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Apr. 30th, 2012
April 28: Second day in Kyoto
Apr. 30th, 2012 07:25 pmI forgot to mention that breakfast isn’t included in our stay at the temple, but there’s a local 24-hour Chinese restaurant a short walk from the temple complex. Yesterday’s breakfast was spring rolls and shumai (Chinese-style dumplings); today’s was sautéed pork. Both meals were savory and filling, and a great start to the day. Like many other non-North American cultures, Japanese culture doesn’t have dedicated breakfast foods (e.g., cereal, bagels), so you can generally eat pretty much anything you’d get at other times of day, though as we learned at Sosuki, a typical breakfast includes rice, beans, soup or porridge, and additional protein in the form of tofu or eggs.
Today we planned to participate in a meditation lesson with one of our hosts, Kawakami Takafumi. He’s the vice-abbot of the temple complex, educated in the U.S. and with an American wife (Hilary, if I’m remembering correctly) and brand-new baby daughter. I’ve meditated twice in my life: The first time was when I was a teen. I taught myself to make my migraines go away by sitting in the dark, since my eyes tend to be my dominant sense, and seize upon any input and use it as an excuse to think about what I’m seeing. I would concentrate on a pond with ripples that matched the throbbing of my headache, and over time, imagine the ripples gradually stilling, and by the time I succeeded and created the image of a flat, perfectly reflecting pool, my headache would be gone. But this was a very deliberate and conscious effort. The second time was during late university, when I studied Yoshinkan aikido, and every session in the dojo began and ended with a brief period of meditation. But there, the goal was to review what we had already learned so we could apply it to the day’s new lessons, and then to review the day’s lessons and make them part of our skill set. So again, it was a highly active form of meditation.
Warning about the next few paragraphs: I will be interpreting what our host said in light of my own preconceptions, and possibly without adequate caffeine flowing through my veins, so inevitably I will miss some of the nuances of his argument and possibly misinterpret or overextend what he told us. Caveat lector.
Reverend Kawakami taught us several important things about zen Buddhism, including clearing up some misconceptions I’d held for many years. For one thing, my only previous experience with zen was from the Japanese martial arts tradition, which takes a somewhat nihilistic view of the world. For example, one of the standard warrior dogmas is that you cannot be a successful samurai if you do not consider yourself already dead, since otherwise you’ll be more interested about staying alive than making sure the other guy gets dead. (That’s an oversimplification, but it’s the way I learned aspects of the budo code when I was younger.)
Reverend Kawakami provided a very different take on zen from the impression I’d acquired over the years. Specifically, he emphasized that zen recognizes the transience and impermanence of life, and reminds us that no matter how hard we cling to the present or strive to grasp the future, both will always slip from our grasp and become the past. Thus, it is essential that we learn to live in the moment and appreciate that moment; learning that lesson is one of the uses of meditation. Another key aspect of meditiation is learning to surrender the ego (something that is often incorrectly perceived as withdrawal from the concerns of the world to avoid dealing with them) and simply accept what comes to you as you meditate rather than trying to consciously include or exclude aspects of experience. It’s therefore a way of seeking awareness rather than a way of withdrawing from the world and extinguishing your awareness.
We did two 15-minute meditation sessions, the first of which was significantly difficult because it’s rare for me to relinquish the constant desire to consciously evaluate what just happened and what I’ll be doing in the coming hours. The second time was easier but still a challenge; 50 years of learned reflexes can’t be overcome in 30 minutes. I already take naps at mid-day to recharge my brain, but although they’re restful, they’re not relaxing in the same way as meditation; I chose the word “relaxing” deliberately, because meditation (to me) is like releasing an overtightened muscle. It’s an interestingly different way of experiencing time, and one I hope to become better acquainted with in coming weeks.
