Writing an article about Zen is almost a contradiction in terms. That is unless I simply leave the rest of it blank…

Just a finger, pointing to the moon…

But, I don’t want to do that!

At its basic level, Zen is an exotic a form of Buddhism. The Buddha lived approximately 2500 years ago (his exact dates of life and death are still uncertain) on the Indian subcontinent. Around 450 years after his death the collected sayings and teachings of his “Middle Way” were collated into canonical form and spread ever Eastwards, surviving the almost total destruction of Buddhism in its native lands.

Early Chinese Buddhism

Lord Buddha teaching, Laos

The large diaspora of Buddhist thought existing in China (Over 80,000 pages!) can be partly explained by the Buddha speaking against distributing written teachings only in Sanskrit (A language of the priest class).

“My Dharma has nothing to do with beautiful language. Just make sure the meaning of the teachings is not lost. This is my thinking. You should speak the teachings according to whatever pronunciations the various sentient beings can take in and understand”

- The Buddha (Vinaya-matrka)

This is unlike the Bible, which was only transmitted in Latin to preserve the core message and the need for priests who could be trained to read it. Thus, as the Buddha’s teachings were carried through the countries of the East, the canon was translated into local languages and took on local flavours.

Words have a power.

Buddha statue in Beijing

Around 100AD Buddhism came to China via the trade routes between the two nations. This early Buddhism was taken by the locals to be a foreign version of Daoism (Taoism) and for the Buddha to be a Daoist Immortal of sorts. This Daoist focussing lens would affect the Chinese form of Buddhism for the next thousand years, but its greatest influence was in this early transmission period. At their core, both religions believe similar things and up to a point one can clearly imagine how the Buddhist texts, when translated into Chinese, would echo Daoism.

Daoism and Buddhism

Mount Wudang Daoist

One of the problems with comparing these two traditions properly is that they both almost always use just their own terms in a circular manner. This is a reliable method of preserving a tradition of course, but it makes the whole thing only “hang on itself” and resist comparison. There follows an attempt in writing their similarities in the same terms. This is not as shocking as you may think as in the 4th Century the Chinese, trying to make sense of Buddhism (and especially the operation of Karma, which scared the elite), came up with “Keyi”, which translates as “Concept Matching”. Only after special status was given to the Buddhist Lotus Sutra (which speaks of Emptiness) by new translators in the beginning of the 5th Century, did the Chinese start looking for differences in this “Foreign Daoism” rather than similarities.

The roof of a Daoist temple atop mount Wudang

Daoists believe that there is no God, only an unknowable “energy” that pervades the Universe and gives rise to the things contained within it. This “energy” is not alive like the west imagines a God to be, it is not even “intelligent”, it is like a naturally occurring pattern and its influence drives what we call nature. It is “behind” reality, “invisible” to our inspection and detectable only by its influence. It is an operation of the universe and the fabric of reality upon which the cosmos, and everything in it, is interweaved. It cannot be put down in words exactly what this “energy” is and its ineffable nature means our experience of reality is relative. Daoists have come up with a set of principles by which life may be lived that reflect the way this “energy” acts upon reality. Daoists believe that in living in harmony with this “energy” is like being in tune with music, a harmonious vibration that leads to a natural life, the best life you can have. The name they give to the “energy” principle is the Dao (Tao). Since it is without form the Daoists reject duality of “self” and “other”, believing that all reality is in fact one weaved together by the Dao. Daoism has no central author or dogma, but it has the concept of the sage and the greatest was said to be an ancient and legendary Chinese librarian called Lao Tzu who wrote a short book just before he retired.

Contrast that with the Buddha’s teachings:

Giant Buddha Statue in Japan

Buddhists believe that there is no God and reality is like waves that rise and fall upon a great sea. For the Buddhist there is no part of reality that is permanent and unconnected from other parts, including the parts that make up “you” – the same way that a sea is made up of drops of water flowing together and dependant on each other. Since everything is impermanent and subject to change, the “I”, the “self”, is not actually a thing, rather it is the (current) convergence of impermanent energies.

“Transient are all component things.
When this with wisdom, one discerns, then one is disgusted with unsatisfactoriness
This is the path to purity”.
- The Buddha (dhammapada:227)

In a very real way there is no duality of “you” and the “Universe” – they are the same thing. What you call “you” is what the Universe is doing right now. This puts “consciousness” at the primacy of reality with all objects being a creation of the mind. To return to the wave analogy, when we watch the sea it appears that the wave is travelling forwards, but really it is just the sea rising and falling up and down in a sequence and the movement is an illusion. Thus it is with your “self”, where the sequence of events you experience, combined with the memory of the past, give rise to the illusion of the self.

A Buddha statue in Sarnath, India

However, one day the wave will fall and your life will end, then the wave will rise and your energy will live again (in a new combination of components). This happens over and over and thus you are reborn anew in a cycle. You don’t have a “soul” that survives this transition as, since all your components are impermanent, there is no separate “soul” to continue. Buddhists believe that this truth was discovered by an Indian wandering prince, who had renounced his position to seek a way of curing the world of suffering. His name was Siddhartha and, after many years of struggle, the nature of reality was made clear to him in a moment of enlightenment and he became the Buddha.

Mahabodhi temple India, the place of enlightenment

He then spent the next 45 years teaching his method of release from the cycle of suffering, which advocated a Middle Path and a life of compassion for all living things. Through this, eventually, all the Karma accumulated in life will be spent and you will not be reborn, rather you will sublime into an unknowable state called Nirvana.

“Whatever arises dependently
Is explained as empty.
Thus dependent attribution
Is the middle way.
Since there is nothing whatever
That is not dependently existent,
For that reason there is nothing
Whatsoever that is not empty.”
- Nagarjuna

Both these teachings see the Universe as existing in impermanent flux. Both believe that the fundamental truth of reality can be practically obtained by enlightenment and that living within the set of principles that such an enlightenment leads to is the path to happiness. Moreover, both traditions rely heavily on meditation to produce insights.

This convergence came to a head in 520AD when in Loyang there was a serious debate on the subject of “Did Lao Tzu leave China to be reborn in India as the Buddha?” Clearly early Chinese thought equated these two as equal sages, or perhaps the Daoists were doing to the Buddha what the Indian Hindu’s did when they successfully claimed the Buddha as a mere Avatar of Vishnu. 30 years later the country descended into turmoil and many of these combined Buddhist=Daoist ideas suffered extreme persecution and fell into the abyss or were forced into the ascetic life in the mountains.

After this chaos subsided, Buddhism in China was restored to new heights by four great schools including the returning ascetic monks who formed an initially highly secret Buddhist sect we now call Chan.

The Rise of Chan

Bodhidharma Statue India

This sect traces its lineage to a form of Indian Buddhism primarily focussed on the insights gained through meditation (Dhyana). The legend has it (a legend created/remembered by the Chan Buddhists themselves) that the master of this form carried his understanding from India to China. His Dharma (Buddhist) name was Bodhidharma and his way, with its “direct” methods, was unlike the Buddhism that had travelled before him. He arrived around 520 AD either by boat, or by walking over the mountains, and was soon in Loyang where he was granted audience with the Buddhist Wu Emperor. However, Bodhidharma thoroughly confused the emperor with quizzical answers to his questions and a distain for the methods of the preceding priests and so he soon moved on from the capital to one of the holy mountains of China called Song, home of the now-famous Shaolin Buddhist Temple. He is said to have lived in a nearby cave and legend has it he stared at the cave wall in deep meditation for 9 years. Over time he attracted some dedicated pupils including a dhuta (extreme) ascetic called Huike. Eventually this tough and direct version of Buddhism found fertile soil in the East Mountain Community (in Huangmei) under Daoxin and then his pupil Hongren (601 – 674).

Chan Belief and the Operation of Karma

The key to understanding Buddhism’s Middle Path is the Buddha’s explanation of Karma. This is a term appropriated from the Hindu Vedas, and which has a subtly different meaning for the Buddhists. Karma is the operation of cause and effect, or to put it more correctly:

Cause, Action and Effect.

In the flux of impermanence, where the whole of reality is co-dependent, and you are but a wave of energy momentarily collated, what happens must be the result of many other things happening. This is simple cause and effect. Karma is the law that what happens to “you” (remembering the above) are the results of your “doings”. In other words, performing actions brings about karma for you. An accumulation of karma results in your part of the “wave” rising again and your rebirth. The operating effect of Karma may be so long term to be across multiple “lives” or it may be something happening directly in front of you.

For example: if I light a candle, it burns. It is my doing, my action that lights the candle. It is my karma that is created in burning it. Cause and effect mean nothing to the candle unless I light it. Performing karma-creating actions pushes around the wheel of life just a little and in the same motion leashes me to it.

According to the seed that’s sown, So is the fruit you reap there from,

Doer of good will gather good, Doer of evil, evil reaps,

Down is the seed and thou shalt taste The fruit thereof.

- The Buddha (Samyutta Nikaya)

If I have “unspent” Karma (even from past “lives”) then I will be reborn again into this world of suffering. What the Buddha suggests is a cure for this in the form of his Middle Path through life that leads to two things:

1. Enlightenment to the nature of the Universal reality.
2. An eventual end to the creation of Karma through action and thereby an end to rebirth.

What happens to “you” after you have finished all your Karma is unknowable. The thinking is that you sublime reality into something called Nirvana. What that is, no-one knows as to sublime means to “go beyond” and in this case the thoughts we have to describe Nirvana are themselves in this Universe and so cannot “go beyond” to describe it.

Nevertheless, the Buddha’s enlightenment was to realise that Karma is what causes rebirth and it should be dealt with. So what causes Karma? The Buddha placed bad Karma’s roots as “ignorance” and “craving”, which are two negative things, suggesting that “negative” Karma increases suffering in the Universe and is what keeps you on the wheel. The mutual interdependence of everything ultimately means that there is no demarcation between what appears to be an individual and the Universe, and so causing harm is to directly create karma and eventually harm oneself. By following Buddha’s teachings, understanding his 4 Noble Truths and becoming enlightened, one stops producing this destructive “bad” Karma by no longer sowing the seeds for it. Therefore, a virtuous life (or lives, plural) directly leads to the removal of the “splash causing ripples in the pond” and thereby to the possibility of obtaining Nirvana.

How do Zen and Bodhidharma fit into all this?

Lord Buddha Vietnam

Translated into Chinese, the word Dhyana transliterates as Channa, which is where the Chinese sect got its name of Chan from. The essence of Chan comes from the (most likely apocryphal) story that the Buddha gathered his disciples and silently held up a flower. When one eventually smiled, he was passed the special teaching “outside the scriptures” that runs as follows:

“No reliance on words.
Transmission outside the scriptures.
Point directly at the minds of men.
See your Buddha Nature and be enlightened.”
- Daoyi (709 – 778)

By “Buddha Nature” the dhyana sect suggests a mental state of identifiable to the Buddha’s is the goal. In other words they believe that all people can be enlightened through the same processes that enlightened the Buddha. Indeed, all are already Buddhas, they just don’t comprehend this. The extreme persuasiveness of this idea is clear, as it promises that enlightenment is in your own grasp. Moreover, it is something immediate and not just reserved for a special few. Chan advocated a “sudden” enlightenment in the adherent, the testing of this by a master and the following it up with a “spiritual deepening”. The main method of seeking this enlightenment is called “Thusness”.

Chan Thusness

Giant Lord Buddha, Thailand

Thusness is seeing the truth of reality. For Bodhidharma this was the realisation that all reality is actually contained within the “pearl” of his own mind.

“For the first time I realised that within the square inch of my own mind there is nothing that does not exist. The Bright Pearl comprehends clearly and darkly penetrates the deep tendency of things”.
- Bodhidharma (Text 3)

All things that arise in the mind are parts of the Universe in flux. An example to explain this comes from the Chan Buddhist Patriarch Huineng a few generations down the line:

Two monks were arguing over a flag atop a pole.
One said, “The flag is moving”.
The other said, “No – the wind is moving”.
Huineng was passing and stopped to say, “No! Your mind is moving”.

For Bodhidharma the primary cultivation of Thusness came through meditation in the form of “wall gazing”.

Bodhidharma, Japan

He had little love for intellectual analysis of written materials, which he felt didn’t assist in changing Karma. This anti-dogma stance came from parts of the original Pali canon where the Buddha pointed out that “all dharmas are devoid of self”, “all phenomena are impermanent” and “all phenomena are suffering”.

Dharma is a word that was, strangely, invented by the British to be able to conceptualise the Buddha’s ideas more clearly. It is therefore not very well translated and basically means both the system of analysis called the Middle Path and the actions required to achieve it. In some circles however the explanations of the Buddha (clearly not withstanding the quotes above) are taken to be so in line with reality that they are the operation of natural reality itself. Thus People often use Dharma to mean “nature’s way”.

