Eric Simpson bares his sole at a traditional Japanese firewalk.
Chanting flows down the mountainside to meet us as we walk up the steep stone steps outside Nyoirin Temple, hidden among the giant cypress trees on Nakatsumine Mountain in rural Shikoku, Japan. On a small, jury-rigged platform just inside the temple’s wooden gate stands Tenkoken Mangetsu, a well-known singer in the area, singing kukai songs in praise of Kobo Daishi, founder of Shingon Buddhism.
Dressed in bright reddish-orange robes, the chief priest, Kaijyo Yamada, strides across the courtyard of the temple that has been his family’s home for ages, welcoming visitors and asking them to join in a shijo meal in the temple hall. He’s a bundle of nerves because today he must prepare for the temple’s annual firewalk, a tradition with roots in Japan’s distant past.
Reverend Yamada can’t put a precise date on when the firewalks began in Japan, but he thinks the ritual dates back to the early days of Buddhism, at least six centuries. As Japan’s Shinto believers also use the firewalk as a method of spiritual awakening, Yamada suspects the first Buddhist firewalks probably sprang from the Shinto faith, which had much influence on Japanese Buddhism in its early days.
We walk around to a roped-off enclosure just to the left of the temple, where several monks are wrapping a huge set of wooden prayer beads around the top layer of a meter-high pile of logs draped with cypress boughs. A small, makeshift altar holding an offering of fruit, salt and biscuits stands directly behind the stacked logs.
As I circle the enclosure, stopping to say a silent prayer at the granite statues that hug the hill, a nagging worry that has been bothering me for a few days worms its way back into my mind: should I walk today or not? Does it make sense to try a second firewalk after my last experience? A few weeks earlier I had walked at another firewalk-not a Buddhist or a Shinto ritual but a New Age seminar-and managed to get across the coals. But I did get burned, and any illusions I had about walking across the coals unscathed had been shattered. My aching feet were living proof to that; the blisters on the bottom of my feet were still healing.
Temperatures vary, but the coals in an average firewalk are about 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 650 degrees Celsius. Since human skin chars at 160 Celsius, it’s fortunate that I walked away-hopped away is probably more accurate-without serious damage to my soles. I did need a generous lathering of aloe vera lotion on my feet later that evening.
So it was with some ambivalence that I gazed at this meter-high stack of logs inside that roped ground and tried to suppress the anxiety I had felt a few weeks earlier from flooding back.
The previous firewalk hadn’t been a complete failure. I had managed to walk across four meters of blazing hot coals without needing hospitalization. In fact, most of the other participants in that firewalk had walked with almost no sign of pain. Several had walked across the fire several times and the seminar leader, a Canadian teacher with years of firewalking experience, had walked four or five times that night alone. But my own concentration had been broken that evening during a crucial part of the preparation seminar, a guided visual meditation. I had attributed my blisters to this lack of preparation, and was now willing to make a second try.
This time, my Japanese friend Sawako reassured me, the coals wouldn’t be so hot. I wondered why these particular coals would be any cooler than those at my first firewalk but hoped her optimism was well-founded. Since Japanese Buddhists have been walking on coals for centuries, I figured I had to put some trust in their tradition.
After a meal of tofu-spinach salad, miso soup, mandarin oranges and rice in the tatami-mat living quarters of the temple, the participants filed outside to the ceremony area. In a few minutes, we could hear the sound of a conch-shell horn and the distant chanting of the priests from the temple buildings high above us.
Rev. Yamada explained later that the procession starts at the gomado, a small smoky shrine next to the main hall where the sacred fire is prepared in an ancient round hearth. Cypress wood is burned and the flame is used to light the tip of a three-meter-long bamboo pole. Then the dozen priests who will officiate at the ritual file down the 108 steep stone steps leading from the main temple buildings to the sacred firewalk enclosure.
The priests carry staffs, scrolls of scriptures, and a sacred statue of Fudo Myo-o, the god of mercy and anger. The statue stands inside a wooden box, called an ozushi, brandishing a rope in one hand and a sword in the other, with fire burning around its head. He is black, the combination of all colors, to signify that anyone can be saved by him.
Fudo Myo-o is the focus of the firewalk ceremony in the Shingon tradition, which is an offspring of tantric Tibetan Buddhism. Fudo Myo-o represents fire, which Rev. Yamada explains is one of the six sacred roots, or rokon shojo, in the Shingon system. The other five are earth, water, wind, sky and mind. It is meditation on the nature of Fudo Myo-o-and how this element fits into dainichi nurai, or the Cosmos-that is the essential focus of the firewalk ritual.
The ozushi is placed on the altar behind the firelogs and Rev. Yamada sits on a large cushion directly in front of the unlit bonfire. A tall, bald monk with a sonorous voice takes a scroll of Buddhist scriptures and starts the ceremony by chanting in Sanskrit. He then takes a long bow and fires several arrows into the air in different directions, as the onlookers scramble to retrieve them. The arrows chase away any unwanted demons or evil spirits and, along with the sprinkling of salt on the ground around the firewalking pit, symbolically purify the area.
Finally, as a conch shell horn wails in the background, two monks use bamboo poles to light the bonfire with the flame that was brought from the gomado. The fire crackles and thick, acrid smoke slowly creeps from the pile of logs. As the smoke begins to billow out, the onlookers cough and sputter as the fire comes to life and the smoke drifts high above the mountain top.
