Interlude of Silent Prayer

Upheavals and life changes led to my accepting the invitation of a close college friend to go to Japan. Ostensibly to make money for a year teaching English conversation, instead I plunged deeply into ex-pat life — teaching English, yes, both conversation to adults and grammar to children for a year — but also into the exploration of culture, cuisine, language acquisition and self-sufficiency. I wound up being there for 3 1/2 years, getting moderately proficient in Japanese, meeting an important romantic partner, and settling into young manhood.

I arrived in the middle of July, 1993, having learned 2 alphabets – hiragana, the native alphabet, and katakana, used to write words that have been taken into Japanese from other countries. I had learned these quickly and was fairly satisfied with myself, thinking, “great, I have learned the alphabets, I’m all set to start learning to read Japanese characters.” I thought that I would at least be able to sound things out from the first. I was met with a language environment that was much more difficult to navigate than I expected, and I was cast into my own mind much of the time. Of course the friend who had invited me was fully bilingual and surrounded by English-speaking friends, so I was not left at sea, but a couple of months after arriving, I landed a job about four hours from Tokyo by bullet train, and then the challenge deepened.

But the reason I began to write this piece is that, several days after arriving, with my head whirling from the foreignness and shock of cultural difference, my friend and I traveled to Kyoto, the ancient city that was the capital of Japan for centuries before it moved to Tokyo in around 1870. The day after we arrived in Kyoto, we went for a walk with our host there, another college schoolmate, a friend I didn’t know as well. It was very hot as is typical of mid-July in southern Japan, and we walked several miles. We took in some of the city’s byways less often visited by tourists. It felt otherworldly to me. We stopped at a very peaceful and old-seeming temple, or Jinja, a Shinto shrine. Old buildings on a small grounds, colorfully painted and adorned with ancient wood, signs and other writing lettered with impenetrable characters; not an alphabetic element in sight. Outwardly, I was dazzled by my introduction to Asia, by the foreign strangeness of the place. Inwardly, my mind continued to whirl with excitement tinged with fear. What had I gotten myself into? How could I possibly make my way here, even with the gracious help of my good friend? We turned a corner and heard a soft sound, like buzzing, but it was not that of the cicadas which were also in loud chorus there. This sounded more familiar. We moved forward quietly, motioned to silence by our host. We silently approached an outdoor shrine, where we saw a single man, apparently lost in some kind of ritual prayer. His hands were held palms together at his chest, the familiar praying gesture, and he sat with knees folded, in a formal posture. It was silent except for the prominent cicada buzz and of the crickets likewise in chorus. The insects’ drone settled into a wall of background sound, like an audio curtain. And the sound of the man’s prayer, the like of which I had never experienced, rang through the otherwise silent temple. Another buzzing hum, human music, rising and falling as he moved his head back and forth, seemingly with a rising and falling internal intensity. After a brief time, we retreated as quietly as possible. The man gave no indication of being aware of our presence. He appeared to be lost in prayer. It was hot. The cicadas’ abdomens sounded, the crickets chirped and the man prayed.

We quietly went on earthen paths around the grounds, taking our time, taking in the energy and spirit of the place. As we were leaving the grounds out the visitor entryway, stopping to absorb the iconography and calligraphy of it, the man emerged from the exit. An ordinary looking man in his forties or fifties, a suit jacket folded over one arm. He acknowledged us with a brief smile and went out. We continued on our walk, eventually hailing a taxi which took us to an outdoor restaurant whose main dining room was a platform built over a river, with the water flowing underneath. Among other things on the menu, we ate river fish sushi. As night settled around us choruses of singing frogs rose and fell as we ate, drank, talked and laughed.

If I have ever shared this experience with anyone, I don’t remember doing so. It is one of the personal vault of memories I carry, as we all have. I’m not sure why I’m sharing it with you, or that it is of any particular use. I have never forgotten that afternoon. While I was introduced to Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan, it was 10 years later that I came to practice meditation. Something about that man praying alone on a hot Kyoto afternoon remains part of me.

Post by Larry Seidl