A retreat at a temple at New Year is delightful when it is very cold and snow has fallen and frozen. A sky that looks like rain is very bad.
When you go to Kiyomizu or such a temple and wait, your carriage drawn up at the foot of the steps, until your cubicle (a room partitioned off for the retreat) is ready, young monks wearing nothing but sashes, in tall wooden clogs, go up and down the steps without the least fear, chanting scraps of sutras or murmuring a few lines of verse from the Abhidharma as they walk about, and it suits the place and is amusing. When we go up, it is very precarious; we keep to the side and hold on to the railing, but the monks treat it as if it were a flat wooden floor, and that too is amusing.
"Your room is ready. Please, quickly," they say, and a monk brings footwear and helps us down from the carriage. Some have their robes hitched up to the hem. Others are properly dressed in skirts and Chinese jackets, very grandly. Walking down the corridors in deep shoes or half-boots, shuffling along, you feel as if you were at the palace, and that is amusing too.
Entering your cubicle, it is very embarrassing to pass in front of people sitting in a row. Looking inside the low lattice before the altar, many lamps are lit before the main image, and the Buddha glitters, very holy. Monks holding written prayers in their hands sway on their platforms as they recite vows, and their voices fill the hall.
Kiyomizu Temple, famous for its great wooden stage, was devoutly worshiped from the Heian period as a holy place of Kannon, and many women went there on retreat. The Pillow Book captures, vividly, its bustle, its solemnity and its small comedies.