Buddhist and Shinto temples are essential to the Japanese not so much for worshipping - rituals of both cults are reduced to bare essentials, prayers take literally 20 seconds - but as spaces of silence : in a country where elevators and taxis, buses and trains, traffic lights, shop assistants and vending machines etc… talk to you, and talk all the time, silence is as much a luxury as space. In a island overcrowded with mountains, forests and people, there are no horizons save the ocean.

A multitude of Buddhist sects dot Japan, some of them from the Zen school. Contrary to the Therevada tradition...