In Portland’s Washington Park, there is a hill with the International Rose Test Garden at the bottom, and the Portland Japanese Garden at the top. When last I visited, I spent most of my time in the Japanese Garden on a bench at the karesansui, the sand and stone garden. One of the main themes of Japanese gardening is the symbolic qualities of stone. Two rocks at the foot of a waterfall—one short and squat, one tall and thin—represent tortoise and crane. Large rocks can be animals, legendary figures, and mountains real (Fuji) or mythical (Meru, Hōrai). Sand or gravel, patterned with an eight-pronged rake, becomes ripples in a stream.
The karesansui at the Portland Japanese Garden has eight stones—seven low to the ground, one tall. The seven face the one, four to a side, three to the other. Around each stone, the gravel that makes up the garden bed is raked in an eight-ripple circle. In the Jataka, tales from the previous lives of the Buddha, a story is told of three princes hiking over barren mountains, who found a tigress starving and unable to produce milk to feed her seven cubs. While two of the brothers went back to their palace to retrieve fresh meat for the tigress, the third, realizing that this meat would not arrive in time to save her, stayed behind, telling his brothers that he felt ill and would catch up with them soon.
Once his siblings were out of sight, the third brother carved a knife from bamboo and slit his throat before the tigress, ending his own life to save the lives of animals. When the brothers returned, all they found of their sibling was his bones and his bloodstained robe. The tigers, nurtured by his sacrifice, had moved on to more fertile hunting grounds. The road to enlightenment is pretty fucking macabre.
Returning, I don’t meditate on this story so much as on the park itself—the view of Mt. Hood, the roses below, the bridge that curves over the koi pond, the tea garden with its double gate to keep out enemy samurai and its winding walkway to ward off demons. I think of my own demons—they were with me this time last year, but now they don’t have much to say.
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