Cherry Blossoms

Good morning!

We have a bright sunny Sunday with many flowers – lilacs, redbuds, forsythia, cherry, and so forth. Garyo sent me pictures of Zuioji with cherry blossoms the day before yesterday, so I posted them in our website’s blog, along with pictures of our weeping cherry in the backyard and the one in my yard.

It was just around this time that I first visited Zuioji monastery, seeing beautiful cherry blossoms in the bright warm sunlight after one week tangaryo – all sitting from early morning until late at night, except meal and bathroom visits, in cold air due to the location on the mountain.

Yesterday I watched a film titled Takamine (Japanese title: The man making cherry blossoming in America), who first crystalized diastase, adrenaline, etc., and who worked to have cherry trees planted on the Potomac River, realizing photographer Eliza Scidmore’s dream of showing them to Americans.

They were the second shipment, as the first couple of thousand trees, an earlier gift from Tokyo Mayor Ozaki to Mrs. Taft, became infected. President Taft gave a speech saying that unlike European countries that sent warships and generals, Japan sent cherry trees, representing peace.

Cherry blossoms are gorgeous, especially in a multitude, but they are quick to fall naturally, and much more so with wind and rain. So they are the representative of flowers (hana) and impermanence. Thus they symbolize cleanness, calmness, non-attachment, decidedness, bravery.

So, people look for the daily news of the sakura-zensen (cherry frontier) approaching and enjoy hana-mi (cherry viewing, lit. flower viewing) with food and drink under the cherry trees. Cherry blossoms are like national flowers of Japan (none decided).

NHK reported a Syrian awaiting the day of peace, enjoying cherry blossoms with his friend sending a hundred cherry trees. Many poems, songs, essays, wishes, etc., on cherry blossoms have been composed in Japan since ancient times. Here is a popular poem cautioning impermanence:

The vain cherry of the mind

That thinks of existence in the morn.

Who can say that there’ll be

No storm at midnight?

Asu-ari-to

Omou kokoro-no

Ada-zakura

Yowani arashino

Fukanu-monokawa

明日ありと

思う心の

あだ桜

夜半に

嵐の

吹かぬものかは

4/3/16

Note: Shinran, Founder of the Pure Land Buddhist School in Japan, is said to have composed this poem when Jien, Head of the Tendai School, told him to ordain him tomorrow, as it was already night.