KOKOKEI STATION

KOKOKEI STATION

These photos were taken from Kokokei station in Gifu prefecture , showing the surrounding landscape, including Amagahashi Bridge (The bridge of the Heavens). In Japanese Kokokei means “old tiger valley/gulch”; but of course, there are not tigers living there. The valley is so named because it closely resembles the area of Mt. Lu[1] in China.

Even in Japan, people tell an old story about Mt. Lu. It seems that once upon a time (all stories should start that way right?) there was a monk named Hui-Yuan[2] who lived on Mt. Lu and had not left the area for over thirty years. One day, his friends Riku Shushei[3] and To Enmei[4] came to see him. It was a great gathering and such a wonderful day for all of the old friends. When it came time for his friends to leave at the end of the day, Hui-Yuan walked with them to the bridge named Kokei to see them off.

Now, Hui-Yuan had made a commitment long ago, never to leave Mt. Lu, and had had never crossed the Kokei bridge, but he was having such a good time talking to his friends, even as he walked with them as they made their way to leave, he paid no attention to where he was. Suddenly he heard the loud roar of a tiger, which brought him reality. In the excitement of seeing his friends off, he had accidentally crossed Kokei and thus had descended from Mt. Lu, breaking his promise never to leave.

Well, that was long ago and far away, yet if you visit the area and leave the train here at Kokokei Station, you will be transported to a world that is very much like what you might see in an old Chinese brush painting or sumi-e; and, after getting off the train and it has left, all you will hear only the sound of the river.

[1] Mt. Lu or Mount Lushan (廬山) is a mountan located south of the city of Jiujiang in Jiangzi Province, near Lake Poyang and it was on its north slope where Hui-Yuin founded the Pure Land Buddhism in 402 A.D.
[2] Huiyuan (慧遠) or Hui-Yuan (334 AD – 416 AD) was a Chinese Buddhist teacher who began studying Zhuangtzi and Laozi at an early age as well as the teachings of Confucius; however, at the age of 21 he was converted to Buddhism by Dao An. Inspired by what he had learned, he left his family a began to teach on his own, later living at Forest Temple, which he founded on Mount Lu. In 404, he organized a group of monks and lay people into a Mahayana sect known as Pure Land Buddhism, the Pure Land being the western paradise of the Buddha Amaitabha.
[3] Riku Shushei was a Taoist scholar.
[4] To En Mei , also known as Tao Qian (陶潛) or Tao Ch’ien or Tao Yuanming (365 AD – 427 AD) was one of the most influential of the pre-Tang Dynasty poets. He came from a notable family which had unfortunately descended into poverty. As a youth, he was torn between his personal ambitions and a desire to retreat into solitude. He served in a series of minor governmental posts but at a time when his sister had tragically died and corruption and infighting in the Jin Court was at is peak, En Mei decided that for him, life was too short to compromise his principles and he resigned. As he put it, he would not “bow like a servant in return for five bushels of grain (later to become a common saying of proverb, Swallowing one’s pride in exchange for a meager existence. Approximately 130 of his poems have survived to modern times and apart from his poems, he is perhaps best nown for his short, wonderful depiction (in prose) of a land hidden from the outside world called Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源) or Tao Hua Yuan, which has become the standard term in Chinese for utopia.