Illustrating Impermanence

Miya Ando: You know, the fundamental nature of reality is that all constituent forms that create the universe are temporal and impermanent. So all things are impermanent. And so the depiction of that in rain, I just thought rain is so overlooked. It’s just so everyday, and yet it’s really wondrous if you start looking really, really, really closely at it.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Miya Ando. A sixteenth-generation descendant of Bizen swordsmiths, Miya is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the ephemerality of natural phenomena. Her new book, Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words, presents a visual compendium of terms for rain, featuring expressions from Buddhist rain sutras, Heian-era poetic anthologies, and regionally specific terms from throughout Japan. Miya is calling in from her home in Manhattan, so you may hear some sirens in the background. In my conversation with Miya, we talk about the concept of mono no aware and how she aims to capture impermanence and transience in visual form, how her experience growing up between cultures influences her attention to lexical gaps, how she uses indigo and micronized silver to embody the spirit or quality of each form of rain, and how she hopes to evoke wonder and awe in her viewers. So here’s my conversation with Miya Ando.

James Shaheen: Okay, so I’m here with artist Miya Ando. Hi, Miya. It’s great to be with you again

Miya Ando: Thank you so much for having me, James

James Shaheen: So Miya, we’re here to talk about your new book, Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words. So to start, can you talk a little bit about this project and what inspired you to work on it?

Miya Ando: During Covid, this was March 2020. I think it was March 10, 2020. The governor of New York, who was Cuomo at the time, asked us to shelter at home. And I thought I would grab some things to work on at home. I was in my studio, and something that I had been very interested in since graduate school is a depiction of impermanence. I had lists and lists and lists of, it was rain and clouds and the waxing and waning of the moon, snow, all of these depictions of mono no aware, or ephemerality, transitoriness in nature. And so during our lockdown time, I thought I’ll just look at my list and organize them, and I started to add to my list of rains. And it was raining. I was sitting out on my terrace. I live in Manhattan, and I was at home with my husband, and I thought, “This is a really good chance to just sit really quietly and look at my research.” And I just landed on the difficulty of depicting rain and even seeing rain, and how beautiful rain was because it is so transitory. It’s here and gone, and it’s really hard to see. And I thought, “You know, let me make drawings of this.” And as I was gathering all of these words, different, very nuanced observations of rain, it turned into a dictionary. 

Lexicography is not like my dream in life or anything. I didn’t grow up thinking, “I’d like to write dictionaries when I’m older.” But it became so robust, it turned into a dictionary. So that is really how it started, and it was because of Covid. I was sitting at home. I’m best when I am occupied with something, something good, and can sort of lose myself in that. It’s mushin. It’s when you lose yourself in the concentration of a task or a thought. And that’s how it began.

James Shaheen: Right. So the project is dedicated to your grandparents: your grandfather, who was a Buddhist priest, and your grandmother, who was a tea master. So could you talk a bit about your upbringing and how it influenced your path as an artist?

Miya Ando: Mm-hmm. Well, I’m half Japanese. My mother is Japanese, and as an infant and a child, I lived in Okayama in Japan. My maternal grandfather is the head priest or abbot of a very small Buddhist temple. It is Nichiren, Nichiren-shu, and I’m from the oldest sect, not Nichiren Shoshu, not the new Nichiren sect, but the old Nichiren sect that was established by Nichiren, who lived in 1222. There are a number of sects that are based on the Lotus Sutra, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, but I’m from Nichiren-shu. They allow their priests to marry. So you don’t see too many people who have fathers or grandfathers who are Buddhist priests, but that’s the sect of Buddhism that was impactful in my personal story.

My sister and I were the first white kids, or half white mixed kids, in our town. So Japanese is my first language, and I’m from two very old families. Both of my grandparents were the fourteenth generation of their lineage, so I’m the sixteenth generation. So I think, for me, my family is very traditional and very religious, and growing up in that context, I had a lot of influences and information, I think, that was traditional, and things like the seventy-two seasons and Buddhism played a huge role in my upbringing.

So yes, I did dedicate this endeavor to them because I think being exposed to Buddhist thought, as it pertains to nature in particular, was something that has impacted the rest of my life, and it’s what I look at in my work.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned seventy-two seasons. You also mentioned a few thousand words for rain. What is with this micro attention to natural detail?

