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The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?
The mind says, “Either/or.” The spirit embraces both.
Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out. · What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not. · In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.
A perfect date in Japan involves accompanying a loved one to a movie, watching the film together in silence and then, on the way home, taking pains not to talk about it. · Words only separate what silence brings together.
The last book Matthiessen published, after a quarter-century as an ordained Soto Zen priest, was about a Buddhist meditation retreat at Auschwitz, aimed at bearing witness to suffering and remembering who we really are; the novel that resulted was almost entirely an expression of rage and lust and impatience and confusion. Its title was In Paradise.
Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in. · A monastery, for St. Benedict, was “a school for charity.” A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.
For a Westerner, Joseph Campbell noted in Japan, meditation may awaken a sense of divinity within; for a Japanese, it’s more likely to inspire a sense of divinity inside a temple, a flower, a gnat. The person sitting still doesn’t say, “I’m awake.” She says, “The world is illuminated!”
“Buddhist meditation frees you from God and frees you from religion,” said the singer-poet Leonard Cohen, deep into a forty-year-long Zen practice.
WORDS More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?
Japan’s foundational novel, The Tale of Genji, is notoriously hard to translate, because proper names are sometimes avoided, the subject of a sentence changes halfway through and speakers are seldom indicated. As the scholar of Japan Ivan Morris writes, the hard-and-fast divisions we like to maintain—between past and present, question and statement, singular and plural, male and female—don’t apply. “Sometimes it is not even clear whether the sentence is positive or negative.”
Even those sentences that do have clear beginnings in Japan generally trail off, like pen-and-ink drawings that leave most of the page open for a viewer to complete. In England, I learned to start sentences by saying, “I’m not exactly sure…” but in Japan the studied vagueness is not just about diffidence but about allowing room for someone else to turn an opening note into a duet.
Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.
In Japan, more than anywhere, nothing is more fatal than thinking you know what’s being said. The English word “hip” in Japan refers to the buttocks, and “smart” means slender. “Naïve” is a good word in Japan, and so is “tension.” A “mansion” refers to a thick-walled, modern and often small apartment.
“If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”
“There are two silences,” wrote Harold Pinter, introducing his Complete Works. “One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it.”
“No word,” wrote Japan’s Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, “can say as much as silence.”
The most essential things come across without words.
“His magnanimity was apparent to all who met him,” a local guide told the American poet James Merrill of Arnold Toynbee’s visit to Japan. “Never once did he reveal his true feelings.”
the ultimate sign of intimacy is not all you can say to a friend, but all you don’t need to say.
The less my Japanese neighbors talk, the more room there is for surprise, and for them constantly to transcend my understanding.
In Japan, I never forget that a great conversationalist is one who listens.
In the public sphere, this commitment to saying nothing may suggest a crippling caution and refusal to take the initiative. In the private, it opens up to a bottomless intimacy.
One sign that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie is the fact that the audience never hears its last, and presumably most important, sentence.
Another is that we don’t know whether it has a sad or happy ending.
“Jikan,” sometimes translated as “the silence between two thoughts.”
“I’ll miss the cleanliness of the air,”
people don’t feel the need to smudge every moment with their signature.
Around us, the scene is not so different from what you might find in Hyde Park or the Jardin du Luxembourg. People everywhere stretch out and have fun in much the same way. But there is a stillness, a self-containment in every direction—so crowded and so quiet—I haven’t felt even in Myanmar or Singapore.
“Every night, when I leave the health club, four or five kids at the front desk shout out, ‘Take it easy. You’ve worked hard!’ I know it’s just a formula; I know it means nothing at all. But it’s an attempt to sweeten the moment, to give me energy, to make every departure feel like the first step towards coming back. It suggests that something remains steady in a world of constant change.”
when I tell friends that I always buy Toyotas because they’re so uncomplicated and reliable—fewer features mean fewer things to go wrong—they don’t always realize I’m speaking about relationships and conversations as much as about cars. When I talk of the economy of verbal and facial expressions in Japan, they may not see that stock verbal exchanges make the country go round much more than the Nikkei Index does.
“I suppose it’s all the things you don’t have to say or explain,” I conclude, “that I’ll miss when I’m not here,”
Lacking space has naturally made the Japanese masters of making space—in a crowded rush-hour train, in a poem or a painting.
Making room for the new or different is less easy, however; in tight quarters, there’s less room for taking chances.
“The extreme physical intimacy of this society necessitates emotional reserve,” writes Andrew Solomon of, in fact, Greenland. “Yes, it is true,” a local woman tells him. “We are too physically close to be intimate.” It’s rude, she goes on, “to say to someone, even a friend, ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’ ”
Emptiness in Japan becomes the luxury that grandeur is in the West.
As the world grows more cluttered, the spare Japanese aesthetic (of clean sushi bar and severe minimalism) grows ever more appealing. In a global Varanasi, nothing so clarifies as a bamboo flute in an empty room.
In Europe, a garden is something you enter, walk around in and leave behind; in Kyoto, a garden is more like something that enters you, inviting you to become as silent and well swept as everything around you. · Departing a Japanese garden, you hope to carry some of its pruned stillness out into the streets; the only thing you need leave behind is yourself.
When Chinese tourists began shaking cherry trees in Tokyo in 2017 to make picturesque backdrops for their selfies, it struck many Japanese as a kind of sacrilege; the whole point of a Japanese landscape is that it makes a schedule for you rather than the other way round.
A Japanese psychiatrist asked every prospective patient to keep a daily journal. He consented to see each one only after all her sentences were devoted to the world outside her.
The running water all around tells you that you step into a Japanese garden not just to open your eyes, but to close them.
The pond in front of you is often kept deliberately shallow—no more than thirty inches—so below becomes a crystalline reflection of above.
“No big light,” she goes on. “Everything is hidden. That makes us calm.”
Silence, the running water tells you, is no more the absence of noise than health is mere freedom from sickness, or stillness an absence of movement. The richest part of life lies in the space between absence and presence.
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.”
Freedom doesn’t mean an abundance of choice so much as liberation from the burden of too much choice.
“freedom consists in my not having made the rules.”
It took me a long time, after meeting my wife, to see that the kindest and most thoughtful thing to do in many situations was not to ask her where she wanted to eat or go. To take the decision myself was to free her from both the burden of choice and the responsibility that follows (knowing that, when it came to what to wear or what to eat at home, she’d extend the same kindness by making the decisions for me).
If you’re always wondering what you will become, he went on, “you will soon become so profoundly implicated in your own psychological agony that you will have little time or energy for anything else, and certainly no sense whatsoever of the bliss and wonder of being alive.”
In Japan, a son traditionally follows his father into his profession, even if that’s the profession of monk or musician. Rather than choosing what he’ll be good at, he aims to be good at what’s chosen for him.
Soon after I came to know her, my wife-to-be said, “I can’t change you, so I have to change myself, since you’re in many ways not so easy.” I was so disarmed by this spirit of accommodation that I tried to do the same with her, changing myself to adapt to everything in her that was difficult.
