Another
update (and nearly week-old pictures) from me. This one should
make you feel sorry for me :- ) (Even though I'm in every day this
week, doing catch-up work, fixing the ever-jinxed-when-
transported-to-Kyoto laptop, reading about hydrogen energy and fuels
cells and rotational dynamics and brushing up on design of magnetic
circuits and also reading about a psychologist's take on the
differences in the ways that Western-culture people and
East-Asian-culture people think, and trying to arrange a video
conference with the executive director of the research section who's in
Tokyo, but took the wrong digital conferencing camera with him, and
cleaning up my desk area, and catching up on email and meeting with the
Japanese students and yada yada yada. Now, you can't claim that
I'm *too* pampered after seeing this picture.)Anyway, this picture is another of my panoramas, less-well executed just 'cause I had the lens zoomed all the way back to wide angle, and the room was dark and I didn't use a flash, instead steadying the camera against a wooden post in the room. Prof. Boyd's head is completely displaced at the junction of two of the pictures, as you'll notice.
The picture is of a Buddhist monk chanting a couple of old worshipful chants for us. There is a temple not far up one of the canyons here that seems to focus alot of chanting and sound as a way to promote worship and spirituality, and the office staff here made special arrangements to have a small performance just for us.
By way of background, Mrs. Helen Bing (you've surely head the name) are long-time benefactors of Stanford, and one thing Mrs. Bing likes to do, since she didn't have a chance to travel at all when she was a student, is to provide a few opportunities for the students who are at study abroad centers to enjoy a few cultural things that they otherwise wouldn't have the chance to experience, usually because we students are poor and can't afford them. So she provides funds to arrange for a couple of dinners, some kind of cultural performance, and a trip for the students at each of the OSP centers around the world.
This year, this was the performance. A very resonant, calming, and somewhat mysterious thing is the chanting of a monk who's been doing it for years -- a little like a Gregorian chant, I suppose, only less tuneful as we would recognize tuneful, perhaps a little less rhythmic as we would recognize rhythmic, but accompanied by an occasional ringing of a small bell. (I've heard the same three rings that started his chants on one of John Lennon's last albums, at the beginning of I'm trying to recall which song -- I'm sure Lennon got it from hearing this kind of chant.) ('Starting Over'? -- don't know for sure.)
I almost bought a small CD they had that was supposed to contain more of the same, but honestly I don't think it could compare to the live thing, what with the surroundings missing and all. The new word to go with this is 'o-bo-san,' which is what you call politely call a Buddhist priest.
Oh,
and there was also off the edge of one side of this open-veranda kind
of room an old stone water-chime kind of instrument -- a small
rock-lined vessel that I guess was originally designed partly as a
cistern and partly to help drain the garden during heavy rains. Someone
randomly built one hundreds of years ago that resonated with each drop
of water, giving the drops' sound an almost metallic or light bell-like
quality, though somewhat quieter. There was no regular rhythm to
it, so it was like an almost natural sound- accompaniment to the view
of the garden, with a little breeze drifting through it. The
garden contained a fir tree that they claimed was over 700 years old,
if I recall the number correctly.The second picture is of a few of the students gathered around a little charcoal warming pit in the floor. After the performance, they let us wander around a but, but it got pretty cold, and not everyone came prepared for it. So after getting a quick glance at the several rooms in this building, some found it more comfortable to gather at one of the small charcoal floor-pits (the traditional way of warming a room on Japan) and warm up their hands and talk. The work here is 'samui' -- the feeling of cold.
Anyway, it was a nice couple of hours away from the office.