Chapter One

DAIZAN'S WALK: RAISING SPIRIT STEP BY STEP

While the author chronicles a Zen Master's 700-mile walk up the middle of Britain, during which he demonstrates how to live in challenging times, she learns to forgive her past.

By
Trysh Ashby-Rolls and Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi

CHAPTER ONE

the way to be daring

In the practice of meditation, the way to be daring, the way to leap, is to disown your thoughts, to step beyond your hope and fear, the ups and downs of your thinking process.
Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

June 20, 2007

I'm feeling pretty nervous as I'm just about to cross on the ferry to the Isle of Wight to begin my meditation walk—seven hundred miles or thereabouts by my calculations. I'd really appreciate your thoughts and prayers...

By the time I read Daizan's email, he has disembarked the ferry from mainland Britain, and eaten supper with a retired couple, John and Nicole, who live aboard a barge on the River Medina. Serendipity is at work: Not only does the Anglo-Saxon word medina mean 'middle', describing a river that divides the Isle of Wight down the centre, providing rich soil for fields and pastures and a refuge for thousands of waterfowl, rare plants, and other wildlife, Daizan's meditation walk will take him up the middle of Britain. Middle of Britain? I think. Surely, the middle is from Land's End to John o'Groats.

Not so.

Tomorrow, Daizan will take his first steps on the road to Cape Wrath in the North West corner of Scotland and he is nervous.

Long before the Romans invaded the mix of islands off northwest Europe in 55 B.C., or that scallywag Augustus cooked up the name Britannia to describe it, Brigid,"triple Goddess of the great Celtic empire of Brigantia" ruled not only the waves and land, but its peoples. The Romans, ever quick to appropriate if it meant assimilating the populace, ordered Brigid's likeness engraved on new coinage. Thus, "a protective being of the highest order," whose people adored her, she morphed into a goddess renamed Britannia. Swathed in a white garment, right breast exposed (later covered on Queen Victoria's orders) she wears the helmet of a centurion. She sits on a rock or a lion, holding a spear and spiked shield, regal as all get out. Place the goddess over a map of Britain and with a small stretch of the imagination, profile fits. Immediately the centre line running north-south is obvious.

June 21, 2007. Day One.

Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi, newly ratified English-born Buddhist Zen Master has spent sixteen years in monasteries, recently returning from Gyokuryuji in central Japan. This morning he wakes up close to the lighthouse at St. Catherine's Point on the southern-most point of the Isle of Wight. Contrary to time-honoured opinion, St. Catherine is not a real saint. Although she has been called "one of the most popular saints of all time," religious scholars have found no evidence of her existence. Yet, the story persists of her martyrdom on a wheel of fire, after whom the Catherine Wheel is named. There is no St. Catherine's village either.

Last night Daizan slept on a stile—one of those old-fashioned gateways that dot the English countryside and allow people, but not cattle or sheep, to get from one field to the next. This stile crosses over a dry hand-built stone wall, providing a deck off the damp ground. Midnight when he arrived here, still jet-lagged from traveling from Tokyo to London via Beijing, he slept like a baby for a couple of hours. This morning, his body is stiff and sore as he sits zazen, eyes open as he's been trained to do while meditating.

Long beams from the lighthouse fade gradually to blinks as the sun rises behind clouds. A light of one sort or another has alerted shipping here since 1323, although back then it was more likely to have been a bonfire on stormy nights warning of the shoreline. Today the distinctive octagonal tower provides a way mark for the considerable sea traffic navigating in the English Channel as well as a guide to vessels approaching the Solent.

A fox strolls across Daizan's path.

In Japanese folk-law, the fox is a magical and powerful creature. Traditionally he is the messenger who sits either side of shrines to Inari, the ancient god of business, good harvests and material success still found in rural Japan—or what is left of it. But there's a flipside to fox (inari): he is also the trickster, particularly in traditional Amerindian and old Celtish cultures (in Japan too). Inari can turn himself into a gorgeously seductive woman who mires a guy in all kinds of trouble, only to skip away later, laughing at the poor man's discomfiture. In Rinzai Zen Buddhism, there is a teaching story (koan), called Hyakujô's Fox.

