TWO

ON THE CIRCULATION OF METAPHOR

Charles Baudelaire famously asked: ‘Have you ever noticed that a bit of sky seen through a vent, or between two chimneys, or through an arcade, gives a more profound idea of infinity than a vast panorama seen from a mountaintop?’1 Large revelations often occur in very small spaces, and they are occasionally the result of a radical shift in scale and perspective. A few years ago Air France introduced the possibility of viewing a real-time video of the earth several miles below on long-distance flights, though these images were not very compelling. The following year, on a flight from Paris to Tokyo, this was replaced by pre-photographed European Space Agency (ESA) satellite images that did not coincide with the exact location of the aeroplane. Might somebody have realized that, due to almost inevitable cloud cover, real-time images are effectively often imageless, a blank white screen? Unlike the intriguing patterns in the aerial photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, taken from altitudes low enough for details on the ground to be recognizable, the ESA photographs are experienced as abstract patterns, since they are scaled to views from an aeroplane flying at a standard cruising altitude of approximately 38,000 feet, from which most ground detail becomes unrecognizable. At one moment there appeared a photo of the confluence of the Amur and Zeya rivers in Siberia, striking for its astounding resemblance to the surface features of certain pieces of contemporary Oribe pottery. Within a certain aesthetic and experiential frame, the surface of the earth (reduced to an image) appears as a pottery glaze, while the surface of pottery (made of earth) appears as landscape. Such correspondences are distinctly more interesting than a blank video screen, essential as this might be to the avant-garde, as they instantiate the profundity, and unexpected postmodernity, of Gary Snyder’s beautiful metaphor, ‘the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbed’.² In iconographic terms, such images (like the kanji for river, , kawa) – on the cusp between figuration and abstraction, representation and reality, the virtual and the material – reveal the destiny of the aleatory trace, which can remain abstract and non-representational, or suggest letter or ideogram, hieroglyph or caricature, icon or image, according to the psychological and cultural predispositions of the viewer. For there exist material as well as cultural preconditions for all metaphorization. In Japanese aesthetics, meaning is sought in even the most random surface effects, those that most Western aesthetics would relegate to the realm of non-figuration. In the case of the ESA image, the reduction of scale, transformation of colour, and distortion of form caused by the display of high-resolution satellite photographs on a tiny, poor-quality LCD screen results in an extreme metaphoric condensation. As will be seen, this metaphor of ground for glaze is less subjective and less extravagent than might be imagined, for what is at stake here is the intransigency of materiality as it gets taken up within the circulation of metaphors.

European Space Agency satellite photo of the Amur and Zeya rivers in Siberia.

Form is indissociable from matter. Semiology has taught us that every trace of human activity is simultaneously gesture, sign and symbol. Perhaps nowhere is this taken to such an extreme as in the experience of Japanese pottery, where manifestations of materiality, chance and symbolism are inextricably intertwined. Just as random patterns on pottery surfaces are often perceived as figurations of landscapes, an unintended crack may well suggest a calligraphic syllabic script (kana) or logographic character (kanji). In the case of a recent tea bowl by Kato Tsubusa that bears three roughly parallel vertical cracks, the pottery specialist and tea practitioner Umeda Minoru commented on it with one word, yama (, mountain), since the form of the crack approximates that of the kanji. A crack (or any other surface detail) may be experienced on the empirical level, for what it explains about the materials and mode of production, or in relation to formal properties within an aesthetic context; it can also be read as a representational sign, or even as a manifestation of a Zen revelation. Like painting, pottery runs the gamut from simplicity to complexity, regularity to irregularity, and each work bears its own representational and symbolic possibilities. Suggestiveness, allusion and metaphor are of the essence. It is told that one of the Chinese emperors of the Song Dynasty, Huizong, would test the artists in the Imperial Painting Academy by proposing subjects drawn from classic poetry. One day he gave them the following verse: ‘Lost in the green immensity, a red spot.’3 One artist painted willows surrounding a garden pavillion with a woman dressed in red on a terrace; another depicted a forest of blackberries harvested by a sole woman; yet another showed a stand of pines topped with a red-beaked crane. But the winner of the contest was Liu Songnian, who created a seascape with the rays of the sun on the infinite horizon. Such minimalism was then rare in Chinese art, but it would come to have a vast posterity across the sea in Japan.