Reverend Kawakami also confirmed that I’d developed a correct understanding of karma, which he portrayed as a form of cause and effect—literally, a law of consequences—rather than the kind of punishment and reward perspective seen in religions such as Christianity and Hinduism (e.g., the “karmic wheel”). In that context, “right action” (dharma) becomes a way of acting in a way that will produce more and better choices with good consequences rather than unnecessarily narrowing the options available to you in the future. The goal is right action for its own sake, not because of some perceived posthumous reward or punishment. One of the common errors that lead to bad action is trying to hold on to the present (e.g., retain your wealth and possessions) rather than accepting the present’s impermanence and evaluating your choices on that basis.
Although our choices progressively narrow as we get older and less of our life remains, we still have the power to choose better options for ourselves in the future. And this, to him, is the essence of zen Buddhism: making awareness an ongoing part of your life by appreciating and responding to every moment. He also noted perils of treating life as a series of rituals rather than meanings. He made a surprisingly pointed comment that you can tell what kind of Buddhist school of thought guides the life of a temple by examining how they treat the Buddha: the schools (including his) that believe in living in accordance with the Buddha’s guidelines tend to display small statues of the Buddha because they treat the Buddha as a wise man to be emulated, not as a divine being to be worshipped, whereas the schools that emphasize ritual tend to have larger statues that treat the Buddha as divine. (He clearly preferred the former approach.) It fascinates me how a similar schism has arisen in every religion I’m familiar with.
Today our first goal was to visit the Tenryu-ji temple on the slopes of the mountains that mark the western edge of Kyoto. It’s Yet Another Beautiful Shrine… and proof that we’re burning out a bit on temples, which Lonely Planet warns is a significant risk in Kyoto. The city has something like 1600 major ones and countless minor ones, and without profound knowledge of the subtleties of iconography, the differences are often obscure and tend to blur. We wandered around for a while and enjoyed ourselves, but nothing really stood out. This is one of those cases where a really good tour guide can enhance your appreciation of the experience. A secondary reason to go was to see the bamboo forest near the shrine, which is indeed lovely… once you get past the weirdness of the notion of a wood-hard grass that reaches tree height. The bamboo does lovely things to the light that can’t really be captured on film.
A second reason to make the train trip to western Kyoto was the Japanese macaque sanctuary just across the river from the temple. (Henceforth, “monkeys”, since that’s much easier to spell than “macaques”.) The sanctuary is a stiff climb up steep slopes to the top of one of the foothills of the western mountains. Fortunately, most of the trails are shaded, but I still arrived pouring sweat. You start seeing monkeys just outside the sanctuary proper, but you’re warned not to feed them or stare at them, and asked not to photograph them. For photography, they want tourists to reach the top of the hill, where there are staff who know the monkeys well and keep them in order, while also stopping the dumb tourists from doing dumb tourist things that would get them bitten or that would harm the monkeys.
There are currently around 140 of the monkeys, and each is named and clearly identified so they can be studied by researchers, but they’re free-roaming within the sanctuary and clearly hang out in one area to put on a show for the tourists. When you reach the top, you walk across an open area filled with monkeys waiting to be fed and enter a smallish shelter with screen windows in which you can escape the sun and watch the monkeys up close, from a distance of a foot or so. The gaps in the screen are large enough for the monkeys to put their hands through, and you can feed them fruits and nuts provided by the staff. (I assume they sell these to raise funds to keep the sanctuary going, but didn’t investigate.)
Monkeys are a ton of fun because… well… they’re monkeys. What more needs be said than that they look like us in miniature? The comparison is sometimes misleading, but true more often than you’d expect. We didn’t see any adult males that I noticed, possibly since they tend to be more aggressive and the staff probably keeps them away from tourists. But there were bunches of youngsters. Not sure how old they would be, but old enough to be roaming around on their own and competing with the adult females for solid food and old enough that the adults didn’t seem to show any guilt over chasing them away from choice morsels of food. Midway through our visit, the staff decided it was feeding time, so they played some hyperactive music while the keepers roamed around with buckets of what appeared to be nuts and grapes, scattering them about while the monkeys chased after the best morsels and we tourists stood around, smiling and getting in the way.