(The gods punish a monk who deceives his students by turning him into a fox for five hundred lifetimes.) In the distant past, a Zen teacher told his students that an enlightened man is not subject to the law of cause and effect. In other words, since his actions have no consequences he can do whatever he likes with impunity. This wrong understanding led to him being reborn as a fox for five hundred lives as a consequence. When the great Zen Master Hyakujo gives a series of teachings, a certain old man followed the monks and listened. One day he remained behind afterwards and Hyakujo asked him who he was. The old man revealed his plight and begs for help asking the question about the subject that had condemed him to his fate: "Is an enlightened man subject to the law of cause and effect?" Hyakujo answered, "An enlightened man is one with the law of cause and effect." At this, the old man was released from his suffereing. A little later the monks find the corpse of a fox on their mountain and the give it a funeral with full monastic honours. In Celtic myths and fairytales, fox is a similar character yet one who gains no such redemption. Wiliness his main attribute, first he cons Mother Hen by befriending her, then sneaks into her coop and steals her eggs. Since the ban on foxhunting in the United Kingdom in 2005, foxes run amok. Considered a pestiferous and opportunistic feeder, these animals raid garbage cans and kill fowl. 'Nothing but a damn nuisance,' most locals will tell you.

In the Amerindian Choctaw language, fox is Nanih Waiya, Great Spirit. His duty is to do whatever it takes to keep the family together and safe. Sometimes he uses "silly tactics as a brilliant camouflage move" so that no one can guess at the "sly power behind such ingenious manoeuvres." For those journeying far away, fox "is an excellent talisman."

If fox has chosen to share its medicine with you, it is a sign that you are to become like the wind, which is unseen yet is able to weave into and through any location or situation. You would be wise to observe the acts of others rather than their words at this time. Use your cunning nature in a positive way; keep silent about who and what and why you are observing. In learning the art of camouflage, you need to test your abilities to pull this off.

Stuffing his sleeping bag and mat into his knapsack alongside his traditional dark blue work tunic and pants (samue), and toiletry bag, Daizan slips his bare feet into his woven straw sandals, dons his conical-shaped straw hat waterproofed with persimmon juice, knots his wide silk belt around his traveling robe atop warm leggings and sets off in search of provisions. Water, especially. Last night he forgot to refill his flask and feels wobbly from lack of food and inadequate sleep. "I do much better with breakfast," he tells me when I call.

He walks up the road and discovers a farmhouse where a woman fills his water bottle. On this journey he will do as the traditional pilgrim monks of Japan—go takahatsu. That is to say he will rely on the goodness and generosity of whomever he meets along the way for food. He carries a black lacquer alms bowl some seven inches in diameter into which people can put food, but not money. Now that he's on his way in the peaceful morning, his anxiety evaporates in spite of the hunger.

"Why nervous?" I ask. "It seems to me you're going to see life in the raw."

"I can tell you that from Day One." he says laughing into his mobile phone, telling me about the fox. I catch his hilarity seven thousand miles across sea and land.

I imagine Daizan's 700-mile walk a series of stepping stones: South Coast, Home Counties, Midlands, Pennines, Border Country, Scotland. It's 40 years since I immigrated to Canada and I'm clueless about what lies beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow. Scenes from Braveheart race across my imagination; and memories of two men I knew, cousins, proud descendents of Pictish highlanders. Large muscular men, yet no more than Daizan's spiritual stature. I forget that 'spiritual' people are also human beings; it is beyond my comprehension that he could be nervous.

"Bless you," he replies.

"But why nervous?' I persist.

"Yesterday I was very nervous. Today hungry but not nervous. The Isle of Wight feels very enclosed, very safe.' He describes his surroundings, "Staggeringly beautiful: broad open downs, happy green trees, very quiet; very peaceful. It really feels like the Garden of Eden."