Lord Buddha, Bodh Gaya, India

Again, the drawing near of Chan’s Dharma to Daoism’s Dao is obvious. The differences between Daoism and Chan mostly center on Thusness being a void state and not the state aimed at by the Daoists (One with the Dao leading to becoming a Sage).

What the Buddha’s quotes above mean is that the dogma in the teachings themselves is also impermanent (obvious when one thinks about the line “all phenomena are impermanent). Bodhidharma took this to mean that the truth was not to be found in the analysis of the canon, but in the void of emptiness brought about by Dhyana meditation. When in this void of Thusness, there are no conditioned entities or concepts. In other words: no “labels” can be created without at the same time separating reality into the dualistic “This [label]” and “Not-this [label]“. From this understanding we come to a characteristic of later Zen Buddhism in that it is full of seemingly complicated “This thing” “Not-this thing” arguments that can confuse very quickly. Sometimes this confusion is on purpose, but more often than not it simply referring back to the nature of Thusness being un-contingent and devoid of labels/concepts. This leads to a common trap experienced by Chan Buddhists of all types in that “Void” itself becomes a concept rising in the mind. A classic error highlighted by another story of Huineng.

The Chan Patriarch was coming to the end of his life and offered to appoint the successor who could write a poem showing their understanding. The top pupil of the temple wrote the following poem:

The body is a Bodhi tree,
The mind a standing mirror bright,
At all times polish it diligently,
And let no dust alight,

Huineng, who was only a youth working in the kitchens, was read this and asked a monk to write up his response:

Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree
The bright mirror is also not a stand
Fundamentally there is not a single thing -
Where could any dust be attracted?

Clearly the first pupil had fallen into the trap and conceptualised the void. Huineng is probably the most important Chan master in all history as his sutra (the Platform Sutra) is the main historical record of Chan back to Bodhidharma (That was until the – very few – writings of Bodhidharma pupils were discovered in a walled-up cave in Northern China in the early 20th century). Huineng’s sutras are probably not literally true historical record, as they were his teaching method, but they highlight his beliefs and understandings. His (supposed) mummy is still seated in zazen meditation pose in the Nanhua temple in Caoqi.

A monk practices

The school of thought crystallised by Huineng was to solidify Buddhism and ensured its survival in China (along with Daoism and Confucianism) for the next 400 years. One practical difference between the Chan and Indian forms of Buddhism is found in the monastic life. Chan (and Zen) focus on work by the monks, “A day of no work—a day of no eating” goes the famous Chan saying. This means Chan Buddhist Monks don’t need to beg for food in the morning like those in Laos, for example, as they are allowed to “work”.

Laos monks begging each morning

This puts a very different view on the monastic life and Chan/Zen monks are very hard working indeed.

Transmission to Japan

Zen Garden, Japan

Two main methods of Chan training were developed and different sects put emphasis on one of them or the other:

1. Silent Illumination through Meditation in Zazen.
2. Koan Riddle Introspection.

Koans are a form of poem or riddle with no clear answer. Examples include:

Who is it who now repeats the Buddha’s name?
Who is dragging this corpse about?
What is this?
What is it?

They started as short stories of previous enlightened Buddhist masters, but soon developed into testing riddles that pointed to direct enlightenment. The student is given the koan to study and examines it for meaning. He is then called back before the master to answer the riddle. Should his answer point to an enlightened insight then he progresses. If it doesn’t he is sent away with a pat on the back to try again.

A Buddha hidden in the back of a giant statue

While Buddhism transferred naturally to Japan through trade, none of the Chan schools flourished there until the two methods were transported by the Japanese themselves to become Zen (the Japanese translation of “Chan”).

Zazen Silent Illumination was transported in 1223 by the monk Dogen who was sent across the sea to study Chan with a mind to solve the riddle of “Why Buddha’s have to obtain enlightenment if all are born with Buddha Nature inside?” He tried the Koan schools, but found their lack of scripture reading to not be for him (something he was extremely critical of later in life). He then trained in the Silent Illumination method at Mount Tiantong. He received instruction he recounted as follows:

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.”

After 4 years in China he took this teaching back to the Kyoto temple called Kenninji and wrote up a guide on how to use Zazen meditation as the core of practice. Eventually this led to his setting up his own school of Zen that became known as Soto (the rumour is that his precocious nature and disdain for the “lax” monks in Kyoto led to him being driven out on his own).

One of the Kyoto temples

This form of Zen is the most well known in the West thanks to a number of high quality books written by (modern) Zen masters settled in the US. Its teaching is focussed on Zazen being the only true Zen practice:

“To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.”

This echoes all the way back to Bodhidharma insights. Dogen created a very large volume of writings and records of his teachings, thoughts and sessions with other monks. This record shows that while he is one of the fathers of Zen, he thought it a silly name:

“If you use the name of Zen School you are not decedents of Buddha ancestors and also have poisonous views…”

His masterwork is called “Shobogenzo” and when he finally died of illness, in 1253, his pupils carried his message forwards with gusto.

The other great form of Zen transmitted from China is Rinzai; the inheritor of the Koan school and the foundation of that most Japanese of spiritual practices; the tea ceremony.

Traditional Japanese tea

Japanese monks had visited China to learn Chan from the 6th century forwards. These monks found among the Chan schools a sect founded by Linji (translated “Rinzai” in Japanese) Gigen (d.866 AD). They were the masters of the Koan method and had an emphasis on sudden awakening missing from the Tendai tradition found in Japan. Rinzai Chan was brought back from China by Myoan Yosai in 1187 who then left the Kyoto temples and founded Shofuku-ji on the island of Kyushu. Rinzai has a much more convoluted history than Shoto, but its practice and nature brought rich and powerful adherents and during the Samurai eras large, important temples were constructed in Kyoto to house Rinzai masters and become teaching centres of excellence of all Chinese arts.

A Kyoto temple

Rinzai emphasises “Seeing one’s true nature” as the heart of their teachings as well as a further deepening of any enlightenment before it can be formally recognised. Like Shoto, Rinzai has lots of Zazen, but this is coupled with Koan practice and hard work “done with mindfulness”. It is a rough, tough form of Zen that Bodhidharma would have certainly approved of. Rinzai himself was famous for beating his students with a stick to bring forth enlightenment and his koans were known for being very difficult to parse. He also shouted a lot, using the martial style shouts now seen in Karate known as Katsuo (Kiai in Japanese). For example, it is recorded in the teachings that:

A Monk asked: “What is the essence of Buddhism?”
The Master gave a Katsuo.
The monk bowed.
The master said, “This is one who can hold his own in a debate!”

Sometimes these interactions are quite funny and speak a lot for the western view of Zen masters:

Another Monk asked: “Master, from where is the song you sing? Where does your style come from?”
The Master said, “When I was with Obaku, I questioned him three times, and three times was beaten”.
The Monk hesitated.
The master gave a Katsuo, then hit him and said, “One cannot drive a nail into an empty space!”

Amongst the influential Japanese Rinzai masters was the great Takuan Soho, most remembered thanks to his connection to famous martial artists and for the invention of a pickle that still bears his name.

True Self is the Self that existed before the division of heaven and earth and before one’s father and mother were born. This Self is the Self within me, the birds and the beasts, the grasses and the trees and all phenomena. It is exactly what is called ‘Buddha Nature”.
This Self has no shape or form, has no birth, has no death.
- Takuan Soho (The Unfettered Mind)

Most notably was his friendship with the great swordmaster Yagyu Munenori (1571–1646) whom he wrote to as a penpal and his sponsorship from the third Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, who built for him the temple Tokai-ji in Edo (Tokyo). This deep-rooted connection to the Samurai meant that during the Tokugawa period Rinzai Zen flourished.

Both these Zen traditions survived Japan’s transition from Samurai led feudalism to a modern country during the Meiji Restoration, but the state religion changed to Shinto forcing Buddhism to adapt. However, Zen’s adoption by the Elite of Japan meant that it has had immeasurable influence on many aspects of Japanese life. From gardening to cooking, fighting arts to making tea, Zen has granted the Japanese a mindset focussed on the now and reaching into the void for creativity.

A Zen garden in Kyoto

In modern times other forms of Buddhism have risen, most importantly of all “Pure Land” Buddhism that brings the concept of faith into the Buddhist Canon. Nevertheless, Zen remains a quintessentially Japanese form of Buddhism, but with a core of blended Indian Buddhism, Daoism and the steel of the great Chan thought of China stretching back 2500 years from Buddha, Bodhidharma, Huineng and Dozen.

Regards,

Basho

Images from my Travels or my Computer Wallpaper Collection, which you can download here: http://www.outsidecontext.com/2009/07/16/the-buddhist-wallpaper-collection/

I wallowed comfortably in the exceedingly warm waters, the balmy mountain air was cool and smelled of the rich wood my surroundings were constructed from. I was butt-naked and in my first real Japanese onsen, the famous hot bath houses of these islands. The small courtyard contained a number of sunken baths of various sizes and yet I was alone. Another set of male travellers had been around and they had taken the cultural cowardly route and worn swimming trunks. There was no way I was going to do that, not that I am aggressively body confident, simply that I have been on a couple of naturist holidays and nakedness in front of others doesn’t concern me. When they saw my nakedness I think they were slightly embarrassed by their choice of trunks and very soon they left. The sun was high up and it was a beautiful sky-blue day. In the far distance, The only clouds I could see where those completely covering Mount Fuji. Somehow the fact that I couldn’t see the “old man” (few visitors actually do as it is clouded over so often) made its masked presence, surely enormous behind the clouds, a little exhilarating. Yes, this could have easily been my idea of absolute heaven and something worth travelling all around the world to experience. I had been imagining it just like this for nothing short of 10 years. If not for one thing totally ruining the experience…

I took a very long breath in and sighed.

Over a cheap speaker the onsen staff was piping in extremely irritating J-Pop bubblegum music. I have an eclectic musical taste, and like everything from Daft Punk to Miles Davis, but the sound was truly horrible. Try to imagine that a 10 year-old Kylie Minogue drank 50 cups of coffee, cloned herself 5 times and sang a song that sounded as saccharine sweet as having your teeth forcibly drilled out with Brighton Rock.

I tried, but I couldn’t take it for more than a few minutes and so rose from the heat and left to find a quieter place inside. Cesca wasn’t with me, she was in the girls-only side of the Onsen, and so I simply found a nice Japanese room laid out in traditional tatami style and went to sleep.

Yes, coming up to see the mountain from Fujikawaguchiko was a mixture of pleasure and pain. Our guesthouse up here was fantastic.

Equal best with the incredible YHA high up in Halls Gap, Australia.

All fabulously made out in high quality wood, with clean walls and large airy rooms.

If I could have bought the guest house whole right there and then I would have done so without hesitation.

It was lovely. The staff was the normal polite but seemingly-unhelpful Japanese found in these places. But, I was getting used to that as we eventually had quite an issue with the man in K’s House Tokyo.

During our Tokyo check-out, we had simply asked him to watch our bags while we went out that day. We had been guests there for almost a week. Every single guesthouse we had stayed in around the whole world had agreed to this. Literally, in every country, city and town featured in this journal we had done this. Mostly, they had a room to stick them in. Some places even had large racks to store them on.

He shook his head, “No.”

I tried reasoning, “Do you not have a room you can just put them by in while we are out? We will be back in a few hours.”

“No.”

“Why not? You have made a couple of hundred quid off us, why not help us?”

“No.”

“I can pay.”

“No.”

I looked at Cesca and she at me. Clearly there was some huge cultural misunderstanding going on here, one where both parties thought that the other was being unreasonable. As is important when travelling in another’s country, I tried to see what the problem was from his point of view. Perhaps, space being of such a premium, he couldn’t fit our bags in his enormous guest house? Perhaps it was a security concern or because of terrorism?

Perhaps he was just an asshole.

Yes, I think that was it. So we left K’s and took them with us. Sitting in the lovely guest house by the mountain I felt that frustration leave me. The space was very special and airy. I therefore decided to create something, which is always a process that makes me feel better. I made a film while Cesca went out early to try to take photos of the mountain.

Afterwards we met up and went to the mountain’s visitor center. There we learned all about the great Mount Fuji;

it’s wonders and dangers.

But it was time to talk. We had considered WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms), but the Japanese branch of this company had been exceedingly unhelpful in assisting us to find a place. I knew we were slightly off-season for many locations and had asked to peruse the “book” before buying it. I was happy to pay once we had selected somewhere, but the book was very expensive and if we didn’t find something then it would be wasted money that we could ill afford. The last thing I was trying to do was avoid paying the WWOOF people, but that is what they accused me off and in very angry terms. Consequently, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with them. This meant we were a week now unplanned.

