Kyoto – the heart thrills

MUSINGS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Milan, 14 November 2018

I recently finished the three-week course which I give annually at Kyoto University, on sustainable industrial development – or rather, lack thereof. Summarizing rapidly, my thesis is that current patterns of industrial development, indeed current patterns of economic development as a whole, are fundamentally unsustainable, and that if we don’t change course soon climate change as well as various other attacks on our planetary ecosystems will lead to their collapse and this to the collapse of our civilizations. The rest of the course outlines how we might change direction.

For the students it’s an intensive course, but for me it’s not so intensive: two three-hour classes a week, plus a bit here and there. So I and my wife, who always accompanies me on these trips, have a lot of spare time on our hands. In past years, we’ve visited the city’s museums but none of the exhibitions this year grabbed our attention. The only exception was the Miho museum, which we had discovered last year. It had a strange (well, to us strange) exhibition, obsessively focused on bamboo tea scoops, used in the traditional Japanese tea ceremony to scoop powdered green tea out of its holder and transfer it to the pot of hot water. We see one here together with its bamboo holder.

Seeing one or two tea scoops is OK, but after the sixth or seventh my interest began to pall; yet this exhibition must have had a hundred of the things. Nevertheless, the building itself and the permanent exhibition was definitely worth another visit. I refer interested readers to an earlier post of mine on this museum.

We’ve also visited all the temples in and around Kyoto (and one year even took in the temples at nearby Nara), so by now we’re pretty much templed out. The only exception this year, because it continues to fascinate, was the Fushimi Inari shrine with its long avenues of torii gates snaking their way up and down the hill at whose feet the shrine stands.

Climbing up through all those torii gates was also useful exercise for us, helping as it did to maintain our fitness in readiness for the week-long walk we were booked in to do after I’d finished my course (and which, with a bit of luck, will be the subject of a future post).

In fact, walking the hills ringing Kyoto became the focus of much of our attention this year. Through serendipity we discovered a network of trails in those hills, and in the days I wasn’t teaching we would set off to explore them. They were quite hard going, their navigation not made easier by the many trees which this summer’s severe typhoons had brought crashing down over the trails. The typhoons were unusually severe this year in Kyoto, as was the summer in general; the climate change I was talking to my students about is making summers hotter and extreme weather events all the more extreme.

Luckily, many sections of the trails were easier on the legs, and it was on one of these sections, as we rounded a corner, that we suddenly found ourselves on the edge a steep wooded slope carpeted by intensely green ferns.

I have a great fondness for ferns. Partly it’s because of their innate elegance.

Partly it’s because of the beauty of young ferns as they uncoil.

Partly it’s because of their great age; as I have written in previous posts, I have a soft spot for those very ancient species which have survived to the present time.

Ferns first appear in the fossil record during the Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago. The first evidence of ferns related to several modern families appeared in the Triassic period, some 250 million years ago. The great fern radiation occurred 70 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period, when many modern families of ferns first appeared. I should point out that in all these periods, CO₂ levels were far higher than they are now. No doubt when that climate change I was talking to my students about, induced by rapidly increasing levels of CO₂, brings our civilizations to their knees and wipes us out as a species ferns will once more conquer the world. Who laughs last laughs longest.

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Pictures: all ours, except:
fern elegance: https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/structure.shtml
fern uncoiling: https://www.bestphotosworld.com/15-lovely-unfurling-ferns/
fossil fern: http://www.tiedyedfreaks.org/ace/natural/natural.html

KYOTO CITY BUS DRIVERS

Kyoto, 25 October 2018

In a previous post I mentioned in passing the wonderful delivery used years ago by an anonymous Amtrak employee when announcing the departure of trains from Penn Station in New York. Here, I want to come back to this theme, the delivery of messages on public transport, but this time the place is Kyoto and the transport in question the city’s buses.

