On arrival in Japan, I hurried to the rock garden at the temple called Ryoanji, eager to work out whether its arrangement of fifteen stones—you can’t see all of them from any one position—represented clouds in the sky or a tiger carrying her cubs across a stream. Now that I’ve spent time in Japan, I walk past that garden to the stone basin around the corner, whose characters, one on each of its four sides, read, “What you have is all you need.”