I don't tell him that for me the Isle of Wight is far from the divine garden image he describes. Nor safe. Some of the worst abuse in my childhood happened a few miles further east from where he woke up this morning. And further over to the west is where, in grief and shame at age thirteen, I flung myself fifty feet down a cliff face to permanently injure my back and legs.

He continues, "I can't imagine anyone chucking stones at me here. So the feelings are more on the level of food and water and my feet hurting in these straw sandals.I have to work out my modus operandi. If I stand outside a supermarket, for example, will I get fed or not? I'll know in a day or two. An empty stomach makes you work out how to do these things." He tells me about a thousand-mile walk he made around Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands famous for its ancient Buddhist pilgrimage. "The first week was trial and error, then I sort of got into a groove. I met a pilgrim who lives off the road down there who taught me a few things. There's a way to be a pilgrim in the same way there is to be a journalist, I guess. Step one is finding the way."

"That's like stepping out into the void," I say, thinking of blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled with sentences and paragraphs, deadlines looming.

He agrees. "And then, as it were, making sense of the void."

"Isn't that the essence of Zen?"

"I'd say so, yes."

My journalist hat squarely on my head I opine that surely in Zen, thinking is discouraged. "What do you mean when you say you've got to 'work it out'?"

"It's a meditation walk. I'm not walking along calculating how to produce things." He explains that the thinking process is closer to 'feeling things out.' Suppose you give oil paints to an accomplished water-colourist. The first time the artist has to feel out how to make these completely different pigments do something. It's not really thinking it through so much as a sense comes up: Try this. Possible avenues present themselves. You try them out. Most often they're not quite on beam, but sometimes they are, of course. The whole process is sort of narrowing it down to what actually works."

"So if one avenue doesn't work, you try another?" My question makes him laugh.

"Yeah, because otherwise you starve. And that's a very good incentive to make it work."

"Your email asks for thoughts and prayers. I'm with you every ten million steps of the way."

"Ah, bless you."

I tell him about the idea that barged into my meditation early this morning, Pacific Standard Time, Canada. How the idea persisted with an urgency I couldn't ignore: Call daily to find out where he is, what's happening, how he's feeling, whom's he met. Keep a diary of his journey. Maybe do a book. He agrees that my idea sounds good, fits his own plan to record something as he goes. "Perhaps this would be the way to do it," he says.

"It would take the burden off you. And," I admit, "this would be my way of being on the walk with you. At dawn this morning your time 4:49 a.m., which was night for me, there I was setting out with you." Better yet, what a way to take Daizan's message, his updated version of Zen that he'll doubtless teach to the ordinary people he'll meet on the road, and share it in a wider sphere. "Because it seems to me you're going to see life in the raw."

"I can tell you that from day one," he says, describing where he slept and about the fox whose story he'll relate another day. Right now he wants to tell me about something else that happened this morning.

A woman hears about him on a local radio station. Immediately after the broadcast, she jumps into her car, drives up and down the lanes in an effort to find him. He's napping on the side of the road when she calls out, "Are you Daizan Roshi?"

"Yes."

"Can you teach me to meditate?"

They sit on the grass verge, side by side together. Cross-legged, like children in kindergarten, the woman on his rolled-up sleeping mat, he teaches her the 'raising spirit' meditation he does while walking. "She's got a nine-year-old daughter--she showed me her picture," Daizan says. "She wants her daughter to learn to meditate. So probably tomorrow, we're going to have another session with the daughter too." As it turns out, he doesn't meet the woman again or her daughter. "But she has my phone number if she wants to call."

He presses on for his next stop: Newport.

Newport lies smack in the centre of the Isle of Wight. Its main shopping centre boasts elegant squares, Georgian and Victorian townhouses and a colonnaded Guildhall, designed by the seventeenth century British architect, John Nash. Historic warehouses have been restored to provide a tiny theatre and arts centre on the western bank of the River Medina, its furthest navigable reach. Until the mid nineteenth a busy port and flourishing market town, its history goes back to the Third Century when the occupying Roman forces constructed one of their fine villas.

