Buddhist Ceremony

Yesterday at the temple, there was a special ceremony. My comprehension of the explanation was kind of muddy, but I'm fairly sure at this point it was a memorial service to the 1-year anniversary of the passing of the previous family patriarch, who it's pretty well implied was also the previous priest of Shinkouzen-ji. I'll explain what actually happened, at the very least.

We woke up fairly early for housecleaning. Hyden and I got put to weeding a couple large areas. And by large I mean half the yard. But hey, it need weeding. The rest of the family was cleaning everything else, so now the temple looks wonderful.

The next chore was kind of a fun one. Around 11, people began showing up for the ceremony. Pretty much everyone was a senior citizen. Anyways, Hyden and I had to deliver tea and little sweet cake things to every one of the sixty or so folks who showed up.

There were also about eight monks who showed up, decked out in full priest robes. A few (two or three) of the priests were actually little old ladies, but with their heads shaved and dressed in the exact same way. Genpou, my host uncle who's really more like a big brother in age difference (he's only about seven or eight years older than me, I'm pretty sure. But then again, my host parents themselves aren't much older than thirty), also showed up from Kyoto, where he's taking monk training himself.

The first session of the day's proceedings was a sermon sort of speech by one of the priests. There were a couple of sutras chanted at this point, too, but I forget exactly when they were placed because I was still running around and helping with chores.

Next was lunch, where I got tea and soup for people who were sitting down to eat. After lunch, we repeated the whole "tea and cakes for the incoming" thing. The lunches were completely vegetarian, if not even vegan.

After that:
The Really Cool Ceremony:
The nine monks march in. Four are on each side of the hotoke shrine, with Sessou-san in the middle. Kind of like this, with the dashes being each monk and the o being Sessou-san:
- - - -
o
- - - -
All of the monks begin chanting and opening Sutra volumes. Japanese sutras are folded like an accordion or those post-it notes with the zigzag fold. Actually, you know that thing people do with the zigzag post-its where they kind of make a post-it "waterfall"? Zen monks beat you to it by a thousand years, and they even know how to do a few tricks with it. Once they've waterfalled one sutra a couple times, they move to the next. There are a few small stacks for each monk. The combined effect of all this chanting and waterfalling paper is kind of stunning. In the meantime, Sessou-san is doing the chanting and sutra book play, and then occasionally walking to the altar and doing a small ritual with incense smoke and some food offerings. This whole thing kind of repeats on loop for a while with various subtleties and intensities before winding down, almost like a jam song.
Heck, I guess there were even a few solos in there, too.

After that was dinner, which was a fairly luxurious bento set. A few of the people from the service stayed for dinner, but I didn't catch who any of them were, really. Also, as a random thought, old people are a little frustrating sometimes because the almost seem to assume you either know all the Japanese or none of it. They're generally just plain hard to understand because they mumble like an English farmer.

After dinner we all had to move around the tables and chairs for clean up.

Pretty much the last notable event of the day was Naoko-san and Sessou-san (the host parents) congratulating Hyden and I on being incredibly helpful for chores. They also may have given us some cashmoney for the Kyoto trip under the condition that we get them a small omiyage of some kind.