Here are two tsukubai--or hand "wash basins" located in the Joan gardens... As a kind of purification ritual, all guests first wash their hands in such a basin before entering the tea house.
Above are the entrance and a couple photos of the interior of Jo-an. An absolutely simple and unostentatious single-room house, Jo-an was designed to exemplify the spirit of wabi-sabi (the beauty of the "imperfect, impermanent and incomplete"), it stands alone in the midst of a beautiful half-wild moss and bamboo garden... Guests, entering Jo-an from the wild and exquisite world outside were supposed to find a different kind of peace-of-heart inside the bare walls of the tea-house, undistracted by the worries and distractions of politics, religion and war.
The sometime student-of-tea himself outside the famous walls.
As usual I could only lament the limitations of photography when attempted to capture the beauty of a wild and overgrown mossy landscape... The wind was blowing in such a way that the whole garden felt filled with a kind of tangible magic--intense green moss, water and rock mixed at every turn, blowing, glinting, and gurgling... I could have spent hours just sitting there undisturbed. Overlooked so much of the time, it is amazing how profound an impact the aesthetics of place and space can have on one... As we were sitting there, B and I imagined someday building a tea house and garden of our own, just like it...
The two pictures above are of one of the other tea-houses on the grounds--newer but quite beautiful in its own right... Note again the "crawl-through" guest entrance, meant to symbolically convey the leveling of all ranks within the tea-room's four walls...
Last of all a few late bamboo shoots--in days even the smallest one will be taller than me--growing straight and fast toward the sun.