“Darling,” I said, pitching my voice in the international husband tone for bad news. My voice said, without saying it, that I had bad news to discuss and I wasn’t being “difficult”, “horrible” or “mean” (all crimes in a marriage).

“What?” she said in the formal wife tones of response. Her voice said, in one word, that she recognised the pitch and, while she appreciated the inevitability of the coming conversation, her mood was not conducive to bad news.

Two words. A life time of conversation carried. All married couples can do this.

“We can’t afford to stay in Japan much longer,” I said, waffling as little as possible.

It was costing us nigh on 900 GBP per week to exist in Japan, barely exist. This was killing our already murdered, buried and recycled as firelighters budget.

“But-,” she began.

“I know. I love it too. A lot.”

“So why leave now?”

“No, not now, just earlier. I still want to go to Kyoto and also to Himeji, then we must go. What we must do now is change up the flights.”

She hugged me.

“Don’t worry,” I said my face buried lovingly in her hair, “we will come back.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

So, I went online and moved up our flight a week. While we had been in China we had already booked the bullet train tickets for Tokyo to Kyoto (they are much cheaper when booked this way as tourists). We collected our things and returned to Tokyo for one final night.

To celebrate our final Tokyo day we went to the Tokyo City Hall, which is a giant skyscraper with incredible (free) views of the city.

It was there, staring out of the windows, that Cesca got talking to a very nice middle-age Japanese man, who worked high up in Mitsubishi, he gave us a brilliant talk on the views around the tower.

His pleasant politeness, equal to our natural state, meant that a few happy hours went by together. Eventually we bowed and thanked him and parted company. Meeting people like that makes travelling worthwhile for me.

After the tower’s bar Sabatini drained more cash from the budget at an alarming rate, we moved onto Ginza and the giant Sony HQ.

This had some incredible tech exhibits and a mini cinema demonstrating the highest quality sound system I have ever heard, which was pumping out the Rolling Stones documentary movie on constant replay. Happily we went out that night to enjoy the nightlife and try a Japanese Internet cafe, which was quite an experience. Tokyo is quite lovely at night. The soft air, and pleasantly thought out architecture, well- we both could feel it. It is also very clean. I think that this is probably due to the ratio of Japanese to Foreigners.

To explain by way of example. Earlier that day we had been walking down a narrow road and ahead I could see some workmen digging up the street. They had the normal brightly coloured barriers up sectioning off half the street. To enable traffic to flow one of the workers was holding up the Japanese version of a traffic “lollypop” sign. I looked at him as we approached. He was the smartest looking workman I have ever seen. His clothes were immaculate and he was wearing bright white gloves without a blemish on them. Then, as we came closer, he  bowed. Cesca and I shared a look of wonder. In Japan people look like they take pride in their work, whatever that work is, and all the jobs are being performed by Japanese. Whereas in the UK many jobs are performed by immigrants. Now, before I start to sound racist let me clarify this point. My society unfortunately looks down on “low grade” jobs. We have foreign people do our cleaning, our road working, our caring for the elderly, etc. These positions are (quite wrongly) considered “lesser”. Not so in Japan. All jobs are (predominantly) performed by Japanese; fully paid up members of the culture and society. The unification of the culture, the 98% Japanese, the “Japan for the Japanese” sentiment, means that these workers are not devalued. Honour comes from doing your job well and not by a valuation of personal wealth. I really like and respect that. I am not advocating a “Britain for the British” approach, I am just advocating a culture where it is about “doing” rather than “having”.

The next morning we got up early and went present shopping. Probably the best knife shop in the world is the Kiya store in Tokyo.

It was established in 1792 by a dynasty of knife makers who can trace their lineage back to 1571! Here you can buy blades of simply awesome quality, fit to grace the home of any Samurai.

My brother, back in England, had become a chef and I wanted to get him something special. 100 GBP later I had the greatest chef’s knife ever made by a man as well as a little something special for my pocket.

Buying here is the only way to get these knives as they don’t sell on the web or mail order. Either go there or don’t have one. That is an attitude I saw all over Japan. They really don’t appear to go in for American-style globalisation at the small level of craftsman. It is something of a pilgrimage to fly to Japan for a knife, so I hope he liked it!

Presents packed in our bags, we headed down to the Bullet Train station.

The white long-nosed train pulled into the platform and we both marvelled at it.

Travelling in this style had long been a dear wish and, I bet, a wish of many westerners.

The train was well proportioned and we sat on the right side as it glided out of the station exactly on time.

The speed it got up to was honestly shocking.

I have been travelling on trains all my life and commute into work, but I wasn’t ready for the speed of the world moving past the window and it made me a little speed sick.

“Bloody hell!” I said to Cesca.

“Never mind that,” she said, “look!”

I followed her pointing finger to see in the distance Mount Fuji clear all the way to the top! I rushed to start my camera and I barely caught it as we zoomed through the Japanese countryside and it was lost behind buildings.

Nevertheless, we got to see it after all and we both smiled to each other in happiness.

After the short journey we arrived in Kyoto and I found the city I would most like to live in in all the world…

Regards,

Basho

4am in Tokyo, Japan trickled around and we were ready to go. We skipped breakfast and headed down to the famous Tsukiji Fish Market.

It opened at 5:30am and back then you could wander in free. Now, you have to pay and cannot arrive before 9am, but we were one of the few brave souls who dared to turn up at opening time. We wandered around the outer market spell bound. It is a collection of tightly knit stalls with private owner-operators selling specialist fish. Each stall owner is usually the expert in selecting this type of fish, freshly bought from the inner market to display on his stall.

The sheer variety of produce on offer is incredible, from octopus

to stonefish

and lots and lots of tuna.

It is said that world’s highest quality fish are sold at Tsukiji to the greatest fish restaurants in the world.

I don’t doubt it, as Japanese restaurants are famous for demanding the highest possible standards. Jiro’s Sushi restaurant is a well-known example. It has only ten seats and yet a quality of food so stellar that it earned three Michelin Stars (the most possible). Professional fish buyers for these restaurants buzz around the stalls inspecting, dealing and tutting; playing the local game of buying the best for as little as possible.

It’s fun to watch, but you have to be careful as motoring dangerously around the market at breakneck speed are little one-man shuttle vehicles used by the workers.

They reminded me of forklift trucks in reverse and are just as sturdy. Luckily, Cesca and I are well versed in dodging motorised danger, by virtue of the years spent in Amsterdam avoiding trams, and so we were not hit. However, knocking down tourists has, in recent years, become such a problem that the fish market now limits the tourist numbers that can visit it and is, I understand, moving to a new locale. No wonder the tourist is considered somewhat of a nuisance. We took in all sorts of incredible fish piled high and huge tuna being sawn into chunks by the workers.

All this food on display was making us hungry! Therefore, we splashed out on something special; sushi for breakfast. If you are coming to Japan on a budget that doesn’t include the 200 GBP dinners (with a 2 months waiting list) on offer at Jiro’s and the like, and you really want to have something more genuine than low-grade sushi served on a conveyor belt, then this is the place for you. At one side of the market a small collection of sushi restaurants offer the real thing, served in the “real” atmosphere.

Sushi is a small meal. It is served for you usually seated at a bar and in a very direct way; with the chef cutting the fish up right in front of you. The vast majority of restaurants in Japan are small, really small (I will cover this in more depth in a later article), but none are smaller than traditional sushi joints. We entered the restaurant and I counted 15 seats. Not much more than a cafe in England. For example, my brother ran a Harvester restaurant (part of a medium-end chain) that seated 350 diners. Nevertheless, there were subtle clues that this was the real deal. Firstly, it had Japanese people eating in it.

Secondly, the menu was in Japanese with only one neglected looking poster with English subtitles.

Thirdly, the chefs were impeccably clean and the knives sharp.

We bowed the short bow of hello, smiled and took up some seats at the bar. The chef served some tea and waited for us to choose something. I knew a little about Sushi, but not enough to order it in Japanese. Thankfully, the chef and the locals were more than willing to assist. We managed to get them to understand that Cesca was allergic to squid and then got stuck in. I do not exaggerate to say that it was the best sushi I have ever eaten.

An important part of that is the restaurant experience.

Preparing sushi properly is a traditional Japanese art form. Indeed running a sushi restaurant at a high level requires impeccable skill in more ways than just being handy with a sushi knife. It looks to be the work of the “master” chef, but really he just assembles the food in what almost amounts to a “performance”. It is the other staff who cooks the rice, marinate the fish and produce the flavours. The “master” then theatrically puts it together in front of you and presents it with the coolest of slight nods.

He then watches you eat it.

While this is done for clues to the taste, your preferences for the exotic and even your handedness, it is and intense experience to be watched like this. You could hate it, but I found that it enhanced the taste of the food. Indeed, the whole place had a special ambiance I would normally expect in a far more formal setting. Don’t get me wrong, everyone was friendly and happy to see us, they just take presenting small slivers of raw fish served on little fingers of rice incredibly seriously.

How seriously? I hear that at the top restaurants the octopus is massaged for 45 minutes to enhance the flavour before going under the blade. I can respect that!

We eventually paid up and left. We were heading down to Kitanomaru park area to see the Budokan, the home of Japanese martial arts, and then the rest of the day was given over to visiting the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which houses the fascinating history of the city.

Very new and well laid out to put you in the experience, this was one of the best museums I ever visited.

Tokyo has a very long and interesting history intertwined with the history of the shogun rulers, who decreed it to become the primary city in Japan.

The Edo period is the part of Japan’s history after the famous “Period of the country at war” that was won by the irrepressible Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara.

His story is probably the most fascinating of all those in Japan’s past, but I think my favourite tale told about him is that he had an English-born Samurai Retainer called William. How an English sailor from Gillingham came to become a trusted Samurai Hatamoto to the great Shogun of Japan is too large a tale to recount here. Suffice to say it is one of the more incredible tales you could ever hear and a highly fictionalised version of it can be found in the novel “Shogun” and in the TV series of the same name. For a more down-to-earth retelling see the book “Samurai William“.

The Shogunate founded by Tokugawa ruled Japan from 1600 right up until the 1860′s and changed the country forever. Peace brought changes that broke the war-focussed class structure and brought about the eventual demise of the samurai warriors. His Grandson, the third Tokugawa Shogun, threw out all the foreign influences after some of the Lords were converted to Christianity by the Jesuits. When the priests protested, he sent them to their deaths. Yes, Japan was a very rough place back then and the country was plunged into a couple of hundred years of effective isolation during which they fell behind the rest of the world in all but some hyper-specialised ways.

This imbalance was eventually compensated by the Meiji Emperor when the Shogunate finally faded. If one is interested in Tokyo historically, then the periods immediately before, during and immediately after the Tokugawa dynasty are the most colourful. We will return to this when we get to Kyoto.

Anyway, the main hall of the museum features a life-size wooden bridge modelled on the original entry bridge to the city, and recounts how the Shogun made it the capital and renamed Edo to Tokyo.

It then covers the history of the city and its people up to the modern times. We both loved it.

That night, tucking into our 7/11 meal, we decided to take a break from the city to get some fresh air and perspective. So, the next day we hopped onto the train and headed up to Mount Fuji…

Regards,

Basho

Tokyo, like Beijing and especially like Delhi, is a city that one could spend a lifetime in and never feel a sense of completion. The Japanese way of doing things enhances this feeling with wards (districts) dedicated to different aspects of the culture.

How these districts come about is fascinating. Cities grow organically in a process known to science as “emergence”, where seemingly random elements eventually fuse together to bring about a collective specialisation.

This is similar to how an ants’ nest works. When foraging, the ants just run around leaving trails of a special pheromone. When another ant comes across this trail, it follows it. Eventually one ant finds food picks it up and returns it to the nest. The ants following it also find food and before you know it, they all go running to and from this location. This builds a collection of trails constantly getting stronger as more ants add to it; a kind of positive feedback. Before long, all the ants have found this “smell” and thousands are pulling at a troublesome morsel, working it back and forth towards the nest. There is no “thought” going on in any one ant, just a simple holistic ruleset, it is behaviour emergent from that ruleset that appears intelligent. City enclaves grow in the same way, but the human ruleset for a city is not smell:

It is commerce.

A great bakery opens in a new area of the city, for example, and pretty soon people are heading down that way for fresh bread. Before you know it, other bakeries open nearby as the trade demand for hot wheat products is higher here. Hey’presto! You have a district specialising in bread! Give that 100 years and you get an enclave where all other types of business either move away or find a way of supporting the bread-shops.

There are other elements as well, of course, such as simple geography meaning that fish markets tend to be near docks, but this emergent behaviour, driven by money and “the market”, is one of the primary constituents of a functioning city.

