Antaiji

Antaiji

Temple of Peace

Jan Reider's Pecha Kucha presentation (2011)



Jan Reider gave a Pecha Kucha presentation on June 28th 2011 about the five weeks he spent in Antaiji building the stone garden in front of the main hall in early 2009. The 400 seconds presentation with slide show (20 slides) can be watched here (German language): Pecha Kucha Berlin #24

"I noticed, time is pretty long."



"The name of the Zen monastery is Antai-Ji, somewhere out there in no-where..."



"Early morning, quarter to three: Everyone get up! You have just 10 minutes to brush your teeth, sit down, and then you spent the next two hours staring at a wall."



"So that was the garden, the way I found it. At least they called it the garden."



"I made a sketch, or two actually. This is the second one. Pretty much according to the manual. With triangular constallations and all."



"First I cut down the bushes, they had not been touched for years."



"Then we started: All the plants had to go. Hydrogenias. We removed them with a power shovel, you might be surprised."



"Those guys were pretty nasty. The rocks, I mean. I picked the best looking ones I could find in the area."



"Didn'nt do it alone though. Some of them were pretty hard working."



"Others were less motivated."



"Speaking for myself, I was happy to do this work rather than plant seeds in the vegetable fields."



"I saw it as my privilege to design this garden."



"We build a dry stone garden, the typical Zen garden. Without professional tools or anything."



"Slowly, you could see the shape. Here one of the islands. I covered it with patches of moss which I transplanted from the baseball field close by."



"The only thing we bought were pebbles. Quite cheap, we are a monastery after all."



"And then, that was a hell of a work - how do call that thing?"
"A rake?"
"No, no, with a single wheel attached in the front - ah, shit!"
"A wheelbarrow?!"
"That's right! A wheelbarrel! Two of us, with a wheel barrel, did al of that work."



"After five weeks, it was time to move on."



"They did the rest of the work without me."



"You can se the results above - they did it quite well."

Contents



Switch to Japanese Switch to Korean Switch to Spanish Switch to French Switch to German Switch to Czech
Switch to Chinese Switch to Italian Switch to Polish Switch to Dutch Switch to Russian Switch to English