A Birdie For Buddha- Shishkine

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A Zen Approach To
Playing Golf In
Scotland

James C. Plowden-Wardlaw

James Campbell Plowden-Wardlaw hit his first golf ball into the gorse bushes at Old Prestwick -- the cradle of championship golf and site of the first British Open -- at the age of nine, during a family visit to a great aunt in Ayr, Scotland. He returned home to America impressed by the game, but waited more than fifty years to play again in Scotland...(More...)

Alex B. Pagel

Alex B. Pagel dubbed his first shot at the Maidstone Club course on Long Island in the 1940s under the Scottish eye of the club professional Jack Ross. This legendary man endeavored to teach him how to hit a ball, never a total success, and how to enjoy the game, by contrast a long and continuing success story. Old Jack also frequently implied that the true object of the game was to play in Scotland on a links course in the wind...(More...)

Hole #1 - Shiskine – Isle of Arran (The Ideal Zen Course)

Shiskine has recently been named one of the top 100 courses in Britain. Crossed by two burns and boasting two of the most difficult par-3s on the island--one having a small green at the top of a gorse-covered hill, the other a blind drive over a hill with the sea on the right and impenetrable gorse on the downside of the hill until the green)--the course overlooks the Mull of Kintyre and is dominated by the sheer cliffs of the Doon. (The original Celtic meaning of shiskine was “a marsh.”)

Shiskine Golf and Tennis Club - 12 holes - Shiskine Shore Road, Blackwaterfoot, Isle of Arran KA27-8HA. Further details in our book 'A Birdie For Buddha.'

What is also interesting about Shiskine is that it is a true Shinto-Zen course because of the way Nature is utilized. The course is landscaped by Nature, not bulldozer. The natural flow of land and sand and hills and beach is utilized in the most artfully simple way. Often framed by seascapes of majesty, the greens are placed and formed so as to challenge approaches, but are not made bunker-ridden obstacle courses.

This golf course has the appearance of having been more of a discovery of what was already intrinsic in the landscape, revealed by the architect’s imagination - in the same way that the master sculptor, looking at a piece of raw marble, can see the statue living in it and needing to be released. And, like the Zen potter pursuing sophisticated rusticity by forswearing formal elegance, so too this course architect has restrained himself from gimmickry and commercialization by tempering the land just enough so that raw Nature has been transformed into a usable course.

Shiskine Sheep in Wild Fern Forest

ABP Retrieves Birdie Putt

At Shiskine the hill is not artificially flattened. Instead an invisible green is placed just beyond it. Nor are fairways leveled, nor gorse removed. Should not the good and bad bounces and the resulting penalties be left so that the player realizes that he is not immune from the buffeting of life, and that good fortune is not solely of his doing but resembles the luck dispensed by the Gods? A humbling course. You are not “in total control.” Luck and nature as well as your proficiency have their role. A Zen course melded into nature at one with the land and life. A course to love and enjoy and play as naturally as you breathe. A Zen course opens for you the possibility of entering a world beyond yourself, of melding with nature, of being absorbed into the rhythm of the universe.

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