One aspect of traditional Japanese garden design with which that I have never been entirely comfortable is the emphasis on miniaturization. The common rationale for reductions such as bonsai and bonkei (a tiny landscape in a tray) is that Japan is so crowded and real estate so expensive that gardeners must resort to such expedients if they want to cultivate more than a scrap. Reduce a mountain range to a collection of boulders and a sea to a pond and almost anyone can own an estate. To me, though, as an outsider, this impulse seemed almost childish, uncomfortably close to the model train landscapes we used to create with teensy plastic trees and glue-on-green-fuzz turf. I have come to feel differently since I began to practice meditation. Twice a week I join friends for an hour of meditation in a Japanese-style room that Wesleyan University built at the back of its East Asian Art Center. The room is a wonderful, serene spot for this exercise: virtually unfurnished except for the tatami mats that cover the floor and a Buddhist statuette in a niche, it overlooks a small garden that recreates, in miniature, the topography of the Connecticut River as it sweeps around its big bend at Middletown. The waterway is suggested by a stream of raked gravel, hillsides and peaks by carefully selected brownstone rocks, and groves and fields by meticulously pruned billows of dwarf pines and other evergreens. The other meditators typically opt to kneel facing the room’s walls, the traditional practice in zendos. As a gardener, though, I always sit (my right knee won’t tolerate kneeling for any length of time) facing the garden. At first this was distracting and I still have trouble maintaining a meditative calm when the resident woodchuck makes his occasional appearances. On good days, though, as I focus on my breathing to empty my mind, the view of the miniaturized garden confuses my sense of perspective. Seemingly so distant, it sweeps me up from my terrestrial perch, out to a spot somewhere up in the clouds. I hover there for the next hour, far above earthly concerns. Unless, of course, that portly woodchuck puffs into view, filling my mind with worries that he is about to munch his way through a neighborhood-worth of vegetation. If I ever learn to ignore woodchucks, I will truly have attained enlightenment.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 14:33:42 +0000
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