Wednesday, June 16, 2010


A KYOTO Past Revisited

While backing up files from an old computer, I chanced upon an old article I wrote for a news magazine in 2001 - the year of my first visit to Kyoto. Having just come back from a trip to Kyoto last May, it's funny how so little has changed in nine years. Even as I prepare to update my previous post on Kyoto on this blog with new information on ryokans and a few other temples, I thought of sharing this old article with everyone in the meantime. Photos have also been updated - digital files this time compared to the earlier scans from film in the older post.



To see a World in a Grain of Sand.
A Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
            - William Blake

With these lines began a boyhood obsession with Eastern mysticism and a grown man’s journey through the sacred cities of the Orient. It is a search for an enlightened mind and a pilgrimage that inevitably leads the spiritual traveler to the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto.

Visiting Kyoto was as much a journey to view the beautiful autumn foliage in this city of gardens as it was a chance to seek satori – the Zen Buddhist experience of the universal unity of reality. But, I suspect, that like me, first-time visitors expecting to find the Kyoto of their imagination will be disappointed with the glass and steel modernity of the central train station and the concrete monstrosity of downtown luxury hotels and shopping malls. Kyoto is, after all, a modern metropolis, and as one of Japan’s most popular travel destinations, dodging tourists that spill in and out of the station can be as exasperating as a Zen koan – those hopelessly unfathomable riddles ( “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”) that either lead to a state of bliss or severe brain damage.


Depending on your state of mind, choice of location and sense of timing, the city can seem either like a tourist trap bursting at the seams or a peaceful backwater town forgotten by time. Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in the city’s most famous landmark – the Kiyumizu-dera. Thousands of tourists every day visit the vast grounds for a postcard view of the temple and pagoda framed by the mountains and high-rise buildings in the distance. It is the most popular view of Kyoto and also the saddest. Each year the skyline is giving way to another office building or communications tower, and traditional tea houses and homes around the temple are being leveled to make way for pachinko parlors, Starbucks coffee shops and karaoke clubs.


But there is still a Kyoto for those who prefer to wander off the beaten track. This is the Kyoto best experienced in its winding back roads and always just after sunrise and before sunset – those times of day tour operators avoid most.  In the back alleys that are often overlooked by the invading Lonely Planet tribe, you will find the Kyoto of Zen monks  and wobbling rickshaws, of  the wooden machiya houses of craftsmen and cobblestone lanes - a whole part of the city that feels frozen in medieval times.  But, above all, it is the sight of a passing geisha that adds the final touch of authenticity to the scene.  From a high of thousands in their heyday, the geisha population of Kyoto today has dropped to just around a hundred.

Modern values and the sinking economy have deflated the once lively geisha tradition and turned it into a luxury that only an inner circle of wealthy patrons can afford and an oddity for a new generation of Japanese youth. Foreigners interested in catching a glimpse of the geisha will have to be satisfied with the rare public appearance she makes.  After all, hers is a world that is off limits to the gaijin – a world that is a metaphor for Kyoto - a city and people that opens its arms to the traveler, but never its soul.  Which is precisely what makes this city so enchanting and my search for its soul more exciting. 


There are over two-thousand temples and gardens all over Kyoto and I chose to begin my search in Ryoan-ji. The temple is home to the Rinzai school of Zen and within it is perhaps one of the most photographed dry stone landscape gardens of Japan. But its location on the western hills of Kyoto makes it one of the most difficult to reach on foot. On off-peak season and weekdays, Ryoan-ji is transformed into sanctuary of solitude. Alone for hours, I sit in meditation - zazen-style - on the verandah overlooking fifteen rocks adrift in a sea of nothingness: intricately shaped gravel that resemble waves under the shadows of the early sun.  They say that if you stare at the garden long enough with an empty mind the wisdom of the universe will be revealed.  I think of Blake and how the words of his poem come alive in the raked simplicity of Ryoan-ji.


After more than a dozen temples my spiritual journey ends at the Daitoku-ji. This complex of 24 sub-temples is a maze of pathways and courtyards that lead from one temple to the next.  Here, I find my private garden and personal courtyard in Koto-in where for an hour under the dying autumn light I watch the star-shaped momiji, those intensely red maple leaves, fall from their branches like tiny kites into the moss-covered garden. Sitting silently, lost in thought, I hear in my mind the words of Ryokan - that most loved of Zen poets: “Abandoning worldliness…I often come to this tranquil place – the spirit here is Zen.”  And indeed, for at least this one fleeting moment in the shadow of a weeping willow, I catch a glimpse of Kyoto’s elusive soul.