Anyone who travels around by bus in this city cannot possibly have failed to notice the rather particular cadences used by bus drivers to announce upcoming stops, to thank you when you get off the bus, and to announce I know not what else (my knowledge of Japanese being limited to literally four words).

I think the Japanese already have a tendency to elongate the last syllable of the last word they pronounce, rather like the Czechs and Slovaks, but Kyoto bus drivers draw out that last syllable to an extreme. It’s as if a London bus driver were to say “Next stop: Trafalgar Squaaaaaaaaare” or “Coming up: Piccadilly Circuuuuuusssss” and “Watch your step getting off the buuuuussssss”. And it’s all said in such calm, caressing tones! As readers can see from the photo above, the bus driver wears a mic linked to the bus’s PA system, so he doesn’t have to raise his voice (it always seems to be men who drive Kyoto buses). He can just murmur quietly and breathily into his mic. My wife and I sit and listen (with some amusement, I have to say) as the driver’s litany of messages rolls out over us. We quite forget to admire the passing views, especially the tourists dressed up in kimonos and montsukis for the day.

The same cannot be said of the canned announcements on the buses, always by women. I don’t know what it is, but when Japanese women have to make public pronouncements they seem invariably to opt for a register in the higher octaves. I suppose they are adopting that childlike tone which seems to be the approved tone for women in this still very patriarchal society. I remember once meeting the wife of a Japanese colleague who spoke English to me in a high, squeaky voice but whose voice dropped an octave or so when she spoke to her husband. Those same squeaky tones emanate from Kyoto buses’ PA systems, announcing chirpily what stops will be next and various other information of public interest. Every time I hear that voice (and there seems to be only one voice used by the whole of the Kyoto bus system), I cannot help but think of the girly characters that populate Japanese cartoons, the ones with the impossibly big eyes and a suspiciously Caucasian look.

Women of Japan, arise! You have nothing to lose but the chains which tie you to ridiculous and outdated role models! Drop your voices an octave! And drive Kyoto buses, for God’s sake!

Well, having got that off my chest, let me go back to listening to the soothing tones of our bus driver. I should tape him, I’m sure playing his voice back in a loop at night as white noise would make me sleep very well.

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Kyoto city bus:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Kyoto_City_Bus_200_Ka_1519.jpg
Kyoto city bus driver: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-kyoto-bus-driver-with-white-gloves-in-japan-133175829.html
Street scene Kyoto:
https://lexiskobe.com/2016/03/04/%E3%83%AC%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B7%E3%82%B9%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A3%E3%83%91%
E3%83%B3%E3%81%AE%E7%95%99%E5%AD%A6%E7%94%9F%E3%81%8C%E3%83%A2%E3%83%87%E3%83%AB%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AA%E3%82%8A%E3%81%BE%E3%81%97%E3%81%9F/lexis-japan-kimono-kyoto-3/
Girl cartoon character: http://www.nijisenmon.com/1070592288

OF ZEN GARDENS AND MISO SOUP

Milan, 3 December 2016

Back from Kyoto, and still with a bad case of jet lag (it’s 4 am and my wife and I are sprawled on the living room couches, wide awake), it’s time to review the three weeks we spent in that city. Apart from the misery caused by the American presidential elections and the pleasure derived from teaching a course on sustainable industrialization to a group of eager youngsters not yet affected by the pessimism of old age, what else will I take back with me from my three weeks spent in Kyoto?

Ever since I first visited the city thirty years ago, Kyoto for me is first and foremost the place of Zen gardens. I have already written a paean to these rock gardens in a previous post, so I will not repeat myself. I will simply mention the pleasure I derived from visiting several rock gardens which I had not seen thirty years ago (or even five years ago, when we came for a brief visit from Beijing). My wife and I decided that our daughter, who came to visit us for Thanksgiving, just had to see a couple of these glorious creations: “he (or she) who has not seen a Zen garden has not lived”, to surely misquote someone famous. We took her to the gardens in Tofuku-ji Temple as well as those in Kennin-ji Temple, both at the foot of that range of hills which runs down Kyoto’s eastern edges and which is constellated with temples. The garden in Tofuku-ji was laid down a mere 75 years ago, in the last years of the 1930s. It gives one pause to think that these so very peaceful gardens were created when Japan was ramping up its war effort towards the disastrous conclusion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five years later.

