Word: ryoanji
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan...
These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden?five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles?is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji...
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