The Art of Creating Coolness - 涼 -

Sep 10

6 min read

What a very hot European summer made me notice again about Japanese summer

Now that the evenings are cooler again, it is strange to think back to just how hot this summer felt.

There were weeks in Switzerland when the heat seemed to stay inside the buildings long after the sun had gone down. I live in an older building without built-in air conditioning, and on some nights the apartment simply didn’t seem to cool.

So I bought a portable air conditioner.

Then began a small summer project I had never expected to have.

I insulated the exhaust hose. I tried to seal the gap around the window. I moved the machine closer to the window, cleaned the filter, and experimented with almost everything I could think of.

By the end of it, I knew far more about portable air conditioners than I had ever wanted to know.

It helped, of course.

But somewhere during those very hot weeks, I started thinking about something completely different.

A Japanese expression came back to me.

心頭滅却すれば火もまた涼し

Shintō mekkyaku sureba, hi mo mata suzushi.

Roughly: If the mind is truly stilled, even fire can feel cool.

I have always found this way of thinking fascinating. There is something about the idea — that even our experience of heat can be connected to our state of mind — that has always felt somehow something very Japanese about it to me.

Can We Create Coolness?

Of course, I don’t take the expression literally.

On a dangerously hot day, I will turn on the air conditioner. No amount of concentration is going to make 38°C harmless.

But I still think there is something interesting in those words.

Temperature is real.

And yet our experience of temperature is not created by the thermometer alone.

Sound, light, movement, texture, memory — perhaps even our state of mind — can change the way a hot day feels.

And once I started thinking about that, I began remembering the summers I grew up with in Japan.

A sudare, a bamboo blind, filtering strong sunlight.

A furin hanging where it might catch a passing breeze.

Water sprinkled outside an entrance.

Light summer fabrics against the skin.

As a child, I don’t remember thinking of any of this as a philosophy.

It was just summer.

A Wind Chime Doesn’t Cool the Air

A furin is perhaps the simplest example.

It doesn’t make the room colder.

It doesn’t lower the temperature by even one degree.

But when a breeze catches it and you hear that small, clear sound, you know that the air has moved.

And somehow, that sound feels cool.

I find that fascinating now.

Growing up in Japan, I never stopped to analyse it. The sound of a furin simply belonged to summer.

Only much later, living somewhere else, did I begin to notice what was happening.

We weren’t necessarily creating cold.

Sometimes we were creating the feeling of coolness.

Uchimizu — Water, Welcome and Coolness

Uchimizu — 打ち水 — is another example, and its history is something I find especially interesting.

The idea of finding coolness in water is very old in Japan. Medieval poetry already contains images of cool river breezes, waterfalls and the freshness that follows a summer shower.

But uchimizu itself appears later.

As chanoyu, the Japanese tea tradition, developed during the Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods, sprinkling water became part of its etiquette. Water could be used in preparing the approach and entrance for a guest — not simply to make a place cooler, but as part of making the space ready to receive someone.

By the Edo period, uchimizu had moved beyond the world of tea.

It appeared in haiku and ukiyo-e, suggesting that sprinkling water had become a familiar part of everyday summer life and a recognised way of seeking ryō — relief and coolness in the heat.

There is a physical reason for it too. Water on a hot surface can lower the surface temperature, and evaporation can help cool the immediate surroundings. Even today, uchimizu has been revisited in Japan as one small response to urban heat.

But what interests me most is that it was never only about a number on a thermometer.

There is the sight of wet stone.

The change in the light.

The sound of water.

Dust settling.

And, in the tradition of tea, the quiet suggestion that someone has prepared this place before you arrive.

A little water cannot change the weather.

It can change one small place.

And perhaps the person entering it feels that change too.

心頭滅却すれば火もまた涼し

This brings me back to the expression I kept thinking about during my Swiss summer.

心頭滅却すれば火もまた涼し.

In Japan, the words are famously associated with the Zen priest Kaisen Jōki of Erinji temple.

In 1582, after the fall of the Takeda clan, Erinji was set on fire by Oda forces. According to the tradition preserved by the temple, Kaisen remained with the other monks as the temple burned and spoke the words:

安禅必ずしも山水を須いず 心頭滅却すれば火も自ずから涼し

The story became deeply associated with his death and with the expression in Japan.

But there is another part of the story that I find just as interesting.

The words themselves did not begin in Japan.

A closely related line appears in the Chinese Zen text Biyan Lu, known in Japanese as the Hekiganroku, and its roots can be traced still further back to a poem by the late-Tang Chinese poet Du Xunhe. The Hekiganroku later became an important text studied within Japanese Zen.

I had always thought of this expression as somehow very Japanese.

Learning that its roots lie elsewhere doesn’t make me feel that any less.

In fact, I think it makes the story more interesting.

An idea travelled.

It crossed languages and places, entered another tradition, and over centuries became woven into Japanese cultural memory.

Perhaps culture often works like that.

Things travel.

They meet something new.

They change, and they take root.

For a Journal called Musubi, I find something very beautiful in that.

Not Enduring the Heat

I don’t think shintō mekkyaku means that we should simply endure dangerous heat.

And I certainly don’t want to romanticise the way people lived through extreme temperatures before modern cooling existed.

Air conditioning can be essential. Shade, ventilation, water and buildings designed for heat matter.

But I do think the old expression points towards something we sometimes forget.

The temperature around us is real. But the way we experience it is also real.

Perhaps that is why the sound of a furin can feel cool even though the thermometer hasn’t moved.

Why filtered light behind a sudare can make a room feel different.

Why the sight of water spreading across hot stone can bring a sense of relief.

These things don’t defeat summer.

They change our experience of it.

Many Ways of Living With Heat

And this isn’t something I want to describe as uniquely Japanese.

People living with hot summers around the world have developed their own ways of finding comfort — shaded courtyards, shutters, fountains, particular fabrics, architecture, foods and daily rhythms.

Each grew from a particular climate, history and way of life.

The Japanese ones are simply the ones I grew up with.

Perhaps that is exactly why I didn’t notice them for so long.

Living outside Japan has made me look again at ordinary things from home.

Not because they are better.

Because distance sometimes makes familiar things visible again.

What This Summer Left With Me

My portable air conditioner stayed.

So did the insulated hose.

I wasn’t about to replace either of them with a wind chime.

But by the end of the summer, I had started thinking differently about what it means to feel cool.

Sometimes it was opening the windows early enough to catch the cooler morning air.

Sometimes it was closing everything before the heat arrived.

Sometimes it was the ice pillow that helped me sleep in a bedroom without air conditioning.

And sometimes it was simply noticing that the evening light had changed and the worst heat of the day was finally passing.

Now the nights are cooler again.

Soon I will probably be thinking about warm blankets instead.

But this summer made me return to an expression I had known for years:

心頭滅却すれば火もまた涼し。

I still wouldn’t test it against actual fire.

But I think I understand it a little differently now.

Perhaps coolness is not only something we measure.

Sometimes, it is also something we create.

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A Small Piece of Japan

涼 — Ryō

Ryō carries the sense of coolness and refreshment.

In Japanese summer life, that feeling can come from many small things: shade through a sudare, water from uchimizu, a light fabric, or the sound of a furin moving in the breeze.

Some change the physical environment.

Others change the way we experience it.

Often, perhaps, it is a little of both.