Kato Tsubusa, chawan, c. 2006.

Kimura Nobuyuki, guinomi, c. 2008, detail.

It might be appropriate to begin this investigation of representation and narrative in the Zen garden with an even simpler image, perhaps the limit of iconicity: a red spot on a white background. While it may appear that this spot is abstract and informationless, it is actually rich in iconographic and narrative signification. For in Japanese aesthetics, metaphor exists within a complex and polyvalent circulation of images, such that iconicity is already narration. Writing of the varied arts of Japan, Maurice Pinguet explains:

Its perfection resides in the fact that an empirical reality (a plum flower, the flight of a bird) . . . signifies that all being is contained within it, indivisible and everywhere equal to itself. Culture will be the development, varied by a thousand sensible figures, of the recognition that nature is deployed in the realm of being. Japanese art is nothing but the sum total of techniques adapted to this operation and conspiring with this evidence. Culture reveals that nature reveals being.4

At the core of this sensibility is an art of subtle allusions. And in most cases, the subtler the allusion the better, such that the single spot or line or crack existing at the extreme limit of figuration is highly valued. The context of the apparently abstract red spot in question is the inside of a sake cup (guinomi) by the contemporary Kyoto potter Kimura Nobuyuki, with the outer surface depicting blossoming plum branches in the snow. Nearly all arts in Japan contain precisely coded seasonal markers, and this piece is no exception. The exterior suggests the very first signs of spring as the plum tree begins to blossom in the snow. As the cup is raised to drink, what at first glance seemed to be a purely abstract interior is recognized in its full iconographic intent, a plum blossom fallen on the snow, suggesting the very last throes of winter. As in haiku, this cup evokes a unique, ephemeral event within the context of recurrent natural cycles, grasped within a fully formed iconography and poetics.

Kimura Nobuyuki, guinomi, c. 2008.

The closest one comes in modern Western aesthetics to such a vast and densely interlinked system of resemblances and allusions is in Baudelaire’s notion of correspondences, which attempts to establish an unsystematic, intuitive sensitization to the intricate and infinite play of metaphors that link all images, all arts, all senses, all the while joining transcendence to immanence.5 While a century of modernism in the West generally depreciated representation and valorized abstract traces, Japanese culture continues to seek representational correspondences nearly everywhere, keyed to the ever-present seasonal markers that are nearly obligatory in haiku and that link all the arts. (The importance of word play in haiku, usually lost in translation, is crucial to the sense of correspondences, insofar as the double meanings thus obtained are in themselves expansive tropes.) Its most basic manifestation is the Japanese floral calendar, with vast symbolic implications and deep cultural resonances: pine (January), plum (February), peach (March), cherry (April), peony (May), iris (June), morning glory (July), lotus (August), seven grasses (September), chrysanthemum (October), maple (November), camellia (December).⁶ But this is only the most schematized version: in fact, over 5,000 seasonal words have been catalogued in classic haiku, and one might even go so far as to claim that the great majority of nouns referring to the natural world have seasonal connotations. Furthermore, certain of the most significant natural phenomena, such as rain, have a very broad lexicon, so as to nuance description, imagery and allusion.⁷ Over time and through poetic usage, most such words (and their corresponding images) have become codified, and thus regularly connote the same sentiments, to the point that there is an implied equivalence between seasons and emotions, or as Augustin Berque puts it, ‘geomorphology is translated into configurations of spirit’.⁸ Concerning the broader scheme of Japanese culture, as Joseph D. Parker explains, ‘In much East Asian elite culture the landscape was traditionally an image of spiritual freedom, religious power, moral purity, and a political position transcendent to or outside of the ambitions and avarice of ordinary life.’⁹ Otherwise stated, the landscape serves as a totalizing system of symbols for nearly all cultural values. This is true for both the literal landscape iconography as well as its major associations, such that

In the classical literary traditions of East Asia the natural world was read historically or mythologically as a landscape inhabited by various well-known poets, as the residences of particular spirits or deities, or as the location of particular important historical events.10

Indeed, in much traditional poetry, such associations were of greater importance than the landscape imagery itself.

