Article: Soulfully engaging

Soulfully engaging
Kyoto is a city of contrasts. People in bullet trains busy with
gizmos, arriving at centuries-old temples and queueing up for
wisdom. And, there is no off season

NEELAM MATHEWS
Posted online: Sunday, June 19, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

Nobody visiting Japan for the first time can deny it is different
from any other travel experience. To start with, it is difficult to
reconcile with the extremes - here are the world's most progressive
people with every gadget possible from different temperatures for
toilet seats to radical designers, juxtaposed into family life and
customs four centuries old.

Nature to the Japanese is a close companion; affable and calming
rather than grandiose and detached. And nowhere is this more
apparent than in Kyoto, that Edmund Blunden called the "temple of
all the earth's towns," a part of the global lexicon, thanks to the
Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997.

There's so little known about the other Kyoto that Jan Morris
describes, "remains to the Japanese something special... the supreme
repository of their ancient traditions, their religion, and their
high-flown patriotism, their golden heritage and their resilient
pride."

Take Kyo-kaori (meaning Kyoto fragrance or flavor), a bottled iced
tea with powdered matcha tea from Kyoto, concealed in a clever
double cap. The bottle contains only water, but when you unscrew the
top cap, it releases the powdered tea from the green tube into the
water as you taste the flavours of Kyoto from an odd-coloured green
bottle!

For a more conventional experience, Kyoto's sights and sounds can
best be explored by foot. Its mass of cool green garden moss, an oft
resounding echo of a temple bell, the inimitable aroma of soy, sugar
and sake, and the sensual caress of silk, can all be taken in on a
day's walk. An over 1200-year-old city, this is a city of 1,600
temples and 400 shrines and palaces and gardens.

One thing Kyoto does not have is an off season. In spring and
autumn, the Japanese flock to see the famed cherry blossoms in
Maruyama Park and the maple leaves in the western hills of
Arashiyama. In summer, the city is ablaze with colour, with the
gilded, ornate floats of the July 17 Gion Matsuri, then with the
Daimonji, when a gargantuan bonfire paints the character "dai,"
or "big," against the eastern mountain slope.

There's so much of India in Kyoto's temples with numerous
manifestations of Buddha. The ten or tembu, originally Indian deva,
Hindu deities, were incorporated into the Buddhist faith and became
its protectors, have their imposing images often flanking temple
entrances. The smell of delicate incense in everywhere.

A popular attraction is the 14th century, Kinkakuii, completely
covered in gold leaf, earning it the name Golden Pavilion. Here in
1984, explains the guide, water from the holy Ganges was brought and
stored.

Meanwhile at the world heritage site, Nijo Castle, the finely
wrought parquet floors of the outer rooms squeak loudly when trod
upon, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the song of the nightingale.
No mere structural quirk, the squeaks were designed into the floor
as a warning system for the shogun, Tokugawa Iyeyasu, who built the
castle in 1603 and lived there in continual fear of would-be
assassins, despite the stone walls and moats that surrounded it.

At the 'Pure water temple', Kiyomizudera, associated with Nara
Buddhism, the oldest sect in Japan, visitors can choose from three
streams that guarantee you one of the three - health, wealth or
wisdom. Interestingly, one sees long queues of Japanese students
opting for the wisdom spring - a direct connotation of their
cultural upbringing.

The approach to the temple along Kiyomizu-michi or Gojo-zaka is
steep and narrow, the streets lined with stores specialising in
local sweets and souvenirs including fans, teapots and ceramic frogs
that promise to bring prosperity. From the terrace of the temple, is
beautiful view of the wooded hills of eastern Kyoto.

Here, walking among the Zen gardens that try to convince belief in
emptiness, actually allows the mind to stop. Be it a solitary stone
in a rock garden or a stray red maple leaf just fallen on carefully
raked sand, everything seems to have it's carefully designated
place.

It isn't long before one finds oneself back into the humdrum of
daily life in Kyoto station, catching the bullet train to Nagoya. In
all this madness, strange how one has caught up perhaps for the
first time, with the fullness of life in all its forms.