Kyoto Journal Issue 50

¥980

(US$9)

Transience and Renewal in Japanese Form
Transience in the Tale of Genji
Kyoto’s Heritage of Festivals
Haiku: The Birth & Death of Each Moment
A Culture of Simplicity

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Category:

TRANSIENCE

 

This world of dew
is only a world of dew,
and yet, and yet…
– Issa (1763-1827)

It is hardly coincidental that so many of Japan’s cultural traditions — including haiku, tea ceremony, calligraphy, and flower arrangement — cultivate a special awareness of both the season and the present instant of focused attention. Buddhist philosophy holds that the entire world is continually recreated, moment by moment. Entering that evanescent instant of creation, one can’t help but be simultaneously aware of its transience.—Ken Rodgers, Cultivating Transience A store isn’t a building, it’s an activity, and a neighborhood is not a collection of buildings, but a social net created by people who live there. Every frayed mat and wobbly table on the soi is a link to the centuries-old tradition of periodic markets that once flourished along canals and village lanes, a way of life that continues to reinvent itself, even in the shadow of shopping malls.—Philip J. Cunningham, Day in Day out: Shifting Scenes on a Bankok Soi

 

While performances are by definition meant to be seen, these performers forget, and are liberated from the desire to be something — for instance, to be as beautiful as possible. That is when they can enter a different non-worldly state of mind, and simply dance on a wave of transience.
Illumination in Each Moment, an interview with Kyoto dancer Nishikawa Senrei by Toyoshima Mizuho
Cover image by Tiery Le
98pp
Published May 2002

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