These translations or transpositions between seasons and emotions are highly codified, to the point of risking innumerable clichés. As actor Oida Yoshi explains, concerning the means of expressing emotion in the Noh theatre, ‘If a person is sad, they don’t talk about what they are feeling, but they might say, “Summer has gone. Winter will soon arrive. The autumn leaves are falling.” Emotion is described through the phenomena of nature.’¹¹ Given their ubiquity, such markers effectively proffer the aestheticization of everyday life, and express the very depths of the soul. Murasaki Shikibu’s classic The Tale of Genji abounds in such symbolism, and at one point the narrator thematizes such literary practices: when speaking of a princess living isolated in a particularly dilapidated and sad house, whose poetic imagination is far less than might be desired, he complains that ‘Any lady living in a place like that should sometimes give poignant voice to her feelings by conveying the sorrows she knew so well in terms of the fleeting moods of plants, trees, or the sky.’¹² Here, the world is often personified, as in this poignant expression of melancholy, also from The Tale of Genji: ‘In the waning light the very sky seemed inclined to weep, shedding a hint of rain.’¹³ Augustin Berque sees the very structure of the Japanese language as accentuating its symbolic and existential rapport with the natural world: the imprecision of the grammatical subject – which can either be decentred and shifted towards a collective identity, or can disappear altogether – facilitates forms of expression where subjectivity is mediated by the surrounding environment, where the human is expressed by the natural, and where nature is consequently elevated spiritually.¹⁴ This feeling towards nature is both aesthetic and religious for, as Paul Claudel so well expresses the matter:

In Japan, the supernatural is thus nothing other than nature, it is literally supernature, that region of superior authenticity where raw facts are transferred into the domain of signification. It [the supernatural] does not contradict [nature’s] laws, but underlines their mystery.15

The great tea master Kobori Enshū (1579–1647) specifically uses such symbolism to express the essence of tea, which he describes as ‘the mists of spring, the cuckoo hidden in the fresh green leaves of summer, the loneliness of the evening sky in autumn, and daybreak in the snow of winter.’¹⁶ The contextualization of the red plum spot is rather simple, given the high degree of codification of seasonal effects and their application to pottery. One may consult, for example, the entry for February in a modern tea diary such as Sasaki Sanmi’s Chado: The Way of Tea. Most of the sweets (okashi) for that month symbolize red or white plum blossoms, such as the yuki no ume (snow on plum), which consists of red bean jam wrapped in thin rice cakes and sprinkled with fine flour. The author specifically associates this cake with a poem by Sōyō:

The plum blossom is covered with snow but its fragrance covers all.¹⁷

Furthermore, this tea master’s favoured pottery dishes for February are of Oribe, Raku and Karatsu, often approximating plum blossoms in form, image and colour.¹⁸ One often finds such symbolism throughout kaiseki meals (the cuisine associated with the tea ceremony, destined to become Kyoto’s, and more generally Japan’s, haute cuisine).¹⁹ Murata Yoshihiro, chef of Kyoto’s Kikunoi restaurant, makes a March dish he calls kakure ume (hidden plum), where he represents the plum blossoms against the last snow by covering a large pink umeboshi (pickled Japanese plum) with a sauce made of shirako, white milt, in this case of sea bream.²⁰ The iconographic coherence obtained by seasonal imagery creates a resonance between the microcosm of the restaurant or tea room and the natural environment.

The profundity of this sensibility, with its vast metaphoric range, its labyrinthine sense of time, and its synaesthetic form of perception, is beautifully illustrated by a passage from Michaël Ferrier’s novel, Sympathie pour le fantôme (2010), in a passage that takes place in a Tokyo bar at the moment that the bartender offers, as the pièce de résistance of a series of dishes accompanying the protagonist’s sake drinking, a simple umeboshi, here preserved in alcohol. The drinkers are at first somewhat surprised by the paucity of the offering, a shrivelled, washed-out, wasted plum, but they soon come to realize its rarity, being told that it has been marinating for 70 years:

I taste . . . Slowly, progressively, at the back of the mouth, then in more distant vaults – the canal of the throat, the stalls of the lungs – its song rises like that of a timid cricket . . . Its flavor is extraordinarily powerful and profound, an acidity at first muted, then fresher, peacefully unfolding. The scents slowly invade me . . . The plum came from afar, it went back centuries, ages, Niagaras of time. You think you are eating it but in fact it is devouring you, it comes to seek you out, to stalk you in the deepest recesses of your palate. You are dispersed from within, drawn out toward your openings – mouth, ears, tympana – that suddenly start to feel, to shudder, to roar . . .

