Word 106
The path up Mount Shigi never runs straight.
The stone steps leading to Chogo-sonshi-ji Temple zigzag across the mountainside in countless switchbacks, guided by a red handrail. Travelers climbing them step by step pause now and then to look back at the ground they have covered.
What comes into view is a route that was never a straight line at all. Right, then left, then right again — the very shape that looks like a detour turns out to be the only way up this mountain.
"I took the long way round for years." "I went through so many unnecessary experiences." "If I had come straight here, I would have arrived so much sooner."
Not so.
"If you do not enter the tiger's den, you cannot catch its cub."
It is precisely because you experienced it that there are things you now understand — and that is exactly how you were able to arrive here.
The path you walked is, for you, the shortest route (to here).
Only at the top of the steps, looking back, can you finally take in the whole path at once — the turns that overlapped, invisible from below. What looked, from the foot of the mountain, like it might run straight, is revealed to have bent again and again along the way. Perhaps it is no accident that this mountain has long been known as the temple of the tiger, its great papier-mâché tiger standing beside the path — a quiet reminder that only those willing to take the long way ever reach what waits at the top.