Kamakura, Where Zen First Sat Down in Japan

The monk at Engaku-ji does not explain anything. He shows a room of twenty people, most of them first-timers, how to fold their legs, how to hold their hands, where to put their eyes. He says that a bell will ring, and that when it rings we should sit, and that when it rings again we should stop. He rings the bell. Then, for twenty-five minutes, in a wooden hall built seven hundred years ago, nothing happens.

This is zazen, seated meditation, and it is the whole of Zen — the school of Buddhism that takes its name from the Sanskrit for meditation and that, more than any other Japanese export, has shaped what the world imagines when it imagines Japan. Kamakura is where it arrived. An hour south of Tokyo by train, hemmed in by hills on three sides and the sea on the fourth, the town was for a century and a half the capital of a warrior government, and the warriors, to everyone's surprise including their own, took to sitting still.

The warriors' capital

In 1185 Minamoto no Yoritomo, having won a civil war, set up his government not in Kyoto, where the emperor sat among the aristocrats, but in a fishing village on the coast that could be defended. The bakufu — the tent government, the shogunate — ruled Japan from Kamakura until 1333. It was the first time the samurai, rather than the court, held power, and they needed a religion to match.

The Buddhism of the court was ornate, learned, aristocratic — vast temples, elaborate ritual, a priesthood as refined as the nobles it served. The new rulers were soldiers with little education and a professional relationship with death. What they wanted, though they could not have said so, was something direct.

Zen arrived at the right moment. The monk Eisai brought the Rinzai school from China in 1191 and, after some difficulty in Kyoto, found patrons among the Kamakura warriors. The Chinese master Rankei Dōryū came in 1246 and founded Kenchō-ji, the first full Zen monastery in Japan, under the direct patronage of the regent. Engaku-ji followed in 1282, founded by another Chinese master, Mugaku Sogen, to honour the dead of both sides in the Mongol invasions. The warrior government built Zen its first houses, and Zen gave the warrior government a way to face what it did.

Why soldiers sat

The affinity is worth taking seriously, because it is easy to make it sound romantic.

Zen offered the samurai three things. It offered a practice — sitting — that required no learning, no texts, and no priest, and could be done by an illiterate man in a tent. It offered a teaching that the mind could be trained, through that practice, to act without hesitation; a swordsman who deliberated died, and Zen's emphasis on the immediate, unreflective response spoke directly to that. And it offered a way of holding death — not as a horror to be avoided or a passage to be feared but as one more thing that was, like everything, impermanent.

The relationship was not always healthy. Zen's usefulness to a warrior class made it useful, centuries later, to a warrior state, and there is a long and uncomfortable history of Zen masters blessing the wars of the twentieth century. The tradition has spent decades reckoning with that. But the original encounter, in the hills of Kamakura, was between men who had killed and a practice that asked them to sit with it. There is something in that worth sitting with too.

The five mountains

Kamakura's Zen temples were organised into a ranked system called the Gozan, the Five Mountains, modelled on the Chinese, and the top four are still here, still working, still open to anyone who walks up the path.

Kenchō-ji is the oldest and the largest. Its approach runs through a gate, past a bell cast in 1255, to a main hall under a juniper tree said to have grown from seeds the founder brought from China. Behind the buildings a trail climbs to a small shrine on the ridge with a view over the whole valley to the sea. Public zazen sessions are held here on Friday and Saturday afternoons.

Engaku-ji, at the top of the valley beside Kita-Kamakura station, is quieter and set into a wooded slope. Its Shariden, a relic hall in the Chinese style with a steep roof of sweeping eaves, is one of the oldest buildings of its kind. The morning zazen sessions here, open to the public, are where the monk did not explain anything.

Jōchi-ji and Jōmyō-ji are smaller, the third and fifth of the five, and are the ones to visit if you want a Zen temple with almost nobody in it. Jōchi-ji is a few minutes' walk from Engaku-ji and has a wooden bell tower over its gate and a garden that is mostly moss and silence.

And there is Hōkoku-ji, not one of the five but the temple most visitors remember, for its grove of two thousand moso bamboo — a forest of green columns, with a small tea house at the back where you can drink matcha and look at the stems. It is the most photographed place in Kamakura and, early on a weekday, one of the most peaceful.

The other Kamakura

Zen is not the whole town, and it would be a strange visit that saw only temples.

The Great Buddha at Kōtoku-in, eleven metres of bronze cast in 1252, has sat outdoors since a tsunami took its hall away in 1498, and is one of the few images in Japan that looks better for having lost its building. Hase-dera, on the slope above the sea, has a nine-metre wooden Kannon and a hillside of thousands of small Jizō statues placed by parents who have lost children. Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, the shrine at the top of the town's main avenue, was the warriors' spiritual centre and is still where Kamakura gathers.

And the sea. Yuigahama beach runs along the bottom of the town and in summer it is a crowded, cheerful, slightly scruffy surf beach; in winter it is empty and grey and the best place I know within reach of Tokyo to walk and think. The coast road west toward Enoshima has the old-style trams of the Enoden line running along it, sometimes close enough to the water to spray.

What the bell teaches

I went back to Engaku-ji several times over the years, and the practice did not get easier, which the monks assured me was correct. Twenty-five minutes is long. The legs hurt. The mind, asked to be still, produces an astonishing volume of noise about lunch and email and whether the person in front is doing it right. And then, occasionally, for a few breaths, it stops — and the hall is just a hall, and the light on the floor is just light, and the bell, when it rings, is the most complete sound in the world.

That is all Zen is claiming. Not enlightenment, not mysticism, not a philosophy — just that a person can sit, and be where they are, and that this is both the simplest thing there is and the hardest, and that a warrior government seven hundred years ago found it worth building temples for. They were right. The temples are still there. The bell still rings. You can go and sit.