Clusters of Moments: Finding completeness in the incomplete: Ryoanji Zen garden

Some months ago, I decide to suspend the blog for a bit. I doubt its authenticity. Even if everything is honest, I edit, or rather, remove big chunks before posting.

I am interested in those big deleted chunks. The raw and real bits that disappear into the abyss of computer memory. Bits and bytes that hold the soul, the true soul, that which is best kept hidden and hence deleted.

Suddenly, everything feels inauthentic. The same honest blog, the exercise in sorting things out, in trying to make sense of the world (I do believe that is what we’re all trying to do from the moment we are born) feels only half true. I decide I need to look closer at the deleted chunks.

I stop posting. Slowly, for whatever reason, I stop writing. No I don’t turn to other languishing projects, I don’t create fictional characters who could resolve/express the “deleted chunks” (since we’re giving them their own personality now).

I miss the writing process. I may not have any talent, but it feels right. It settles me.

Reluctantly, I decide to start writing the blog again. Simply because a blog post is something that I have to end, to round up before posting. It doesn’t remain a stray, unfinished thought (there is that half-baked attempt to complete a thought). I decide that tying up loose ends may be a good thing.

I decide to write again. I have scribbles from a recent travel.

My breath stops. I know exactly what I must write.

A few weeks ago, I sit in front of fifteen rocks at the Ryoanji Zen temple garden in Kyoto. Fifteen is a symbol of completeness in Buddhism. Yet, the rocks are arranged such that from no angle, can you see all fifteen at a time.

Yes, there is completeness. We know it. Yet we can never see it.

Simple. Elegant. True. Harsh. Beautiful.

Or perhaps it suggests completeness in everything. And we must have faith in that completeness. Even when we can’t see it. So much power would lie in that believing. In that faith.

Perhaps my deleted chunks are the rocks that continue to exist, even when I take them out. They are part of the fifteen – the complete. The blog post with the deleted chunks is still complete. Even if I can’t see it. Even when I doubt it.

Such simple elegance. Evidently, I don’t have the enlightenment to see all fifteen – in the garden, in my edited blog post. And yes, the belief is that all fifteen stones are visible once you attain enlightenment. And yes, did I mention my eleven-year-old claims she can see all fifteen. But I digress.

We sit on the verandah and stare at the karesansui (dry garden) with its white pebbles, raked neatly into linear patterns, and the carefully arranged fifteen stones. Everything is fitted neatly in the walled courtyard and visitors sit on the verandah and gaze.

I wonder how many are trying to see the fifteenth stone. I wonder how many are surrendering to the incompleteness in the complete. I wonder how many find it easy to have faith in the completeness.

Such a simple garden. So complex. Such simple lessons. So profound. If only all learning could be so. If only we could apply these learnings to our daily life. Would our life be so too?

Simple. Profound. True. Beautiful.