Calligraphy inside Kuri, the main building, of the Ryoanji Temple (龍安寺 or 竜安寺, Ryōanji), Kyoto, Japan

I saw this calligraphy inside Kuri, the main building, of the Ryoanji Temple (龍安寺 or 竜安寺, Ryōanji), Kyoto, Japan. I asked for help for the translation and my dear friend Carol aka 奇芍 told me that these are all Chinese characters.

She wrote: "In Japanese, there are some adopted Chinese characters in it so that I can read them, nonetheless, with the fancy style, not too easy to read; all I can say is that they're related to ZEN teaching. I'm positive about it."

 

I got also further information from her about these adopted Chinese characters:

"''Prior to the 3rd century, Japanese had no writing system. China, on the other hand, already had a civilization advanced past its time, with a well-established writing system of characters, called Hanzi. The Japanese decided to borrow Chinese characters as a way to give their language a written form. The problem was, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages. Chinese, for example, does not have tense or conjugation. Japanese, on the other hand, has myriad conjugations of its verbs that can express different tenses, moods, and level of formality. To add insult to injury, Chinese phonetics are more complex than Japanese phonetics. Worse yet, Chinese is a monosyllabic writing system; each character (or word) contains one syllable. Japanese words can be multiple syllables.

However, the "Hanzi" mentioned above means the traditional Chinese, not the simplified Chinese used in Mainland China now.""

 

The temple and its gardens are listed as one of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, and as an UNESCO World Heritage.

 

Done