We would have stayed longer, but had to get to our new accommodations on the eastern side of town, which meant returning to the temple by rail, hiking up to the temple from the train station, getting our bags, hiking back down to the station to catch a crosstown bus that originated there, busing up to the new place, then phoning our hostess (Yasuko) from a phone booth. She came to get us in her car, which barely had room for the three of us and our hiking backpacks. But it was a lovely touch because even though it was only about a 15-minute hike up the hill, it was an *uphill* hike, and after a full day of hiking in the hot sun, the last thing we wanted to do was add another tough slog.
The Yonbanchi minshuku is a compact little place, with three bedrooms (two for guests) each big enough for two futons with a little space left over, a single bathroom, a living/dining room, a tiny kitchen off to one side, and a shower in the backyard. It’s not as elegant as the last two places we stayed, but it definitely has its charms, including the fact that it’s more than 150 years old and was a former samurai’s house. Also, Divyam (French and English) and Yasuko (Japanese and English) are charming and enthusiastic hosts. Our room is on the second floor, beside the hosts’ room, and reached by a flight of stairs steep enough to give a ladder some competition for verticality. Bamboo handrails and a couple strategically placed bamboo handholds make it possible to ascend and descend safely, and there’s a motion sensor that turns on a light if you need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and can’t remember where the light switch might be. The front yard is walled off from the street by an old wall made of wattle and bamboo (which we can see because part of it is damaged), and the lock on the sliding door that leads to the street is the kind of thing a vigorous 10-year-old could kick open—or pick with a hairpin if the kid were more ambitious. Seems to be the kind of neighborhood where a greater level of security is unnecessary.
Dinner was at Goya, an Okinawan “fusion” place located a stiff 15-minute walk downhill to the local restaurant row. The main differences from Japanese cuisine seem to be a greater use of strong pepper and the addition of bitter melon, which tastes exactly as the name suggests. I don’t think I’d want to eat it by itself, but as part of a stirfry it was nicely different. Dinner was washed down with Yebisu black beer, a dark malt with a delicious caramel and licorice finish. Desert was chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream from the local “Lawson’s” store, a 7/11 competitor. The futons were comfortable, and the pillows were stuffed with something about the size of barley, which was comfortable and made for a good night’s sleep.
Probably the last post for some time, since we leave shortly for the airport and may not be able to post again before Vancouver airport. (I think there’s free wi-fi in Narita airport.)
Today we planned to participate in a meditation lesson with one of our hosts, Kawakami Takafumi. He’s the vice-abbot of the temple complex, educated in the U.S. and with an American wife (Hilary, if I’m remembering correctly) and brand-new baby daughter. I’ve meditated twice in my life: The first time was when I was a teen. I taught myself to make my migraines go away by sitting in the dark, since my eyes tend to be my dominant sense, and seize upon any input and use it as an excuse to think about what I’m seeing. I would concentrate on a pond with ripples that matched the throbbing of my headache, and over time, imagine the ripples gradually stilling, and by the time I succeeded and created the image of a flat, perfectly reflecting pool, my headache would be gone. But this was a very deliberate and conscious effort. The second time was during late university, when I studied Yoshinkan aikido, and every session in the dojo began and ended with a brief period of meditation. But there, the goal was to review what we had already learned so we could apply it to the day’s new lessons, and then to review the day’s lessons and make them part of our skill set. So again, it was a highly active form of meditation.
Warning about the next few paragraphs: I will be interpreting what our host said in light of my own preconceptions, and possibly without adequate caffeine flowing through my veins, so inevitably I will miss some of the nuances of his argument and possibly misinterpret or overextend what he told us. Caveat lector.
Reverend Kawakami taught us several important things about zen Buddhism, including clearing up some misconceptions I’d held for many years. For one thing, my only previous experience with zen was from the Japanese martial arts tradition, which takes a somewhat nihilistic view of the world. For example, one of the standard warrior dogmas is that you cannot be a successful samurai if you do not consider yourself already dead, since otherwise you’ll be more interested about staying alive than making sure the other guy gets dead. (That’s an oversimplification, but it’s the way I learned aspects of the budo code when I was younger.)
