Shift and slide through the darkened rooms as a shade. Turn on no lights; let the sense of the place guide you as you walk around.
Glide down the stairs into the main entrance way. See the lacquered bamboo ornament hanging from the ceiling and let a clock with no tick tell you a time that is constant in the world. Go around and past the kitchen area until you face 3 stepping stones laid on the floor leading to a door. Hop over them – one, two, three, – and slide back the black wooden door to reveal a small, quiet bedroom. Two chests of drawers against two walls, a lamp with a paper shade on the floor and a futon laid out in front of it. On the walls are four scrolls: two with kanji characters in exquisite calligraphy that flow down the paper like water down a stream, one with a picture of Daruma, the last of Amithaba Buddha, benevolently smiling upon you.
Leave the room, close the door and hop back over the stones to the kitchen area.
Don’t stop; go through the wall into the meditation room. Float down the middle of the room, past the regularly spaced cushions were the auras of the past people to meditate here are still visible to any who could and would see. Forwards, until you stand under the golden bells and chimes in front of an alter to the Buddha. Pause a while before turning to your right, and passing through the wall into a tatami room.
Admire a scroll depicting the Kannon Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara riding on a dragon before moving into another tatami room, behind you as you face the scroll. A large table occupies the centre of this room with countless ghosts sat around it, drinking tea and conversing in almost dead whispers.
Sliding doors open onto the wooden walkway and doors to the garden. The sounds of birds singing and insects humming float in to you from outside. Pass through this room and come back to the main entrance way. On your right is the bamboo ornament. On your left is the door outside.
Slide the door open, go outside and sit on the dark-wood bench on the right of the entrance way. Look up at the trees that line the mountain in front of you.
Wait for the wind that rustles the leaves of the trees to reach you and, when it does, allow it to caress over you and slowly pull from you a tiny piece of yourself that will forever remain at Horakuan, walking the meditation path.
Michael F.