Pressed leaves

Trying to settle my closet is a fortnightly job, and truly challenging, as it seems to suddenly acquire certain similarities to the White Knight’s recipe for a pudding. Almost everything under the sun seems to have come there to roost.

Getting rid of clutter is good Feng Shui and all that, but more, much more, is the way things get straightened out inside your head. They were canny, those old wise men and women, they apparently targeted the practical, material world, while in truth their target was the inner spaces.

I was already then an ardent “Japanophile”—if I can use such a term—when I was introduced to the Zen garden and its attributes by my husband. What I found fascinating was the raking of the sand everyday, leaving orderly patterns.

I remember the same being done in the huge front yard in Trivandrum where I lived the early years of my childhood. I also remember how my companions and I went about placing odd and interestingly shaped stones arbitrarily over the raked sand. We would then sit down at some distance from the entire arrangement and gaze at it for what then seemed hours. When I heard about the Ryoanji Temple at Kyoto, the raked sand, the stones, and the people who meditated on them, I was simply amazed!!

As children we knew nothing about the metaphysics of the whole process; just that the raked sand, and the rough misshapen stones offered a delicious aesthetic contrast, which we did not want to disturb. We just enjoyed looking at our handiwork from a safe perspective and we did a different pattern every day.

Yes, it takes a while to get it all figured out but this is my understanding after half a century of "living in the material world". Appreciation of visual harmony is, I feel, a very natural instinctive thing. Children are untouched by any artifice or any presupposed notion, either societal or otherwise and therefore their vision is pristine and unclouded.

Is the Zen garden then, a celebration of this instinctive affinity to visual harmony? The Japanese are unique in that they have perfected visual harmony to an extremely refined art centered in the principle of “less is more”.

Great art has this essential simplicity that makes it rise above time and space; and, no, simplicity does not come easily. It is  there without seeming to be so, without making a din of it, by just being what it is. The epiphany is not outside the work but a part of it, and is the sole reason why we are drawn towards it in the first place.

“O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

W.B. Yeats -“Among School Children"