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Dizang asked Master Xiushan, “Where do you come from?”
Xiushan replied, “I come from the South.”
“What’s Buddhism like in the South these days?”
“We take it seriously and talk about it a lot.”
“That’s not as good as planting this field and pounding rice to make food.”
“What does that have to do with saving the world?
Dizang said “What are you calling the world?”

Dizang is the teacher who told Fayan that not knowing is most intimate. I hear Dizang talking about the intimacy of not knowing what the world is, and also not knowing what saving the world is.

As I write this I am sitting in Hakone, Japan, at a hot spring hotel. I am here with my Japanese wife, and my sister and brother-in-law who have never been to Japan. I have accompanied people visiting Japan for the first time and found that I saw things through their fresh eyes, things that I’d stopped seeing, having lived in Japan for seven years and visited annually over the last thirty-five.

My wife Sarasa also looked forward to introducing her country and customs to our guests. In a sense, “saving” them during their first and perhaps only visit to Japan.

One thing she looked most forward to was introducing them to the pleasures of soaking in hot spring water. However, my brother-in-law had lost his left leg below the knee in a work accident. He has a prosthetic that can’t get wet and he didn’t have crutches.

I’ve never seen a person whose leg is missing have a bath at a hot spring. It’s interesting, that in Japan, where they take much better care of their elders and disabled than we do, there are no accommodations.

As for my sister, she had no interest in getting naked with a bunch of strangers, perhaps not even with my wife. They also had little interest in Japanese history, so visiting temples and shrines and other “must do, must see” things we had wanted them to experience were not high on their list of things to see and do, which was a little hard at first.

But I noticed that what seemed to interest them more were more mundane things.

My brother-in-law, who works in construction, was fascinated with the construction techniques he was seeing here. He was impressed by the level of cleanliness maintained even in areas where heavy machinery was operating, not to mention the overall lack of litter. It gives him an appreciation for the attention to detail in Japanese culture that others might find in Tea Ceremony or another traditional art.

As an ex-fireman, he smiled and nodded when he realized that the fire hydrants were buried underground, marked by tall red poles topped with metal signs. It made complete sense to him as something one would do in a country the size of the Pacific West Coast, with half the population of the U.S., and 75% of the land too mountainous for buildings. He very much appreciated the way manhole covers were works of art usually related to the town’s location or primary product.

They found a first encounter with a Japanese 7-11 fascinating, seeing new offerings like fried burdock root chips and spaghetti sandwiches. There were also the two basements of the Mitsukoshi Department Store, founded in 1673 by a kimono fabric merchant who introduced labelled pricing, selling customers whatever length of fabric they wanted. We wound our way up and down every aisle on each floor, sampling delicacies and resisting the temptation to buy just about everything.

After viewing the cherry blossoms at Ueno Park, we spent some time sitting in an outdoor café. As it happened, the table in front of us was occupied by three young Japanese, two women and a man. It was hard not to overhear their conversation, which revealed that what we were witnessing was the introduction of two people by a mutual friend as potential partners for each other. My sister and brother-in-law were fascinated as my wife and I told them what was going on. That led to a deep conversation about Japanese culture, more satisfying for all of us than any of our temple visits.

As we have learned to “not know” how to “save” their first visit to Japan, we are “saving” their first visit to Japan, as well as our own visit.

—David Weinstein

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David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community