Miya Ando: I think that one of the really beautiful things in the Japanese language is this very careful, close observation and chronicling of the natural world. It really is based on a reverence for nature. I’m really heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. My mom is a teacher of Urasenke tea ceremony, and so Zen has been a large part of my life through my mom. So when you’re talking about the moon and mountains and clouds that change constantly, in a Zen world, Zen thought is depicted and illustrated and articulated through nature. And I loved it.

That was something that resonated when I was a young person, the idea that everyone can look in the sky and look at the moon and the mountains, and we all know what clouds are and that they shift and change, and that those natural phenomena had much deeper philosophical ideas within them was something that really captivated me. So it wasn’t just that clouds are ever-changing and change by the microsecond. It was about that all things are impermanent, and that you and I are impermanent. And this idea of mono no aware, it’s both a philosophical and aesthetic idea. It’s about having a sensitivity or an appreciation to ephemeral things and having an empathy for particularly fleeting things. And why are these fleeting things depicted as particularly beautiful? It’s because we are fleeting. It’s an empathy to yourself, and you are no different than these fleeting things like clouds and falling stars. So that was something that really interested me.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I want to go back for a second to something that you just said in passing. You mentioned sixteenth generation, which of course where I grew up in Southern California, that’s rather unheard of. So your grandfather came from a long line of swordsmiths, and again, you’re a sixteenth-generation descendant of that lineage. But can you talk about how that history has informed your own approach to art being a descendant of swordsmiths?

Miya Ando: My grandfather is Ando, and we had an ancestor named Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu, who made a sword that was identified by Japan as an object of national importance. It was a sword. I think in my upbringing, because I’m mixed race, I’m not perceived as being Japanese, I’m perceived as being non-Japanese. But living in Japan, it was, I think, a way to investigate my own heritage and my identity when I was a young woman.

When I was at Yale for graduate school, I got an opportunity to go back to Japan to be an apprentice in Japanese metallurgy, and I was very interested in studying. Japanese metallurgy is quite distinctive. It’s very, very refined, and I was really interested in learning more about the ancestry and the lineage of the persons in my own family who had the ability to make these incredible objects. And as an apprentice, I was profoundly influenced by something called a hamon, which is particular to Japanese katana swords, and it is a cloud or wave pattern just on the edge of the sword. And it is a pragmatic thing. It’s part of tempering the blade so that the blade actually—Japanese katana have two rigidities. The spine has a different rigidity than the sharpened blade. And to get those two rigidities, when the steel is tempered, clay is put on the edge of the blade, and when that clay is removed after the tempering process, it looks like a cloud. So obviously, the technical parts of this are extremely interesting, and it’s just such a high level, that they smelt the iron out of earth that comes from under rice fields. So Okayama, or it was called Bizen in the past, Bizen swords and Bizen pottery are really quite renowned because of the iron content in the earth. So that tamahagane, or the steel that is the steel that swords are made from, it’s smelted right out of the earth, the dirt.

So all of these things are fascinating, but what’s profoundly impactful for me was that a sword has only one function, and it is to take life. And on this object is a cloud. And so this kind of combining of something in nature, a cloud, which is a very good vocabulary for transitoriness, that was something—I thought that was just such a poignant object. A very beautiful, very dangerous object, but very beautiful in that.

From that experience, I went on to making really the only series of paintings I’ve worked on in my career, which started as hamon paintings, just a line on steel with some sort of mist or fog. And then that evolved into what I’m making now, which are more literal. They look literally more like clouds. So that had a very direct and impactful influence

James Shaheen: Yeah. So along with that influence, there’s something else that you say was quite influential in your work. You say that as a Japanese American, you were raised between cultures, languages, and geographies, and your art explored the relationship between East and West. So can you talk about this betweenness and how it informs your work?