Reverend Kawakami provided a very different take on zen from the impression I’d acquired over the years. Specifically, he emphasized that zen recognizes the transience and impermanence of life, and reminds us that no matter how hard we cling to the present or strive to grasp the future, both will always slip from our grasp and become the past. Thus, it is essential that we learn to live in the moment and appreciate that moment; learning that lesson is one of the uses of meditation. Another key aspect of meditiation is learning to surrender the ego (something that is often incorrectly perceived as withdrawal from the concerns of the world to avoid dealing with them) and simply accept what comes to you as you meditate rather than trying to consciously include or exclude aspects of experience. It’s therefore a way of seeking awareness rather than a way of withdrawing from the world and extinguishing your awareness.
We did two 15-minute meditation sessions, the first of which was significantly difficult because it’s rare for me to relinquish the constant desire to consciously evaluate what just happened and what I’ll be doing in the coming hours. The second time was easier but still a challenge; 50 years of learned reflexes can’t be overcome in 30 minutes. I already take naps at mid-day to recharge my brain, but although they’re restful, they’re not relaxing in the same way as meditation; I chose the word “relaxing” deliberately, because meditation (to me) is like releasing an overtightened muscle. It’s an interestingly different way of experiencing time, and one I hope to become better acquainted with in coming weeks.
Reverend Kawakami also confirmed that I’d developed a correct understanding of karma, which he portrayed as a form of cause and effect—literally, a law of consequences—rather than the kind of punishment and reward perspective seen in religions such as Christianity and Hinduism (e.g., the “karmic wheel”). In that context, “right action” (dharma) becomes a way of acting in a way that will produce more and better choices with good consequences rather than unnecessarily narrowing the options available to you in the future. The goal is right action for its own sake, not because of some perceived posthumous reward or punishment. One of the common errors that lead to bad action is trying to hold on to the present (e.g., retain your wealth and possessions) rather than accepting the present’s impermanence and evaluating your choices on that basis.
Although our choices progressively narrow as we get older and less of our life remains, we still have the power to choose better options for ourselves in the future. And this, to him, is the essence of zen Buddhism: making awareness an ongoing part of your life by appreciating and responding to every moment. He also noted perils of treating life as a series of rituals rather than meanings. He made a surprisingly pointed comment that you can tell what kind of Buddhist school of thought guides the life of a temple by examining how they treat the Buddha: the schools (including his) that believe in living in accordance with the Buddha’s guidelines tend to display small statues of the Buddha because they treat the Buddha as a wise man to be emulated, not as a divine being to be worshipped, whereas the schools that emphasize ritual tend to have larger statues that treat the Buddha as divine. (He clearly preferred the former approach.) It fascinates me how a similar schism has arisen in every religion I’m familiar with.
Today our first goal was to visit the Tenryu-ji temple on the slopes of the mountains that mark the western edge of Kyoto. It’s Yet Another Beautiful Shrine… and proof that we’re burning out a bit on temples, which Lonely Planet warns is a significant risk in Kyoto. The city has something like 1600 major ones and countless minor ones, and without profound knowledge of the subtleties of iconography, the differences are often obscure and tend to blur. We wandered around for a while and enjoyed ourselves, but nothing really stood out. This is one of those cases where a really good tour guide can enhance your appreciation of the experience. A secondary reason to go was to see the bamboo forest near the shrine, which is indeed lovely… once you get past the weirdness of the notion of a wood-hard grass that reaches tree height. The bamboo does lovely things to the light that can’t really be captured on film.
A second reason to make the train trip to western Kyoto was the Japanese macaque sanctuary just across the river from the temple. (Henceforth, “monkeys”, since that’s much easier to spell than “macaques”.) The sanctuary is a stiff climb up steep slopes to the top of one of the foothills of the western mountains. Fortunately, most of the trails are shaded, but I still arrived pouring sweat. You start seeing monkeys just outside the sanctuary proper, but you’re warned not to feed them or stare at them, and asked not to photograph them. For photography, they want tourists to reach the top of the hill, where there are staff who know the monkeys well and keep them in order, while also stopping the dumb tourists from doing dumb tourist things that would get them bitten or that would harm the monkeys.
