A Re-initiation Into Kyoto

On April 2, 2011 I arrived back in Kyoto from San Francisco after a twelve-hour flight. I was tired but excited, anticipating a warm welcome from my native city. However, I had forgotten how harsh the weather in Kyoto could be during the spring. Everyone has an image of a beautiful Japanese cherry blossom under a sunny blue sky in April, but only the native people know how cold it can be at night, and how high the temperature can rise during the daytime in this valley surrounded by mountains. So I went through a re-initiation into the Kyoto weather-and I got a cold!

As Tetsuro Watsuji so eloquently described in his book Fudo (translated into English as Climate and Culture), our lives are tightly connected to the climate: we are the products of the climate, in a sense. Existing with all that holds and embraces us, we are literally embedded in the web of interconnected networks of material and immaterial beings. Thus, it was necessary for my being to be re-molded and become a product of the Kyoto weather again. And it was during this re-initiation into the Kyoto weather that my whole being slowly started to remember its connection to my birthplace.

I had always wondered what my Gen-Fukei (original landscape) might be, the landscape that evoked in me the feeling of belonging and origin. Yesterday, while walking down the street from my rented apartment, I found six tiny Jizo shrines along the narrow street, and I realized immediately that the presence of Jizo was definitely part of an original landscape for me. Jizo is a symbol of the compassionate protector of villagers and travellers. Jizo is a bodhisattva who made a vow to save all children from going to Hell. Often called Ojizo-sama affectionately, Jizo can mean Earth Treasury, Earth Store, Earth Matrix, or Earth Womb. Often the shrines to Jizo are very small in size and stand along dirt roads at the entrance of a village, with a bib around the Jizo's neck. People offer flowers, water, and sometimes food.

Since childhood, when I had no idea of the meaning of Jizo, the image of a small Ojizo-sama by the roadside symbolized the compassion that we are endowed with innately-the same compassion that we are born with and are showered with all our lives. For me, Ojizo-sama always meant that the world is full of love and trustable: that everywhere we go, we are protected and loved, we are held and cared for, often in some mysterious way.

When I found several such shrines such a short distance from my apartment, my heart jumped with joy and excitement. The feeling that I had come back to my native land overwhelmed me. Ojizo-sama was still here. I had been away for so long, journeying for my entire adult life, through thirty-six countries and innumerable cities and villages. But Ojizo-sama protected me all the time, all the way along, and finally I am back to see their shrines again, so that I can pray and express my gratitude to him from the core of my heart.

My return to Kyoto has had a good beginning. My mind is floating in another world, full of wonders, many of which are yet to be discovered.

Hiroko Shiota is a doctoral student in the Philosophy, Cosmology, Consciousness program. She has practiced and taught yoga and meditation for the last twenty years in more than thirty countries. She has also been engaged in a holistic education, working with children of kindergarten age around the world. Her dissertation will explore a new human-earth relationship through her own experiences of weaving through Japanese traditions, Tantra yoga and meditation practice, and a Western new cosmology.