Then, entire strata rush by: Time, with its veins, its marblings, its alluvia . . . Not that of social plans and reforms, checkbooks and calendars . . . real Time, the time that unfolds at the end of time . . . Simultaneously, your entire body begins to exist as never before: five senses, your voice changes, and your smile sparkles like a rain storm. Your nostrils palpitate. Your nose has wings, your ears pavilions. You become bird, insect, butterfly.

Profoundness of the plum. One has to search far for words, not only haphazardly in dictionaries but also in the infinite range of interior treasures, one’s entire portable lexicon, whose very existence was previously ignored: peaks, plains, musical staffs. A poem of elegance at the tip of the tongue and on the edge of the nerves.21

Not only does this plum serve to reveal the depths of the protagonist’s soul and to offer an allegory of the plot – in which certain people lost to history, the phantoms of the title, are revived through art – but it also reaches beyond the seasonal metaphor to plumb the depths of time itself. Here, the excessiveness of metaphor – which, in its explicitness, hyperbole and lack of attachment to a codified poetics is radically different from the aesthetics of the haiku – leads to revelation.

These examples of plum blossoms and fruit reveal how the complexity of iconography reinforces the profundity of narration. But there is another key factor that must be taken into account: unpredictability. Given the extent to which the aleatory is valorized in Zen-inspired aesthetics, it is often difficult to determine whether mimetic effects are established by creative premeditation or through retrospective contemplation. Not pure chaos, but a partially controlled ordering of chance, a fluctuating tension between the infinite and ineffable formal complexity of the macrocosm and the finite though indeterminate materiality of the microcosm. Perhaps sculptor Isamu Noguchi said it best when, speaking of stonework in his last writings, he insisted: ‘chance no chance, mistakes no mistakes’.22 The wabi-sabi aesthetic derived from the tea ceremony and central to Japanese aesthetics emphasizes irregularity, asymmetry, rupture, accident, breakage, erosion. Such effects are most evident in pottery, where a crack, slip or glaze may be seen to represent a mountain or a cloud. To seek random images in irregular and dilapidated surfaces is not unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s suggestion of finding images by staring into a fire in a hearth or by throwing a paint-soaked sponge at a wall and investigating the consequent patterns; or eighteenth-century painter Alexander Cozen’s technique of discovering landscapes in decomposing walls; or the passion for pierres paysagées or Chinese dream stones; or seeing images in clouds. In the West, such randomness is related to the Romantic aesthetic of incompleteness and potentiality, which valorizes sketches above oils because of the extent to which they leave a great part of the aesthetic act to the spectator’s imagination, a similar rationale to that behind the Japanese admiration for ink drawing. The difference is that the Japanese have both a millennial tradition of seeking such effects (inspired by even earlier Chinese art), and a vast catalogue of forms to codify such imagery, which is not incidental but essential to their arts. Indeed, one of the key descriptive terms of Japanese pottery is keshiki, which refers to the ‘landscapes’ suggested by the varied surface irregularities caused by firing certain types of pottery: stains, breaks, cracks, vitrification, flash marks, ash deposits, finger impressions and so on.23 Such landscapes do not, therefore, stem from the sort of free association typical of the unlimited and unrestricted semiosis characteristic of much Western modernism, but rather from a traditional aesthetics based on a vast set of poetically validated associations. In the context of tea, such ‘landscapes’ are not merely Rorschach tests revealing private symbols, but additions to a venerable history of poetic imagery. Just as pottery often conjures up landscapes, natural scenes may well evoke pottery, in a particularly site-specific manner. For despite the current tendency to use commercially produced clays, all the great kilns are associated with particular types of local clays, which in themselves bear visual suggestions and symbolic resonances. As Louise Allison Cort put it so well: ‘The fifteenth-century tea men who first brought those jars into their tearooms knew how to read the landscape, just as they could read shadings of ink on paper and see mountains and streams. In their mind’s eye, they saw the valley that had made the jars.’²⁴ Such is a poetics of the earth in its primal form.

