In April 2008, I moved from Dharamshala to Delhi, the capital. Having completed almost all the research, all that remained was to take the sleeper express to Kolkata and return to Japan.
I already had a concrete image in my mind of the flow of the manuscript up to this point as a story. I had more than 10,000 photographs on my hard disk as data for the story. All that remained was to go back to Japan, work out the details and write it all down at once.
Three years of research. The various martial arts and the people who practise them. The Indian philosophy of the different chakras, which I “discovered” through the rotating techniques of the stick arts. The unforgettable process of immersing myself in this quest. The long, long days of exploration and wandering that I remember with deep emotion.
With a certain sense of accomplishment tinged with a some sense of emptiness, perhaps my mind had lost its normalcy. On the fateful day of April 4, I boarded a sleeper train at New Delhi station to Kolkata, where all of my photo data was stolen, along with my passport, cash, camera, PC, and other valuables.
The modus operandi employed against me was an extremely rudimentary and simple trick that should have been obvious to an experienced traveller like myself.
Second-class sleeper trains in India have three tiers. The lower bunk serves as a seat for three people during the day, while the upper bunk serves as a luggage rack. The middle bunk, which is the backrest of the lower bunk during the day, is raised and fixed as a sleeping berth at night, completing the three-tier sleeping arrangement.
As I boarded the train, squeezed through a huge crowd of Indians, I checked my number with the upper bunk, placed my shoulder bag containing all my valuables on the lower seat and lifted my backpack to the upper bunk. During this time, habitually, the shoulder bag was always captured in the corner of my vision.
Then, just as I was about to turn my face down to get my shoulder bag, a boy suddenly spoke to me, pointing to the luggage on the upper bunk and saying something in Hindi.
Unfortunately, I know some Hindi, so I involuntarily followed his fingertips and looked away from my shoulder bag, trying to understand what he was saying.
Probably less than a second, I instinctively had a bad feeling and, shouting “Oh my God!” in my head, I looked back at the shoulder bag on the lower seat. But it had already disappeared without a trace.
It was too tough an ordeal for me, who had put all my energy into this trip as the culmination of three years of work.
Stunned by this last-minute attack, completely an unthinkable situation, I was no longer able to help myself mentally or materially. I had some cash left in my wallet, but after all, a foreigner cannot even stay in a hotel without a passport.
In this desperate situation, I finally regained my composure after a while, and the first thing I thought of was the Nihonzan Myohoji Temple, which had helped me on many other occasions. I was too busy to visit the temple this time also, but I was sure that there was a Nihonzan temple in Delhi too.
I was desperate for any help, and literally ran into the temple at Indraprastha.
I spent about three weeks there. Not only did the nun of the temple, Katsu Anju-san, kindly accept me when I suddenly visited, she even spent almost a day interpreting Hindi for me when I had to obtain a theft certificate from the police station, which was the first difficult task.
And all the while dealing with the unimaginable red tape of India, such as re-issuing passports and re-obtaining visas, every morning and evening, I chanted the mantra, Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, read the Lotus Sutra, and looked up at the huge white Shanti Stupa in front of the main hall.
Most readers will not understand how impenetrable the labyrinth of red tape can be in India. Faced with this challenge, on top of the shock of the theft, I must have been unable to maintain my mental stability on my own.
Is that the merit of the spiritual practice “Sadhana”? My last hours in Delhi went surprisingly smoothly, and I managed to clear all the hurdles and could return safely to Japan in late April.
I then wrote the manuscript, including the previous chapters and some final chapters, in one go, before my memory faded, and approached several publishers to discuss the possibility of adapting it into a book. However, no publisher gave me a good answer.
This in itself was not a disappointment to me. The loss of photographic data and information notes meant that the contents of the manuscript were incomplete and did not reach a satisfactory level as a single work of book.
The real crunch time came after that. When I was in Delhi, I still had a task in front of me that I absolutely had to do. And while I was writing the manuscript, all I had to do was concentrate on it as best I could. But when it was all over, my mind was possessed by an inescapable feeling of emptiness.
For the past three years, I have been travelling with a sense of ‘mission’ to do this work for my beloved India, where I once spent a period of my youth. I have carried out the enormous process of introducing the still unknown Indian martial arts to the world and unravelling the mysteries of the ‘chakra philosophy’ that symbolises India, all on my own. It is no exaggeration to say that I have devoted my entire life to something that, as much as I love it, is not profitable.
ut the Indians (even though they are criminals) have dealt me a severe blow: they have taken all the photographs and data I have collected over the past six months, as well as all my possessions. All the work I had done up to that point had been completely negated and destroyed by the Indians themselves. This fact began to eat away at me as time went on.
I wondered what all the hard work had been up to now, and if there was any point in continuing this work any longer.
To further rub salt in the wound, the memories of that theft incident haunted me more vividly with each passing day like a ghost. These recurring flashbacks continued to consume my mind, tormenting me with intense regret as if I were a parent who had lost a child through their own fault.
If only I’d put my shoulder bag on the upper bunk, no, if only I hadn’t taken it off my body, no, if only I’d at least had a separate data backup, no, no… My mind was sinking into a bottomless swamp and struggled.
I can’t go on like this. Remembering some sort of clear and calm mind during the days in Delhi, I headed for Nihonzan dojo in Sendai which I knew before.
When I arrived at the Sendai Dojo, the abbot, Ninomiya Guruji, welcomed me with the same smile as usual. I concentrated on the morning and evening sadhana practice, as I had done in Delhi, and devoted myself to chopping wood and other works as if shaking off any doubts I might have had.
When I returned home from my two-week stay in Sendai, an email was waiting for me. It was from Asai Guruji of the Nihonzan Niigata Dojo. He was involved in editing the newsletter of the Japan-Bharat Sarvodaya Mitrata Sangha and asked me if I would like to write something about India for the booklet.
In retrospect, it may have been out of kindness and compassion, hearing about the theft incident in Delhi and my mental depression, to give me something to do as a relief. But it turned out to be a big turning point for me…
When I saw the cover of a back issue of Sarvodaya magazine, which the editorial team had given me as a sample for writing the manuscript, I felt a mild shudder. It was because there I saw the image of Mahatma Gandhi, dressed in a piece of cloth, walking with a stick.
It was, of course, a figure synonymous with Mahatma Gandhi and also a familiar image to me. But at that moment, as if captured, my consciousness was fixed on the single stick he was holding in his hand and I could not look away.
Why did Gandhi have a “stick”?
It was a question that could be described as abrupt.
Perhaps, this question may have been prompted by my excessive fascination with stick art, but it didn’t stop there.
Generally, the photographs and portraits we see of him are in his old age, and the stick in his hand is often regarded as a walking stick to help his foot. But is that really the case? I remembered seeing a photo of him in middle age with a stick in his hand as well.
Could this stick have a deeper meaning than a walking stick to support his foot?
My intuition was whispering that at the time.
Then the next moment,
‘This is Danda, isn’t it?!’
With a shock that made the scales fall from my eyes, I shouted in my mind.
This became the epochal shift in my perspective, which until then had only seen the Chakra=Wheel superficially.
Images flashed through my mind as I reviewed my stay in India over the past three years, a total of 18 months. Here and there were scenes in which a single stick had an impressive presence.
Any hesitation I have had because of the theft incident was completely blown away. Like a computer searching through a hard drive at high speed, with a one-pointed mind, I continued to search through my memories.
~to be continued~
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 