2001-07-24 - 2:59 p.m.
I wasn't even thinking about nothingness (part 2)

Today we had to get up bright and early to go to Myoshinji, a very old and venerated Buddhist temple. My mom insisted that I wear something "appropriately covering" for a house of worhsip, which my shorts and tank tops apparently were not, so I wore a larger t-shirt and jeans.

It was really, really fucking hot. Also, it was full of tourists wearing much less than we were. But that is my fighting mind, not my true Buddha nature, talking.

We found our way to the famous garden therein, which was actually several gardens and cost 400 yen ($3.75 or so) to get into. The first thing you find along the path is what I can only assume is a small cemetary. Lines of headstones with stone paths in between. By the entrance is a statue of Buddha with three babies (don:t ask me), with a pool of water in front of him into which some tourists had tossed a few 10-yen coins. People had left small offerings on and around the headstones. A few had left flowers, but most headstones had little containers of water on them, glasses, teacups, coffee mugs, and at least one beer can... There were also plenty of candles, many of them melted by the sun and lying on the ground like worms stranded aboveground after a rain.

I walked around the shady part barefoot for a while, which was nice in the heat. It made me even more aware of the ants swarming all over the place. Big ants, serious critters, maybe not as big as Florida insects but big enough to hold their own with our own campus ants. Loving and protecting all creation requires that you try very hard not to squish any of it, so I had to step very carefully. After a while I put my shoes back on and proceeded to the next part of the garden.

There are two rock gardens at Myoshinji, with a wide path running between them: The Yin Garden and the Yang Garden. The brochure says that "The relationship between the Yin and Yang Gardens is subtle." Going by the usual definition of the words, the Yang is the bright, active garden; the Yin is the dark, earthy, feminine garden. The Yang Garden has large gray stones and spots of green plants placed like islands in an ocean of light, almost white pebbles (as you stand by this garden, you can just hear the rushing water of the waterfall below it). The Yin Garden is made of darker pebbles, with the same combination of stones and "islands" of greenery, but the relationship of the features and the background is slightly different. The concentric cirles raked into the sand around the stones look like waves lapping against them in the Yang Garden; in the Yin Garden, they look like ripples, or even some kind of shock waves--the effect is as if the stones had just been dropped into the tranquil garden, rather than being a part of a sea of motion as in the Yang Garden.

Below these, the path leads down, past the tourist souvenir booth and the restrooms (where I got a much-needed drink of water), to benches that afford a view of the waterfall that could only be heard before. I won:t try to describe the waterfall. It was a waterfall in one of the most famous gardens in Kyoto; draw your own conclusions. Koi (colourful carp--think really big goldfish for a visual) were swimming in abundance in the pool at the bottom. I knelt on the stone half-bridge on the water to get a closer look at them. They came up to the surface, since they thought I was going to feed them. Beautiful.

(Digression: On the street last night, we passed a pet shop. At first, we noticed that there was a bat in the cage outside--pretty exotic. Then we noticed the cage under it, which contained a CAPYBARA. For those of you who don:t know, capybara are the largest rodents in the world. I:d seen some before, from far away at a zoo or something. This one was right in front of us. I had some small inkling of how it must be to see a komodo dragon [cf. Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine], because, you have to understand, this was basically a hamster, only it was *two and a half feet long.* Holy shit, man. And they were keeping it in a cage, which I just don:t want to think about.)

When I sat on one of the benches, ants decided my toes were a great place to be and started hanging out there a lot. They seemed to be nibbling on me, and I realized that I might in fact *be* food, since my toes were covered with dead skin cells. They were just trying to establish a nice little symbiotic relationship with me. I declined their offer as gently as I could. Love and protect all creation, but that doesn:t mean you have to let them eat you.

My time:s almost up, and I didn:t get to say some of the interesting stuff about the language barrier that I had saved up for today. Oh well.

Sayonara, capybara.

[edited 1/1/03]

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