The Philosopher’s Path

An autumn leaf
Falls from a tree
To the moss floor
Of the forest

Red stars glinting
In a green sky

Heap of colour
Which two women
Wielding twig brooms
Will sweep away.

— Kyoto, December 2024

• • • • •

The Philosopher’s Path (哲学の道) runs along the foot of the Higashiyama (‘Sunrise Mountain’) that forms the eastern limit of Kyoto, and runs from the Nanzen-ji (‘South Temple of Enlightenment’) in the south to the Ginkaku-ji (‘Silver Pavilion’) in the north past numerous other temples. In one of these, Hōnen-in (1680), we saw two women sweeping fallen leaves from the moss under the trees.

Whereas, in English, it is the poet’s choice between the possible combinations and variations in even so simple a line as the title of this poem that constitutes much of the poetry (‘The path of the philosopher’, ‘The philosopher’s way’, ‘Way of the philosopher’, ‘The walk of philosophy’, ‘The philosophical road’, etc.), in the ideograms of Japanese and Chinese poetry, in which the characters emerge as presences from the empty space of an absent or minimal grammar, (哲-philosophy, 学-study, の-of/to, 道-road/way/method) it is in the movement of reading — of which the reader is the agent and not the subject — that the poetry comes into being (‘The philosopher’s path’).

There is a parallel with this act of linguistic making. If, in China, the past is continuously remade in the present, in Japan it is continuous with and in the present: not fetishised, as it is in the West, as ‘heritage’; not reified as ‘history’ in unalterable record; not packaged and sold as ‘experience’ on the tourist trail; not cited as incitement to patriotic violence or inducement to obedient speech. The women sweeping the green moss of leaves, like the monks who rake sand into ziggurats, are present to their labour, which is as new as the fallen leaves, as old as the land onto which they fall.

In bleak contrast to which, the defining characteristic of Western consciousness is not to be present to our surroundings; to photograph rather than to look; to talk loudly about everything other than what is in front of us; to sneer rather than dare to open ourselves to beauty; to defer the now of consciousness to a future that will never arrive; to live our lives to the accompaniment of whining children and canned music played by idiots, to noise-emitting screens that are never turned off, to the clichés of those striving to be profound, to words spoken for the millionth time as though they were said for the first — and other desperate attempts to avoid the risk of life. In other words, the defining characteristic of Western consciousness is to be dead.

The fullest and, perhaps, the most atrocious embodiment of this consciousness is the figure of the tourist. Confronted with something he has been told he should be enjoying, something from which he suspects he should be learning, something he knows he should be looking at differently than through the screen through which he looks, learns and tries to enjoy the rest of the days of his death, the tourist raises his smartphone and presses a finger against its screen, locking the world in the digital coffin in which, already dead, he is decomposing.

The sacred, the spiritual, the space of ritual — which is present in Japan more than in any place I have ever visited — is the creation of paths, borders, verges, approaches, streams, stepping stones, moats, bridges, walls, of the mountainous gates they erect over every entrance, of thresholds, steps, frames, hangings, doors, courtyards, boxes, roofs, divisions, separations, articulations, roots, of sweeping and raking, of leaves and moss, in the creation of which the Japanese are masters of time.

While we, in the downfallen West, want everything now — sex, wealth, success, recognition, love, God — everything that money can buy and whose worth is nothing, except to those who value nothing that cannot be measured in quantified time, void of quality. In contrast to which, the most attractive quality of the Japanese is their silence.