Cloud in the form of Fujisan, Kyoto, December 2009.

Consider the range and limits of such metaphoric complexity: ‘Sekishu once placed some water-plants in a flat receptacle to suggest the vegetation of lakes and marshes, and on the wall above he hung a painting by Soami of wild ducks flying in the air.’25 Here, the heterogeneous combination of the real and the represented in a single image does not create a sort of meta-representation, but rather suggests that the world consists of many levels of reality, both hidden and revealed. A different sort of hybridity is manifest in the entrance hall of the famed ryōkan (inn) Chikurin-in Gunpou-en, which seems to be decorated with two large vases containing elaborate flower arrangements. While one of them is indeed an ikebana arrangement in a light-blue vase, the other is in fact an illusion, a dark vase posed in front of a screen depicting white flowers which appear to be placed in the vase.²⁶ The difference between these two flower ‘arrangements’ is a lesson in Japanese metaphoricity, which has long existed in the art of ikebana. We find another such arrangement by Teshigahara Sōfū in his book This Boundless World of Flowers and Form: an arrangement created for the Kyoto temple Kanchi-in consisting of pine, persimmon and white camellia in a Shigaraki vase set before an ink painting by Miyamoto Musashi so that one of the lateral branches of the ikebana is positioned to make it appear that some of the nearly abstract images on the painting are part of the flower arrangement.²⁷ These sorts of illusions and allusions must not be forgotten regarding the arts of tea and of the table, where pottery is an integral part of the culinary scenography, and where each piece is ideally chosen in relation to such wonderfully complex sets of elements.²⁸

This aesthetic thus values both abstraction and figuration, production and reproduction, the unique presentation of sheer materiality and the categorical representation of images with all their allusions and connotations. While most names of tea huts stem from literary sources, the given poetic names (mei) of tea utensils such as bowls, water jars, tea caddies (chaire) and scoops may be inspired either by literary allusions – whether from Zen aphorisms or court poetry – or by physical qualities. To name an object, whether univocally or equivocally, is to situate it within a symbolic and historical matrix and, not coincidentally, this act of naming also adds a surplus value to the work by seemingly attaching it to famed historic people and places. Consider, for example, the celebrated tea bowl Fujisan (one of eight chawan designated as National Treasures) created by the legendary painter and potter Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), on which a subtle effect of slip and ash glaze vaguely resembles Mount Fuji seen through the fog. Zen aesthetics are exemplified by suggestion and allusion, valorizing the attenuation of the literal by the indistinct, the shadowy, the obscure, the hazy. It is precisely such vagueness that motivates this type of representational sensibility, illustrated by the perennial Japanese fascination with forms obscured and rarefied by fog and mist, smoke and shadow, rain and snow. The state between the choate and the inchoate, that moment when images emerge or disappear, the cusp between figuration and abstraction, is particularly appreciated. This is an art of the incipient and the potential, manifested spatially by incompleteness and temporally by the suggestion of continual transformation. The desire for iconicity, the very anticipation of recognizing an image, creates a tension and dynamism in our perception of the object, transforming it into a partially open work, full of figurative potential.

Whereas the satellite photo described earlier evokes the earth as pottery, in Fujisan the pottery surface recasts a formed handful of earth as mountain and atmosphere. On the macrocosmic level, a tiny pottery crack may well symbolize the effects of the great earthquakes that regularly ravage the Japanese peninsula, a metaphor that, after consideration of our satellite image, no longer seems so audacious. At stake here is the representational quality of traces, where the potency of visual (and auditory) metaphors does not necessarily depend on the degree of verisimilitude, but rather on the differences between terms, forms, materials. This is well expressed by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur:

Konpuku-ji, topiary in the form of wooded hills, with Bashō-an hut in the background.

