Japan: Messengers of the Gods

Divine messenger at ease. He knows he's cool.
The beautiful, ancient city of Nara is chockablock with Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and famously mercenary deer. Camera-ready attractions are conveniently clustered inside Nara Park, which is ruled with an iron hoof by a cartel of deer that has successfully leveraged the legend of one of their own bearing the god of a local shrine on its back into an entitlement  program that gives them the run of the place in perpetuity.
Signs warn that Nara deer can be bossy, and they are. Each year their pointy little horns are ceremonially sawn off and the stumps blunted to nubbins to prevent them from inflicting serious damage on sightseers. Enjoying protected status as messengers of the gods, they are free to work the crowds, aggressively soliciting shika-senbei (deer crackers) sold at stands throughout the park and terrorizing small children. Here the herd skillfully separates a little girl from her mother to shake her down for whatever she's got in her Hello Kitty purse. She's about to scream, but she's not going to bleed.
It's worth running the deer gauntlet to get to the treasures of Nara, which include the Daibutsu, the largest of Japan's large Buddha statues, appropriately housed in the world's largest wooden building—the Chinese-inflected Daibutsu-den, an architectural marvel whose vast dim interior is scented by the sillage of 1300 years worth of incense. The Kasuga Taisha Shinto shrine at the far end of the park is reached through a primeval pine forest so deep and dense that all sound is absorbed, and walking there becomes an act of silent meditation. Surrounding these major foci of worship are dozens of minor shrines and temples consecrated to various deities and spirits. Being in Nara is like visiting St.Peter's—you don't have to be a believer to be moved by what is evidenced there; you just have to believe in belief.

Answerjack and I are equal opportunity respecters. We light candles in cathedrals and touch the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. Jack's kissed the Wailing Wall, and we leave chocolate and whiskey at Marie Leveau's crypt in New Orleans. In Nara, we paid our respects to the Buddha and the kami with offerings of incense and yen. At a small shrine near Kasuga Taisha, our guide wrote the characters representing our deepest personal wish on an ema and we hung it on the shrine's fence, bowing in accordance to custom. We really meant it.

It would make such a heartwarming story if we had found a house immediately upon our return to the States. Not. In fact, the batch of newly listed houses that I stumbled through in a haze of jet lag and dismay constituted a nadir of sorts, the sorriest assortment of greed-driven failed flips, REOs and down-market staging yet. It is a measure of my despair that when I saw on Craig's List that an acquaintance was renting out guest quarters in the lower level of her house in the Bay Area, I was seriously tempted to give her a call, even though I know for certain that she is barking mad: the idea of moving there during what was shaping up to be an interminable  house hunt seemed, briefly, to be an improvement over making the 300-mile round trip schlep from the foothills every 4-5 days. The moment passed, thank heavens, and we found our house a week later.

  

Comments

[21stCenturyMom]

But you did find a house even if the Gods did take their sweet time. And the deer? Useless and annoying as rats.

[Buddha Statue]

I like the picture of the Buddha statue. It really asks for the respect of the viewer.