The Path of Philosophy, Kyoto, Japan. One of the most scenic walks in all of the world, the path of philosophy in Kyoto during the cherry blossom season was immensely beautiful. Here I walked for hours among the pink cherry blossoms, by a flowing canal in the burgeoning spring.
Heart in bloom, walking slowly, eventually I came across a beautiful lady in traditional silk kimono dress standing under a great cherry blossom tree, saw the composition in my head and executed the idea. The resulting photographic work is named “The Thousand Autumns of Seed Bellow”, a reference to the novel “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zooet” by David Mitchell, set in Japan during the Shogunate era of the 18th Century. Seed Bellow is an ironic nickname, as people sometimes find my name hard to pronounce, and Bellow comes from the surname of one of my favourite writers, Saul Bellow, author of the great Nobel Prize-winning novel “Humboldt’s Gift”.
Among the pink cherry blossoms of spring, I walked, heading south into the heart of Kyoto, past the verdant greenery of the mountains on the outskirts, where Zen Buddhist life is still preserved in the peaceful temples rising high above the city. Kyoto is a walker’s paradise, and once one escapes from the shopping grid that monopolises the centre, Kyoto begins to reveal its ancient, timeless beauty.
I stepped into the Buddhist temple. The clean, linear, spacious wooden design of the temples of zen, focuses an inner development through its simplicity and disregard for the detritus of the world in a motivation for awareness.
At Tenryūji temple, the delicate design of the Japanese rock garden pulled me in to its circle. The harmonious rock garden at this “Temple of the Heavenly Dragon” was designed in 1345 by the zen master Muso Soseki, intending to reach awareness through contemplative viewing, that of entering visually while meditating in the abbot’s quarters, rather than physically walking through the rock garden itself. The effect is that of only the minimal, paring down to the essence, the elemental awareness of the visual.
Here I achieved clarity of consciousness, seeing in the present, the here and now of the stillness and peace behind all things.
I came to a central pond surrounded by rocks and pine trees and the Arashiyama mountain beyond. I sat down and contemplated the stillness in silence, and returned back to the karesansui, the dry rock garden of minimalistic raked gravel, surrounding a central pattern of black rock, in a meditative simplicity. I had seen many such tranquil gardens, yet this was the most tastefully arranged, away from the crowds of the more popular Ryōanji Temple, with its elongated rectangular design. Here was peace. I sat down and breathed in the fresh spring air with a clear mind.
Further, I walked at Daitoku-ji, where red maple trees, sparsely planted among the moss in an autumnal arrangement often decorate the landscape, and strolling here now by the tranquil lake and gazing out at the pavilion among the water from behind the mossy trees, I was able to meditate into peaceful awareness, far from the madding crowd.
Yet of all Japan’s beautiful cultural sites, some of which are surprisingly not on the UNESCO cultural heritage list, or John Dougill’s excellent guide to Japan’s richly historical areas, the temple of Nanzen-Ji is surely one of the most beautiful temples in Kyoto.
The ponds in its gardens, populated by strange, beautiful fish, surround the wooden, spacious temple indoors. Once one steps inside, a painted wooden screen is revealed, and here the clean, wooden design and detailed artwork on the walls radiates cleanliness and simplistic harmony.
Inside the cocoon of this wooden temple, it was silent all around and the only sound was the beating of your own heart, like the silent rhythm of your own beginning, in your mother’s womb. My eyes open, I looked through the temple, ready to see.
In the resulting photograph, a silhouette figure is walking past dramatically with the clear light behind the sliding screen. It represents a form of inner peace and acceptance, yet there is a gentle sadness here, of the sinking dreams of the floating world, of mono no aware. “Mono No Aware (物の哀れ), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence of (無常 mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.” (Wikipedia).
