Near the end of his life, the Buddha delivered the famous flower sermon, in which he held a flower up to his disciples and said nothing. All day today, Kyoto was preaching the flower sermon to me. First, I went to the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, where I saw incredible tulips, cherry blossoms and rare tropical flowers in the greenhouse. Then, I walked the crest of the Higashiyama mountains from Daimon-ji down to Himukai-jinja Shrine. The trail was like a tunnel of flowers, with mitsuba-tsutsuji (three-petal mountain azalea) blooming on both sides of the trail. Speaking of Buddhism, my good friend and former bandmate from Vassar College, Evan Brenner, is performing a one-man play about the life of the Buddha. The website for his play is
here and a YouTube clip can be found
here.
Here are some tulips from the Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
The cherry blossoms are still hanging on at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
This flower brought me right back to my days in Borneo. I saw it in the greenhouse of the Kyoto Botanical Gardens.
This is a mitsuba-tsutsuji (three-petal azalea) that was one of the thousands (millions?) lining the path across the Higashiyama mountains today.
This is a shaga (fringed iris) at Himukai-jinja Shrine. This is one of my favorite flowers that blooms in Kyoto.
