The Eighty-Eight Temple Pilgrimage, on the island of Shikoku in Japan, consists of walking to eighty-eight Buddhist temples and numerous other sacred sites along a circular route of about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles). Its legendary status is rooted in the life of the monk Kūkai (774–855 CE), who trained and performed miracles at some of the sites along the path. Kūkai (later known as Kōbō Daishi) would found the Shingon sect of Buddhism in Japan, and devotees would embark on this pilgrimage to honor him. Today, individuals take on the pilgrimage for various reasons: from religious devotion to the physical and mental challenges of completing the circuit and the chance to experience Japan’s natural beauty and vernacular landscapes.

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 experiencing 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, would say.

The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage features ninety-one of Wylie’s captivating photographs from his journey as well as an introductory essay by the noted writer Pico Iyer, who writes, “The photographs offered here . . . 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.”