it.” I was thankful and glad that the time had come. On 6 October 1967, I started from my home, alone. I had asked that no one come to say goodbye so I left before sunrise and took the first train from Nara to Kyōto.

When I set out on foot early in the morning, I saw many white bush clover, a flower that blooms only in autumn. They were bent over with dew as if they were bowing and saying sayōnara.

As I said, it is six hundred kilometers from Kyōto to Tōkyō. I walked every day for twenty-five days. I do not know how I was able to walk that far but with every step I prayed for the people who died in the war. On this trip I met many people. Afterwards I felt I had become a better person. I had many valuable experiences and received many deep impressions. I could not buy that happiness with money.