In Tokyo we decided to visit as many of these districts as possible so as to get a feel for the whole thing. We started with the most specialised called Akihabara – home of Manga, Anime and the Otaku. It is strange, in a country famous for obsessive practice of one type or another, that being an Otaku is looked ever so slightly down on. Indeed it is one of Japan’s greatest exports as Otaku cultures can be found in many countries including my own, but nowhere is it so large as in its birthplace of Japan. An Otaku is a culture obsessive. The obsession can be over almost anything, but the meaning of the term is usually limited to Anime and Manga (the films and the comics respectively). Its Western translation is often given as “Geek”, but frankly the real meaning is far more derogatory. “Geeks” are people with a high quality technological skill-set, able to manage (particularly technological) concepts at high speed and with great memory recall. The memory aspect is the reason Geeks often use movie quotes and memes in communication, simply because they remember them so much better than “normal” people. A Geek, can therefore, have a full collection of social skills and be in the normal culture just as much as anyone else. The negative connotations of the word Otaku would perhaps better translated as “Weirdo”. There is a very large slice of “unreality” to the obsession of some Otaku and it can appear to others to be formed of “unhealthy”, or even “immoral”, attractions. It varies in type and scale of course. For example, some Otaku simply collect comics (like 90% of youths). Others like dressing up as characters from their favourite series and you can find many people walking Tokyo dressed as Hudson out of the film Aliens. That is not so bad and, given the girls dress up too, is probably quite a lot of fun.

On the other end of the scale it gets more disturbing. Hardcore Otaku, well… some will lock themselves in their bedrooms and have only “relationships” with jailbait girl dolls and “love pillows”, never speaking to “real” people at all. Why does this happen? I think it is to do with the market. Otaku culture spends billions on its obsessions and the market is simply providing what they want. However sordid it can get.

The most in-your-face example I encountered while in Tokyo was the cult surrounding Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE). This philosophical animated series features giant robots piloted by young school children, who fight to save the world from alien invasion.

So far, so normal. But that isn’t the half of it. NGE is dark. NGE sexualises its child pilots at every turn in a twisted and very repressed way. The main character is a young boy with crippling self-doubt, together with a girl who has probably been molested, a cleavage-heavy female guardian who drinks too much before she seduces him (he’s about 14 remember) and a clone of a girl who has no moral mind (say no more).

The robots these characters pilot fuse their computers with the child’s mind and cause extreme stress and mental damage on them in use. Over the course of the series they mentally degrade to breaking point. Eventually, in the bizarre finale, the world and everyone in it is literally turned into goo.

Like you do.

Anyway, I had watched NGE in China and, while I was impressed by its philosophical underpinnings, it left me feeling very unhappy and depressed. To sum it up in one sentence: it is dodgy. What I wasn’t expecting was to see it everywhere in Akihabara.

NGE had managed to reach some sort of Otaku nexus and bridged a huge number of Anime sub-cultures. I had heard of these periodical collective obsessions taking hold of Akihabara, but I would never have expected it to be this one.

Consequently, I felt very bad bringing Cesca into this area of town, plastered as it was with the NGE characters on all corners. I had imagined coming here all my life and here I finally was, but I couldn’t shake a sense of moral revulsion. So we didn’t spend as long as I would have liked to or had imagined I would. We visited the Tokyo Anime Center and I was able to happily relive some of the more sane and life-enhancing Anime like the magical Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle and the excellent Ghost in the Shell series. Both high quality, fantastical and moving.

We also visited Mandrake, the largest center of Anime and Manga merchandise in the world. Row upon rows of dolls brought a swift exit here when they started to disturb.

Then we went to Don Quijote, the massive discount store.

After that I was consumer’d, and definitely Anime’d, out and so we hopped onto the train and headed to Asakusa for a bit of classical culture. This area is most famous for its ancient and popular shrine, which sits at the head of a long series of shopping strips. Normally I would hate such an atmosphere, but these strips had been here for something like 200 years and deserved a little more attention.

Hundreds of small shops were being swarmed by happy tourists of all creeds. Interspersed amongst these were dozens of food outlets, some of them serving interesting foods,

and many traditionally dressed locals.

Including some in full Geisha outfits. Looking at one got me thinking, and the photo I think bares this out, that these were tourists dressed up as Geisha.

Still, they looked amazing and everyone was snapping photos of them.

The shrine itself was confusingly brilliant. Brilliant in that it clearly was of a very high quality and swarming with people.

Confusing in that there were no signs in English and we had no idea what was going on. It didn’t look like any shrine we had seen before.

Still, we washed our hands,

paid some money into the slot and got a slip from a draw.

I know now that this is a form of divination and that the paper had either a blessing or a curse on it. On our way out we stopped for some food and soaked up the atmosphere. The food was on simple skewers, but still cost a lot by our then standards. Already the lack of finances was beginning to tell heavily on our ability to do things that cost a lot. The atmosphere was, thankfully, free and worth its weight in gold.

Quite a place and an essential destination on a visit to Japan.

We returned to our guesthouse via the 7/11 for dinner of sandwiches. This sort of food was all we could afford. Mind you, I could eat like this forever – even low-grade food is great in this country!

(Well, maybe not the “Cream Collons”)

On the walk back the sun dipped down and the city cooled. The light was something wonderful and we toured around the district taking it all in. I felt really at home in this city, but as I said to Cesca, Japan is not for the westerner as it is almost impossible to emigrate there.

The next day we caught the train to the fashion capital of the East and influencer of the world; Shibuya.

Shibuya is home to some of the most iconic buildings and locations in Tokyo. It starts right outside the station door with a statue of a little dog who famously waited for his master day after day, year after year. Unfortunately, the master had died and never came back. The little fellow is rightly considered an archetype of devotion and dedication and earned his statue.

Right opposite this is the famous “scramble crossing”, which is something that has caught on in the wider world and we have one in London now.

But these landmarks are small potatoes next to the Mecca of youth fashions laid out over the road in the 109 Building.

Here floor after floor exhibit fashion so forward that to the untrained eye it looked unfashionable. I suspect that the reason for this is this building defines the fashion in the first place, making it almost Avant-garde.

The prices of these items is also “forward”, and appealing only to the Otaku. For example, Buzz Rickson jackets (copies of those worn by US pilots during WWII) fetch hundreds here for an item that originally cost just a few dollars. Also “Porter” bags challenge even airport TUMI stores for sky-high prices. Still, they are lovely bags and speaking as a bag Otaku myself I would have loved to afford one.

Walking around this nebula-like birthplace of half the world’s fashion trends – constantly full to the rafters with the Japanese super-cool – Cesca spied a really expensive patterned bag and couldn’t stop herself from loudly exclaiming,

“I have that pattern on my ironing board!”

She always does things like this just as I am drinking something and my spit-take back into the bottle of water at my lips caused the liquid to rush up my nose and gush out into my hand, giving me both a coughing fit and clearing my sinuses in one fell swoop. The looks on the faces of those around me as they struggled with the twin emotions of being made fools of (so embarrassing) and trying to look snide at Cesca (herself an expert in branding) was priceless. I was laughing and coughing all the way back to the exit. We were clearly both way too uncool for a place like this, so we left and walked around Shibuya browsing the other shops.

Then Cesca saw something and gasped.

We were in a large bag shop that offered umpteen different styles and brands of bag and Cesca was jumping and squealing in glee as she dragged out of a pile a white bag with blue lettering. I took a closer look at it. It was made of that nylon wicker packing material used for industrial sacking.

The sort of thing you would expect to see full of glass sand or concrete mix. It had been fashionably recycled and sewn into a small hand bag, presumably because it would be unique and make some point about globalisation or consumerism.

“What’s so special?” I said.

“See this logo?” Cesca held the bag aloft and indicated a logo printed on the original sacking material in bright blue, which stood out from the brilliant white. The material had been artfully cut and sewn so that the logo was prominent on the the bag’s side.

“Yes?” I said and then it dawned on me, “you don’t mean?”

“Yes! I designed it!”

“Wow, you are so cool baby”

Cesca smiled very happily and did the little wiggle-dance she does when she is ecstatic (which I have always found endearingly cute and sexy).

I considered the logo; I have often remarked on the strange way the world must look to the Graphic Designer specialising in Branding. They must see their work everywhere, and indeed at home Cesca did all the time due to her designs for Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. However, to find her work here in Tokyo, the heart of coolness, on the far side of the planet and on such a fashion-forward product… Well, that was cool.

“You have to buy it” I said.

So, she did and still uses it today to hold some of her art gear. That put us in a very good mood and we spent the rest of the day browsing and supping. Highlights included an amazing traditional craft store and the large music stores. As night fell the district came alive and we had lots of fun peeking at the Love hotels (icky!) and the evening night life.

Quite a place Shibuya.

We returned late to the guest house, but sleep wasn’t long on the cards as we had plans for the next day starting before dawn.

I have always looked at maps of the world and wondered if they skew perspective. America appears massive while Australia and India are diminished and Japan… well, miniscule. Even when I was young, I knew somehow that reality didn’t concord with this portrayal. I know now, for example, that India is mind bogglingly huge and that the Australian coast is a challenge to travel from bottom to top as the real distance is much more than any map suggests. As the sage’s say, “the map is not the territory” and nowhere is this more true than the depicted size of Japan and its capital Tokyo.

Even calling Tokyo a city is a misnomer, doing serious damage to the definition of that word. Tokyo is rated, by those who make it their business to judge such things, as number 3 or 4 on the world city index. Behind New York, my home of London and often behind Paris. This is almost comical and can only be due to the fact Japan is on the “other side” of the world, which is surely also the fault of the map industry as nowhere on the globe can be on one “side” or another. Any reasonable person’s judgement cannot put Tokyo as just an A+ (rather than London’s A++) as it has more land and more people than anywhere else. It is a new definition of enormous, excelling in every way and especially in those ways that matter to the traveller. For example is has double (double!) the Michelin Stars than the next rival, Paris. It has culture so strong and independent that it is one of the few places on my travels capable of resisting (by envelopment) current corporate “westernisation”. Indeed Tokyo’s goal, and one it has achieved since the Second World War, is not to simply swallow western values and culture, but to actually feedback and make us take some of it. Tokyo’s youth culture for example is everywhere in the west. Its arts of all types are prized. Its technology ahead and inspiring things such as the iPhone (such a copy of the Sony Clie).

Yes, Tokyo is not really a city at all, it is more like a ravening monster rising from the sea and stomping around the world, culturally leaving wet claw-shaped footprints all over.

In many ways this size is all that saves us from domination. It is so big and encompassing to not only be resistant to outside ideas, but also be an island of ideas that only look inward. What I mean is there is much in Tokyo that you would only find in this city as it can support an independent localisation of ideas not seen elsewhere. There is enough people here to make “success” of a product or service without ever leaving its borders. It has no need for globalisation. I found this out immediately upon arriving.

The airport ATM sat in the corner of the little booth. It had taken us an age to find it as there seemed to be a complete dearth of them, which contrasts to the UK where they are literally everywhere. I stared at it and had been doing so for 5 minutes. You see, I was trying to work out how to make it actually dispense cash. This is not a naturally tenable position for me to be in. In my western world I am a master of technology and at the top of the game. For example I was once in a hospital having a ENT specialist put an endoscope up my nose to check for Apnea. He took the viewing scope away from his eye and asked if I would like to see what he could through the device?

“Yeshhh” I snorted, the device up my nose and dangling into my throat was making speaking difficult.

He pulled towards him a large computer system mounted on a wheeled podium. It looked very new like the plastic wrapping had just been taken off. Into this he plugged his end of the scope via an adapter and then boggled at the machine trying to make it show the picture on the computer screen. Clearly he was unsure how to use it and which button sequence started the screen. After 10 seconds I gently reached across and said,

“It’s thishh one,” press, “then thishhh one,” click, “and thhen presshhh here,” I said indicating a final button.

The doctor pressed it and suddenly I could see on the screen my own tonsils from a very unique angle.

“How the?…” The doctor said looking at me in amazement.

Cesca leaned in and said, “He’s in IT and good at that sort of thing”.

All for naught here. This cash machine, and I checked again that it was as such and not some sort of exotic device for turning wood, had nothing in common with any cash machine I had ever seen. Some parts clipped open revealing a cavernous mechanical interior that looked like you wouldn’t want to catch your hand in it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to accept a card, how to input how much cash I wanted, or even how to turn off the quietly instructive Japanese voice emanating from its interior. This is how everyone must feel back at home all the time I thought. Eventually, very eventually, I figured it out and the machine folded open like a flower to dispense some Yen. I remember thinking that this would surely be enough for a week.

It lasted a day. Japan is really expensive.

We caught the train into the city and my excitement started to build.

I had always wanted to visit Japan, ever since I was a child. So much of Japanese culture, that which made it to the west, was part of my youth. I had studied Karate for many years, I had read Manga and DT Suzuki, I watched Anime, I loved the movies of Beat Takeshi Kitano, I relished Sushi and I knew all the works of Japanese history made popular in the west.