Miya Ando: Yes. Well, Japan is different from America because it’s homogenous. And so if you’re different or of a different race, it stands out more. And I think there is more opportunity for marginalization due to that. So I’ve had sort of an unusual relationship to Japan. I lived in both places. I went back and forth and back and forth. I really identify as being both Japanese and American. And during Covid, I had this kind of weird epiphany, and it went like this. It was like, oh, well, I can see lacuna, which are lexical gaps. Because I have command of both languages, it was really easy for me to see that there are all these two thousand words describing rain, pertaining to rain, for example, that don’t exist in the English language.

When something is valued, it’s given a name. So these lexical gaps or lacuna, they’re missing concepts. And I felt that this living in betweenness or not truly having a place or being of both places, if you will, I found something during the pandemic that felt of use. I thought, “Oh, this is really actually kind of fun.” And so I started writing all of these words that don’t exist. You asked earlier about the observations. It’s all of these very nuanced observations and innumerable observations really of such a pedestrian or ubiquitous thing like rain. But there are all these ways that early autumn rain is different from early autumn night rain, and there are just so many ways to describe things that don’t exist in the English language. And I thought, “Oh, this is something that I’m really built to do because I’ve lived in both places.” And that was something that really hadn’t occurred to me until then, until very recently.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting the thought of all these words in Japanese for rain that don’t exist in English. How are those then expressed in English? And is that something that you attempt?

Miya Ando: Well, they’re missing ideas. It’s so fascinating. This project, and my interest in language and the reason why I use bilingual titles in my paintings is because they are missing concepts. It’s a way to comprehend the value system, the very soul of Japanese society and the Western society, English-speaking cultures, America, which is my other country.

When you value something truly, you give it a name, you call it out, and this is a very interesting way to look at values, what we value in one society versus another. It was very challenging. I think translation is an art. I tried in earnest to explain what this idea was, what this word was, and when I say in earnest, I mean I tried in earnest to accurately translate my understanding of each concept or each word, each word in the dictionary. And also at my disposal, I’m an artist, so to draw it.

James Shaheen: Right, so in other words, you have a linguistic approach, but you’ve also said that art can be a way of getting at these lexical gaps, and you say that visual interpretations of these terms are not so much illustrations as evocations, attempts to embody each particular type of rain. So can you tell us about this distinction, and how are you setting out to evoke or embody the spirit or quality of each form of rain?

Miya Ando: Well, it was a real challenge because rain is really hard to see. It’s really fast. It’s barely visible. It is hard to draw it, I think, without it becoming a cartoon. I did try to photograph it at first, and then it was such an utter fail. I said, “Okay, well . . .” Because it’s too fast. And I asked my husband to, like, stand since you need something to be in front.

What makes it so beautiful is it’s so transitory. It’s really here and gone. You can sort of hear it. Sometimes you can’t hear it. It’s barely there. It’s one of these really beautiful, evanescent things. And so I thought I’m at my best when I set up the most difficult equation I can, especially during Covid when things were very still, and I tried to evoke the quality of that word and the emotion there.

For me, it was how I understood each of these very beautiful words describing. And I tried in earnest. Once again, many of the words are anachronistic. They’re not in the contemporary lexicon of Japanese language. They’ve become extinct, which makes them even more beautiful, this idea that there are, for example, I think seventeen ways to say elegant, quiet, calm rain, sohoburu. And that word is not really, it’s fallen out of usage because it doesn’t come into our conversations, whereas in the Heian period, for example, maybe a thousand years ago, you and I would be having this conversation sitting and looking outside, and it may come up if that was a condition. The attunement to our surroundings, things were slower, and I think there’s something quite beautiful that comes from looking at that language.

So I tried to evoke that word or phrase. In my dictionary, I have a lot of words that describe the effect of rain or philosophically what rain is. It isn’t simply descriptions of types of rain, but for example, Zengo, Zen idioms that discuss rain as something that really talks about the human condition or about our own impermanence, for example. So that was the challenge to make drawings.

James Shaheen: So this transience or impermanence comes through in your choice of material in your art. The drawings use natural indigo dye, which you describe as a type of clock marking and recording time’s passage. So can you talk about the use of indigo in your work?