I stepped into the sukiya, the tea room. In the spacious wooden room, delicately arranged in tasteful restraint and the promise of harmony, spread out on top of a long tatami mat, I found an old lady kneeling down, sat upright on her knees. Next to her were ceramic bowls of tea, stretching out along a thin red carpet. Drinking the steaming tea, she looked out at the garden outside, at one with the harmonious scene in the open wooded room among the carefully arranged flowers.
Kakuzo Okakura, writing in “The Book of Tea” explains that the tea ceremony is the reflection of the eastern culture and philosophy, for tea “is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste”.
In witnessing such a simple scene, I viewed the old lady as a microcosm of the Japanese aesthetic. Here she was at peace, simple being in harmony with her own awareness of the world, as she sipped upon the steaming bowl. “The east and west, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life”, wrote Okakura. “Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things”. In the here and now, I was able to rejoice in the simplicity of being.
In Praise of Shadows, the essay by Junichiro Tanizaki influenced all of my resulting photography, exploring the Japanese aesthetic in mediums such as art to emphasise the subtle contrast of shadow, illuminating the scene. It allowed a degree of imperfection, and showed movements performed simply and naturally, without a sound to disturb the growing equilibrium of the clear moment.
There was warmth and intimacy here too, the delicate awareness of restraint.
Yet as the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu once wrote, “heaven and earth are pitiless”. Away from the noisy confusion of life outside, there was a real discord between the peace within, a juxtaposition of Japanese society and its modern conflicts, that may have resulted in extreme acts such as the burning down of the golden temple of Kinkaku-ji, as related in Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel “The Temple of the Golden Pavillion”.
I stepped out again into the city. Traffic grinds to a halt during the hanami, cherry blossom season, taxis inching slowly along, polluting the city with chugging gusts of curling grey smoke. I walked past them all without a care in the world.
The clean streets I passed in the city showed the harmony that was not apparent in their superficial dullness and uniformity. The people I met along the way were always polite and deferential, educated and intuitive to the needs of others. Yet this was a walk not to understand the mind of my Japanese neighbours, it was to find peace and awareness within myself, exactly as in accordance with the school of Zen Buddhism from the city where it first emerged.
White flowers dangled above me on the sidewalk, hanging from the baskets in front of nearby houses. Such a sweet, fragrant scent. “In the trembling of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers?” wrote Okakura.
The art of ikebana, flower arranging is like re-arranging my memories of Kyoto, to give order to the imperfect and seek for perfection within my own awareness of the scene; and the growth of my own perception into a harmonious balance. This is why the Buddhist temples I write of were designed so as to not be perfectly symmetrical, according to the Taoist principles, such as put those forward by Lao Tzu, about “the way”, or rather the dynamic journey itself, or the process through which perfection is sought rather than the perfection itself. It is something one must strive for within, a challenge to attain the harmony and balance in the greatest battle you or I will ever fight, the battle within yourself.
Before I ever came to find myself here, I was highly influenced by the outstanding book “Lost Japan” by Alex Kerr. In this succinct book, with the zest of a newly peeled lemon, Alex Kerr writes of his lifetime of living in Kyoto and the beautiful culture here, the temples, the calligraphy, the kabuki theatre, the design of building a house in the style of the wooden bamboo houses found in the literature of Junichiro Tanizaki. Kerr writes of the harmonious style and structural arrangements of the temples in “Another Kyoto”. It is an obvious tragedy however, that this is a dying world. The beautiful detail of the city of Kyoto has all but disappeared, a culture degraded in the wake of modernisation.
Yet to the best of my ability, I tried to preserve these ideals and incorporate them into my photographic art, to bring the beauty of still Kyoto to life. Through the medium of art, I hoped that I would be able to develop the peace, harmony and elegant beauty of the floating world.