And, of course, my taken-name, Basho, is from the great Basho of Japan. Bit of an obvious clue, really.

I knew that all this was about to be, embarrassingly, proved to be a delusion; a cargo cult compared to the real thing. Japan was, I always realised, far enough away that the western version of it would only be a hyped approximation due to, if nothing else, the fact that no one who knew better would be around to correct it. Strangely this made me all the more excited as surely we were to be “let in”, to gain the “inside track”. Surely, I thought, the inscrutability of the Japanese would be laid open to us and my knowledge of the place, such as how to bow properly, would open doors?

Tokyo, like all A+ cities, is made up of suburbs with their own flavour connected by a transit system that enhances this feeling.

This is the same as in London where you can walk down a few streets and be in a uniquely different area, but with a sense of transition. Get the tube everywhere however, and you feel like you’ve stepped between worlds. Tokyo has this in spades.

The first place we went to stay was on the edge of the central city and was a very clean suburb under the glow of the high rises in the short distance and beneath raised train lines.

Nestled is how I would describe it. It was quite peaceful and the main thing I noticed was the huge amount of vending machines lining the streets, which all lacked for pavements.

It seemed like they were simply everywhere, all along and offering different produce of all types. Unlike the large ones found in the UK, these were smaller and designed to be compact. They were also not given their own “space” like in the UK. Here they almost blended into the buildings and doors they stood silent guard at. More amazement was given over to the car parks. They were like a combination of a giant vending machine and a lift. You park your car in it, get out, press the button and the car is lifted up and away out of sight to be slotted in amongst others. Incredible the first time you see it. We arrive at “K’s House” and checked in. The local man working behind the counter was polite but unimpressed by our arrival. Not that we expected hotel-like hospitality, but he was clearly bored of Westerners. The other thing that struck me was how mind meltingly expensive it was for a room. The cost was around £35 each per day. This literally made my head swim for a few seconds as I calculated the costs of being Japan for the time we had planned. With food, travel and a little light entertainment we were looking at something like £800 per week. That would have lasted us a month in India.

Japan was going to cost us, so it had better be worth it!

Let’s find out…

Regards,

Basho

We often take arriving at the destination to be the purpose of travel. Taken in this way the journey itself is not the point, rather it is the serious business of transporting our bodies from one place to another. Getting to the end location as quickly as possible is the requirement and thanks to the modern world this is possible almost instantaneously. The modern method of travel seals us into those cold tubes called aeroplanes as they charge through the sky at such speeds that we can hardly have any notion of the glorious planet we pass across. We want to get somewhere new and fresh and different as quickly as possible and this is ironic as the very thing that enables us to get there quicker is also what makes all the “there’s” so similar. Globalisation through airpower means stepping into the plane and swapping one city for another as though by some magic trick or like watching a play where they drop the lights and quick-change the scenery backdrop.

When we travel this way I always feel like we are being subjected to some sort of carefully crafted deception, and by this I mean we are deceived not by a government or tourist board (although they are in on it), no we are really deceived by ourselves. This clamouring for “getting there”, to the “destination” pervades everything about our culture. The results of success most come faster and faster, until almost the only success that matters is overnight success. This is a recipe for unhappiness repeated every day. We are brought up to believe it from the very beginning by the way we are educated. By the chasing grades to get into top set, chasing University places and striving for the best campuses. Then too in the world of work where we have our “quota” to make, our burden of work to carry or we will be fired for not working fast enough. We put up with it because we have our eye on the prize, on the end game, on the fantasy of a board-seat where we can relax by virtue of being at the top of the tree. However, when we get there at middle age, what we find is that this “thing” we have been waiting all our lives for has arrived, and… it’s not satisfying. It is like we place ourselves in a bubble where we can ignore all that goes on around us as though in some kind of sleep until we get that thing we imagine we want.

So it is with travelling. I firmly believe that arriving is not the point of the journey. Take music as an analogy. There the final crashing chord of the composition is not the point of the composition, if it were then there would be musical concerts where people only played finales. The point of music is to dance or sing along with the tune and enjoy it while the music is playing.

In other words: the journey itself is what matters.

Those who travel for any length of time but do not realise this miss the opportunity to experience something very life affirming and important. By stopping focussing on arriving, and by travelling long enough to feel the passage of time, we can come to realise that what really matters in travel is the same for life in general. That bubble all around us, that threatens always to trap us in the same frustration-coma we feel at home, can and must be resisted. Travel can and must become a joy in itself and then the stopped and broken down buses, the flies and touts and baking heat or cold will not bother us.

The evidence that this is possible is out there to see. Great travel books and writing are never just about the destination, they are about the changes the act of travelling brought about during the journey. When I look at the photos from my travels, I realise that my favourites are of the people and places we discovered by accident not design. When I think about the true happiness I felt while travelling, it was to be found in climbing mountains, diving in seas, exploring huge coastlines, eating with locals and being outside the bubble of my own making. I met countless people on my journey who were also travelling, but I could see that many were not experiencing the same thing as I. For they knew and could almost taste that travelling had something more, something greater to experience, but they were metaphorically tripping over their own feet in their rush to get to that thing. By doing this they numbed themselves to the tune “playing” all around them that is the rhythmic dance of cultures, sunsets and mountains. If they listened to the tune it would enable them to feel the music deep inside; if only they stopped trying so hard.

I listen to that tune still years later.

For me I have been reliving these feelings and savouring them through my writing about our journey, and always about the journey itself: not just the destinations. Thus truly I have been travelling again, all these years, only without moving. It has been a great experience and it is only now coming to a finale as we are reaching (for the second time) our final country. I am looking forwards to reliving that final journey, as in the same way life needs an end to have meaning, travelling the way we travelled required an end. This last journey is special to me as when I was young, I imagined this country many times. I seemed to love it from afar without really knowing it. It was my youthful goal to arrive there, but I am eternally glad to having taken the long way around. By the countless steps through cultures so new and interesting, by learning things about ourselves and what matters to us and by listening to the tune around us we were finally ready to arrive on these shores. Not as tourists, but as seasoned travellers ready for a new beat.

So, after journeying across Australian beaches, New Zealand’s mountains, Singaporean cities, Malaysian towers, Thai temples, Laotian rivers, Cambodian jungles, Vietnamese heartlands, Indian deserts, Hong Kong light shows, Tibetan high passes and Chinese treasure chambers we had arrived as different people.

People listening to the music.

Finally, we were ready for Japan.

Basho as he entered Japan

Regards,

Basho

“So,” said Cesca loudly and clearly, just as I was drinking from a water bottle, “What’s all this about China and Tiananmen Square?”

I almost did a spit take.

“Quiet!” I said and I looked around, wiping water running down my chin. Yes, we were standing bang in the middle of said location.

Cesca was annoyed and went red in the face, “What?!” she said.

“Don’t mention the protests in public!” I said in a hiss, “We’ll get deported!” I was acutely aware that I sounded like Basil Faulty around Germans.

“Oh don’t be silly,” she said with an incredulous look on her face.

I wasn’t being silly not in the least. Tiananmen Square was made world (in)famous by the 1989 student protests overzealously put down by guns and tanks. The Chinese government had learned a hard lesson in public relations that day, and a lot of protesters learned one too about the Chinese government.

In some respects I understand. It must be, for example, really hard to control this enormous country. Moreover, the history of China, written large in this square since 1400, has let flow more rivers of blood than any country other than perhaps Russia. After all, the long-gone Emperors of China had lived in the giant palace at one end of the square for a thousand years, but theirs had not been easy dynasties. Highlights include the Mongols marching in so successfully that most people forget it happened, the British fighting their way in, the Boxer Rebellion (a mind-meltingly hideous period of Chinese history), the Japanese invasion of WWII, and then – of course – Chairman Mao’s revolution and his cult of personality. Compared to those events the shooting of a few thousand uppity students hampering for Western Democracy doesn’t measure a blip. Tragic story that it is, horrible, murderous and paranoid that the reaction was, given Chinese history, I am not in the least bit surprised it happened.

However, it is true that the “love” for the great leader is long gone and for most little more than lip service. No one is praying daily to his photo any more for example. I’m glad. The problem with Maoism is not that the country is communist, communism is a really good idea, it is that Mao (in the same way that Stalin did) inserted himself in the mix at the top and was determined to stay there. China under Mao was a disaster because there were none of the “checks and balances” found in western democracies. For example, US Presidents, no matter how “great” or “powerful” can serve only two terms. Any attempt to change that will result in civil war in a heartbeat. In the UK, an all together more civilised nation, the Queen has the power to force an election on behalf of the people. A queen has done it before. Her power to do this is in the army (plus the police) because who do they swear allegiance to? That’s right; the Queen. Would they force an election out of an unruly government if the Queen said to? Yes, you bet your arse they would, they would enjoy it.

Not so in China, here power is concentrated in an élite ruling clique and without accountability to the people, shit happens. On that night the general who put down the protests was, from his point of view, protecting his capital and thereby his nation’s structure – but from everyone else’s he was protecting a political élite and it was to they that he was accountable. Of course, British generals have committed similar murders in India and Ireland but, and here is the rub, not against their own people. Not that he had a choice, even questioning verbal orders was almost a death sentence and the first general that night, who asked for written orders, was lucky to only get 5 years in jail.

So, the whole event is still an open sore for the Chinese government and wary of future protest they have installed undercover agents all over the square looking for troublemakers. I thought everyone knew that.

Apparently not.

Still, it was a very impressive sight. The square is huge (the 3rd largest in the world) and a major civic junction. Moreover as a visitor to this city you will definitely come here; it’s simply impossible to ignore. At least you will walk across it a few times. The first thing you notice is that it is intensely political in focus with massive pictures of Mao adorning the palace and statues to the man’s theories prominently displayed.

This is a form of belief-building all nations do. The British, after all, have Nelson’s column and statues of other warrior leaders all over London silent of any historical judgement of them.

Amazingly we stayed only 2 minutes from this sight and could almost make it out from the window. Beijing, I quickly realised, is an incredible city. In places so modern it is breath-taking, but in other places – often overlapping – it is so ancient that one simply struggles to imagine that far back. Again, similar to London in that respect. Our visit was the culmination of our trip to China, and while we did have a mission while there (changing our Japan airline tickets – an adventure that would take 2000 words just to outline), we were really there just to be tourists.

Our first outing was to the palace of the Forbidden City itself and this was truly one of the highlights of my entire year away. There are two ways to do the palace and which one you take will define your experience.

The first way is to take a tour. This seems natural as there is so much to see and some expert guidance is welcome. However, this is often a great mistake. The City is roughly a succession of giant courtyards of varying importance leading front to back with a huge garden at the end.

You can walk directly through it in this regard and this is what the tours do – a basic straight run down the middle. Big mistake. The courtyards are all very samey and if you don’t know much about the intricacies of courtly life in the City before you get there, then you won’t understand it at all.

If you are very short on time and must take a tour (that in itself is a tragedy for this is one of the largest museums in the world) then I strongly suggest that you watch the TV series on Empress, the “Dowager Cixi” (one of the most fascinating and maligned women in history, whom is the source of the phrase “the power behind the throne”), which will give you a good primer to the place. Even so, you will miss much…

The second way is to go it alone and hire the wireless guide with headphones. This allows you to wander around the place and most importantly to the other large courtyards to the sides of the main areas that house the treasures and museums of which there are many.

The wireless device, which looks like a plastic slice of toast with a little map drawn on one side, is GPS controlled or some such and as you walk around it suddenly kicks in with commentary on what you are seeing, where in the city you are, and the history of that area.

Highlights for me included the incredible museum to Chinese pottery

(China’s pottery is the best in history – so much so we even call fine pottery “China”), the fascinating clock museum displaying the Chinese Emperor’s infatuation with Western style timepieces and mechanics (indulged as only a truly despotic regime can)…

…and the treasure chambers (which has diamonds the size of acorns).

Then, at you own pace, you can peer at the greatest Chan Buddhist treasures in the world (collected here by the obsessive Chinese Empress mentioned above who likened herself to a Buddhist deity)…

…and, finally, wander satisfied in to the gardens at the rear.

Both Cesca and I were simply amazed by all of this and loved our visit. We were then surprised by some of our traveller friends’ negative stories and it was only when we compared them that the above two experiences emerged.

After the visit we walked back across the square and to the food district for a Duck meal. This was a very touristic experience (they come and carved the duck at the table), but it was so delicious I didn’t care!

Next we visited the great park known as the “Summer Palace“.

This enormous area surrounds a large lake in the middle and was the playground of the Chinese Empress where every whim was indulged and nothing encapsulates this better than the marble “boat” the Empress had carved for parties.

The park takes a whole day to do, easy, and if the weather is nice is probably the best place to be in Beijing.