Miya Ando: Yes. Well, indigo is a really wondrous botanical. It grows like a weed, and it’s all over. The oldest piece of indigo-dyed fabric was found in Peru, and it’s 6,000 years old. It’s still blue. So as a molecule, indigo oxidizes. So it behaves in this very interesting way. The longer indigo touches a substrate, like cotton, or in my case, it was paper, the longer the indigo touches the material, the darker the color. So one-second indigo looks very faint blue, very, very faint blue. And ten-minute indigo looks darker, darker, darker, darker blue. There’s one-minute indigo that is like a baby blue. And so if you look at indigo and the spectrum of color between very faint blue to almost black, it’s all by time.

So indigo is a natural clock. It’s a clock of color. Color is codified time in this instance, and it is such a beguiling natural dye. It’s also really lonely. Indigo is a very, very lonely, lonely creature because it only has one friend, woad. Woad is the other blue botanical. But besides that, there are no more blue botanicals. There are other blues like lapis lazuli that are mineral. But I thought it would be really cool and interesting to work with indigo due to its temporality. It’s a temporal . . . it has time within it. And that made so much sense because I’m already a person that looks at the concept first, this idea that rain articulates impermanence and what would be the best material that viscerally may communicate that concept. So indigo was selected for that reason in particular.

James Shaheen: And you also use micronized silver, and I’m looking at reproductions and not looking at the actual art, so now I really want to see the art. Talk to me about the use of micronized silver.

Miya Ando: Ginpu is micronized pure silver powder. It’s a powder. I learned about it when I was studying maki-e, which is making drawings on urushi lacquer. You paint with lacquer and then sprinkle powdered silver or gold onto that. It’s something I was studying. And my teacher in Japan gave me powdered silver and said, “Go home and work on this on your lacquer while you’re practicing, basically, and then when you’re really good, you can work with the gold powder,” which, I’m a student, so silver it was for me. But then it was there, and I thought it’d be so beautiful because it looks like raindrops. It also looks like stars. So I sort of borrowed it from myself and applied it onto my rain drawings.

I love it because silver and many metals, steel as well, has a very intrinsic and unique quality. It redirects light to your eyes in this way that you can see transitory light, and it’s really beguiling. It’s really, really interesting because it almost acts like a barometer of the day. If it’s a very bright day outside, the silver is more luminous, and if it’s dark and rainy or at night, it’s quieter. And so it has an ability to reflect light. And so that’s why I applied it as another way of communicating the concept of my project, which is about time and temporality and ephemeral things.

James Shaheen: Okay, so turning back to the lexical side, the project takes its title from an ancient term for rain, ama no mizu, which translates to water of the heavens. So can you tell us about this term and its significance? It’s very poetic. Why did you choose it as the title for the collection?

Miya Ando: The word is called ama no mizu. Ama is a way to say sky, but it is an ancient way, and today the word for sky is sora, which means the sky. It’s actually really interesting because the kanji for sora, which is ku, means emptiness, in Buddhism, empty or the void.

So the sky has always represented more than just simply the blue and the clouds. But the ancient way to say sky, maybe the firmament, ama means the above, the thing that is where the deities reside, where the clouds reside. It’s really the above that is something perhaps sacred or holy.

And no means belongs to, and mizu is water, so water that belongs to the heavens, water that belongs to the sky, water of the sky. And I selected that particular word because it places rain into a context that is already not just—it’s not necessarily otherworldly, but it becomes philosophical. It’s the thing that connects earth and sky, earth and heaven, us to the deities, us to the above.

And so I am very interested in natural phenomena that can be taken as nature and as the natural world, but also philosophically. And as I said earlier, Zen Buddhism is really interesting because nature has illustrated or articulated Buddhist thought. So ama no mizu was the term that I selected for the book.

James Shaheen: You know, I also wanted to ask you about your choice of source material for the dictionary since the sources in some sense reflect your own biography and family history. You draw from Buddhist rain sutras and prayers for rain, Heian-era poetic anthologies your grandmother introduced you to, Zen idioms closely connected to the art of tea ceremony, which figures prominently in your family, and regionally specific terms from throughout Japan. It’s a lot. So talk to us about the sources you’re using because so many of the words don’t even exist anymore in Japanese or aren’t used anymore, and some of them come more locally from your family, others come from history

Miya Ando: Well, this was before AI. I started it in 2020. It was books. I tried to do some internet research. The Internet is good for some things, but not for very, very, very in-depth research. So books. And I kept telling my husband I was like a pearl hunter. I felt like I was diving into the ocean, and sometimes I’d find a pearl, and it was a word that was a new, another rain word. I traveled to Japan five or six or seven times during those few years during Covid and was in bookstores and looking at old calendars and talking to all my friends and my erudite scholarly friends.

