Grasses of Idleness #55

from Kenko
"A house should be built with the summer in mind. In winter it is possible to live anywhere, but a badly made house is unbearable when it gets hot.

There is nothing cool-looking about deep water; a shallow, flowing stream is far cooler. When you are reading fine print you will find that a room with sliding doors is lighter than one with hinged shutters. A room with a high ceiling is cold in winter and dark by lamplight. People agree that a house which has plenty of spare room is attractive to look at and may be put to many different uses."

Grasses of Idleness #71

from Kenko
"As soon as I hear a name I feel convinced I can guess what the owner looks like, but it never happens, when I actually meet the man, that his face is as I had supposed. I wonder if everybody shares my experience of feeling, when I hear some story about the past, that the house mentioned in the story must have been rather like this or that house belonging to people of today, or that the persons of the story resemble people I see now.

It has happened on various occasions too that I have felt, just after someone has said something or I have seen something or thought of something, that it has occurred before. I cannot remember when it was, but I feel absolutely certain that the thing has happened. Am I the only one who has such impressions?"

Grasses of Idleness #82

by Kenko
"Someone once remarked that thin silk was not satisfactory as a scroll wrapping because it was so easily torn. Tona replied, "It is only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller that a scroll looks beautiful." This opinion demonstrated the excellent taste of the man. People often say that a set of books looks ugly if all volumes are not in the same format, but I was impressed to hear the Abbot Koyu say, "It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling complete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better."

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters."

Grasses of Idleness #25

from the Buddhist priest, Kenko:"The world is as unstable as the pools and shallows of Asuka River. Times change and things disappear: joy and sorrow come and go; a place that once thrived turns into uninhabited moor; a house may remain unaltered, but its occupants will have changed. The peach and the damson trees in the garden say nothing - with whom is one to reminisce about the past? I feel this sense of impermanence even more sharply when I see the remains of a house which long ago, before I knew it, must have been imposing."
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A note on Kenko: Yoshida Kenko is a priest of the Zen sect. He wrote Grasses of Idleness (AKA Essays of Idleness) from 1330-1332, during the very end of the Kamakura shogunate under the Hojo Regents, marking the transition from a patrician to a feudal culture (according to George Sansom's Japan: A Short Cultural History). He will, for an undetermined space of time, serve as Liverputty's man outside of the court intrigue of Kyoto.