Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The art of cleaning

Shisendo Temple, Kyoto sightseeing
This is a garden early in the morning and the garden is perfectly clean. Lots of lines, drawn by bamboo broom, set off the cleanliness.

By the way, here is an interesting small story about Senno Rikyu, one of great tea masters.

One day Rikyu told one of his pupils to make a garden clean and he cleaned up the garden immaculately. Even after he finished the cleaning, Rikyu said to him, "it is not enough." After that, he did another cleaning for a while and he asked Rikyu if he stop cleaning again. Rikyu said, "No, not enough!" Then Rikyu surprisingly began to shake a tree in the garden to make leaves falling onto the ground. He intended to make the ground feel more clean by putting some leaves.

Turning the perfect into the imperfect, Rikyu thought, made the perfection more perfect and added the depth to the perfection.

He preferred asymmetry to symmetry, imperfection to perfect, simplicity to flamboyance. These are some of criterion in tea ceremony.

Location by Google Map

5 Comments:

At 12/13/2006 10:51 PM, Blogger tr3nta said...

The new Madrid daily photo has now started…
Come, and tell me u think…
Thank u all for the ‘unbelivable’ dailyphotoblog network…

 
At 12/14/2006 1:07 AM, Blogger Zannnie said...

This photo is sooooo neat!:)

 
At 12/14/2006 1:32 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Also the thought of the story is really good and gives a lot of thinking.
Thank you for this!

 
At 12/14/2006 7:34 PM, Blogger JaamZIN said...

i love the story beside the photo!

 
At 12/15/2006 4:45 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like a lot your lately photos in this blog. They are so relaxing, indeed all around Zen gardens is like this.

Thank you for the nice story with this photo.

Ciao =O)

Raquel

 

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