In the Eleventh Century, another invading force, the Normans, established a stronghold on the site of a Saxon Fort at Carisbrooke, then the island's capital. Today, Carisbrooke Castle is an historical landmark open to visitors. Indeed, Newport caters mostly to tourists with its shops, pubs, restaurants, fast-food diners and nightclubs. Paying scant attention to such worldly delights, Daizan heads for a local Buddhist Centre.

Once a week a Soto Zen meditation group, meets together for practice. Daizan meets up again with Nicole, with whom he ate supper last night. Tonight he eats with the Centre's practitioners, and it is just after the meal that I call him.

"I'm feeling like the cat that got the cream," he says. "Sluggish, too, to be honest." The dinner was his first meal of the day. Now he's waiting while people arrive for sitting practice, after which he'll give a talk on the importance of looking after one's teacher. Tomorrow he plans to head for the ferry and get onto the mainland to start walking northwards—Newbury, Oxford, Banbury, Coventry maybe. "Due north up the middle, because you know in our meditation, when things go right they go due north up the middle."

"I don't have a map." I tell him my local bookstore doesn't carry maps; that I'll have to take the ferry to Vancouver Island to buy what I need. After fulfilling a dream doing graduate studies, then living in Victoria, I moved to Pender Island in fall, 2003. These islands are part of an archipelago that stretches from Haida Gwai to the Southern Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea, cross the U.S. border and continue on down Puget Sound, Washington State, ending at the city of Olympia. "How does it feel now you've started your journey?" I ask.

"It feels like I've been here before."

"Tell me, Daizan, how you'd answer people who'd say, 'Huh! He's just a freeloading hippie type?"
"Well, yes." His reply takes me aback. "Probably there was something in the original hippie thing that was very true, very genuine. This was something I discovered last time I did this kind of thing when I walked a thousand miles around Shikoku without any visible means of support. What you realize very quickly is that it's not you. You're just the feet but actually there's this whole beautiful network or support system almost, and it's everything combining together that makes it possible. It's very humbling and inspiring. I believe the fact that somebody can do something like this is an on-going good-news story. It's concrete, tangible, visible proof there are generous, good-hearted people in the world. Because this thing couldn't run for even one day without a whole string of those people appearing. So it's just a little focal point, some of that energy of goodness can manifest."

"You carry no money, so what happens if people put money in your begging bowl?"

It happened on Shikoku. Japanese people like to give money and for the first third of the walk Daizan was strict and said, "No, no, no and no. Only food." Then along came a man insisting he put a thousand yen in the bowl. Daizan persisted in putting his hand over it, persisted in saying no. After a bit the man started crying and Daizan relented. Oh darn it, go on then, he thought, at which point he decided to accept money. "On this walk I'm not going to accept money. I'm going to tough it out or ride it out, because I think it's more of a blank canvas here. People's expectations are pretty much zero, so it's easier to guide a sense of an appropriate response."

"And the language is easy because you're English and therefore you can say what you need to say to people in your own—and their—language."

"People are arriving for zazen. I have to go."

"I send you my love and blessings and prayers."

"Thank you so much."

"I'll talk to you tomorrow. Same time." It's 11.45 a.m. where I am on the west coast of Canada. Clock time Daizan's side of the pond is eight hours ahead. In Europe they call 7:45 p.m. 19.45—something I always forget.

"Gassho." I hang up. Lovely word, gassho. It means "I honour and respect you, love and bless you . . .

June 22, 2007. Day Two

The Portsmouth-bound ship slowly fills up at the Fishbourne Car Ferry Terminal. Daizan waits just outside the gates. Thirty minutes have passed and still he hasn't managed to hitch a ride. People either ignore him, or look away, embarrassed. Under these circumstances, carrying no money and refusing to accept any is a problem. His idea of a car driver slowing down for him, offering him a ride, letting him off the other side isn't working. No bites at all.

