The equipment of the Shikoku pilgrim is not costume. Each item is a claim, and the claims are what the circuit is about.
The white robe
The hakui is white because white is the colour of death in Japan, and the garment is the one a corpse is dressed in. The henro puts it on to walk. The old circuit was dangerous (long, remote, poorly provisioned, walked by the sick, the outcast and the destitute as often as by the devout), and people died on it; there are pilgrim graves along the route. Wearing the burial robe is not a metaphor about dying to the old self. It is a practical statement that the walker is prepared to be buried in what they are wearing, and it was for a long time literally true.
The staff
The kongo-zue is not a walking aid that has been sanctified. It is Kobo Daishi. The rules follow from that, and they are strict:
- At the end of the day the staff is washed before the pilgrim washes.
- It is stood in the alcove of the room, not leant against a wall or laid on the floor.
- It is never used to tap or strike a bridge, because of the story that Kukai once spent a cold night sleeping under one, and the sound would disturb him.
Two travelling as one
Dogyo ninin is written on the hat and on the staff. It means the henro is never alone: Kukai walks the circuit alongside every pilgrim, continuously, and has been doing so since the ninth century. This is not remembered as history. It is asserted as a present fact, and the equipment is how it is asserted.
Osettai
Osettai is the gift (food, drink, money, a bed, a lift), pressed on pilgrims by people who live along the route. The rule is that it cannot be refused, and the reason is precise: the giver is not being kind to a stranger. The giver is making an offering to the Daishi, and the pilgrim is the channel. To refuse is to deny someone their merit, which is a harm, not a modesty.
This produces the odd economy the circuit runs on. Buses, stamp books, calligraphy, robes and prefectural marketing on one side; on the other, a parallel gift system that will not accept money and that the commercial side has never displaced. Both have been running side by side for decades and neither party seems to find it a contradiction.
And the number
Eighty-eight is not explained by any early source. The circuit's attribution to Kukai is traditional and unsupported: what is attested from the Heian and Kamakura periods is ascetic circumambulation of the island by monks, not a numbered list. The fixed set of eighty-eight temples in a settled order is a product of the 1680s, and specifically of print, of Shinnen's guidebook of 1687 and the route markers he had put up.
Which is to say: the practice is genuinely old, the form everybody now follows is early modern, and the founder credited with it had nothing to do with the version that exists. The white robe and the staff are the older thing.