Sunday: Sogen, pickles, and the Cadillac of Temples

March 29, 2018

After the market experience I met Sogen Charlie Billingsley for lunch. For the past few years Sogen has been leading the Hakuun-ji Zen Center in Tempe, Arizona, having taken over when my dear brother monk Sokai died. And for the last six months he's been living at a one of the Myoshin-ji subtemples, the one led by Noritake Roshi, who was recently installed as the Abbot of Rinzai-ji.

It was just great seeing Sogen again, and I feel lucky to have caught him here at the tail end of his journey - next week he returns to Tempe. I admire his courage. He left his job and tidied up his affairs enough to come learn Japanese and train in a temple for a time. Finding the right school for Japanese lessons was a challenge, but after a couple of months he found the cheaper state-sponsored school the best one for him. He's been living the temple life with two or three monks, and Noritake when the Roshi isn't travelling - up at 4:30, chanting (he's the mokugyo player), breakfast, and then work. He said temple life involves a lot of cleaning and samu (work practice), with not a whole lot of zazen sprinkled in. His fellow monks were patient and Noritake Roshi was a great support to him, and still he said he felt humbled every day, with his faulty Japanese and fumbling around for the right chant to chant. He said that was a great lesson by itself, apart from the other things he'll take with back to the states from his stay.

I'd only met Sogen a couple of times before, the last time at Sokai's funeral, but we'll keep in touch. It was a treat to share a long lunch with him.

But now, off to the pickle shop with Wes, where my job is to choose one exotic pickle for tomorrow morning's Japanese breakfast, and he'll choose the other. Those are the packaged pickles to the left, and the samples to the right, and there's another table too. Eggplant, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, leaves and flowers - pickled in many different ways.

So I start tasting, and one of the shopkeepers tells me what that type is, and shows me over to this other type. She doesn't speak much English, but she's very helpful and funny. Then I see she's buying pickles herself - she wasn't an employee but a customer. Many times something like this happens - a woman points to what stop is next when I'm looking at the map on the bus, a young man I've asked about the Kyoto wifi (there are hotspots around the city) offers to let me hook into his through his phone. Here she is, with her daughter:

On from there to Higashi Hongan-ji, a huge Pure Land temple near the train station. Wes calls it the cadillac of temple in Kyoto. We get there too late to go inside, but the buildings are very large and beautiful from the outside, with delicate, tasteful gold inlay everywhere. The Pure Land temples I've visited use a lot of gold in their decorations.

Here's the gatehouse.

Just as I'm taking a photo of the gate's lock, the guard comes over and swings it closed for the night.

You'll notice the gatekeeper has a really nice uniform on. There are uniforms everywhere in Japan - street cleaners, cab drivers, restaurant workers. Wes tells me that during the 1930s when Japan like the rest of the world was in a depression, the government decided that everyone will have a job. And with the job often comes a nice uniform to dignify it. On our neighborhood there the streets are mostly pedistrian, but now and then a delivery truck needs to get through, so there are traffic stewards around whose sole job is to guide them through the streets safely. These jobs are usually taken by older citizens who need work. Here's one of them on our corner.