At least he has a full stomach and clean body. Last night he slept in a tiny, yet comfortable, guest berth on Nicole and John's barge again, and this morning's breakfast, as well as a shower at the marina—their treat, since they dropped the required 10p into the meter for hot water—has stood him in good stead. Before he walked to the ferry dock this afternoon, he stopped off at nearby Quarr Abbey, arriving there at lunchtime. But if he hoped to get a bite to eat, he was out of luck. Seems the monks there have a longish lunch hour, so when Daizan got there, no one was around.

Quarr Abbey is a Catholic Christian monastery whose church is a tall and rather beautiful brick edifice that opened for business on June 23, 1907. Tomorrow, the monks will celebrate its one hundredth anniversary. A little before 2.30 p.m., as Daizan sits resting, a very grand bell starts ringing, calling everybody to a service called nones.

Originally, nones was the "ninth day by inclusive reckoning before ides in the ancient-Roman calendar (seventh day of March, May, July, October, fifth of other months)." Whether or not the devious Augustus manufactured an ecclesiastical hour for the early Christian church is not germane here. Suffice it to say that the word nones is "fifth of the canonical hours of prayer, originally said at [the] ninth hour in the day at 3:00 p.m."

Daizan joins the fifteen black-robed monks in the church where they chant an Gregorian repetitive melody. "This went on for only for about ten minutes and then we came out from there and started to say hello and that sort of thing," he tells me over the phone. "I had tea with one of the monks and a couple of oblates—lay people connected with the monastery. After that I walked down to the ferry."

Where he now waits.

A ferry worker watches Daizan with a jaundiced eye born of years of experience with miscreants and itinerants of all sorts before sauntering over. "Look mate, the way tickets work 'ere, people pay for their car plus the passengers. All of 'em have already paid so no one can really give you a lift."

"What about the other ferry?" Daizan asks, referring to the Isle of Wight Passenger Ferry Terminal at Ryde.

"Nah, they're all the same." The man shakes his head as if to say, 'It's hopeless, you can't do it.'
Yesterday I talked with Daizan about stepping into the void. Recalling the event, he tells me about stepping into the current. "There's no framework," he says. "It's finding and creating the shape as you walk. Because there are invisible means of support for all of us, I think, it's just stepping into that place where they can manifest."

No sooner has he finished conversing with the ferry worker than a woman drives up. "Sorry, I can't put you in the car," she says, winding down her window to hand him a bit of paper. "Here's a foot passenger ticket."

Daizan jumps onto the boat, arriving forty minutes later at a quay in between the Royal Naval Base and the Continental Ferry Port, the UK's second busiest for passengers and freight. Walking past the Portsmouth Harbour Station, he turns from the Gunwharf Quays and historical dockyard into the city itself. I can hear cars honking and the noise of Friday night, 7:45 p.m., people rolling in and out of pubs.

"Hey Grasshopper!" The shouts from a passing car are benevolent.

"Why Grasshopper?" I ask.

"From that old television program, Kung Fu. Remember?"

I don't. We didn't have television until I was seventeen, recovering from my first gynaecological surgery. "Well, better call you names than throw eggs," I quip. "Sounds a bit rough though."
Rough is right. If the Isle of Wight is genteel, Portsmouth is the opposite, and with its being pay day and the start of the weekend, the get-drunk, have-a-fight atmosphere of downtown is just getting going. Daizan hopes he gets clear of it before things get too wild. Although the population of the city itself is under 200,000, an estimated half million people reside in Portsmouth's metropolitan area, making it the eleventh largest urban area in England. Mostly, the people who pass him pretend not to notice the strange man in the weird getup. Yet, now and then someone stops him with a question or two.

"Where you from?" a Portsmouth woman asks.

"South Isle of Wight," he says. "Japan originally. I'm walking up the length of England."