The tourists are out in force here, but there more than enough space for them all. There are also many interesting events occurring during the day including a dance troop of very attractive young Chinese ladies dancing in one of the courts.

The quality and maintenance of this place belies its history. The truth is that it is really the *second* Summer Palace. The first one was even more impressive and the real place from which the Chinese Emperor governed. That once housed the greatest treasures of the huge realm, some over 3500 years old, most of which are now hidden in lofts in Wales.

Yes, Wales. In Britain.

When the British and French destroyed the Chinese army (1856, the 2nd “Opium War”), marched into Beijing and forced the Chinese government to buy our Opium (whatever their objections to the health costs), they also decided to teach them a lesson for putting half our trade delegation to death. One they would not forget. By this time China’s Emperors were so pathetically corrupt that the country was essentially heading towards starvation while they lived a life of luxury. Much like what happened in France; a great (despotic) leader built an empire (France had the “Sun King” and China the Chin Emperor) who ushered in a new dawn only to have subsequent generations get fat screwing it all up.

So, the lesson taught to the Chinese was to burn the Summer Palace down. It took 3 days. That is, of course, we burned down what we didn’t loot first. Consequently, some of the very very best China, Jewels and historical treasures of this country can be found in the lofts and kitchen cupboards of the ancestors of those Welsh Engineers and French gronards.

Not surprisingly this is still a sore point with the Chinese and another thing not to mention in polite Chinese company. The Empress had the current palace built to replace it (the original has never been restored) and, after the revolution, it has become this splendid public park.

We had a really great time here, despite the crowds, and went back to our hostel happy.

The next day we decided to do a walk on the Great Wall and so caught a bus out-of-town in its direction.

It is often claimed that the Great Wall of China is visible from Space – it isn’t. Nothing man-made is, but it is fantastically long from the land. Historically an almost country-bankrupting barrier, the wall was designed to funnel the Mongol hordes into a single defensible point from which they could be picked off. In the end, so many died building it and it cost so much to maintain that the general responsible was quietly pensioned off and the wall abandoned. Soon after, sure enough, the Mongols just went through the gap in the center and took over the country. Nevertheless the achievement of building it was spectacular. As a tourist there are two main sections you can walk. The nearer of the two is easier and also busier. The further is not so easy, or safe, and is a hike of about 4 hours up and down the hills (of which there are many). If you have the chops I recommend the furthest section.

When you first arrive on the bus and are let lose to attempt the walk, you think to yourself that you will be alone on the wall and isolated. However, the wall is packed solid with touts selling cold drinks of all types, which got very tiring for Cesca who hates that sort of thing. Also, the wall was cleverly designed in a way that doesn’t help you as a modern hiker.

The general knew all too well that the Mongols may simply climb the wall and take over whole sections. So the entire wall is also designed for defence against itself. Each section (about 100 meters) can repel not only those on the ground, but also from the left and right.

There are multiple designs for this from steep sections, interior odd spaced walls, large holes, narrow turns, etc. This means that in many places you are literally climbing up to the next tower. I can just imagine how hard it must have been trying to assault this fortress of a wall. Bugger that!

All alongside the main built structure lays some simply breathtaking sites in terms of countryside.

The view is one I will always take with me. Unfortunately the modern Chinese appear to care little for it. I saw a group of bored looking teens throwing rubbish off the wall with no cares at all. This got Cesca very angry indeed, something that was picked up on by said teenagers and they mocked us for our concern. I was acutely away that we were standing on a 5 meter wide wall of over 20 meters in height, deep in the wilds of China and miles from anywhere.

Falling, or being pushed, off would be a bad thing so we moved on. A pity that they were not cherishing the place like we did. In the end, this hassle and the touts coloured Cesca’s memories of the wall, but if you look in the photos at her you can see that actually she really enjoyed it.

After an exhausting 4 hours we came to a large iron bridge structure and the end of our walk.

Worth. Every. Penny.

Next Cesca wanted something special and signed up for a Calligraphy lesson from an outreach society. This required a journey through the excellent public transport system (much better than London’s!), which I remember had a slightly humorous, and presumably accidental, inflection on the English words to get off the train – making it sound a little like a strained order.

On the journey to the class, we got to see the city in a wider context.

The streets were clean and people seemed happier than those in India (for example). It was pleasantly laid out and in general a good experience to commute across. I could imagine if not living then at least working there.

Strangely we saw smog only on the last day, which appeared as a fog hovering in the distance. I am sure that sometimes the city suffers immeasurably, but as an honest reporter I cannot say I saw much of it.

Finally our long tour of China was coming to an end. We had managed to sort out our flights to and from Japan and I was excited to visit the one country I had always dreamed of.

I will be honest, I had not expected much from China and that had been a mistake. A big mistake. Cesca was right that China and I were made for each other in many respects. The ancient traditions and philosophy of Daoism had accorded with my own thinking so closely to be nothing short of spooky. Indeed a few months after returning to England I suddenly had a realisation while walking through Liverpool St station and bang - I was a Daoist (and proudly put it on the UK census). While China may not have this affect on everyone, it is the nature of travel – and especially travel to places you don’t know well – that you will have your horizons broadened and even perhaps your life changed too?

China, no matter how alien a world it was – and how frustrating it could be – was a place I didn’t want to leave.

Regards,

Basho

Everyone loves Pandas and at the Panda Conservation Centre near Chengdu, China is probably the best place to see them in the world.

Watching them reminded me of the Douglas Adams quote:

“…On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than [Pandas] because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the [Pandas] had ever done was muck about… having a good time. But conversely, the [Pandas] had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

As for the The Museum of Qin featuring the Terracotta Warriors – well, China has yet to fully come to terms with their legendary Emperor who literally put the “Chin” in China. This fascinating, but very touristic, site is at the cutting edge of research into the great leader. His tomb is nearby, flooded with lakes of mercury and out of bounds to all. Until that is opened, this dig, only part of the retinue he took with him into the afterlife, is the best way to experience how it was under the man who conquered the warring tribes and united them into the amazing Chinese culture.

Hope you like the film,

Regards,

Basho

No recent product launch has grasped the Zeitgeist as much as the Pebble watch. It represents a perfect storm of elements coming together all at once and its success is going to be studied for years.

The story of the Pebble is intimately bound to the story of the website that enabled it: Kickstarter. Much of the media attention has been about this new marketplace, which must be an absolute boon for economists; for it represents the operation of market forces in a pure microcosm, and like evolution isolated on a small island many weird and wonderful creatures are born. Eventually there can be Island Gigantism and this is a story of such a monster being formed.

Initially Kickstarter was the “crowd funding” startup servicing geeks from places like the “Maker” sub culture. Those who actually wanted to be able to sell their ideas, but lacked the backing of the dragons. Perhaps theirs was too small an idea or too niche to attract normal backing. However, in this modern era of the internet, what we come to realise is that being niche is absolutely no barrier to success. I met a guy, a friend of my mother in law, who lives in an enormous house in the British countryside and is very wealthy. What did he do? I asked him. He tapped a little 5cm badge in the shape of a helicopter on his chest. Wow, you make helicopters?

“No, I make these badges.”

Yes, you can make a fortune with niche ideas, if you can produce and sell them. The main advantage is that you will not have many, if any, viable competitors and like all animals devoid of predators, you can build your colony (your brand) and the world will be your oyster. Brand is the key and must be jealously guarded if you want to be the next SuperDry or Cambridge Satchel. On the other hand, Apple has killed off many Young Turk brands who threatened theirs. Kickstarter, as the name implies, quickly evolved from just having good ideas to being a way of building that brand and with it building noise.

This is the point the economists got interested, because this brought competition for attention and competition is the primary force in the market. It was no longer enough to have a great idea, now you needed to have a great presentation to go with it or it would be lost in the pile. Many ideas have been touted for how these presentations should go. Some have mixed in the sexy, always a bonus if one is selling to a geeky market:

Are these guys selling keyboards or hot backsides?

Others have played hard on their geek cred by hiring geek celebrities to present (if only Douglas Adams was still alive – some lucky product would be making millions).

Neal is a well known Geek icon, only topped by perhaps…

The Gaben!

Others still have used humour and power of their already existing geek brand.

Penny Arcade‘s (very funny) Kickstarter was to remove adds from their site –

However, most have gone for the Apple-style presentation mastered by Jobs and Ives with high production values and cool designers talking to camera. This was the first element that drew me to the Pebble. The video they produced showed a carefully worked out professionalism, while at the same time being down-to-earth enough to come across as genuine.

  The Pebble Kickstarter video

The next element was the product itself. It was simply a brilliant idea and exactly on time.

In the past few years, the iPhone has not given anyone palpitations of excitement. I have owned every generation of the device and picking up my iPhone 1 (now in the hands of my 2 year old with no simcard) and comparing it to my iPhone 5, I do not see anything revolutionary between them at first glance. Of course, generationally the iPhone has come on in leaps and bounds and my nicely bevelled iPhone 5 is incredible in that respect, but its nature is essentially unchanged. This has led to a noticeable frustration on the part of the consumer who wants to be in the excitement of the “revolution” promised by Apple devices and delivered by the first iPods, iPhones and iPads. Such frustration has allowed Google to catch up and overtake in the phone market, and even Microsoft has done it right with Windows Phone 8. People are hungry for something new.

Smart phones, smart watches.

Watches are the utmost niche product. They represent who you are, the expression of one’s personal style, much more than they represent a way of telling the time. The third reason Pebble took off is that it came at a time where the phone has supplanted the watch as a time device for the vast majority of people (although definitely not for me). Pebble represents the watch making a comeback and saying, hey – if a phone can do what we have done for generations, we can do what a phone does just as well! So far, smart watches have either been expressions of high art, divine and unreachable for anyone who cannot wear glasses like this guy:

This guy invented this watch, the SPARC:

Which is wonderful with one problem: it costs £4000!

Alternatively, they have been for sporting use, like the Suunto outdoorsman and its incredible diving ranges, or the Garmin GPS hybrids, or the Nike running watches. All of these are niche activities again. It shows how popular they are “under the table” when you see websites like the excellent DCRainmaker who makes a great living out of simply reviewing running watches in depth and with style. Strangely, the best “watch” to be the progenitor of the Pebble is the old square iPod Nano. One of the first and most liked Kickstarter was for a strap case that enabled you to wear the Nano as a watch. Combined with the quality of the Apple screen (touch, colour graphics, etc.) this was a great – if little bulky – idea.

As mentioned above it was “killed” by Apple when they changed the design of the Nano. This is perhaps the best indication that a watch was in their R&D department’s to-do pile.

What Pebble realised is that if you follow the classic Microsoft PC (and Apple with its devices) route then you make the platform first and let others make the usage apps. Thus, you make a product for everyone who wants one and bring all the niches together to form a nexus. What a nexus the Pebble was. I surf Kickstarter every now and again as I am waiting for it to come to the UK (when I am going to relaunch my film idea) and I came across the Pebble. I was quickly sold. In a fit of insanity I bought a pre-order ticket in the knowledge that I would get my cash back if the idea failed and a product of some quality if it succeeded.

I was aware though that this was buying sight unseen. My willingness to do so is the final element of the perfect storm: online shopping and the death of the highstreet. We buy almost everything online now, even our food. We do this sight unseen of the product for two reasons, one: it is far easier and quicker, and two: products – even high end ones – are mass-produced to a standard. You see a photo of the product in question and you simply know that the item delivered will be exactly that thing. What Pebble did was make us believe they could give us exactly what they promised.

Then someone hit the viral button.

Viral is a pure expression of the internet and the speed of thought it represents. Going viral with a product involves getting it in front of the evangelists and curators of that part of the web. For watches that could interact with a smartphone this was simply to entice the websites of the techno-glitterati such as Engadget, Wired and Lifehacker;

followed by being picked up in the “new press” of the podcasts such as This Week in Tech.

Before you could shake a stick these guys had more orders than they could have predicted for 10 years. I can imagine them rubbing their hands with glee at having passed the “funded” barrier on Kickstarter and then this excitement rising as they smashed their most optimistic projections and then the slow creeping horror as It. Just. Kept. Rising.

So much money raised, the numbers don’t fit in the box!

Success is truly a two edged sword and as the Epicureans would have said pleasure is not measured in the amount. Too much of a good thing hurts and 100 times their predicted orders must have been like iced water down their backs.

That I have the product in my hand, that it exists at all, that they didn’t take the money and run or fold or kill themselves or end up in prison… well, it deserves a standing ovation just for that. It has validated Kickstarter as a market. All thanks to a digital watch.

At the moment, Pebbles are shipping at a rate of 5000 a week. The stats are:

The Pebble.

My Pebble, understandably months late, is here. Now.

Unboxing and first impressions

The Pebble box is clearly the result of compromises and more the better for it.