There are currently around 140 of the monkeys, and each is named and clearly identified so they can be studied by researchers, but they’re free-roaming within the sanctuary and clearly hang out in one area to put on a show for the tourists. When you reach the top, you walk across an open area filled with monkeys waiting to be fed and enter a smallish shelter with screen windows in which you can escape the sun and watch the monkeys up close, from a distance of a foot or so. The gaps in the screen are large enough for the monkeys to put their hands through, and you can feed them fruits and nuts provided by the staff. (I assume they sell these to raise funds to keep the sanctuary going, but didn’t investigate.)
Monkeys are a ton of fun because… well… they’re monkeys. What more needs be said than that they look like us in miniature? The comparison is sometimes misleading, but true more often than you’d expect. We didn’t see any adult males that I noticed, possibly since they tend to be more aggressive and the staff probably keeps them away from tourists. But there were bunches of youngsters. Not sure how old they would be, but old enough to be roaming around on their own and competing with the adult females for solid food and old enough that the adults didn’t seem to show any guilt over chasing them away from choice morsels of food. Midway through our visit, the staff decided it was feeding time, so they played some hyperactive music while the keepers roamed around with buckets of what appeared to be nuts and grapes, scattering them about while the monkeys chased after the best morsels and we tourists stood around, smiling and getting in the way.
We would have stayed longer, but had to get to our new accommodations on the eastern side of town, which meant returning to the temple by rail, hiking up to the temple from the train station, getting our bags, hiking back down to the station to catch a crosstown bus that originated there, busing up to the new place, then phoning our hostess (Yasuko) from a phone booth. She came to get us in her car, which barely had room for the three of us and our hiking backpacks. But it was a lovely touch because even though it was only about a 15-minute hike up the hill, it was an *uphill* hike, and after a full day of hiking in the hot sun, the last thing we wanted to do was add another tough slog.
The Yonbanchi minshuku is a compact little place, with three bedrooms (two for guests) each big enough for two futons with a little space left over, a single bathroom, a living/dining room, a tiny kitchen off to one side, and a shower in the backyard. It’s not as elegant as the last two places we stayed, but it definitely has its charms, including the fact that it’s more than 150 years old and was a former samurai’s house. Also, Divyam (French and English) and Yasuko (Japanese and English) are charming and enthusiastic hosts. Our room is on the second floor, beside the hosts’ room, and reached by a flight of stairs steep enough to give a ladder some competition for verticality. Bamboo handrails and a couple strategically placed bamboo handholds make it possible to ascend and descend safely, and there’s a motion sensor that turns on a light if you need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and can’t remember where the light switch might be. The front yard is walled off from the street by an old wall made of wattle and bamboo (which we can see because part of it is damaged), and the lock on the sliding door that leads to the street is the kind of thing a vigorous 10-year-old could kick open—or pick with a hairpin if the kid were more ambitious. Seems to be the kind of neighborhood where a greater level of security is unnecessary.
Dinner was at Goya, an Okinawan “fusion” place located a stiff 15-minute walk downhill to the local restaurant row. The main differences from Japanese cuisine seem to be a greater use of strong pepper and the addition of bitter melon, which tastes exactly as the name suggests. I don’t think I’d want to eat it by itself, but as part of a stirfry it was nicely different. Dinner was washed down with Yebisu black beer, a dark malt with a delicious caramel and licorice finish. Desert was chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream from the local “Lawson’s” store, a 7/11 competitor. The futons were comfortable, and the pillows were stuffed with something about the size of barley, which was comfortable and made for a good night’s sleep.
Probably the last post for some time, since we leave shortly for the airport and may not be able to post again before Vancouver airport. (I think there’s free wi-fi in Narita airport.)