Higan－Dancing on the Far Shore

Most Buddhist rituals came to Japan with the texts and monks of the seventh century and later, but the solemn celebration of the equinox, although carried out in very Buddhist circumstances, is not found in India or in Chinese Buddhism. It is a native Japanese rite embedded deeply in the life of the people.

Since antiquity, Japanese Buddhists have regarded the equinox as an occasion for reflecting on the nature and goals of human life. Higan, the Japanese word for equinox, literally means “the far shore” across the Sea of Nothingness. The original Pali term for the concept was paramita, a virtue of the sort that leads inexorably to enlightenment. The prescribed six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism are selfless giving, precepts, perseverance, energy, meditation and wisdom.

For a period of one week – three days before and after the days of the equinox itself – Buddhists gather at temples to attend services and listen to teachings on the Dhamma, or Buddhist Law. The Higan is the most important religious event in the month of September. The ancient Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan) records that monks at the beginning of the Heian Period were already spending a week in spring and in autumn reciting the sutra, so it seems that the equinox was the first occasion for Japanese Buddhism to develop new practices unseen on the mainland.

A more popular general understanding of the “far shore” is Death, so the period is characterized by visits to ancestral graves and praying for the salvation of souls. A Buddhist scholar pointed out that there are three features of the higan period that link it to the idea of Enlightenment: the mildness of September days and nights, the perfect east-west axis of the sun, and the equivalence of night and day.

Pure Land Buddhists aspire to be reborn in the Western Paradise of Amida, the Buddha of Great Compassion. The chanting of Buddha’s name helps seal the fate of the chanter, and “Namu-Amida-Butsu” becomes, in the rush to flee the beating wings of death, Nenbutsu.

Another point to note about this season is that the harvest is upon us, or anyway upon the boisterous farmers, who have thrown themselves into sacred wrestling and dances to the gods of rice for millennia, since long before Buddhism arrived on these shores. It is not difficult to see how the Dances of September became incorporated into the Equinox Rites: temples all over Japan soon came to be centers of Nenbutsu dancing, a practice still seen in Kyoto.