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What’s a water basin doing on the cover?
The photo on the front cover of PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy is a picture I took of the stone water basin behind the monks’ quarters at Ryoanji
temple in Kyoto, Japan. Ryoanji is perhaps best known for its rock garden—15 stones in a sea of white gravel. It’s designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, but was once infamously described by the British travel writer, A.A. Gill, as “an impractical joke, medieval builder’s rubbish.” Although I’ve visited Ryoanji on several occasions, when I went there in early winter 2005, the garden wall was being restored, so for once it really did look like a builder’s yard. Instead of contemplating the rocks and gravel, I spent my time admiring this simple, but beautiful water basin.
Looking beyond the obvious
The crystal clear water trickling into the basin through the bamboo pipe symbolizes for me a constant flow of fresh ideas, a fount of knowledge, just like the Internet.
Viewed from above, the water basin also has a fascinating inscription. Read clockwise from the left side, the characters mean arrow, five, short-tailed bird.
The final character, at the bottom, has no meaning on its own—and that’s the clue. In combination with the square opening of the basin, it forms the character for sufficient. In fact, the mouth of the basin is an integral part of the inscription. Each character combines with it to form a completely different one.
Once you unlock the secret, it forms the following sentence: ware tada taru wo shiru. Roughly translated, this means “I know only satisfaction” or “I am content with what I have.”
This is an important concept in Zen philosophy—knowledge for its own sake is sufficient. A person who learns to become content is rich in spirit, even if not in material terms.The more you think about it, the deeper its meaning becomes. Just like the rock garden—if all you can see is a pile of rubble, you have missed the point.
However, the subtitle of PHP Solutions is not Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance (apologies to Robert M Pirsig). I want to teach you practical skills. At the same time, the inscription on this water basin embodies an important message that applies very much to creating dynamic websites with PHP. The solution to a problem may not always be immediately obvious, but creative thinking will often lead you to the answer. There is no single “right” way to build a dynamic website. The more you experiment, the more inventive your solutions are likely to become.