On 17 October 2013 we took a day trip to Nikko (north west of Tokyo), sacred to both Shinto and Buddhist worship. The first temple Rinno-ji was founded by Shodo Shonin in 766, the temple of Chuzen-ji in 784, and later the Fatarasan Shrine. When the first shogun of the Tokugawa clan died, the temple of Nikko Tosho-gu was built as his burial place, completed 1617. The two storey Yomei-mon (or Sunset) Gate, decorated with brilliant colours and over 500 sculptures, is particularly famous. From this gate an avenue leads to Nikko Toshu-mon Gate. The courtyard contains famous treasures by master carvers, especially Hidari Jingoro. Best known are the Three Monkeys – “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” – inspired by Buddhist teaching that by so doing we shall be spared from evil. The overwhelming richness of decoration in the temple, with many Chinese references, says that the emperor respected, and was aligned with, his powerful neighbour the Chinese Empire, but also saying that the Tokugawas were here to stay and rule: which they did, until the mid-1880s.

We arrived back in Tokyo from Nagano on 14 October. Next day we spent much time at the wonderful, if not well known, Idemitsu Museum, a must in our opinion for any visitors. It was founded in 1966 by Sazo Idemitsu, a wealthy industrialist and collector. His aim was to expand Japan’s collection of art masterpieces for the benefit of future generations. The main feature on this day was an exhibition of calligraphy and ink paintings by the Zen Buddhist monk Sengai (1750-1837), who was at the Shofuku-ji temple in Fukuoka and a devotee of Rinzai Zen Buddhism. He used his talent to unravel Zen doctrines, often using simple ink brushstrokes plus calligraphy (which we un fortunately couldn’t understand). Some pictures showed great flair and sense of humour (such as his “ailments of old age”). In the final room of the museum is a shard collection put together by archaeologists specialising in pottery, taken from many kilns in Japan (and a range of other places in the world). One large room has lovely views over the Imperial Palace and its gardens (which we had visited on an earlier trip).

That evening a typhoon hit the area, suspending the metro lines, causing 17 deaths and 54 missing, and cutting off the airport for a while. We were largely oblivious to it in our hotel, and next day dawned clear. [to be continued].

“The word as normally used brings to mind pictures of distance: the transcendent is what is unattainably far off, outside our range of understanding. [Lewis helps us see] not an incalculable separation but an inexhaustible strangeness, a refusal to be captured. And in Lewis’s narrative (the Narnia stories], this is expressed in terms of rebellion, the joyful overturning of a self-contained order in the name of an uncontainable truth”: Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World, p.139.

Rowan Williams has this to say:

“It is not true that large numbers of people reject Christian faith –  if by ‘reject’ we mean that they deliberately consider and then decide against it. They are imperceptibly shunted towards a position where the ‘default setting’ is a conviction that traditional Christianity had nothing much to be said for it. People who have settled down in this position are not likely to be much moved by argument: they need to be surprised into a realization that they have never actually reckoned with what Christianity is about” [The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, 2012, pp.14-15].

“that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called ‘we’. Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were a dream” [Surprised by Joy].

C. S. Lewis seems to have spent his life yearning for a sense of other-worldly joy and bliss. He attained this, momentarily, at first in his intense interest in Norse sagas, Wagnerian legends and music, George MacDonald’s fantasy stories and in flashes of landscape. He admitted in his autobiography Surprised by Joy that for a long time he made the mistake of striving too strenuously and consciously for this transcendental joy. It was not to be attained this way. It was elusive. It came, not as an end-product of reading, acting, striving or imagining, but as a side-product of these things, something that just happened. Nor should you expect it to last. Trying to make it last didn’t work. It could not be captured. Many mystics had discovered this.

C. S. Lewis, famous of course for his Narnia stories, was well known in his own time as a major defender of Christianity, someone who made the core beliefs of Christianity accessible to ordinary readers. Alister McGrath, Lewis’s biographer, makes the point that Lewis. in his celebrated book Surprised By Joy (1955), picked up on a Wordsworh poem of 1812, when he was grieving over the death of his three year old daughter. After some time Wordsworth came to see a “visionary gleam of joy” and hope. Seizing on this, Lewis “offers his reflections on  the source of a deeper vision of Joy, rooted at one level in the yearnings of the human heart, and at another in the nature of God. It is God who shoots such ‘arrows of Joy’ as a means of heightening his sense of longing, stimulating his reflection, initiating his questing, and ultimately achieving his transformation… Memory, joy, and longing then become gateways to God” (McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, 2014, pp.8-9).

Joseph Needham was “The Man Who Loved China”, a great historian of Chinese science. He was also religious. He gave this advice to Christians in a Cambridge college sermon in 1961:

“Focus on Christian essentials, not on the accidental incidentals of the faith but on its eternal values: “If we only knew the treasures of human experience of God contained in cultures which because we will not work to understand  them seem so foreign to us, we should hug them to our breasts and cry out in amazement at the work of the Holy Spirit under all meridians…if heaven is where the good are, and where good things are done, perhaps the invisible Church already covers the broad earth without our knowing it, most truly one spirit, under one God and Father of all”.