Oct 11, 2010

Dou'unji - Cave Cloud Temple 11


After moving away from the waterfall and the pavilion, I discovered a very nice pagoda. As in most garden pagodas, this was made from stone, a single large rock that had been carved into the shape of a traditional five-roofed pagoda.It looked very nice slanting up through the vegetation. Pagodas started out in India as burial sites, but eventually became symbols representing the Buddha's reaching nirvana, nibbana in the Pali language. Actually it represents his paranirvana, which is the nirvana related to the death of the physical body.
Near the far end of the garden, I found a stele, which I could not read, and a stone replica of a six sided meditation hall. These are often used as lanterns in Japanese gardens but this one did not appear to have an actual empty space inside. But what the heck, as the Heart Sutra says, emptiness is form and form is emptiness. If you really understand that, I wish that you would explain it to me, since it is one of the keys to Mahayana Buddhism.
I left the garden via a bridge that passed over the roadside drainage ditch. Actually the water from the waterfall flows through the far side of the garden and into this ditch, from where it flows back to the little stream that I passed as I entered the grounds. Bridges like this are quite common in gardens. They a made from a single slab of rock that has been split off an even larger chunk of stone. They are not polished are finished so the ridges that remain from the splitting process run the length of the bridge.


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