In 2012, Robert Sibley shared his experiences on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in his book The Way of the Stars. Sibley’s latest book, The Way of the 88 Temples, chronicles his journey on the Henro Michi, one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in Japan. Located on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four islands, the pilgrimage comprises 88 temples and covers nearly 900 miles. Publishers Weekly has said of the book, “Sibley’s acute psychological observations are interwoven not only with vivid details but historical and cultural contexts of the ancient Shikoku pilgrimage. Throughout his journey, Sibley asks himself—and the travelers he meets—why walking the path is important. While he finds no one answer, this accomplished narrative demonstrates that the impulse to seek inner change through a physical journey, if mysterious, is enduring.”
Following is an excerpt from The Way of the 88 Temples.
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I started out thinking of my pilgrimage trek as little more than an adventure—a “secular journey to sacred places,” as a Japanese sociologist puts it. But walking twenty to thirty kilometers a day for two months has both physical and psychological consequences. By the end of my trek, I was no longer able to dismiss the spiritual dimensions of the Henro Michi, including the presence of Kōbō Daishi, as mere folk superstitions. There were too many serendipitous situations and synchronistic circumstances for me not to wonder if someone, or something, was watching over me. I set out on one kind of journey but ended up on a very different one. This, of course, was not unusual. Pilgrims are often subject to “psychosomatic sensations,” and these sensations “are often the most significant aspects of pilgrimage in the view of the participants themselves.”
I knew none of this as I sheltered from the rain beneath the shōrō, or bell tower, at Shōsanji temple. I was just grateful to have reached the twelfth of Shikoku’s eighty-eight temples. I’d visited the first eleven temples during my first two days of walking. It had seemed easy. But this day, my third, was a killer. I walked—staggered—for nearly nine hours, covering fourteen kilometers along a trail that climbs and descends three mountain ranges. By late afternoon, when I reached the final steep staircase that climbs to Shōsanji, I was trembling with exhaustion. My leg muscles burned and my back ached from the load of my pack. I was seeing spots in front of my eyes. Worse, the worm of uncertainty had crawled into my mind: the prospect of two months on the road was suddenly daunting. Rational or not, ringing the temple bell was a gesture of defiance against the demons of doubt as well as an expression of thanks to whatever deities might exist for having delivered me from my inadequacy. It was also an appeal, superstitious though it might have been, for the gods’ help in the weeks to come. Standing beneath the shōrō, looking across the temple courtyard to the distant mountains, with my thigh muscles twitching in relief, I thought I would need it.
The Way of the 88 Temples is available now.