"Did you just come from Japan?" a second woman asks.

"Yes, a couple of days ago."

"Did you walk from Japan?"

"No, not from Japan." Daizan's tone of voice betrays no hint that his interlocutor has asked a silly question. A barrage of questions follow, including "All the way to Scotland?"

Aware that time and money slip away while I listen to the folk surrounding him, I push on with my next question. "I'm curious about something you told me on your first day out: your sense of everything being one after a few days' walking on the island of Shikoku. Is it like that on this walk?"

"You start to realize that you're just the feet of this amazing combination and interaction and net of kindess and love and generosity."

"Like Indira's net?" I ask, mispronouncing the great Hindu/Buddhist god's name. Indra constructed a huge net over the dome of his palace, each knot held by a dazzling jewel that reflected every aspect of every other jewel in the net. But not only mythology tells of the interconnectedness of everything, so does science. Fritjof Capra noted in his Tao of Physics that it struck him how alike the metaphor of Indra's net was to the hadron bootstrap model, "created by Eastern sages some 2,500 years before the beginning of particle physics." If you, like me, are not into the intricacies of particle physics, we need only think of Nature:
Field biologists using sensitive detectors have discovered that the needles of trees near Alaskan rivers owe their nitrogen to the carcasses of salmon that die along the banks, the same salmon that feed the bears whose pawing aerates the soil that . . .

Daizan explains that his walk is not much different. So far, the number of people who have popped up and helped is hitting double figures—and this is only the evening of the second day. At my prodding, he describes his walk around Shikoku.

There's a tradition in Japan of walking as spiritual practice. Some of the old monks were incredible walkers. One such, Master Sozan, heard a teaching related by one master to another yet make neither head nor tail of it. Something must have piqued his curiousity, however, because he sold everything he owned and walked right across China to ask the first master for clarification. Still Sozan didn't get it. For a long time after meeting the master, he carried on walking as tradition dictated.

The word for a novice monk in Japanese is unsui. Un means cloud; sui means water. So a cloud and water person's mission in life is to wander in search of Truth. There are ranks of monks in Zen, rather like in the army, unsui being first rank or beginner-- a free or flowing person not only seeking Truth and the True Master but also the right place to practice. When the unsui finds what his heart seeks, he must travel further to find other teachers who help him refine the teachings and take them even deeper. After which the monk continues on his way.

Monks still travel in Japan to some degree, but even more so in Korea where traveling is the traditional pattern of the Zen monk's life. The monk lives on the road going from temple to temple studying with first one master, moving on to study with another, then moving on to study with yet another. Later, after a monk has had some kind of understanding of the teachings, he hits the road to yet other masters to compare, test and deepen his understanding more and more. Yet inevitably, he moves on.

Shikoku is well known for its ancient pilgrimage that follows the route of a great master from the past, Kobo Daishi. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth some 1200 years ago, Daishi was a smart youngster. This was just as well since in the society in which he lived, education came before all else studying the teachings of Confucius, whose erudition included the rudiments of governance and government—rather like political science these days. Apparently, the process was both time-consuming and boring. Nevertheless, the young man had ooddles of stick-to-itness and it wasn't long before he rose through court ranks to become the equivalent of a cabinet minister. At the same time, he must have had something of a spiritual search going on, because he was also studying with a monk, learning to meditate and so on. Until, at some point, something in him said, Enough. And he left the court and went off into the mountains to practice the style of meditation the monk had taught him—a mantra style where you repeat a word or phrase a million times as a sort of set retreat.

Kobo Daishi sat in peaceful woods, walked on and sat beside quiet lakes, walked on and sat on hill tops where he did his million recitations. Yet he found nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Then he went off somewhere else, did a million more recitations. Still nothing. So he went to another mountain. And another and another. Being stubborn, he refused to let go and this seeking went on for years. He just had to find what his heart told him was true and real.