Before the firewalk begins, supplicants prepare prayer sticks of plain light wood, called gomaki, to send wishes to Buddha. These sticks will be tossed into the fire by the monks during the firewalk ceremony. My friend Sawako asks for success for her son Yoshi in his elementary school examinations. Rev. Yamada says these wishes are really petty annoyances that bother us in our daily life; throwing the gomaki in the fire represents the destruction of these small earthly desires and their transformation into a more profound love. Of course, Rev. Yamada adds, even though people realize that only by denial of these worldly desires can they reach true spiritual understanding, they may still want their wishes to come true as quickly as possible.
The giant wooden prayer beads, which the monks have taken off the bonfire before lighting it, are handed from one person to another as the onlookers chant and gaze at the flames. The beads, as long as a boa constrictor and just as animated, snake their way around the fire again and again, accompanied by the singing of sacred Buddhist scriptures. An older woman presses the beads against her shoulder and neck, rubbing the beads for extra effect. The priests circle the fire, chanting prayers and simultaneously grabbing dozens of prayer sticks and tossing them into the fire. The people standing outside the roped area watch as the sticks fly in arcs toward the flame and disappear. As the fire grows in intensity, the monks edge away from the fire, dashing close once in a while to rescue any errant sticks that have dropped short of their mark.
As the fire dies down a little, several monks use long-handled bamboo sticks with metal claws on the end to tear apart the smoldering log-frame and the glowing coals are spread out to form a path. Two monks beat the coals with such intensity that one bamboo pole snaps in two. The coals gradually die down and form the hot, powdery base that people will walk across.
All this happens quickly and with precision as the crowd presses around the roped enclosure. One monk takes his position at one corner, pounding a steady beat on a brown, half-meter diameter drum and another lowers the rope to let the firewalkers inside. The remaining monks take a twenty-kilogram bag of salt and pour the contents along the pathway. The salt serves two purposes: blessing the fire and covering the coals so the fire is not so intense.
The crowd surges forward through the opening and forms a line behind Rev. Yamada, who is now at the head of the firewalk pit. Meditating for half an hour in front of the fire, he has tried to become one with the fire by allowing the small cosmos, represented by the fire, to expand and join with the huge cosmos. This meditation, he explains later, is a renunciation of worldly desire in an attempt to attain a higher consciousness. He doesn’t expect all the people at the firewalk to meditate in this way, but those who understand Buddhist concepts will feel something spiritual when they walk across the fire. Many walk because they believe it will help their requests to Buddha to come true, others because they believe it will help them remain healthy during the cold winter-sort of a spiritual booster shot.
Rev. Yamada admits he feels anxious himself before each firewalk. But as he stands at the head of the firepit, he simply gives himself up to Fudo Myo-o and when he feels ready, he walks. He has been burned in the past, so he doesn’t walk slowly to show off his spiritual superiority. He folds his hands together in prayer, chanting loudly with his prayer beads in hand; he takes a few steady strides and walks across the two-meter stretch of coals.
The participants roll up their pant legs and take off their socks. Except for the uninitiated and the very young, fear doesn’t seem to be a factor now. Young and old stand in line, waiting to go. A priest takes a wooden stick with a colorful flag on it and hands it to the first lay firewalker -and he walks across. Dozens and dozens follow, some praying, some walking slowly, and others quickly. No one cries or shows any sign of pain, or even discomfort. The air is filled with chanting and an atmosphere of mutual support and trust adds to the sense of security around the fire. The line of priests at the side of the firepit is not only for spiritual but physical assistance: if anyone stumbles or is getting burned, they are there to help out. If there are any burns, Rev. Yamada calls them “scolding” from Buddha.
Finally I arrive at the head of the line with my six-year-old daughter. I intend to walk with her hand-in-hand but the monk says: “No, only one person at a time.” I take the stick he offers me and, looking straight ahead, I step onto the coals. There is no heat, no searing pain. I don’t really have time to think about anything and before I realize it, I am on the other side, watching my daughter walk towards me.
She cries: “It’s hot!” and scampers across the fire shouting, but with a smile on her face. Once she reaches the other side, she’s fine. We check her feet and find one small black spot where she has stepped on a live coal. My feet are unscathed; the only scars are from that previous firewalk. Two young boys of five and eight, Sawako’s sons, also walk across and find it hot, but not painful.
The long, involved preparation for the New Age-style firewalk was intense, but somehow this traditional-and salt-cooled-Buddhist firewalk was more successful for me. The Buddhist ceremony didn’t directly address questions of fear or the heat of the fire. Presumably the faithful were so involved in the ritual that the more mundane question of burning flesh was abandoned. As their minds concentrated on matters of the mind and spirit, their feet glided across the coals relatively unscathed.
As for me, the shortness of the walk and the copious amount of salt did wonders for my courage. I was also relieved to hear that they also dig up and prepare the soil in the firewalk bed, removing any small stones, to prevent burns. Apparently in the past some priests were burned by small stones, and they didn’t want this to happen again.
Strangely, my feet didn’t even get black from the cinders. And the blisters and scars from the earlier firewalk feel much better after my trot across these coals. Maybe a third firewalk is worth considering.