If we continue to translate mimesis by imitation, what must be understood is the contrary of the copy of a preexisting reality, and we must rather speak of creative imitation. And if we translate mimesis by representation, we must not understand by this word a redoubling of presence, as we can still hear in the Platonic mimesis, but the cut that opens the space of fiction.29

This is instantiated throughout the Japanese arts, and the resultant equivocation between abstraction and figuration constitutes an ineluctable aspect of Japanese aesthetics. It is inscribed in the very structure of Japanese writing, which contains both syllabic script and logographic characters, composed of three principle forms: formal block or regular (kaisho), informal semi-cursive or rounded ‘running hand’ (gyōsho) and cursive ‘grass writing’ (sōsho). The limit of equivocation between, indeed conflation of, word and image is found in ashide-e (reed-script picture), drawings where the brushstrokes simultaneously serve as representational elements (reeds, water in motion, stones and so on) and kana in the cursive style. Thus Japanese calligraphy articulates visual and conceptual forms, creating a fundamental ontological equivocation, and a consequent principle of correspondence, at the very core of Japanese imagery and thought.³⁰

This complex, refined and open-ended sense of representation will even have consequences concerning the most mimetic forms of reproduction, namely imitations (and counterfeits) of pottery. While the archetypes established by the early tea masters, notably Rikyū, remained ever-present within the tea schools established by Rikyū’s descendants, they would have been continually refined. Rikyū’s taste would thus become, according to Joseph Kitagawa, a sort of ‘“grammar” which structures new expressions and experiences’.³¹ Tradition would be superseded by novelty, which would become new tradition in turn. Eventually, however, what began as creativity would fall into mannerism and sterile repetition, as is often the case following aesthetic revolutions. Thus any object directly related to Rikyū is of prime importance. Yet given the minute number of such objects, reproductions of famous teabowls, a practice engaged in by the Raku workshop over the centuries, became essential for numerous reasons: ensuring the transmission of traditional pottery techniques, marking commemorations and homage, disseminating the orthodox taste of Rikyū, creating a community of practice, elaborating aesthetic symbolism and spiritual aura, maintaining the authority and continuity of tea institutions, establishing associative contact with past tea masters, offering readily available models for further creativity, determining social status, generating market value. Morgan Pitelka explains:

Reproduction helps us to understand the operation of tradition itself. Far from being a reductive, derivate act, reproduction serves to sustain and support tea practice; it is neither a purely creative nor conservative process, but one that enriches, extends, diversifies, and preserves tea culture in varying degrees depending on context, period, and practitioner.32

For example, Kaga Kōetsu, a famous red Raku chawan created by Hon’ami Kōetsu, was frequently copied, even by so famous a potter as Ryōnyū (1756–1834), the ninth-generation head of the Raku household. It is clear by comparing these reproductions that absolute fidelity to the original was not essential, but rather the reproduction of the general shape, colour and distinguishing details. Indeed, such reproductions were often made from hearsay, without the possibility of ever having examined the original piece. It could thus be said that the relationship between archetype and copy in such cases is metaphoric, with a transfer of only certain pertinent and distinguishing elements, without any desire for integral reproduction. Such is imitation as creation.

This suggests that the key to understanding all forms of representation, as well as the paradoxes thereof, entails the contradictory exigencies of mimesis, metaphor, correspondence collateral with rupture, metamorphosis, disintegration. Japanese aesthetics maintain an imperative to create a circulation of metaphors between the various arts, all the while stressing the ephemeral effects of passing time.³³ Several factors determine the degree and mode of representation stemming from an art object’s material uniqueness: its utilization as a design element (within the strict limits of the tea room environment); its position within the representational field (in relation to the other objects in the tea ceremony); and its performative use value (in the choreography of the tea ceremony).

This complex notion of representation, linked to considerations of temporality, is also crucial to considerations of gardens, since their fundamentally seasonal existence implies constant transformation – both linear change and cyclical degradation followed by restoration – and thus perpetual iconographic mutation. This richness is best made apparent by conducting the mental exercise of matching the sundry elements of a given garden, as they change through the year, to the total catalogue of seasonal words in haiku. This will clearly reveal how metaphoricity is founded on temporality, or rather on a palimpsest of temporalities guided by the seasons and open to aleatory effects. Thus the aesthetic perception of gardens necessitates attunement to unique material forms (design), to their ever-changing appearance over time, and to recognition of how such forms are experienced and formalized through poetic allusion.

