The Gods and Scents of the Eastern Mountains

The world of the Eastern Mountains above the Philosopher's path was illuminated by an iridescent glow. We are protected here in Kyoto, surrounded by mountains, each of which has been sanctified. The deities of the mountains protect us from the outside world while enchanting the world within. Immediately over the mountains in Tohoku lies disaster and turmoil. Further beyond lies the Asian continent, a hotbed of activity, economic, military and otherwise. And even further beyond the valley is the political upheaval of the middle east. And these anxieties do penetrate the valley, but as an energy which stirs the deities of the mountains to greater levels of activity. The gods are alive and they are protecting us. They dance and sing to protect us. The gods inhabit the Eastern Hills and the temples and shrines which dot the Philosopher's Path. Never was a philosopher so much possessed of the shamanic energy of the gods. Never was a philosopher so much favored--ney, not merely favored--but a force which presenced the gods in the midst of the human as Nishida. But this is ultimately appropos as Kyoto is the land of the gods first and foremost. All arts emerge from the ecstasy of the gods.

And the gods become present when a space is opened up for them. Last night all my faculties were engaged, and I smelled, saw, heard, and felt that space open up. Initially, it was the smell. We exited a small cafe a few paces, and just down the hill, from the Philosopher's Path. The air was ripe. In the misty dusk, I looked up and saw the forests draped before me along the hill slopes. There was a mild glow behind us as the lights from the center of the city refracted dimly in the evening fogs washing over the city. Approaching the Philosopher's Path, which snakes along the Eastern Mountains, we met wave after wave of smell--pungency, blending with a silky velvety sweetness. The texture of the air and the smells which ran through it experienced indistinguishably. Touch and scent woven together into a silky tapestry.

There had been rain all day. The chill of the previous week left one with the feeling that yesterday morning was an early autumn rain. But by dusk, it was most certainly an early spring rain. The drizzle peetered out leaving only a quiet misty echo of the down pours of the early afternoon--the trees still reeling, greening really, being suffused with their heavenly nourishment. Heaven, and earth, cloud and dirt united into a single delicately intense heaving organism as the rain suffused the trees and the verdant forest undergrowth.

There was a silent, almost warm glow beyond the canal which ran along along the Philosopher's Path. There were the lights of the city, of Kyoto, of the Miyako--the Old Capital. Their warm mild glow was an invitation... The palace, the temples, the shrines, the ancient homes were beckoning the gods to their hearths.

Seeing the mild glow over to our right as we walked south against the mountains, along the Philosopher's Path, bathed in the intense scents of the mountain ceders, buoyed along by the rushing of the stream in the canal below, my mood shifted from pensive to gleeful. Energy suffused my body and I felt my physical self break off from the rigid shit stick of deep interiority. My arms and and legs and the feeling bits on my finger tips pulled away, attracted to a beautifully manicured garden sitting at the edge of a grand old house. The moorings of isolated self-hood pried off, I could sense my deepest loneliest interior pouring out into the world, into the garden, into the fabric and fibers of the garden bamboo, the majestic beams of the house visible from the street due to massive bay windows and a warm bright illumination emerging from within.

The world around me flooded into my lonely soul as the loneliness poured out. In this exchange, my faculties were charged with the shamanic energy of the mountain gods, and I felt protected again.