Zen gardening

There’s not a lot of Zen in a Zen garden. At least not when you are surrounded by hordes of snap happy tourists, fresh off the coach armed with sun visors and umbrellas. All noisily pondering the meaning of the carefully placed rocks in the carefully raked sand pit, or perhaps just noisily discussing how the noodles were at lunch. Either way, noisily.

Then there is the wildlife: Large flying wind-up beetles revving and squawking away like canaries on motorbikes, butterflies that look like flying ewoks and mosquitoes. You can’t get any peace anywhere when there is a mosquito around, and during the humid days we were in Kyoto there were mosquitoes. Lots of them.

It is also difficult to gaze at the sand and rock scenes long enough to clear the mind or solve the riddle without getting photo guilt. The guilt you get when you know that you are spoiling other people’s photos by standing in the background, or next to them, or directly in front of the temple. But in a Zen garden in Kyoto in summer you simply can’t get out of the way. Instead, you quickly shuffle along the carefully trimmed path hemmed in by bamboo fences. Stunning as the temples and picturesque as the gardens may be, a stroll through a Zen garden isn’t quite the same meditative experience as it was for the masters of old.

But, there are those who appear to be having a Zen time of it. The Zen gardeners. This dedicated fleet of workers pimp and preen the gardens to perfection: Sweeping up fallen leaves, pulling out individual blades of grass and washing stones. Wearing long protective clothing, bonnets and mosquito coils, they are protected from the tourists and insects alike. Through such meticulous gardening practices they must surely be on their way to enlightenment.

For me, I didn’t get any closer to Buddha, nor did I solve the mystery of the sand patterns. However, I did write my first haiku:

In a Zen garden
Glow the first leaves of autumn.
Quickly, fetch the brush!