This, It’s an extinction diary. It’s a diary. It really is. It’s a dictionary, but it’s an extinction diary in many ways. It has to do with the climate and the changing of nature and the rain, but also of my own observations and chronicling. It really is a very abstract diary of my own life. I grew up speaking with, I guess the equivalent is sort of like an Arkansas accent, like what you would consider maybe something like a Southern accent that’s a little difficult to understand. That’s the region of Japan that I grew up in when I first learned how to speak. And so I have an affinity and a real love and adoration for people’s dialects. My friends always tease me when it might come out sometimes, and my mom never speaks with her regional dialect because it sounds a little folksy, you know. But I have a real admiration and a love for these varying dialects of which there are many, and the words are really whimsical and regional. So you may only use that word in your locale.

So through the lens through my own personal veil through which I view the world, you can see my interests, which are amagoi, rain-making ritual prayers, rain sutras. I’m just so fascinated by the rain sutras that were used to invoke rain during drought. You know, Japan is only ten percent arable land. It’s very mountainy, and drought was just something that people feared, and it was just terrifying. People would starve because of this. And therefore, since rain is a deity in terms of the Shinto religion and revered and people were terrified of rain and also loved rain and adored rain, hence all of these different words. There were rain-making rituals and poems and prayers and Buddhist sutras and chanting. So you see a lot of that in the dictionary.

Also, I have an affinity to female writers from the Heian period that have been overlooked by history. There are women’s writings that are just so poignant and just gorgeous. I put a lot of women poets in there because I love them and I admire them.

As you said, Zengo, my mom’s influence with the tea ceremony, and also to illustrate once again that something as pedestrian as rain could really be an articulation of something much deeper about impermanence. You know, the fundamental nature of reality is that all constituent forms that create the universe are temporal and impermanent. So all things are impermanent. And so the depiction of that in rain, I just thought rain is so overlooked. It’s just so everyday, and yet it’s really wondrous if you start looking really, really, really closely at it.

James Shaheen: So I know there are so many to choose from, but do you have any favorite terms that come to mind from the compendium, just to give listeners a sense of what some of these terms are like?

Miya Ando: Yes, I do. I have lots.

James Shaheen: Maybe 2,000.

Miya Ando: I have one hundred. How is that?

James Shaheen: Right, you chose on hundred of the 2,000,

Miya Ando: I did. I think I’ve whittled it down. My favorite really is kitsune no yomeiri, which is fox wedding rain. It’s so beguiling. It’s so wondrous. It is when there’s clouds and sunshine at the same time. So when it’s sunny, and all of a sudden it starts raining out of nowhere, you didn’t expect it, it’s very unusual and kind of mystical. And that is the precise condition where foxes get married. So foxes wait for that kind of sunshine. It’s also the condition that creates rainbows.

So when I was a little girl, my grandparents told me that foxes are getting married right now when it rains like this. And that just really changed my relationship to nature, and it really is so delightful. And so there are at least half a dozen words in my dictionary about fox bride weddings, foxes finding a wife rain, those types of words that just seem whimsical and magical, and it just really shifts your perception. And I really wanted to share that with my friends and tell people, like it’s not just sunny and . . .  so things like that.

I love words like fuji na ame, which is wisteria rain. There’s beni ame, which is rain on safflowers. So very precise rain that falls on certain flowers and petals, and then you have two really ephemeral things at once. You’ve got flowers falling, and you’ve got petals, and tsuki shigure, moon rain, rain that falls in front of a full moon. Those types of words really fascinate me.

I’m having an exhibition this October, September and October, one in LA at the Japan Foundation and one here in New York at Sundaram Tagore, which are my favorite rain words, and I made them large because all of the drawings in my dictionary are small. So I picked my favorite words that I wanted to spend more time thinking about, and I executed them large. And so I thought a lot about every time I’d find a word that I thought, “That is just like a respite for your soul,” I’d just seek solace in these ideas, especially with the way the world is today and how it was in Covid. 

