“
The horror the Japanese have of the unexpected and the decisions is requires.
The Japanese will become the most aesthetic people in the world.
Six Buddhist sects have sprung from the interpretation of the scriptures and on ceremonial days, their priests wear tunics of raspberry, saffron, pistachio or violet, which create a lovely effect on the gray-brown-green of the Japanese landscape.
The cemeteries are the fish ponds for the temples.
These foreign visitors demand that before they leave Japan, someone should wrap up the "soul of Japan" for them. What do they want? Suddenly, through a simple mental process, their ignorance should be transformed into knowledge, clear-cut and precise, please, so that they can discuss it when they get home. I judge them, but I too, would sometimes like to find my meal set in front of me and fast. We come to this thin and frugal country with our greedy metabolisms: the whole West is that way. The golden dishes, the maharajahs, the rubies as big as the duck eggs, that is what struck our first explorers, not the frugality that is truly one of the marks of Asia.
Have you ever drunk a good bottle of wine with a connaisseur? It is a form of torture.
Because of the rhythm of Noh, travel is so slow that winter always overtakes travelers en route. They travel in tiny steps across a sort of mental Tibet.
Japan: a self-sustaining island, rich in gold and in solver, excellent products, a disciplined and frugal population that carries cleanliness to the point of fanaticism, an always-appropriate alternation between honesty and hypocrisy, in short, the best governed state in the world.
Walking does help to support the insupportable.
When things turn bad, rather than expecting too much from people, one must sharpen one's relations with things.
The tao ( the philosophy of Lao-tzu, sixth century B.C ) taught that our mind is a troublemaker that interferes between life and us, that we are victims of our categories.
What exactly is Zen? For some it is a religion, for others a form of therapy, a means of liberation, a guide to character, a reaction of the Chinese spirit against the Indian spirit.
True saints are not always on hand for writers who are passing through, people who don't need what one knows. In the Orient, knowledge is given spoonful by spoonful to the people who are truly hungry and the word "secret" means nothing here.
In old Chinese Zen it was traditional to choose the gardener who knew nothing to succeed the master rather than one who knew too much.
In this style of decor, as in the food, there is an immateriality repeated again and again: make yourself small, don't hurt the air, don't would our eyes with your terrible colored shirts, don't be so restless and don't offend this slightly bloodless perfection that we have been tending for eight hundred years.
A crane preening his feathers, this elegant bird, so inexpressibly white, posed in the middle of the reeds, like a Ming vase.
”
”