The garden was designed by Mirei Shigemori. This was his first major work and it made him famous (at least in the small world of landscape gardening). The work consists of four gardens surrounding the Abbot’s Hall. The largest, and best known, is the south garden.

It is dominated by four clusters of massive rocks. Standing imposingly at one end of the garden, they represent the mythic, far-off isles of the immortals.

Their shores are “washed” by a sea of raked white gravel, which leads the eye to five moss-covered mounds at the other end. These represent the five main temples in Kyoto of the Rinzai sect of Buddhism, one of whose temples is Tofuku-ji.

This garden obviously has its roots in the design of the far more famous zen garden at Ryoan-ji.

Shigemori’s departures from the classical zen garden style were far more radical in the other three smaller gardens surrounding the Abbot’s Hall. The north garden has a checkerboard pattern, with square paving stones embedded in moss, that gently fades off into randomness, thus drawing the eye to the stand of Japanese maples beyond.

The west garden repeats the checkerboard motif, but this time with a dense array of square-cut azalea bushes.

The small east garden departs from the usual use of rough stones, inserting instead seven truncated stone cylinders (recycled from the temple’s old outhouse) into the usual “sea” of raked gravel surrounded by moss. Shigemori set the pillars out like the stars of the Big Dipper, Seven Northern Stars in Japanese.

These last three gardens caused much frothing at the mouth by the traditionalists but also drew much praise from the garden landscaping avant-garde. I leave it to readers to decide in which camp they want to be in. Meanwhile, I will move to the second zen garden which we visited with our daughter, the gardens in Kennin-ji. These gardens are a good deal more venerable, as befits the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto.

The same design of gardens surrounding the Abbot’s Hall is found here. We have here the main garden, where, in contrast to Tofuku-ji, the monk-designer allowed a fringe of vegetation along the far border of the garden.

On the other side of the Abbot’s Hall, we have a smaller garden that invites the visitor to step over it to a beckoning tea house.

(unfortunately, the path is off-limits, but the determined visitor can reach the tea-house through a more circuitous set of stepping stones).

We have a moss garden enclosed between buildings and walkways.

Finally, squeezed in between several buildings, we have the small, compact “circle-triangle-square” garden

so-called because it is said that all things in the universe can be represented by these three forms (at the risk of being irreverent, though, I see the circle and square in the garden but I don’t see a triangle).

Switching gears dramatically, these three weeks in Kyoto also reanimated the love which my wife and I have for miso soup, that most Japanese of all soups.

Readers may think I lack gravitas turning in this way from the glories of Zen gardens to the humble miso soup, gentle handmaiden to the flashier main courses of countless Japanese meals. But I feel there is a strong affinity between the two: spare simplicity in the assemblage of the constituent elements, yet delivery of intense pleasure to the senses.

What is it about miso soup’s ingredients that give it that unique taste, to be found in no other soup? It is a question which I have asked myself every time I sip on its delights, yet it is only now, in my jet-lagged haze, that I turn to the Internet to find out.

The answer is the miso paste. It is this paste which, mixed with the traditional Japanese stock “dashi”, is at the heart of all miso soups. Other ingredients that are added, such as silky tofu cubes, finely chopped spring onions, and seaweed, are – if I may mix my culinary metaphors – merely cherries on the cake. Digging further, to my mind the magic of miso paste, what gives it that so very special taste, is the fungus Aspergillus oryzae. I should perhaps explain that miso paste is the product of a fermentation process; here we have the fermentation taking place the traditional way.

Our friend A. oryzae works its fermenting magic on a mash of soybeans and salt (to which other grains such as barley and rice are sometimes added). This is what the little critter looks like through a high-powered microscope.

My internet searches have also turned up the interesting fact that there are many kinds of miso paste, depending on the length of fermentation. At the less fermented end of the spectrum, we have white miso, lighter in colour and taste, at the more fermented end, we have red miso, darker and with a stronger flavour, and we have different colourings in between.

As one might imagine, there are regional preferences in the colour of one’s miso paste and, by extension, one’s miso soup. We must have been eating white miso soup since that is the preferred colour in Kyoto (while red miso soup is preferred in Tokyo, for instance).

After all this, my eyelids are beginning to droop. Maybe I’ll be able to get in a few hours of sleep before the new day dawns and have sweet dreams of visiting Kyoto once more. There are more Zen gardens to visit and more miso soups to try.

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Tofukuji-south garden-1: http://kyotofreeguide-kyotofreeguide.blogspot.it/2010/04/tofukuji-temple.html
Tofukuji-south garden-2: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3930.html
Tofukuji-south garden-3: https://www.artflakes.com/en/products/japan-kyoto-tofukuji-temple-landscape-garden-1
Ryoanji garden: http://www.123rf.com/photo_21419380_zen-garden-in-ryoanji-temple.html
Tofukuji-north garden: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toufuku-ji_hojyo7.JPG
Tofukuji-west garden: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/121832697
Tofukuji east garden: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/121832672
Kenninji gardens-1: http://www.yurukaze.com/tag/kennin-ji/
Kenninji gardens-2: mine
Kenninji gardens-3: http://www.wa-pedia.com/japan-guide/kenninji_kyoto.shtml
Kenninji gardens-4: http://asian-images.photoshelter.com/image/I0000NbQQcA_e4yM
Miso soup: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lH7pgsnyGrI/maxresdefault.jpg
Aspergillus oryzae: https://sites.google.com/site/microbiologiecours/support-de-cours/mycologie
Miso pastes : http://www.thekitchn.com/the-best-type-of-miso-for-miso-soup-tips-from-the-kitchn-215117

KYOTO IN NOVEMBER

Kyoto, 13 November 2016

We read glumly about the results of the American presidential elections and their aftermath. The future looks bleak. Yet, even in this dark hour, it is impossible not to be struck by the beauty that surrounds us in Kyoto.

The paintings on the sliding doors of the temples, branches spreading over a wash of gold.

The sweep of moss, brilliant green, under the trees, in the temple gardens.

The leaves turning on the Japanese maples, early November scarlet bleeding into old summer green.

I am moved, like the Japanese poets of old, to compose a haiku.

Velvet moss greening gnarled roots,
Maples blooming red:
I weep for America.

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Sliding doors: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44858
Japanese poet: https://www.pinterest.com/reaconnell/haiku-japanese-poetry/
Other photos: ours

WORLD HERITAGE SITES – OUR LIST

Beijing, 9 March 2014

I was recently in Dubai with my wife for a long weekend. If you don’t like shopping, which I fervently do not, if you don’t get much of a kick out of visiting the tallest building in the world, which is definitely my case, if you don’t quite see the point of going skiing in a mall, which I certainly don’t, then your to-do list in Dubai is really quite short. On one side of the saltwater creek which wends its way through the middle of the city

you can visit gold and spice souqs of dubious antiquity. On the other side, you can visit a small remnant of the old town, saved, so it seems, from the wrecker’s ball by the intercession of Prince Charles with the Sheikh of Dubai. You can follow this up by a visit to the Dubai Museum, housed underneath a quaint little old fort and filled with a rather pathetic set of dioramas showing the old ways of life in the sheikhdom. A 20 minutes’ walk downcreek will bring you to the Sheikhs’ old residence (or rather, a nearly complete reconstruction of it) filled with some old photos of Dubai. You can cross from one side of the creek to the other in supposedly old wooden boats which ply the waterway. And that’s it. Of the four days that my wife and I spent in Dubai, we actually only needed two to visit the city itself. We used one of the days to visit Abu Dhabi (or rather, the planned eco-city district of Masdar) and while I was sitting in a conference my wife used another to visit Al Ain, an oasis town some two hours’ drive from Dubai.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s really very pleasant to wander around without haste, poking your nose in here and there, snapping photos of this and that, taking long lunch and coffee breaks, and enjoying mild and sunny weather. But what really got my goat was a small exhibition which we stumbled across somewhere in the souqs, which proudly announced that some time this year Dubai expected UNESCO to nominate the creek and its immediate surroundings as a World Heritage Site. Give – me – a – break! The Dubai creek a World Heritage Site?! That’s ridiculous!! For those readers who may not be familiar with this UN programme, I should explain that it implements an international convention, the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, whose purpose is to protect and conserve for present and future generations cultural heritage (monuments, groups of buildings, sites) or natural heritage (natural features, geological formations, natural sites) of outstanding universal value. Please note: outstanding universal value. Those are big, big words. Put another way, the sites which are nominated as World Heritage Sites should be so fantastic that it would be a crime for me and every other citizen in the world not to do everything in our power to protect them for future generations to marvel at. Does that describe Dubai creek? I – don’t – think – so!

I had first entertained serious doubts about the World Heritage Site listings when we went on a family holiday to Finland some ten years ago. I had seen that a church along our itinerary had been listed. Intrigued, I dragged the somewhat unwilling family to visit it (to this day, my children remind me of this and other churches I forced them to visit in Finland). What we were confronted with was a small, rustic church whose three main claims to fame were (a) that it was quite old, (b) that it was made entirely out of wood, and (c) that no nails had been used to make it … this was “outstanding universal value”?? Puh-lease! My cynicism over World Heritage Site listings only deepened over the following years as everywhere I went I came across really quite ordinary sites which had been listed. UNESCO’s convention has obviously been hijacked by the tourism industry and its hacks in Ministries of Tourism to brand national sites and raise tourism revenues. And no doubt political correctness has reared its head. It won’t do for just a few countries to have all the heritage sites of outstanding universal value, every country should be able to claim at least one …

This debasing of the World Heritage Site brand is a pity, because I think there are a number of places around the world which through some magical combination of geometry, colour, light, and siting really do have an outstanding and universal value to all of us in the world and whose preservation truly deserves the concerted attention of the global community. My wife and I put our heads together, and what follows is our list. Its main weakness is that it is based only on places which we have seen – so much of the world for us still to see …

Since Dubai got me going, I’ll start with cityscapes:

– Venice, which must be the most beautiful city in the world

– Paris, especially the part along the banks of the river Seine running from Notre Dame Cathedral to the Eiffel tower

(I find Paris to be at its best at night, when all its buildings are lit up like theatre backdrops)

– Rome, especially the Baroque part of the city

where, though, older Roman urban fabric can poke through

– The historic nucleus of Istanbul, on its peninsula jutting out into the Bosphorus

– Old Prague

– On a smaller scale, San Gimignano in Tuscany

which can stand for all those wonderful hilltop towns and villages scattered throughout central Italy (Siena, Todi, Gubbio, Assisi, Volterra, Arezzo, Perugia, Urbino, and on and on …)

– I will add Savannah in Georgia. My wife and I stumbled on the city by chance thirty years ago, and we were blown away

I wonder if I should I add Edinburgh? My wife is doubtful, but the New Town there is really very nice, with a magificent view over the Firth of Forth

and there is the dramatic backdrop of Edinburgh castle

What about Manhattan?

I’m torn. Manhattanites certainly think that the borough has outstanding universal value, non-residents may not be so sure.

After cityscapes we list a series of buildings and complexes that stand out because of the beauty of the buildings themselves, often highlighted by their siting:

– Taj Mahal, which must be one of the most sublime buildings in the world

and which can stand in for a series of wonderful Mughal edifices dotted around northern India (Fatehpur Sikri, the Mausoleum of Akbar at Sikandra, the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi, the mausoleum of Humayun, …)

– Angkor Wat

with its wonderful faces carved in the temple walls

– The rock gardens and temples of Kyoto

– The chateaux of the Loire in France, especially Chenonceau

and Azay-le-Rideau

– The Alhambra palace in Andalusia

with its typical Arab love of water

We don’t just list old buildings. We would add at least two modern buildings:

– the Sydney Opera House

– the east wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC

My wife thinks we should also list Labrang, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery-town in Sichuan

I’m not convinced that it really has outstanding universal value, yet.

I’ll add here a couple of the wonderful garden-parks which were created around some of the grander country houses in the UK in the 18^th century.

– Stowe gardens

– Fountains Abbey and Gardens

Which brings us naturally to our last list, our choices of natural heritage sites of outstanding universal value. We would start with the canyons in the American west. Rather than list the Grand Canyon, which some might consider the natural choice, we would list some of the smaller canyons:

– Bryce Canyon, especially lovely in winter, which is when we saw it:

– and Canyon de Chelly

– We are moved to list here too the Atlas mountains in Morocco. When we first saw them, we were immediately reminded of the canyonlands in the US

but what was even better was that the locals were still making their villages from the local clay so that villages seemed to grow out of the landscape

– From canyons on land to canyons on the sea, and here we found the fjords in New Zealand more striking than those in Norway

– From water to none, with the red sand dunes of Namibia

– and back to water again, with the Amazon River

– from hotter to cooler, with the high meadows of the Alps in the Trentino in Italy

– from grass to trees, in this case the truly magnificent sequoias

– and finally back to grass and water, with the Scottish Highlands

-o0o-

Well, that’s our list of cultural and natural sites which we would consider to have outstanding universal value. As I said earlier, the list is no doubt incomplete simply because there are still lots of places we haven’t visited. We’d be interested to know how readers feel about this. What sites would they put on their own list?

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ROCKS IN THE GARDEN

Beijing, 4 December 2013

The Chinese have a a strange relationship with rocks. Go to any self-respecting Chinese garden and somewhere in the twists and turns of its paths you will come nose to nose with a fantastically twisted rock standing there waiting to be admired.

The Forbidden City in Beijing has a specimen which is (of course) very large

while a number of the famous gardens in Suzhou have examples more to the human scale.

Admire them they do, the Chinese. When they catch sight of one of these rock sculptures, they will normally break into oohs and aahs, and end up – inevitably, in today’s culture in China – taking a group photo in front of said rock.

The fascination with these rock sculptures extends to internal spaces. It is very common to come across smaller (and sometimes not so smaller) versions in Ministries and other public buildings. Even in the intimate space of the scholar’s study, it was almost de rigeur for the scholar to have a small rock sculpture such as this one

sitting on his desk, among the brushes, ink stand, rice paper, and the rest of his scholarly paraphernalia.

This is not a dead art form. Chinese sculptors are continuing to create these rock sculptures, as this photo from an outdoor exhibition in Chicago attests (in this case, though, while the design principles remain the same, rock no longer seems to be the medium)

I have to assume that Chinese garden designers, like their English counterparts, were bringing the natural landscapes around them, suitably tamed, into their gardens. In the case of the rocks, the landscapes in question must surely be the karst landscapes which are common in many parts of China. This is one such landscape in Yunnan, known as the Stone Forest and famous enough to have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

(on an aside, I should note that it was visited by Lisa, of whom I have written earlier, during a trip which she took to Yunnan some six months ago; predictably, her photos of the trip included a large number of her, or her traveling companion, or her tour group, standing among the rocks)

I have to say, I don’t like these rock sculptures. I find the sheer froth of all that twisted stone to be just too much. Those whorls, those curlicues, those knobs, those piercings, the sheer grotesqueness of it all … Ugh!

This fascination with large rocks has taken on a modern twist. It has become a sign of class for any organization with pretensions of social or economic significance to have a large rock placed before its important buildings, with its name carved on it in classy Chinese characters. These rocks tend to eschew the flowery style, opting instead for a massive ponderousness which no doubt is meant to signal the solidity and power of the organization in question.

I don’t like these sculptures any better. They are just big and heavy with no redeeming features that I can see – the Chinese will sometimes get excited about the script, either because it adheres to the classical cannons of beauty for Chinese characters or because they are copies of some famous Chinese person’s script, but all that leaves me cold.

So you can imagine the relief and pleasure I felt when my wife and I came across this

in the courtyard of a museum in Suzhou, which was designed by the architect I. M. Pei (he of the East Wing of the National Art Gallery in Washington D.C.). Here at last was a rock sculpture in China which I could relate to, spare, simple, clean of line, yet able to evoke beautifully its subject, a range of mountains in the distance.

It is that same spare style which made me fall in love so many years ago with Japanese rock gardens which my wife and I visited in Kyoto during a trip to Japan. Here are pictures of some of the more beautiful of these gardens.

When I saw these gardens, I vowed that some day, somewhere, I would make my own rock garden. I had to wait 15 years before I got my chance, in Vienna, in a corner of the large balcony which wrapped itself around our apartment. I bought the small stones in a garden store, I found two largish stones in the woods around Vienna (I nearly bust a gut carrying them to the car and then up the stairs to the balcony), and I strategically placed two small plants (also bought in the garden store) behind these stones. I cut saw teeth into a plywood plank to make a rough rake, and then I lovingly raked the small stones around the large stones to create a vision of ripples around rocky islets. The result was really not bad, even if I say so myself.

But we left the apartment, and with death in my heart I had to abandon my rock garden. But some day, somewhere, I’ll make another one, to contemplate it in my old age with peace in my heart.

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Rock sculpture in the Forbidden City-2: http://www.annapoynter.net/pictures/China/IMG_2011.JPG [in http://www.annapoynter.net/Holidays.html%5D
Rock sculpture Suzhou-1: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3016/2901558799_c71f5ea4d5_z.jpg [in http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangenation/2901558799/%5D
Rock sculpture Suzhou-2: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/20090905_Suzhou_Lion_Grove_Garden_4502.jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_garden%5D
Rock sculpture Suzhou-3: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/2984134.jpg [in http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2984134%5D
Scholar’s stone: http://www.mrlei.com/images/134/1.jpg [in http://www.mrlei.com/item.php?cat=rock&lang=%5D
Stone forest Yunnan: http://31.media.tumblr.com/54195fa03584bc1fbc2a488da1fb12d9/tumblr_mhd5vjD4wl1s2zxumo5_1280.jpg [in http://viajes-por-el-mundo.tumblr.com/post/41747655074/viajes-por-el-mundo-capitulo-81-karst-de%5D
Rock in front of building-1: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_pxr81FiVJcw/SsHJAmLcQEI/AAAAAAAAAQU/6bdhavyfVu4/s320/IMG_1209.JPG [in http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html%5D
Rock sculpture in Chicago: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yHQ9FxAo-ZQ/TW0pQdVNXkI/AAAAAAAAcUM/LodlhBZ5_y8/s1600/LI-sculp-MP-007b.jpg [in http://chicago-outdoor-sculptures.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html%5D
Rock landscape Suzhou IM Pei Museum: http://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/files/2010/03/full-rocklandscape.jpg [in http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/i-m-pei/image-gallery-of-the-suzhou-museum/1570/%5D
Kyoto Nanzenji rock garden: http://www.lexaloffle.com/img2/jrg1.jpg [in http://www.lexaloffle.com/jrg.htm%5D
Kyoto Ryoanji: http://famouswonders.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Ryoanji-Rock-Garden.jpg in [http://famouswonders.com/ryoanji-rock-garden/]
Kyoto Ryogen-in rock gardens: http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/ryogen-in-zen-rock-garden–kyoto-japan-daniel-hagerman.jpg [in http://fineartamerica.com/featured/ryogen-in-zen-rock-garden–kyoto-japan-daniel-hagerman.html%5D
Kyoto Tofukuji rock garden: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bWbsTZVSaLw/S8uzFo1o2mI/AAAAAAAAAO4/tq11td38q3I/s1600/april-13+141.jpg [in http://kyotofreeguide-kyotofreeguide.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html%5D
Kyoto Totekiko rock garden: http://muza-chan.net/aj/poze-weblog2/totekiko-garden-ryogen-in-temple-kyoto-big.jpg [in http://muza-chan.net/japan/index.php/blog/smallest-japanese-zen-rock-garden-japan%5D

TEMPLES IN LAOS

Luang Prabang, 20 February 2013

I must confess to a certain weakness for the Buddhist temples in this part of the world. I first came across them nearly thirty years ago (Good Lord, is it really that long ago?) when my wife and I visited Japan. My photos of that trip are packed away with all the rest of our stuff in Vienna, so I’ve borrowed a few pictures from the web to refresh my memory, all from Kyoto, a wonderful place. This is Kiyomizu-ji.

But probably the most iconic temple of them all in Kyoto is Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

Look at that delicate architectural tracery embedded so naturally, so lightly, in the surrounding greenery.

Many years later, my wife and I saw another style of Buddhist temple in Bangkok during a brief stay there on our way to Angkor Wat. This is Wat Benchamabophit:

And this Wat Ratchanatdaram:

And then, once here in China, we saw yet another style, a heavier, more “imperial” style. The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is one of the nicer examples.

All quite different. But I think you will agree that there is a common thread: the raking of the roofs. I don’t know what it is, but this lift of a roof at its tip really gives a wonderful grace to a building, even a rather heavy, stodgy building like the Temple of Heaven.

So it was with pleasure that we saw this again in Laos, first in Vientiane:

Then in Luang Prabang:

I saw other things that warmed the cockles of my heart, like this for instance:

This is where I can refer the reader back to my previous post. What we’re seeing is the similar use of paintings to educate the faithful in two places that are nearly 9,000 kilometres apart. The Italians have an expression for this, tutto il mondo è paese, the whole world is but a village; in the end, we’re all the same wherever we live. In the previous post, it was my young daughter who was illiterate. In this case, it was me – and alas, I had no-one who could explain the story which the paintings were telling.

We also liked the way that the temples had different roofs piled one on the other.

It quite reminded us of the stave churches in Norway, several of which we had visited some five years ago:

Tutto il mondo è paese.

We also liked a certain set of Buddha statues that we came across. These are in the “praying for rain” position:

And these are in the “no war” position:

Well, I suppose that’s what we all want, isn’t it? We want to eat our fill and live in peace.

Tutto il mondo è paese.

_______________________________

Kyoto-temple-1: http://anime.aplus.by/uploads/posts/2011-01/1293979203_xigasiyama.jpg
Kyoto-temple-2: http://www.gadventures.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Kyoto_GoldenTemple.jpg
Bangkok-temple-1: http://misto-market.com.ua/turizm/images/interestplace/98/1.jpg
Bangkok-temple-2: http://travel-tips.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/holidays-Bangkok-Thailand-hotel-package-deal-travel-tips-guide-Wat-Ratchanatdaram-Temple.jpg
Temple of heaven: http://templeofheavenbeijing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Temple-of-Heaven.jpg
Norwegian stave church: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llqkm5GrsA1qzxqgco1_1280.jpg

the other pictures: mine