And it is true that as I soon as I began a long walk into the central city, I could see that the traditional world found in the films of Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa was long gone. Literally nothing of cultural value appeared for miles around. All around were grids of grey shopping stores, large roads of grey, slow cars at a standstill. Dull, universally dressed office workers walked past, unengaged. Yet of all my memories of travel, Japan was perhaps the most important to me. It is true that much of Japan is ground down by relentless uniformity, drudgery and dullness, but there are so many beautiful aspects of traditional Japanese culture and art still preserved. I needed to somehow capture this dying culture, aesthetically and emotionally.
While walking in Kyoto for hours and hours, I came across an orange coloured temple far off the beaten track somewhere along the way and spotted a monk in white emerging. He moved out of sight, surrounded by a thousand paper cranes, like the title of the novel by Yasunari Kawabata. There were a thousand pockets of peace in the busy metropolis of exchange. And I continued to walk, trying to see beneath the shallow surface presented to my eyes.
Facing myself, and emerging from the deepest sehnsucht, I had a near life experience. I dreamed that I stood at the door of the gate of reality. But I could not walk through the door. In the dreamy haze of my weltschmerz, there was no way out for me. Because the only way out, is through. Keep walking.
Cherry blossoms in the park, blushing blossoms of the April morning, seas of tranquility in a fertile dream. I was here.
And walking in Kyoto among the cherry blossoms, suddenly the skies opened up with rain. I got lost, hopelessly lost in the heavy rain, pounding on the blurred confusion of the endless, darkened streets. Drowning alone and confused, I somehow emerged into a garden, and once again two hours later, without knowing it, I was back in the place I had started from. Maruyama park perhaps, I no longer remember among the lost corridors of the flood of memory.
And somehow, I ended up under the cherry blossom tree and in front of me was my photograph, a girl in a red coat, standing under the dripping wet, white-pink softness of the cherry blossom tree, under an umbrella, shielding herself from the rain.
The rain dries in the end and once again the clouds part to let the sunlight through, with the dawn of a new day. The next morning I decided to head south, back among the mountains on the outskirts of Kyoto.
At Fushimi-Inari, I created one of my most iconic and lasting images. In the background are the orange coloured gates of the Fushimi shrine, the orange torii gates leading up the mountain for miles. In the centre is a man walking through the gates into the beyond. As written about by Lao-Tzu, it represents the process of the journey. Yet it was influenced by the Zen Buddhism of the mountains around, in that it shows the process and seeking of my own journey around the world. The photograph is a metaphorical representation of passing through and a journey into the unknown. It is about not knowing the direction; the title is Forever Lost. But more importantly, it is to know that travel is not about reaching a destination. It is about the journey itself. It is about new beginnings and the discovery of reality.
Too often in the west we strive for material things, seeing them as objective goals that in and of themselves will make us “happy”. A house, a car, a person, or digits in a bank account. Yet when we fall short of these ideals, we face the hardest, most painful disappointment. We have often never known that they are illusory goals and that what we will remember, value and cherish for the rest of our lives are the experiences we have had, and the actual journey itself as being lived in the present moment, that has enriched our lives. End goals simply arise from our harmonious actions, and are meaningful when they flow out directly and naturally. One cannot force life, anymore than one can force oneself, without breaking like a ming vase. It is truly not about the end destination, but about the journey itself.
Such is the eastern way, and the engagement with the natural world all around. Yet the Japanese, like most societies in the world, have faced rapid industrialisation into a commercial system, forever striving for more. Driven by their collaborative and socially organised nature, their business model skyrocketed at the end of the 20th Century, as one of the world’s fastest growing economies, an upsurge in technology, rampant consumerism and neon-lit cities churning out the exchange of money. Influenced and encouraged by America at the end of the second world war, what was already a system increasingly geared towards massive industrialisation, went into overdrive. And somewhere along the way, the beauty of a tempered, silent harmony of inner peace lost its light. Each child lost to the disappointment and resignation of a business school that pushed them to mechanistically seek material goals was a tragedy, in that they knew no different way. And if they did, the system would not allow them their freedom.
