Well, this is an unusual episode of my little podcast, I’m sitting just outside the main gate or the main entrance to Eheji Temple in Japan.

I’ve been in Japan probably three weeks now, just over.

I started with a Sashin, an intensive retreat on Mount Ikoma with a Rinzai Master and a number of people, in fact two Rinzai Masters from England and the United States.

They brought some of their congregation, if that’s the right word, to sit the retreat.

And then the second week we did some rather wonderful traveling around, going to significant Buddhist sites.

I may do other podcasts about that in more detail.

After the close of that retreat, I went to Kyoto and stayed with a friend of a friend, which has been rather wonderful.

I visited a number of temples, including Go-Koan, I think it’s called, hopefully I’ve got that right, which was a temple founded by Manzan Dohaku, one of the people in our lineage, in the Soto lineage, which is rather wonderful.

I was able to not go in, but bow towards the door of him, found a shrine there where his body is interred, and I was keen to come up to Eheji, which is one of the two main head Soto temples.

It was a temple founded by Dogen himself.

I’ve had a couple of days at Eheji, staying in a very nice hotel which is attached to the temple.

There are various ways that visitors can engage with the practice at Eheji temple.

In this case, they do, in the case of the hotel, they provide an introduction to Zen practice, and also an early morning lecture in Japanese, and then attending morning service.

I did those things over the last couple of days, and both were wonderful.

Morning service was particularly amazing, very hard to describe, but 150 monks or thereabouts chanting the scriptures.

Very difficult to even start to describe.

All I can suggest is that if you get the opportunity ever to come to Eheji and attend morning service, you should take it.

It’s quite profound.

One of the notable things was they have a Mokugyo, which is what they call an empty fish or wooden fish, which is a large spherical wooden, I suppose drum, you could call it, the most fantastic sound.

You may hear we’ve got the first tranche of visitors to the temple this morning, turned up, washing their hands in a little washing station next to the entrance.

It was particularly lovely to chant the ancestral line, which is something that I’ve done many times up at Throstle, the monastery that I’ve mentioned before that I go to in Northumberland.

It’s quite an amazing experience to chant those words in the company of so many amazing monks.

I’ve been taking some photographs, but I find the place incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to capture in any sensible way.

And I think that’s largely because the life of the monastery and the life of this temple is in the people.

And that’s impossible to capture.

That was very clear during morning service.

There’s a moment, well, period at the beginning of the service where one of the sutras is chanted and all of the monks were dragonning, as it’s called, which is like a rather beautiful back-and-forth path being traced out by the monks, kind of a rounded zigzag through the through the Dharma Hall where this took place.

Pretty much impossible to describe, but just, yeah, this place is alive.

And it just makes me incredibly grateful to be One of my teachers sent me an email asking if I’d seen the spine of the dragon.

And I said, no, I haven’t seen the spine of the dragon, but I’ve seen the back of the dragon.

One of my teachers sent me an email asking if I’d seen the spine of the dragon.

And it took me a moment before I realized what she meant.

The monastery here, the temple is, it’s as if it’s surrounded by a curled-up dragon.

The mountains around it are just like a mountain.

They are just like a dragon curled around and it’s nestled safely within the coils of this amazing dragon.

I’ve tried to capture it using video or photography, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to do so.

It’s just experiencing it is enough.

So I wanted to, I wanted to do a podcast during my time in Japan.

And this seemed like the perfect moment and a very significant place.

So I will end now with thanks to all of my teachers, everything that’s brought me to this moment.

And I hope you’re all doing okay.

I hope you find at least a moment of peace today.

And I wish you well.

Goodbye.