A Hut of One's Own

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Thoreau's two-year sojourn in his tiny house enlarged his sight exponentially; Walden culminates in a vision of human possibility so huge that only images of sea and sky were adequate to it ("A tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip").

So the hut, dwelt in mindfully, confuses our sense of scale. It is snug -- but it can open us to the entire world by helping us clear away the physical and mental clutter of our lives. For me, the most beautiful symbol of this seeming paradox is in the Vimalakirti Sutra, one of the most important scriptures of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In it, the wise Buddhist layman Vimalakirti, a wealthy man who has embraced what today we call voluntary simplicity, invites disciples of the Buddha into his tiny chamber, where he is lying ill. There he not only teaches them Buddhist truths, but also treats them to a vision of the universe -- a fantastic show of all things and all possibilities, within his four small walls.

Legend held that Vimalakirti's chamber was one jang (that is, 10 Chinese feet) square. The term fang-jang ("a square jang") is pronounced hojo in Japanese, and this resonant word reappears in the title of one of the great classics of Japanese literature, Hojo-ki (The Account of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut) by the 12th-century musician and poet Kamo no Chomei. Chomei's era saw the courtly culture that produced Japan's first great literature and art destroyed in brutal wars between military families vying for power. The imperial capital of Kyoto, Chomei's home, was burned countless times, and evil luck brought a whirlwind and an earthquake to the city too -- disasters he describes vividly. Eventually he retired to Mount Hino south of the capital. "Now that I've reached the age of sixty, when life fades as quickly as dew," he writes, "I've put together a lodging for my final days. I'm like a traveler who prepares shelter for one night, or an aging silk-worm spinning its cocoon. The size is not even one hundredth of the house where I lived in middle age." It is, in fact, one jang square.

Chomei is writing within a long East Asian tradition of male recluses: men of affairs who retire to the countryside when they have fallen out of political favor or have been driven from home by war. Relieved at last of the stern responsibilities of Confucian official and family life, they attune themselves to the pleasures of solitude and the rhythms of nature -- by embracing either the Chinese Taoist tradition of mountain-dwelling "immortals" who live free of care, or Buddhism, with its long heritage of monasticism and reclusion. Chinese landscape paintings often include little images of retired gentlemen taking their rural ease in thatched huts, and the small room where the Japanese tea ceremony is performed is intended to evoke a recluse's dwelling. And although women could become Buddhist nuns, they didn't take part in the mainstream of this tradition. (Instead, some aristocratic Japanese women of the middle ages, all but cloistered in their homes, used their ample leisure to create a great literature of psychological insight and refined sensibility, of which Lady Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji is the jewel.)

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