consider, esteemed abbot, all of the countless invitations, writing them out, putting them in the envelopes, sealing them, addressing them, mailing them, then all the planning: who will receive the guests, where will they be accommodated, which monks will be receiving visitors; then the memorization, here the jikijitsu decorously takes up the thread of the discussion, teaching them sūtras they’ve never even heard before, beating the dhāranīs into their heads, drilling them on who has to go where and when, how many times have I myself tried with them as well, sighs the jikijitsu, how many times — fine, says the abbot with a conciliatory expression, but then scratches his freshly shaven head again; all of this is fine, but everyone clearly agrees that things are not proceeding without error; time is pressing, so he has no desire for any more fruitless chatter on this question, let us begin from tomorrow, everyone with his own task, with redoubled zeal; and that is how they leave it, with redoubled zeal, all of the monks taking part in the discussions accept this, it’s just that from the next day onward the abbot somehow does not sense that redoubled zeal, or it does not somehow appear at all that the zeal of anyone entrusted with drilling the monks in a given task has been redoubled, the abbot walks through the monastery rooms, he hears the monks reciting the sūtras, he watches attentively when a jikijitsu or a rōshi holds a rehearsal in the hondō, and he sees what he sees, he just rubs and ever more nervously rubs his skull, which, as the hair begins to grow in again, is ever more itchy, because he hears, he sees, he senses that not only is it not flawless, not only is it not yet correct, let alone perfect, but it will never ever be so, given the material in the Zengen-ji that they are able to summon forth; it will never be any better than this; he paces back and forth from the western gate to the eastern gate, from the northern gate to the Sanmon, and then one day he is suddenly filled with tranquility, for he senses that he has accepted, somehow, in the course of things he has reconciled to this: that they are what they are and not any better, he has given in: that put together like this, from the rōshi to the battan, the shikaryo to the kakuryoosha, from the jushoku to the ensuryo, they are altogether capable of this much, and this perception for once does not fill him with sadness, or more nervousness and dissatisfaction, but rather with tranquility, it’s the intention, he says to himself in the evening before retiring, if the intention is correct, then there is nothing else to wish for, so that the next day, summoning the monastic leadership for a discussion, the exact date and time of the delivery, and also that of the kaigen shiki, is determined, the letter has already been dispatched to Kyōto, and the responses are already coming back from the invited expressing how wonderful it is, the date — mid-March — is perfect, they will be here, everything is proceeding impeccably, and the time has already come for the monks to proceed to the samu, that is they begin to clean and tidy in a manner that has never been seen before, far out-stripping the usual tidying up, they set to work on cleaning the buildings from within, they set to cleaning the monastery from without, a broom and a floor mop make their appearance in every corner, outside, in the courtyard and the back courtyard and the rear-most courtyard, not a single square meter remains where a rake and a broom have not made their presence felt, the fever is general, it has infected everyone by now, the great day is coming, they take out and survey yet again their attire to ensure that between the koromos and the obis, the kesas and the kimonos, everything is in order, that they are clean enough, ironed, undamaged, that they are suitable for the great ceremony of the kaigen shiki; and everyone finds, that somehow. . everything is ready, it’s strange, but along with the shared and gratifying excitement, there will also be, growing ever stronger amidst the entire monastic community, an inner certitude that during the forthcoming ceremony everything will be fine, everything will proceed with decorum, as the great day approaches, ever fewer disquieted countenances are seen, a deshi, a battan, or a jisha running about here and there, and on every face there is joyful anticipation, so that when the news arrives, late in the morning one day, almost around the same time as the day’s first meal in the monastery, that a special delivery van with their Buddha has set off, the monks signal with joyful eyes that they have understood, it has begun, although according to general agreement the kaigen shiki is actually not supposed to begin here in the hondō as they file in, but when the special delivery van from far-off Kyōto turns out of the gates of the Bijutsu-in, traversing the still sleeping city, reaching the Takeda Kaido, cutting southward up to the Takeda intersection, and there turning ninety-degrees to the left onto the Meishin Expressway, making the one hundred and seventy kilometers from Ōtsu past Hikone and Maibara to Sekigahara without stopping, as is happening right now, and after a half-hour the competent driver turns off at the designated exit from the Meishin Expressway and even if he is moving now a little more slowly than on the freeway, he still, despite all the twists and turns and tiny little villages, reaches Ikinomiya in good time, and without hesitation finds the road to Inazawa, and in the Zengen-ji, as if they sensed exactly where he is, the western gate, just when he appears at the end of the street leading up to it, is opened by chance, and no one bothers himself about the fact that even before the driver’s arrival they kept opening up the gates again and again, peeking outside to see if he was here already, we opened the gates just by chance exactly at the moment when he appeared at the end of the street, the deshis waiting at the western gate later recount, so we just left it open, really, as they then relate further, it just so happened that the shikaryo gave us the order right then to open up all of the gates, and we opened them, as actually did occur, because in reality, according to the original plan devised by the abbot and the others during the final planning sessions, they are the ones who were meant to open the monastery gates, not at the usual hour, but rather at the time of the arrival of the van, that is of the Amida Buddha, they opened the western, the eastern, and the northern gates, and even the Sanmon, and it is actually with this, the opening of the Sanmon, that the monks of the Zengen-ji inform the residents of Inazawa that they are joyfully welcome upon this illustrious day as, within the context of a rare ceremony, their most sacred of sacredness, now restored, shall