Reminiscent of an Amazon box, the device sits inside together with its charging USB cable and a single sticker saying to visit go.getpebble.com. The watch itself clips out easily and my first impression was how light it seemed. Mine is the black one, but other colours exist.

My normal watch is the very big and heavy Hamilton Jazz Master Maestro during the week and the equally enormous Casio G-Shock A-1000 at weekends and compared to these giants, the Pebble is as light as a feather. It comes with a simple rubber strap of good quality and with a nice weighted buckle.

However, the rubber strap effect, for a watch I am primarily going to wear in the office, is definitely something I would change. Its build quality is clearly first generation and nothing compared to, for example, the high build of either of the watches mentioned above.

My watch collection for size comparison. The middle top watch is a huge 45mm

Dimensions.

• 144 x 168 pixel display black and white e-paper
• Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR and 4.0 (Low Energy)
• 4 buttons
• Vibrating motor
• 3 axis accelerometer with gesture detection
• Water resistant to 5ATM

On the wrist the length of the body is evident. I have big wrists watch-speaking and can carry off 45mm watches with ease due to my size as a person. However, the Pebbles body does come across as long. The back of the watch does not curve around the wrist and the rubber strap does not lift the body to enable a flat wear. The watch front, on the other hand is smooth, clean, and curved well. Therefore, my first impression is that this watch looks “good” on the wrist, but not “great”. The actual screen space on the face of the watch is smaller than I imagined and the border posts are large. If Sony had made this watch, or Apple, I am sure that these posts would have been smaller and the screen bigger.

Once I figured out how to turn the watch on (hold a button for two seconds) the quality of the display immediately improved my initial feelings. It displayed a well crafted picture asking me to pair to a phone. The text was very clear to read. There is a backlight for easier viewing, which can activated by shaking the watch.

Screen.

• Display Size: 1.26 “
• Contrast Ratio: 20:1
• Response time: 30ms
• Operating temperature: 70 º C to -20 º C
• Backlight for dark environments

This module is a transflective, monolithic active-matrix liquid crystal module utilizing Sharp’s CG-silicon thinfilm transistor process. (Sharp)

Whatever the bumpf might say, this is a clear and high quality screen:

The first phone I paired it to was my iPhone 5. I paired the Pebble in the Bluetooth options then I downloaded the app required from the iPhone store and booted it up.

It found the Pebble and went through a pairing process. It then immediately offered a firmware update.

 Notice the magnetic charging cable attached to the left

This downloaded over Wi-Fi quickly and was transferred to the watch just as rapidly.

In the app, I went to the Pebble “store” and downloaded a few watch faces. You simply select one and it appears on the watch as an option in the main menu:

At the moment only a few are available and the watch screams for more well designed ones.

Android.

Paring it to Android was similarly painless.

There are a number of programs for passing notifications on this device.

Buttons.

The three buttons on the right side of the Pebble control the functions:

The left side single button acts as “back”:

Their play is good and they are not wobbly. There is a feeling of pressing something, which while not the sort of click-beep my Casio produces or the “clunk” of the chronograph on the Hamilton, is substantial enough to be definite.

In use.

The next morning I put the Pebble to use.

Suited up and ready to go to work

As I walked to the bus I was listening to Audible. The phone was deep in my coat and I was wrapped against the cold with thick gloves on. Normally this makes the changing of tracks, pausing and playing – such as when one has to speak to a bus driver – something best described as “a total pain in the ass”. With the Pebble on, this suddenly became easy as pie. One click and Audible paused, I got on the bus, spoke, paid, thanked for change, walked down the bus, sat and clicked again – Audible started back up without any hassle. Definitely an improvement. I can imagine that this will become a regular and beloved feature.

While in audio control mode the screen permanently displays the track and controls with the time as a very small font along the top. The benefit of the screen being of this special type is that it can display without necking the power in the battery. The great upshot of this is that the watch does not ever need to “sleep” and dim or turn off the screen. In the modern digital world of power saving, high rate consumption and having to plug everything in all the damn time, this is incredible and a completely new world. The iPhone dimmed and went dark as the “timeout” turned off the screen to save power. The Pebble stayed clearly on the whole time. Of all the features of the watch, this is my favourite.

However, of course, the other main feature is notifications. Would this be just as killer as the music controls?

The process of setting up the notifications requires you to set the notification switch on the Bluetooth settings in the iPhone to “on”:

Then, on a notification-by-notification basis, go through, and assign them to “on”, to “banner” and to “show in lock screen”:

This is a tiresome process. However, it works and the notifications are passed instantly they arrive. I have it switched on for emails to either of the phones’ accounts, messages, and calls.

If the size of the notification, when one arrives, goes beyond the size of the screen the up/down overflow is controlled by the right hand side buttons scrolling the message and the middle button clearing the notice. However, side-to-side overflow, such as a long name, cuts off.

In meetings, where phones are always off the table and switched to silent by convention, the ability to glance at a watch is a lesser sin. Of course, glancing at your watch all the time can give an altogether different impression! However, a casual glance can really help. The screen can be read from quite a distance, so perhaps there is a security issue here if you have the sort of team who email each other during meetings.

Problems.

There are issues with this part of the process at the moment. The iPhone is not designed to support the externalising of notifications very well. Consequently, when the Bluetooth connection is broken for any reason, such as moving out of range, only the calls and messages parts are reconnected when the connection is restored. This is a little less than ideal and the source of much frustration on the Pebble forums. However, it is Apple’s fault. What is causing the frustration I believe is that we all know Apple will not hesitate to kill off something that doesn’t benefit it directly. Consider the fate of Flash on the device. Apple may fix this, or Pebble may, but it must be the nightmare of all peripheral companies that Apple considers them in the same light a whale shark considers pilot fish; just feeding off them. What is clearly needed is a protocol to pass all notifications directly to an external source and for this protocol to be managed by a service that reconnects when the device moves in and out of range. Such a service must be monitoring the calls already (or my Bluetooth headphones would not reconnect automatically), so the other functions should be added. How long that will take to be implemented is anyone’s guess. Large companies move slowly and indeed have many layers of Quality Assurance before such a fix can be released.

Faces.

The fact that this watch is square means there are fewer numbers of “real” watch faces we can expect to see on the Pebble. The daddy of all square watches, the totally divine Jaeger Lecoultre Duo, would work incredibly well on the Pebble.

What faces we currently have are not well designed, and this is an area that Pebble should have put more work into for their product launch.

Something Microsoft and Apple have learned and learned well is that you must produce a number of very high quality applications on your platform. This encourages others to try to reach such heights and showcases what can be done. Microsoft for example have Office, and this is the killer application of every edition of Windows since version 1. Apple, on the other hand, have Final Cut, which has been used to produce Hollywood movies. Pebble has not spent some of that enormous money producing high quality applications for launch and this is much to their detriment. I suspect that they are aiming for “compatibility” with well-known apps such as Runkeeper and hopefully this will come true. Still, more apps by Pebble would have been a very good idea.

So far the Pebble is scoring well. It has been of great use today during the day. I have been receiving messages from Cesca and emails while standing and talking. Nice. All day I have been controlling Audible and the iPod in the iPhone. I cannot wait to try a different strap however.

Changing the strap.

The strap came off easy with a little help from a penknife and I happened to have a James Bond NATO, which looks rather fetching, as well as a leather one:

Anything is better than rubber on a city watch!

Conclusions.

The Good

• The screen is very high quality
• Power consumption (the battery goes for 7 days)
• Functionality
• Overall design

The Bad

• A few bugs, but then most people haven’t got theirs yet – early days
• More clock faces needed
• Buttons are essentially last generation in this modern world of touch-screen everything.
• Screen picks up dust and sweat, so a film cover is a good idea

The Ugly

• None of the high-end apps shown in the Kickstarter film exist… yet
• Apple entering this arena is like a dark cloud in the distance.

The Future.

Overall this is a great device, more than a toy and a lot of fun to use. Its build quality is not a straight 10 out of 10, but then my Hamilton is 8 times the cost and that is one of the cheapest watches with an ETA 7750. The Pebble is a generation 1 device however. To hold a Pebble is to glimpse the future; it is at the zeitgeist, but will it last into the future itself or is it just holding open the door for someone else? It is anything but a forgone conclusion either way, remember that Pebble has sold 68 thousand devices already.The predators are stirring around this young startup upstart and the next few weeks and months will determine if it flourishes or not.

I for one hope it makes it.

Regards,

Basho

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In China, Daoist mountain temples are so numerous that there must be something about high places that appeal to Daoists. A longing for mountains, cliff edges and being above the clouds. A simplistic analysis of this, one using that most ignoble of human faculties, the so-called common sense, would say that this was driven by a wish to be closer to heaven. But, much like the western view of Hinduism, this is more than a mere bowdlerisation; it is complete bollocks.

To be sure I climbed one.

“We have a choice” said Cesca, sitting comfortably in our guest room in Li Jiang.

“OK” I said putting my book down.

“We are heading to Chengdu and the Pandas, then Xian and the (terracotta) Warriors. But, after that we can go either to Wudang or Song.”

I thought about this. Song Mountain is probably the most famous mountain in China. The stories of that holy place and the dramatic history of the men who lived there permeate western culture like no other legend China offers. You see, Song is where the Shaolin temple resides. I also knew it was only a pale shadow of its former self.

The “temple” is more a tourist trap now for it has been famously burned down and rebuilt more than once, more than twice. The last time, during the Communist revolution, resulted in the deaths of most of the monks and it was only the tourist’s fascination with this temple that led to it being brought back to life.

Wudang, while not as famous, also has some exposure in the West. It is often featured in the same classic movies as Shaolin, but usually cast in the role of the antagonist. Recently it has appeared in three Hollywood movies that spring to mind: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon recounts the adventures of a swordsman from Wudang (although the temple seen in the movie is not the real one),

Li Mu Bai: No growth without assistance. No action without reaction. No desire without restraint. Now give yourself up and find yourself again.

The Bride’s master from Kill Bill 2, Pai Mei, is based on Bak Mei of Wudang,

Pai Mei: It’s the wood that should fear your hand, not the other way around. No wonder you can’t do it, you acquiesce to defeat before you even begin.

and the (new) Karate kid bizarrely features the young hero learning the snake forms from observation of a master high up in the mountain.

Mr. Han: Chi. Internal energy. The essence of life. It moves inside of us. It flows through our bodies. Give us power from within.

I also thought of the journey we were on spiritually. In India I had come to the somewhat worrying conclusion that Buddhism was just as riddled with ridiculous dogma as was Christianity. This had been all the more reinforced by the visit to the Tibetan high plains and its temples. I had furthermore been put in a spiritual high by our walking of Tiger Leaping Gorge. What I wanted was something to help focus my feelings I had taken from that walk.

“We go to Wudang” I said with confidence.

It was, thankfully, off season when we got there. The nearest train station was in a city at the foot of the mountain and required us to venture out and find transport to the high “resort” town that leads to the climb up the steps. Walking out of the station carrying our bags, our faces white and conspicuous, drew friendly humorous smiles from the locals. I could see what they found so full of mirth as our backpacks were large and augmented by front packs and hand baggage too. We must have looked like two turtles to the burghers of the town. However, they were more than happy to help direct us to a taxi that could take us to the bus up the mountain.

We were dropped off at a tourist gate area where we walked through a semi deserted open-air shopping arcade to a line of ticket booths. The cost of entry was quite high, but not so high we wouldn’t pay it. I guess that this is the Chinese way of preventing people from just living on the mountain without permission (it is a UNESCO Word Heritage site). It was all very official, like entering Disney World.

After the gates came a local bus. That journey was through miles of wild and woolly country of a wonderful green interspersed with the occasional martial arts temple until arriving at a mountain town built almost vertically. There we checked into a deserted hotel (I am sure that we were the only guests as the room water was not heated) and then wandered around the town looking for food for the night and the next day’s excursion up the mountain. That night we slept in its shadow and I dreamed of the ancient tales of Wudang.

The Daoist history of the mountain is long, very long. Daoism itself started as an almost shamanistic belief system before developing into the basic form centred on the belief in a great spirit of nature that is fundamentally weaved into reality. This unknowable and ineffable spirit, named “the Dao”, affects the world and by living in accordance with it great benefits can be garnered. The rest of Daoism is the discussion of the unknowable and its effects together with “research” into how to gain the benefits. This research was/is undertaken in the high mountain retreats/temples and Wudang is the home of one of the most important. There are something like 20 temples dotted along the mountain slope and it is topped with the great Purple Cloud Temple high above the cloud’s level. It was to this that we wanted to walk/climb.

Yes, I know this sounds like Star Wars. There is a reason in that Daoism was the inspiration for “the Force”.

Eventually, as with all religions that survive, a myth was built by the “vision” of a certain person. This form of Daoism suddenly had gods, including the emperor of China, and – even more strangely – rules to be followed by a priesthood. This was given the rubber stamp of the government and is the main form still found in China today.

Many things we take as fundamentally Chinese, such as the Ying Yang symbol, come from Daoism and it has affected Chinese medicine, literature, art, pottery, the fundamentals of society and what it means to have faith.

However the most commonly encountered effect (if you are western) is how it has changed the martial arts forever. The most famous tale of Wudang is that Tai Chi was invented here by ex-Buddhist monk Zhang Sanfeng. Who, while watching a snake and a crane fight one day, realised a great secret regarding the nature of power and flowing of energy. This is a secret at the heart of Wudang martial arts, which as “softer” than the more structured and rigorous “hard” styles found in the north. This split also follows along the lines of Buddhism, which had a serious schism after the 6th Zen Patriarchy was awarded to a temple kitchen-hand (the fantastic Huineng) on the basis of a single poem and leading to a sort of north south divide. Thus it follows with the martial arts of the two areas. This is – of course – painting hundreds of years of history with a broad-brush, but it is true that one of the reasons Daoism and Buddhism intertwined so much is through the “expression” of the Dao found in the martial arts.

Proof can be found in the detail behind the legendary stories. For example it is now known that the Tendon Change Classic (the famous “manual” of the Shaolin) is actually Daoist. This is obvious when one see’s the movements performed as they are clearly Qigong (literally “Life Energy Cultivation”) exercises taken out of context.

In the end, whether Sanfeng truly invented Tai Chi here or not, it is true that this mountain is the heart and birth place of a lot of important special martial traditions and principles. Wudang martial arts’ is a soft core over a hard frame. Gentle movements for using the energy of the attacker against himself. This method illuminates a fundamental truth about the movement of energy in the body (and by respects in the Universe, Daoism would claim). Meeting a blow with a defensive block – like in formal Karate styles – can lead to as much pain in the blocker as the blocked. Force on force. What they teach in the softer arts is to meet force like water, to absorb it, to grasp it in enveloping control and to then to “place” it (usually on its own head). I always council students to imagine it alike the power of the sea; flowing back then forwards, unstoppable yet yielding. Strong enough to break down cliffs and erode valleys, yet supple enough to give when it needs to.

This is core Daoist philosophy expressed through combat. For the Daoist, it is to express the Dao and be connected to it.

These principles have travelled far from this place and can actually be found in many Dojos’ of the west today. The main route of this influence follows Chan Buddhism’s journey through China and into the countries further east. The truth is that Chan left China changed into something new. It had now an element that had been left out of the Indian Buddhist form’s journey over the mountains of Tibet. The newly-adopted Daoist principles had made their mark and the two great philosophies ruled China for generations intertwining in ways as yet fully unravelled. So, when eventually Chan left China, and went to Korea and Okinawa, it had a strong undercurrent of Daoism in it.

When it got to Japan it was named Zen.

So, if Buddhism is Zen’s father, then Daoism is surely its mother. The Japanese had by this time invaded Okinawa and, legend has it, took its fighting arts back with to the homeland to become Karate. Karate came to the west (and to England through the great Vernon Bell, who I once met shortly before his death), where it remains today and each week you can see white pajamaed students in thousands of Dojo’s, regardless of their “style”, directly practice the principles first created in the philosophy of Daoism founded in Mount Wudang.

That is quite a heritage.

True, in western styles, the soft energy is often “pushed down” and minimised, but some still have it where you can see it. I studied such a style for a few years, Goju Ryu, where they have a kata (ritual movements against imaginary attackers) that is almost exactly a Wudang form practiced in a different timing.

I was eager to be able to understand the philosophy behind this flowing energy, for I had felt it many times in the martial arts and it raised many questions in my mind. Such as: How can a little master, such as my small 72 year-old master of Aikido, Don Bishop, be able to throw someone my size with no effort at all? How did sensei Humm of London Kendo be able to defeat any student half his age without being hit or wearing armour? I knew this subtle mastery of the energies came from long study, but I also knew that there was something more, something they were “tapping” into. Even if they didn’t know it. Like a man dropping into a great stream and briefly using its energy to float down river rather than walk. What was this stream? Where did it come from? And why was its use both gentle yet powerful?

I woke in the morning ready for the climb. Or at least I remember thinking I was ready. I wasn’t. At all.

One of the founding principles of Zen and Daoism is that self-improvement (leading to enlightenment) comes through effort. It often comes, however, while doing something else other than the learning part of the practice in question. You need to be doing and not learning. Focussing on the territory and not the map. Spiritual growth can be in the most simple of actions; the knuckle press-ups of Goju Ryu Karate or the gentle moving meditation of Tai Chi. It can be the daily Zen of gardening or the quiet meditation of the tea ceremony. The result is a type of mental reprogramming. Not for nothing has Zen and Daoism been compared to psychotherapy.

I was about to experience what was, for me, the greatest expression of this “practice without practice”; the walking up of the 20 thousand steps up mount Wudang. That effort, and it was an effort I quickly realised, was the point of the Purple temple being at the very top of the mountain. Not so that it is closer to heaven, but so that you must rise, and work to rise, and thereby be able to let go enough to feel the flow of the “great stream” of which I wrote. For while that stream is there, it is like the bottom of a pond, or something only seen out of the corner of your eye, you can only see it when the waters are calm, or your mind distracted.

20 thousand steps is quite a distraction.

We started by walking up and through the town until we came to a path leading a winding journey around the mountain.

This path snaked ever upwards and disappeared into the trees as its bends followed the contours of the slopes.

We had no idea where this journey would end as the path bent so much as to obscure more than the next 100 meters. It was a well built path with only a few other walkers other than locals selling their wares. Soon the town was left far behind and we were greeted with amazing views of the surrounding mountains covered in forests flowing uninterrupted right up to our feet. They were some of the most beautiful I have ever walked.

The sun was mostly absent, and this gave a parallax shaded appearance to the distance which enchanted more than detracted.

The sections of steps started lengthening after half an hour as we rose through and past grotto’s labelled as the ancient homes of hermits practicing alchemy of both the potion and martial arts kinds.

Along this forestry route we kept encountering all sorts of locals who, much like in Tiger Leaping Gorge, looked ancient and yet could hop up the steps with the grace and power of one who has been doing it all their lives. They bounded past us with no effort at all.

Next came the palanquin carriers who also didn’t appear to be struggling despite having to carry rich looking Chinese on their backs straight up the steps.

Being carried up the mountain was to fundamentally miss the point of its existence, but I guess this depends of your spiritual position. After this section we regularly came across temples that the path ran directly through. Fantastic courtyards with burning censer offerings. On the walls of the buildings we noticed photo diagrams of the martial arts of Wudang and some of the current masters. They were somewhat touristic and unrealistic, but great looking.

There has been a revolution in the martial arts in recent years, mainly brought about by the American martial forms. This revolution rejects heritage, myth and the religious foundations of most of the arts (most obvious in what is called Kung Fu) and focuses on a single question, “does it work?” This has given rise to Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) that wants to televise the answer to this question. I personally would never bemoan the MMA world, I have fought too many of them to disrespect their talent, but I am a Daoist and avid historian so the legends fascinate me. I cannot help but feel that a hidden truth, placed in the older forms, is there to be discovered. I have seen too many amazing feats by martial arts masters to deny this. Does it work? Yes, I can attest that it does. But, if the ability to rain pure destruction on your enemies is your only wish then MMA is perhaps better for you. For me, I want a way of life that illuminates, pleases and also enables me to kill should I need to. The thing is, once you have studied martial arts for long enough then combat brought about through fear no longer affects you. In other words, most masters I have known are very kind, calm and gentle people. I just strongly suggest you don’t try and mug one.

The steps now became steeper and the stretches of carved stairs longer and longer.

Together with the fact that we were half way up a mountain meant that we laboured to breath well and this journey was taking a toll even if we were really enjoying it. Indeed I remember holding hands, smiling, laughing, making jokes and having a great time.

As we passed English signs explaining some of the history of the mountain we stopped, read and discussed. The path remained very high quality and the areas were very clean. All in all, it was wonderful.

Eventually we came to a large collection of buildings. To get this far had taken over 3 hours. This area was really busy and had lots of rich looking tourists.

“Where did all these people come from?” Cesca said.

“I don’t know, but they don’t look at all tired” I answered.

Indeed they did not, in fact they distinctly looked like the sort of people that would not toil to climb these steps. The mystery was solved when we walked around the corner and saw the massive Alpine style cable car station. Someone had built a shortcut up the mountain for the tourists entirely missing the point of its existence. But, hey they got to see the view.

We ate lunch here and then pressed on into the temple complex itself. These buildings were in very good condition and each doorway had English explanations of the history of the forthcoming room.

Steps up between the buildings were now chain-lined and thousands of people had attached padlocks to the links. Each padlock had an inscription in Chinese.

I had seen this before and I knew that they would be a booth somewhere with a little man offering to carve the inscription for you. Eventually we made it to a temple which purported to offer good luck if you walked around the giant statue inside and we duly did although it was very cramped for someone my size and I had visions of being stuck behind this carving forever.

After this we ascended to the peak above the roofs. This was another hike up multiple stairs, but we were excited by this point.

As we came up to the very peak we were now within the cloud layer. In summer this would probably be above it and a surreal experience, but for us it was like walking into the clouds.

Atop the peak is a courtyard of around 100 meters a side and in the middle was a large grotto style temple building carved from brass and lined with pillars.

It was quite a sight and outside stood a very old looking priest with a huge classic Chinese beard. He looked a little swamped in tourists, but also very used to the experience.

If the cable car wasn’t available, I have no doubt we would have been the only ones on this peak. Eventually we walked down the rear of the courtyard and through a winding stair until we were back in the main temple area.

With unspoken agreement we started back down the steps.

Going down was harder. My legs burned something chronic at having to stretch to step down and I could tell we would be suffering in the coming days. As we passed people we gave out words of encouragement to those climbing up who looked like they couldn’t tell how long the rest of the journey was.

After only 2 hours we were back in the base town and we walked to the hotel.

They wouldn’t let us check in. The hotel was closed it seemed. OK then would they let us have a shower? No. I must admit Cesca and I got very upset at the cultural stubbornness these people displayed. The fact we could not speak each other’s language exacerbated it and eventually it resulted in both parties getting seriously pissed off. So, wet through from the climb we lugged all our gear off the mountain and back to the city where we found a hotel and fell into bed.

Sure enough the next day my legs were in extreme pain and walking around the city finding food was a slow tiring business. We found a burger bar and tucked into chicken burgers.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was not the same person who had climbed that mountain. Something had changed. It wasn’t to crystallise into a public exaltation of that change for nearly a year, but nevertheless it started here. I had read so much, studied so much and listened to so many voices on my journey to a spiritual awakening that it was as if those last 20 thousand steps and the Wudang peak truly capped it off.

I had finally seen the “whitespace” that framed the world, the negative image that gives form to all the positive images we see around us. I had found the core of this feeling I had been carrying around for 30 years and my journey from the child first encountering a Zen Buddhism book in a little bookshop in Maldon was now almost complete.

A lifetime of asking, questioning and study. At the Christian churches of my childhood, at the dinner tables of my mother and father, in the GCSE English class of my teachers, in the A-Level Philosophy of Plato, in the degree Philosophy of Nietzsche, in my 20 years of martial arts study, in my discovery of Buddhism, my walks listening to the Zen master Alan Watts, my year long journey to the East around the temples of Asia, China and India and now finally in our ascent to the top of this mountain bringing it all together and showing me the connecting structure in one place.

In a type of Satori and with it a peace.

I believe there is an energetic and currently unknowable flowing “spirit” to the universe that is the core of it being in existence. It isn’t a God who loves us like a father; it is bigger than us and our petty dogmas. It is the Starmaker; an operation of reality that we are barely aware of and it means that I believe there is no duality in the universe. Living with it is to live fully. It is like the music of the universe playing all around you and one simply has to hear it, accept it and let its celestial dance guide you through the moments of your life to find peace.

Truly then I believe that we do not see reality like it actually is. There is something more, but it is not away from us in a heaven, it is right here all around us and we are a part of it, woven into its fabric, in the same way that the valley is a part of the mountain.

The mountain that showed this to me was Mount Wudang, Hublei province, China.

Years later I had a conversation with some incredulous Christian friends that went like this:

“The way you talk, Basho, you are on the path to Christianity,” he said and they smiled to each other, “at the moment you are simply denying God, you must listen to him”.

I smiled back, “No my friends,” I said, “I am not denying God. I have climbed the mountain and opened the door at the top. I just didn’t find Jesus on the other side, I found the Universe and with that came spiritual peace.”

Regards,

Basho

Thanks for reading this article – I hope that you liked it. If it has left you wondering, “Just what is this Daoism stuff?” Then the answer – of sorts – can be found here: What is Daoism?