Rock gardens, Part 2

A short ride on a big bus took us to the monastery, on a hillside on the northwestern outskirts of Kyoto. A guide conducted our group of forty or fifty around the grounds, which I admired, and probably through some of the rooms, though I don't recall, and I'm sure that we heard something about the history of the monastery, which I promptly forgot. The high point was to be the rock garden, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention to anything else. I wasn't feeling cynical. I felt, or wanted to feel, ready to have a powerful experience.

We viewed the garden from a low platform, a long open verandah that lay all along one side of the main building. There was plenty of room for all of us to stand there and contemplate the garden's austere beauty, its mystical what-is-it, its enigmatic presence. But I found it impossible to get in the right frame of mind while standing in a crowd. I wanted to commune with the rocks, to hear them silently speaking to me. I wanted something to fall into place--to feel a wave of oneness--something!--but I just couldn't get past the chatter of the people around me. It may have been quiet chatter, but even the idea of chatter was too much. I didn't blame them: they were interfering with my experience, and I was probably interfering with theirs. We coped as best we could, I suppose. Then a second and louder busload arrived: a crowd of camera-happy tourists from somewhere in Europe, if I recall correctly. Any chance of a special moment was over.

We were escorted back to our bus by a roundabout route. We walked slowly past a pond lined with lovely flowering shrubs. Very nice. Drooping trees reflected in still water. Lily pads. Wasted on me, though, in that moment of disappointment. We boarded the bus, and it bounced and blatted its way back down the hill to the city center and left us to go our own ways.