I was very anxious during Covid, so some of these words were just like a portal into this world, and those I’ve kept in my heart and spent more time on, so therefore making these larger, larger drawings that take, like, forever to make.

James Shaheen: I’m really glad that you mentioned fox weddings because that stopped me in my tracks. I thought, “What the heck is that?” And I thought it’s impossible, it’s improbable that there would be such a word for when it’s both sunny and raining and fox weddings. And I thought, “I don’t know how to put that together,” but it really captured my imagination.

Miya Ando: Yes. I think any of these things, any concept in nature that creates wonder and just is captivating, I can just reside there. 

James Shaheen: I stopped on that one for a while, and I just had to think about it.

Miya Ando: Don’t you want to live there? You want to live in a world where foxes are getting married.

James Shaheen: Exactly. Under certain meteorological conditions, you know?

Miya Ando: Very particular. Well, in Shinto, foxes are messengers, and they are sacred, and they also change into forms. And anytime something is a little off or something is unexplainable, it’s probably a fox that did it. So I do get it. It’s unusual that rain would come out of seemingly nowhere. It doesn’t really make sense. So obviously, foxes are involved.

James Shaheen: Of course.

Miya Ando: Of course.

James Shaheen: Who else?

James Shaheen: So you begin the preface with a quote from the 15th century monk Ikkyu Sojun. I’ll use the quote that you used. “Let us learn to read the love letters sent from the wind, rain, snow, and moon, rather than studying complicated things such as sutras.” So can you tell us a bit about this quote and how it resonates with your practice of listening to the natural world?

Miya Ando: Yes. Ikkyu is one of my favorite radical Zen monks. Ikkyu said that we should study the love letters sent by the rain and the wind. And it’s so beautiful to think about nature in those terms, in that context, that instead of or rather than simply always studying the sutras, to look outside and that the sutras are in the wind and the rain, and not only is it knowledge, and not only is it learning, it is a source of love, right? They’re love letters. I mean, love letters are different from saying the thesis or whatnot. So I was beguiled by that. I think it’s a really beautiful way to think about our surroundings and the natural world, and we as part of the natural world, it’s just a perception shift to think about how the natural world is a mirror of our own lives and our own impermanence, and that concept is very closely related to the notion or the idiom of mono no aware that states a sensitivity to particularly ephemeral things.

And I think nature is a mirror of that. You just look at the seasons changing and rain and things that are evanescent. It mirrors our own evanescence. And the psychological shift that occurs within this context of mono no aware is that rather than in the Western world, impermanence and death and dying are not nihilistic. It is an opportunity to be aware of the present moment, and you feel lucky that you saw something particularly evanescent in nature, like a shooting star or falling Momiji leaf or a falling petal, for example.

So looking at nature, I think Ikkyu is a radical monk, and he was very edgy, and that I thought it was a lovely way to begin the book by introducing an idea that is of utmost importance, which is that, yes, rain is a natural phenomena. It also is an illustrator of something philosophical.

James Shaheen: Mm-hmm. On the other hand, as has been pointed out in the work the petals fall, the leaves fall whether the rain hits them or not.

Miya Ando: Yes.

James Shaheen: That was especially nice.

Miya Ando: That is our life. That is precisely our life.

James Shaheen: Yeah.

Miya Ando: It is exactly perfect. Everything about that is perfect.

James Shaheen: Yeah. So back to Ikkyu’s quote or maybe working on this project in general, you mentioned that it was raining outside, I think, around the time that you started it. How has the work changed how you experience rain?

Miya Ando: Oh, well, I mean, I love rain. I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and in Japan, and I mean, rain like I have not experienced since. Just really torrential, awesome rain in the redwoods. I lived in a redwood forest. And I start in my preface by discussing how these redwoods are just like thirty-story tall buildings. They’re 300 feet tall and 300 years old, and one came crashing down after the rain, during the rain when I was a teenager, and that sound shook the entire forest. So the awesomeness of rain.

