Dear Shaded Viewers,
Spring had come to Kyoto. Nothing exuberant, just a few plum and cherry blossoms here and there, mixed in with fresh bamboo. The Zen garden par excellence is at Ryo an-ji, long and rectangular, raked gravel and rock. These dry gardens are meant to be contemplated, not walked in, as if looking at a Chinese scroll.
The oldest of the Zen gardens are covered in moss. I went first to the Daitoku-ji Temple, located in the Western Hills, and there found Ryo gen-in’s moss garden, constructed around 1500. It had been a cold winter, and the moss was red.
Later, I found a garden that seemed to break all rules. I’d gone to Shisendo-ji on the opposite side of the city, in the Eastern Hills of Kyoto, to see the portraits of the Immortal Poets (36 watercolors that we are forbidden to photograph), and there I found a dry garden with plants, a Zen garden you could walk in. The original owner came from Edo (Tokyo) in 1641, and made garden with a pond, a little house to shelter his fish, and had designed a device – a sozu –to scare off deer that ate his bushes. I heard a strange noise, but only saw a piece of bamboo that looked like an irrigation pipe. After it filled up, it tipped over and emptied causing one end to drop down hard against a rock, with a sharp Clunk.
Best,
Nancy