The Eighty-Eight

The Eighty-Eight Temple pilgrimage, on the island of Shikoku, located between the Seto Inland Sea and the Pacific Ocean in the southwestern part of Japan, consists of Buddhist temples and numerous other sacred sites along a circular route covering about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers). Its legend is rooted in the life of the monk Kūkai (later known as Kōbō Daishi), who trained and performed miracles at some of the sites along the path. Kūkai (774–855 CE) would later found the Shingon sect of Buddhism in Japan, and devotees would embark on the pilgrimage to honor him. Now, individuals take on the pilgrimage for a variety of reasons, from religious devotion to the physical and mental challenges of completing the circuit and chance to experience the natural beauty and vernacular landscapes along the path.As photographer William Wylie approached his sixtieth birthday, he saw an opportunity to mark the auspicious occasion with a symbolic journey, one that would offer some kind of transformative experience and allow him to indulge in his enduring interest in rambling. Not a practicing Buddhist but with a deep connection to nature and an interest in the power of places, he arrived prepared for austere temples and raked stone gardens on the Shikoku trek. What he found in between the eighty-eight temples was equally provocative and memorable to the temples themselves. Everywhere he walked a landscape spread out before him like a beautiful accident, where the aim of the day’s walking was immersion, to slow down and listen for the crickets behind the bath house, as Issa, the famous Haiku poet, might say.The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage features 91 of Wylie’s photographs from his journey along with an introductory essay by Pico Iyer, who once wrote, in his essay “The Walled Garden,” “The relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain . . . ” The photographs offered here make no attempt to resolve that contradiction but instead relish in the possibility that ambiguity of the ordinary is earned and that, in the current era, beauty is as precious a reserve as it is scarce.