It makes sense that rain is a dragon deity in Japan. It’s a dragon. You know, there’s rain that splits two dragons in half and dragons fighting rain, and it’s because I could see that. I could see, you know, it’s not that much of a leap. But one kind of funny thing is that my nears and my dears, my close friends, they don’t know it, none of them know this, but I have a whole group of people that every time it rains, they ask me what kind of rain it is. “What kind of rain is it? No, like exactly what kind, like what’s the particular word?” And it’s like, “Is this early morning spring intermittent rain? What is it?” So they’re constantly . . . it’s adorable, and I love them, and I never tell them that there’s a collective consciousness amongst the people I interact with. It’s totally adorable. And they all try to take pictures of it, and it’s like a blur. It’s like nothing, you know? 

James Shaheen: It’s hard to film rain.

Miya Ando: It’s really difficult. It’s so silly. So I guess the secret will be out, but so that’s sort of delightful and funny and adorable of my friends to do that. But my husband is asking me, he had to listen to me because it was just he and I during Covid at home. He had to listen to me saying all these different things like, “Oh, there’s a word for snake crawling up tree rain,” and all these . . . he knows all of them. And he asks me occasionally, like it was really cold this winter and we were out sitting on our terrace, and his coffee got really cold right away in the mug, and he said, “Oh, is there a rain that makes coffee cold?” So people are always suggesting rains to me, including, “Oh, there should be a . . .”

James Shaheen: Maybe we should create our own words, you know.

Miya Ando: Yes, definitely.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I also think of how do you keep track of seventy-two seasons? Like, what season is it now, you know?

Miya Ando: Yes, it’s a lot of things. You know, seriality unfortunately is something that I’m built as a really serial kind of structured person where I literally just finished, it came out of the rain dictionary, but it’s 498 aspects of the rainy moon, and there were 498 aspects, so I had to draw them. And it’s really to honor this idea of very precise observation and the reverence that one has to be able to observe things very closely.

For example, in the seventy-two seasons, the seasons are based on natural phenomena and things that shift: when fireflies appear, when peach blossoms occur, when thunder occurs. And that is sort of unique to Japanese thought.

You know, Shinto, the native religion, has six million deities, and there is a deity that resides in trees. And at the Buddhist temple, we had to cut down this great old, old tree that lived right in front of the temple, and it was leaning and leaning and leaning. It was getting dangerous. It was very old. They had to cut this tree down when I was a girl, and I couldn’t go outside. I had to watch from inside because it was a little bit dangerous. There were four priests who were called to cut down this tree, to pray to the tree, “We’re sorry we have to cut you down.” I wasn’t outside. They wouldn’t let me go outside because it’s dangerous. But from the side where I was looking, there was not just my grandfather, it took this really long time before they cut the tree. They were praying to the tree, which is the proper way to cut down an old temple tree.

So this idea, I don’t know. I should ask if the tree had become an abode for a deity. In Shinto, waterfalls and Mount Fuji is an abode for a deity. And this is part of the reason that precipitates this idea that you have all of these observations. I mean, nature is holy, and you revere it. There are deities. And so seriality, it shows respect, I believe, to have thousands of ways to describe one very small natural phenomena, for example. I also have a moon dictionary. There are like 1,500 words for the moon in its phases, like a lot, a real, real lot. A ton. It’s fabulous.

I mean, the language shows this reverence and this precision and chronicling, and that’s why I call it my extinction diary because this kind of observation and looking takes time. It’s hard to discern one kind of early morning rain from what it looks like from quiet afternoon rain in the same day. It takes a lot of—I  have tried it. It takes an incredible amount of slow looking and calm sitting to notice nuances. And I think today things are very, very fast, and if you don’t get it in a second or two or five seconds it’s gone, and you don’t get it. You just missed it.

People don’t even have time to even deal with the concept. And unfortunately, within that is intellectual loss. So you’ve got language loss, and within intellectual history, you’ve got . . . I mean, the seventy-two seasons calendar is anachronistic. It’s not in use anymore. But because I was exposed, part of my conditioning when I was a little child with my grandparents and these people that had a sort of a more traditional outlook, I aim to preserve some of these things just because I was exposed to them, and I’m privy to them, and I know them.

