Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [103]
The philosophy of pure poverty penetrates every facet of traditional Japan. Visitors to Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, home of the famous rock garden, will have seen a stone water basin in the garden at the back, whose motto is known to schoolchildren across the land: four characters are carved in it, surrounding a square hole in the center of the stone, which is a visual pun, since all four have the radical for «mouth,» a square, in them. The message-the essence of Zen, one could even say of Buddhism in general – is Ware Tada Таrи Shiru, which means «I know only what is enough.» Another translation is «I know the limits, and that is enough.» Nakano writes plaintively:
When I speak of Japanese culture to foreigners, the problem always circles back to the way we live today, which is only natural. The reason I began talking about this side of Japanese culture is I wanted to say, «The Japanese products you see and the people making them are not all there is to the Japanese! This is what our traditional culture was!» While I know full well that it is being lost in today's Japan, it was my desire to introduce the best, the supreme point of Japanese culture.
If «pure poverty» and «knowing what is enough» were the supreme points of Japanese culture, where in the world did Japan's modern gigantism, the insistence on the biggest and the longest, the taste for the bombastic, come from? Within traditional culture itself, coexisting with pure poverty has been an other tendency, a competitive streak. When the imperial court built cities like Kyoto and Nara, it did so with an eye over its shoulder at China and Korea. In Nara, the very first order of business was to devote all the energies of the state to building the Hall of the Great Buddha, intended to compete with the largest temples of the Tang-dynasty capital in Chang-An. Today's Todaiji, though a much smaller reconstruction, is still the largest wooden structure in the world.
Later rulers celebrated their reigns with undertakings such as the Great Buddha in Kamakura, Hideyoshi's Himeji Castle, and the Shogun's Palace in Edo, which are among the larger structures of the premodern world. In short, Japan also has a strong tradition of celebrating its rulers' power through impressive monuments. What is going on today may be a similar affirmation of wealth and power.
Thoreau wrote: «Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East, to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them – who were above such trifling.» The answer is, of course, that none were above it. Every state, as it acquires wealth, goes through a phase in which it enjoys building bigger and taller structures. Versailles, the Houses of Parliament, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower – these are all Western monuments. Newly industrializing Asian countries are headed one after another in the same direction, with mega-projects scheduled for China, Malaysia, and Singapore. From the Pyramids of Egypt to Malaysia's new Linear City (a twelve-kilometer mall and office building planned to straddle the Klang River in Kuala Lumpur), monument building would seem to be a universal need, perhaps even a basic human desire.
There is, however, one critical difference between ancient societies and those of today, and it is that raising huge monuments in pre-industrial times was difficult, involving massive mobilization of people and resources. Notre-Dame, the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace, Angkor Wat, the Vatican took centuries to complete. In contrast, the