Japan’s economic growth is set out in detail in “Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival” by David Pilling, the Asia editor of the Financial Times. Such a story, of living by the sword of economic risk has often resulted in dying by the sword, with the crash of financial markets in recent times. And many Japanese are disappointed by the direction their country has taken.
Haruki Murakami, a writer with an inner life and sensitivity, talked about the changes wrought on the culture of Japan, as he interviewed the “stoic, uncomplaining office workers and bureaucrats” at the time of the Tokyo gas attacks, stating that “I admired them, and at the same time, they depressed me. I think their lives are absurd. They are consuming, consuming themselves, you know. They commute two hours between their house and the office and they work so hard. It’s inhuman. And when they come back to their house, their children are sleeping. It’s a waste of humanity”.
It is hard to disagree with Murakami, who goes on to state that “most Japanese don’t have any sense of direction. We are lost and we don’t know which way we should go. But this is a very natural thing, a very healthy thing. It is time for us to think. We can take our time”. This view of Japan’s choices as a kind of direction in the course of history, that is still developing, is in many ways a Taoist idea. They may turn down a branching side road of excess, but it is a journey of learning, and they can walk along a path that branches off into many different directions, emphasising a more creative, diverse way of life, inspired by the inner development encouraged by the ancient Kyoto and the practices of old.
Natsume Sōseki wrote of the pleasures of strolling in the verdant stillness of the Japanese mountains, before the pressures of modern Japanese society forced a generation of young characters such as Toru Watanabe in Murakami’s beautiful novel “Norwegian Wood” to drift by through life, lost in a sad haze of dreamy nostalgia.
I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Japanese youngster here, as I stayed in accommodation in the suburbs on the outskirts of Kyoto. What would it have been like, walking the road from these suburbs to school every day, falling in love, dreaming in youth, then settling into a job in an office, returning late to sleep in a cramped, mortgaged flat? I did not want this life, not in London, not here. I walked along the blue road of the suburbs for an hour, and suddenly I came along a sign written on the road - 止まれ - Stop! How could I stop, on this journey of life? I could never stop. I had to go on, and nothing would force me to do so. I can be anything I want to be.
I travelled to Osaka, and found nothing of any beauty among the neon stores, a concrete grid, with nothing to dream. Hiroshima was a quiet place, with a peaceful green park. Feeding the deer in Nara was a pleasant memory. Yet I longed to return to Kyoto, the walker’s paradise.
Here, I had one of my greatest experiences, spending time with white monkeys at the Arashiyama monkey reserve. A steep, steep climb up a mountainous incline towards the top led to a scene where white macaque monkeys bathed in the hot spring. I came to an elderly monkey, splendid with his white fur and pink face, etched with lines of experience. Standing up to face me, I stood face to face with the monkey, while he gazed deep into my eyes and I did the same. He was captured in a spiritual, meditative pose, the Spirit Monkey.
I tried to put myself behind the eys of the monkey, to feel what he was feeling. I wanted my empathy and consciousness to extend to another life. I wanted to see myself through the white monkey’s eyes, to see how I appeared. But I could not see through his eyes. And if I could, I could not see myself, because I would not exist. No matter how much we try, each experience is one’s own. There is a distance between us all.
I had passed a metaphorical “gate of no return”, for I was now of a new mind, cleansed by silent awareness. I recalled the magnificent orange coloured gates in the sea at the entrance to the island of Miyajima. There I was caught in a bad storm, where a scene arose of a silhouette walking under the gates, shielding herself from the rain. I imagined myself like the silhouette in the photograph, a symbol for the journey of knowledge, for once I had passed through the gate, there was no turning back.
This was my Kyoto story, where I achieved clarity of thought. The Little Boy, the atomic bomb of all my emotions and memories exploded into a thousand fragments, into a black rain rainbow, and then settled into a profound stillness, and the silent awareness of peace.
Read on for the next chapter via the link below, as we are about to enter our journey together to - ISTANBUL, TURKEY......