And mostly I just want to tell my friends because they’re so beautiful, and they’ll be gone. So the extinction diary is about that. It’s not simply about the fact that their rain is ridiculous and crazy now. And the seventy-two seasons calendar is actually off by several days due to climate change. The geese don’t come back when they did. This is a 2,500-year-old calendar. I mean, it’s a long time for an agrarian calendar to be in use where it is now not lining up. It’s misaligned to nature. Summer is way earlier. It’s way hotter. There’s all this crazy rain. There is not enough, you know, all of the things that have occurred.

James Shaheen: You know, the types of rain that you chronicle are themselves disappearing due to climate change. So can you talk about how you’re thinking about preserving and passing down knowledge to future generations? I mean, in the same way that the words have been lost historically that you’ve resurrected, now we’re actually seeing an actual loss of the various phenomena of rain.

Miya Ando: Right, and it’s important for me, I think all I can do, I think all I’m able to do is to catalog and translate to preserve that knowledge. I feel lucky to have been part of my conditioning when I was a child. I was introduced to some of these things. So to collect and gather and the MIT Press, I feel so much gratitude to the MIT Press for having interest in what I thought was quite an esoteric project. But now there’s a dictionary of these words, and I think of the work that I make as a poetic lens through which we can look at our environment. It’s just a different way of inviting more attuned observation of our surroundings that we are part of, and it is part of us, and we are part of nature. So the poetry of 2,000 words for rain or seventy-two seasons is in many ways, I didn’t make it up, the seventy-two seasons. I just love it, and I’d like to translate what I can and share it with my friends and people who don’t know about it yet.

James Shaheen: So we’re running short on time, but I did want to ask one more question. You say that perhaps ironically, the project is an ode to the speechless quality of rain, and you mentioned earlier a moment in childhood where you experienced shock and wonder about fox wedding rain, my favorite. So can you talk a bit about how you hope to evoke or inspire that sense of awe and wonder in your viewers?

Miya Ando: Well, the whole project really is ironic in the way that it’s really verbose. I mean, this whole conversation, I’m sorry if I’m soliloquizing, but it’s a lot of words. And the whole point of this project is that rain is the speechless quality. It’s ineffable. It’s speechless, and it’s beautiful, and it’s transitory. And really that’s what I find beautiful about natural phenomena like clouds and rain. It’s the speechless quality. I hope that maybe my book invites people to think about something really ordinary and overlooked like rain and say, “Wow, there is a culture, there is a people who really looked at rain and gave them all their own little names,” and the precision of the nuanced subtleties.

And I think, as I said, I didn’t set out to write a dictionary. It’s just for my own self, it’s sort of mind-blowing to think of what it takes for a society to come up with a language that is that detailed. It’s really the poetry is just in that alone, I think, or what I admire about that language.

James Shaheen: You know, we talk about the speechlessness of rain, or you do, and yet we can sit and listen to rain for hours in the same way we might look into a fire with rapt attention. It is in a sense speaking to us at the same time. Would you agree with that?

Miya Ando: I love that there are some words about rain as a timekeeper and rain as this rhythm. And I think probably if I ask myself in my heart and soul why I love that, it’s because I grew up in the temple. It’s all based on Nichiren Buddha’s drum. It’s based on this.

You know, the Buddhist temple in Japan, it’s paper walls. So at 4:30 in the morning when my grandfather would chant sutras, I mean, I’m just right on the other side of that. So there’s something really comforting about that beat and the tempo. I think it’s a bother, also. You know, people go, “Oh, it’s raining,” and, you know, you get all wet and et cetera. And I feel that way too sometimes. But it’s also quite beautiful and calming and meditative, and the sound is contemplative, and it sort of comes and goes, and it’s sort of there, and it’s also not there. It’s there, but you can’t really see it. So it’s all the good things. It’s everything that I love.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Okay, Miya, anything else before we close?

Miya Ando: No, thank you so much for having me and for being interested in my book.

James Shaheen: Well, it’s a joy to talk to you. Miya Ando, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Water of the Sky, available now. Thanks again, Miya.

Miya Ando: Thank you so much. Thank you.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Miya Ando. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!