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Impressions of Lisbon
My first trip to Europe was pretty easy. Not the getting there โ that part was actually pretty difficult. I flew through Heathrow, but leaving Haneda the plane flew east over the Pacific Ocean, north between Kamchatka and Alaska, through the…
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Visiting the Kyoto State Guest House
A few years ago one of the members of Writers in Kyoto shared a broadcast from NHK’s Core Kyoto S05E02 Kyoto State Guest House: Hospitality Imbued with Beauty and Craftsmanship. This is a special compound located in the Kyoto Imperial Palace…
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Minamiza
Took a walk up the Kamogawa tonight and saw Minamiza, the theatre where all the kabuki greats have been performing for the the past hundred years.
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6 months an upฤsaka
At the beginning of the year I undertook a commitment to take my Buddhist learning to the next level by becoming an upฤsaka, or โlay devotee.โ Last fall I applied to and was accepted into the upฤsikฤ program at Birken, the…
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On Shijล this afternoon the Naginata-hoko is going up. Look at the rope work and the size of some of the posts! #gion #็ฅๅ็ฅญ #kyoto
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Such a glorious day today in #kyoto 😁 Hope you all had a lovely Tanabata 🎋
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The End
Cross-posting the greeting from this month’s edition of my newsletter, since it is of personal significance. The last day of June. A Real Feel™️ of 42 degrees celsius. Not even summer yet. But things started to settle down this month. We…
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My neighbourhood has a lot of Buddhist craftspeople. They make altar fittings, carve statues, etc. One warehouse is used for cleaning parts of temples. I pass by every day and there is some new chunk of a temple that has been…
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Blowing away your sins
Although we live in downtown Kyoto, we are somehow still within the precinct of Fushimi Inari, the mountain shrine south of the city with all the torii gates (some photos from our hike up there a couple years ago โ). The…
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Rainy remembrance
In the rain today I walked to Bukkล-ji ไฝๅ ๅฏบ, an important temple in the centre of Kyoto for Shinran, the founder of Shin Buddhism. I am not a temple member, but this is the neighborhood temple. In a famously gridded city,…
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