be returned to its rightful place, and to the same extent that the citizens of Inazawa, one year earlier, had been unmoved by the news of the secret farewell ceremony, now with the Festival of the Return of the Buddha, moved by the possibility of seeing today a colorful, unique, and rare event, they go to the Zengen-ji, the word spreads everywhere, this time it really is worthwhile, and so the city sets off from the textile mills and the rows of machine works, already at around seven in the morning several hundred have gathered in the temple courtyard across from the Hall of Buddha; there are at least three hundred of them, one of the young monks, his eyes glittering, but fearful of exaggeration, whispers with cautious appraisal into the ear of the jushoku; three hundred, repeats the abbot dumbfounded; yes, at the very least, repeats the boy a little uncertainly, not knowing if this is a little or a lot, and huddling up, he does not move from the abbot’s side, as if to say that perhaps he is wrong, but how could he tell for sure how many there are, that is, he couldn’t take any responsibility for his words; three hundred, the abbot murmurs to himself once again, ill-temperedly, and signals to the boy that there is no problem, it is not the boy’s words that he doubts, and it is not because of them that he is in a bad mood, but rather, how are we going to be able to move around in here, he says aloud, so the boy hears it, and the boy’s anxiety subsides — so many won’t be able to fit into the hondō; he spreads his arms apart to the boy, who, of course, grows concerned as well, for the abbot himself is speaking of such fateful questions with him, but at the same time sad ones too, for the news that he has brought has made the abbot sad, well, no matter, he waves his hand, he smiles at the deshi, and sends him somewhere on a task and already he has come out of his quarters to look for the two illustrious guests, the two abbots from Kyōto, with whom he will lead the ceremony of the kaigen shiki — as all the same it is most auspicious, the answer to his query having arrived from Kyōto months earlier, it is the most auspicious to conduct the ceremony is in the presence of three abbots — and the abbots have slept well, they say, and you can see from their plump cheerful faces as they enter — he steps toward them, greeting them with three deep bows — that they slept well indeed, sweetly, like the sleep of children, they repeat; following the prescribed ritual, they receive the greeting of the host, then together they proceed out of the building, the crowd opening before them, in front walks the abbot of Nanzen-ji with two monks accompanying him, and in his wake the abbot of Tōfuku-ji with two accompanying monks as well, and at the end walks the host-abbot among his own jishas, they proceed thus across the middle of the wide courtyard, where by now there may be even a thousand, and they step, in the same order, into the hondō, where on the right side, in the prescribed order, are the elder monks, on the left side the younger unsuis, the deshis, the battans, and so on, all facing each other, and to the back, next to the main entrance are the jikijitsu and the musicians, so that they can be observed by the lay public, the merely curious and the tourists, then in the silence the high clangorous peal of the shokei resounds, and the congregation with the three abbots facing the altar of the Buddha in front kneels down, then another musician beats the hokku, the large drum, at which point the abbots stand up; all of this is performed three times in a row: the ringing sound of the shokei, the kneeling, the thumping of the hokku; getting up, shokei, kneeling down, the great drum; getting up — and then the same thing for the last time, and then the jikijitsu is already striking the large drum, the mokugyo sounds forth as well, and the gathering place their hands in the gesture of gasho-in — as does the abbot, who now turning to the left takes two and a half steps, then turning to the right steps over to the incense stand, then kneels and gets up, so as to bow to the altar where the Buddha is to be placed, then he kneels down, gets up, again steps before the incense stand, takes with his right hand a stick of incense from his assistant, holding it horizontally with both hands between his thumbs and index fingers, and raises it up to his eyebrows, then he kneels down with it and gets up; with his left hand he plants it into a vase filled with ashes, and then he does the same with another stick of incense on the right-hand side of the vase, and then with a third stick of incense; it seems that the essence of the matter is that he always takes it with his right hand, then raises it with both at once to hold it horizontally, and with his left hand he places it into the ashes, while his gaze passes all around the incense-stand, then he bows to the altar, places his hands together, takes two and a half steps to the right, then once again moves to the right, and with that he returns to his place, then turning to the left he makes two and a half steps again, and stands before the main prayer bench, which has been placed between the three abbots and the altar, but by then the recitation of the first great sūtra has long since begun to resound to the rhythm of the mokugyo — the Sacred Water-Prayer, addressed to the Mahasattva Bodhisattva, followed by the brief three-line invocation to Avalokiteśvara, so that the ceremony then goes beyond the boundaries of prayerful activity, that is, while the entire gathering in resounding chorus, under the direction of the voice of the jikijitsu, chants in special unison: all that is unclean and foul and decayed and impure is now being made pure here; the abbot slowly bows toward the altar, then raises a tiny water bowl prepared in advance, in which one single tiny tree-branch is blossoming, he raises the little branch with the middle and index fingers of his left hand, then with the middle and index fingers of his right hand he bends it into a ring, so that the bottom of the stem passes through it, tying the ring into itself, exactly at the point when the sūtra, in the voice of the jikijitsu, as it rises out of the chorus, indicates that this entire hall and the whole of this place are being purified by this moment of the ritual and the prayers, the voice of the jikijitsu soars above the chorus of monks, which at times seems to resound with higher ascendancies in some distant, ever so distant rapport — then, along with the clang of the gong dying out, the enchantment of this purification dies away, and from that point on, for quite a while and without the jikijitsu, only the congregation has the word, the word which is understood by no one now, or perhaps was never understood by anyone, as the gathering now recites in broken Sanskrit: