15 October 2011
It's just a rumor
that this is a small pine,
these are actually the branches of a tall pine
that hold up the clouds.
-Honen Shonin
October 13 marked a month since our arrival. Japanese language skills not much improved, but increasing familiarity with Kyoto, and our neighborhood (and Japanese manners etc), makes day-to-day life relatively smooth. Since it was a teaching day for Win, I set off for the famous hillside temple, Kiomizu-dera. It was quite mobbed, but the main hall is a grand sight - a huge wooden structure with a large veranda hanging over the hillside, supported by over a hundred wooden pillars 15m high. Wonderful views of Kyoto. The photo is one of the smaller buildings.
The next picture is of school girls (who have just visited the "love stone" which is two stones about 18 meter apart and if you can walk accurately between them with your eyes closed you wish for love will be fulfilled). Japanese temples and shrines abound with ways of making wishes and sending prayers. I saw one in which you wrote a wish on a paper doll and put it in a tub of water. When the paper dissolves you wish comes true. The next photo shows people drinking from the sacred Otawa-no-taki spring which is felt to have therapeutic properties.
In the evening we were given a "welcome" dinner by Win's department at a very nice restaurant, Manzara Hon. Very nice food, especially the abalone stew, and a very delicate dumpling sort of thing in broth. Conversation not always the easiest.
I saw an old Japanese silent film (I Was Born, but...from 1932) on Thursday at the International Center with Hou, a Chinese woman who lives in the building. She speaks Japanese pretty well, but barely English, so it was not too easy to communicate. She has been in Japan for a long while with her husband, who is in Asian Social Studies and interested in something like whether an EU model would be feasible for Asian countries...
Friday was mostly Japanese lessons. I think we are supposed to be able to learn Hiragana pretty quickly but 48 characters is too many for me! I keep trying to think how each sound goes with some visual mnemonic but that doesn't work very well. At least three characters look like mice and way more than that look like kites.
Today we were invited for a visit to the Urasenke Chado Research Center, a school devoted to the study of the way of the tea. It was a special occasion for foreign visitors. We were treated very graciously, given a short talk about the tea ceremony, a demonstration by students of the school (who were variously from Poland, Jamaica, South America, Finland etc), and then served an appropriate fall sweet and matcha tea. The study of tea is from the Japanese perspective a life time endeavor. It fits with the ideas of tranquility, harmony, graciousness.
After lunch we headed to another famous temple, Chion-in, where we understood there would be a crafts flea market on the 15th of the month. Perhaps the on and off rain, or the timing, or something else, but no market in evidence. (I later found out I had confused Chion-in Temple with Chion-ji Temple where indeed there is a crafts market every month. An honest mistake.) Instead bus load upon bus load of Japanese heading in groups to the temple to partake in various ceremonies, including beating wooden drums (hundreds of these) while sitting on the floor, chanting of monks and so on. We could not quite figure out the meaning of the occasion, but it certainly gave one the feel of being in the midst of a pilgrimage of some sort. The temple and the gardens are very beautiful. The 4th photograph shows some monks chanting prayers, and the last were the participants sitting on the floor drumming and the monks up in front. The small sculpture is of Honen who founded the Pure Land Buddhist sect.
Love to all-
No comments:
Post a Comment