At last he came to a little sea cave down on the south tip of the Island of Shikoku. Where it seems that at dawn one morning he found what he was looking for. Normally, when a seeker gets 'it', he takes vows and a new name to become a monk in a ceremony called tokado. Not Kobo Daishi. When KD looked out from the entrance of his little cave he saw the sky (ku) and the sea (kai), and that's the name he gave himself: Ku Kai. After exiting his cave, he wandered about Shikoku anonymously helping people. Helped somebody dig a well here, cured somebody there, lent a hand building a resevoir somewhere else. Whatever had to he done he did. There are lots of stories.

A few years on he found his way back to the court and told his friend the emperor what he had done. To the Emperor's delight; an enlightened person was a rare thing. Eventually Kobo Daishi was ordained as a full monk, went to China and brought back the teachings to Japan. He became a hugely influential person.

Skikoku is an ancient pilgrimage route very much connected with Kobo Daishi, one of the greatest figures that Japan has ever produced, particularly in Japanese Budhist hisory. He is supposed to have designed the writing system, was one of the great calligraphers and a great poet who had a tremendous influence on Japanese culture. People even believe he never died, so enlightened was he. Every pilgrim on the walk around Shikoko carries a staff symbolizing Kobo Daishi so that, as you walk, the old monk walks with you. There's a saying and motto on Shikoku, 'Two people walking together'-- you and Kobo Daishi, of course.

"For me," Daizan continues, "that pilgrimage—well, I have a connection with Kobo Daishi for sure. I have a great awe and respect for him really. Added to the mix is a strong connection from way back in another lifetime with shugendo, or mountain practice. That's an ancient style of Buddhist and Shinto practice. I had some karma from the past connected with Shikoku and mountain practice that it was time to sort of clear – unraveling another karmic notch from the past."

"What does your name, Daizan, mean?" I ask.

He explains that Dai means big and zan means mountain. Daizan studied for fifteen years with his first master, Daishin; then more recently with Shinzan. Stick the two halves of their names together and you get Daizan. "It's a way of honouring the two major teachers I've had in my Zen training."

If his reasons for walking around Shikoku were traditional, his walk up the middle of Britain is not. His training is finished, he's a full-fledged Master, yet he feels he has a debt of sorts to pay. And because he was born and raised in England the first place for such repayment is his own country. His offering is to make Zen teaching available and see what kind of response arises.
Once again our conversation is interrupted by a group of young people, beer cans in hand, some mere children. "You a monk?" asks one.

"I'm a monk, yes." Daizan responds as if it's the most natural thing to find a Japanese monk strolling through the suburbs of Portsmouth.

"Are you a walking lampshade?" giggles another, pointing to Daizan's conical shaped straw hat.
"Walking lampshade, Daizan repeats. "Yes, that's right."

It's starting to rain, he's in the thick of Friday night somewhere in the sprawl of a public housing estate, and concerned about finding somewhere dry to sleep. He says it's his next real challenge. When I ask about eating, he replies that he hasn't eaten lunch or supper. A sleeping place takes precedence. "Rain's a bit more critical. Doesn't matter what you sleep on—concrete's fine. But sleeping actually in the rain is tricky."

I wonder how on earth he kept warm and dry in the midst of half a dozen typhoons in Shikoku when the rain seemingly never let up. In his good-natured way he laughs. "I didn't keep dry at all." Most nights he found somewhere to sleep, usually under the eves of temples. But, "It was a warmish autumn," he tells me. So far he hasn't found any equivalent in England, and when I mention churches, he doubts the possibility of their being open. He's willing to give it a try, though.

It took him six weeks to walk around Shikoku—and the island is well-used to pilgrims, welcoming them at every checkpoint. Daizan thinks it'll probably take the same amount of time even though this is a shorter walk by three hundred miles. After all, he's meeting more people, spreading his old Zen Master Shinzan Mayomae's word, raising the spirit of Britain. To say nothing of walking across a grim and grimey working-class area on a rainy night on the edge of a city revving up for drinking and fighting.
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