Let's see... It has been two full rotations of our 5-day week schedule since I have posted here. Since then, we have had 6 work days, two ringkous, two one-day sesshins, and two Hosans.
After the previous one-day sesshin, we had a HUGE bonfire. During the summer at Antai-ji, there is constantly grass to be cut. We pile all of this grass in the middle of the baseball field. But grass-cutting doesn't actually just mean grass, it means that we completely clear out the ground, so many fallen branches go into this pile as well. Aside from all of the grass and tree branches we had piled up, a local guy came by and dropped off a truckload of wooden pallets, which we also added to the heap. The final result was a pile of combustible materials that was about 10 feet in height, and 20 feet in diamater. The fire was huge. I uploaded pictures to my Flickr page - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomamundsen/sets/72157605695855513/
The previous Hosan, which happened the day after the big bonfire, I went on a hike with one of the other guys staying at Antai-ji. We hiked up a 'path,' I say path in a very loose sense of the word - it was basically a jungle with enough clearing on the floor of the forest to see which direction you should walk in. It took us about an hour to make it up to the top, where we found a fire ring and a great bird's eye view of Antai-ji. I also have some pictures from the top of the mountain in the same Flickr collection of photos. I had a good chat with the other hiker, we talked about pygmies in the Amazon, how their eyes have evolved so that they have much better vision in the forest than ours, but when they leave the forest, they have no sense of depth-perception, and can't figure out that people standing 100 feet away are not actually miniature people floating in the air right in front of them...
After Hosan, we of course had another sequence of 3 work days, a one-day sesshin, and today's Hosan. The first two work days were pretty standard. On the third day, it started to rain very heavily, so we did some wood ('maki' in Japanese) chopping. It was pretty cool to do - relieving sexual tension of living with men for almost a month, and not having seen an attractive female since I left Osaka. Actually, I've hardly seen any women at all since I've been here, aside from the 60-year old nun, and a not-so-attractive Japanese girl that came to stay for two nights. We do go to Hamasaka every couple of weeks, but there is really not that much going on there, and you don't really see too many people, let alone hot chicks. So yea, it was good to take my frustration out on a wood pile.
We actually had a good casual talk last night after sesshin about the whole women situation at Antai-ji. We had our typical post-sesshin party, this time with snacks and candy shipped from Israel (one of the monks is half Israeli, half Canadian), and of course - Japanese beer (only 1 can per person, don't think that monks are getting hammered!). It turns out that women are the number one reason why it is so difficult to dedicate your life to monasticism. At Antai-ji, there have been many monks who have left because a chick came to stay at Antai-ji, they fell in love, and off they went to get married, have kids, etcetera. Actually, there is a former Antai-ji monk coming to visit during July that did exactly that a number of years ago. He is also the subject of Docho-san's famous story about the man working at the sushi restaurant.
During ringkou before the sesshin, we got into an intense discussion about the importance of attentiveness at Antai-ji. Before, I discussed how self-sufficiency is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself, because it forces attentiveness on the monks. It turns out that I didn't fully understand this. We aren't been attentive just for the sake of the practice. We are being attentive, because the stuff we are dealing with (rice, vegetables, chicken shit, etc) really possess infinite value. You don't pay care to rinsing the rice because Zen practitioners should be attentive, you pay care to rinsing the rice, because each grain of rice is extremely important. I did not have that mindset when I came to Antai-ji, and really, I had no idea anyone else did until this talk. Now that I have a better understanding of just how important EVERYTHING is at Antai-ji, I think I will do a lot better job and make less mistakes.
These guys are really serious.
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