Yet it should not be assumed that such hyperbolic attention to detail suggests that there is a single appropriate manner of viewing such gardens. Zen implies multiple levels of interpretation, all valid in different manners. There exist what Gregory P. A. Levine calls a religious, mystical, devotional eye, with its ‘temple effect’, and a secular, scholarly, historical, pleasure-seeking eye with its ‘museum effect’. Both of these, in their own way, are motivated by ‘eye-opening effects’, that is, viewing protocols which configure specific ways of approaching such scenes and objects.34 Each person arrives with different beliefs, different expectations, different protocols of viewing. Where one finds in Zen gardens the living presence of nature, another seeks a revelation of the transcendental void, while a third discovers sublime beauty. One need not become a Buddhist monk seeking enlightenment (satori) to appreciate the Zen garden, yet, as for all art, the form and depth of appreciation depends on what one brings to the scene. These temples and gardens are thus simultaneously sites of meditation, magic, devotion, knowledge, curiosity, and even commerce, play, profanation.

The crucibles of Japanese aesthetic form and practice have long been tea rooms or pavilions, many of which are to be found facing gardens within Zen temples, a fact that causes further aesthetic complications. A glaring misunderstanding with vast implications is the anachronistically modernist desire to see Ryōan-ji as purely abstract and beyond iconographic determination, as has been the case with Bruno Taut’s writings from the 1930s, which inaugurated the Western disregard of Ryōan-ji’s iconography. Taut’s high-modernist appreciation of this garden, as well as of the Katsura Detached Palace, was formulated in the light of functional, minimalist, anti-decorative modernist imperatives. (Philip Johnson is said to have burst into tears on seeing Ryōan-ji. His emotions were certainly inspired by Taut’s vision.) In the modernist West, one’s perception, fortified by anti-representational concepts and prejudices, is often arrested by the beauty of abstract imagery, while in Japan the same image might well function as what could be termed a ‘metaphoric relay’. Typical of this abstractionist misinterpretation, which has practically become the standard reading of Ryōan-ji, is that of Thomas Hoover, who writes in Zen Culture:

Unlike Daisen-in, the garden at Ryōan-ji is not a symbolic mountain scene. It is instead a work of abstract art on a canvas of sand which goes beyond a symbolic representation of a landscape scene to provide a distillation of the very universe. It is internationally regarded as the very essence of Zen, and it is almost impossible to describe, in either words or pictures.35

. . .

Between them, the gardens at Daisen-in and Ryōan-ji encompass the range of kare sansui gardening in Ashikaga Japan. The first is a symbolic landscape of parched waterfalls and simulated streams drawn in monochromatic granite; the second, a totally nonrepresentative abstraction of stone arrangements in the sand-covered ‘flat garden’ style.³⁶

This perceptual confusion is confounded by a conceptual particularity, the fact that of all the classic Zen-inspired dry gardens, Ryōan-ji is one of the rare ones in which the stones are unnamed, whence its iconographic ambiguity. This is surely one of the factors that led to the Western view of this garden as abstract and minimal (rather than a representation of mountainous islands on a vast ocean, as is the usual reading of the stones set on raked gravel in a dry garden), an interpretation congruent with the precepts of international modernism.

Katsura Detached Palace, shoin (main building).

In comparison, the extraordinary garden at Daisen-in (a subtemple of Daitoku-ji) is composed of approximately 100 stones, all of which bear names, variously denoting stone types, unique stones or use value: Buddha’s foot-impression stone, turtle’s-head stone, immovable stone, zazen (seated meditation) stone, splash of waves stone, Dharma stone, bright mirror stone, dragon’s-head stone, tiger’s-head stone, hermit’s-head stone, white cloud stone, waterfall stone, pearl stone, and so on. Concerning the specific value and meaning of stones, François Berthier notes: ‘Just as the landscape suggested by the garden at Ryoanji is abstract, the one at Daisen-in is given quite concrete expression’, a claim clarified by his explanation concerning Ryōan-ji: ‘It is precisely because the significance of this garden remains vague that it is so rich in meaning: it is because it is shrouded in mystery that it offers everyone a large margin of fantasy.’37 In fact, this ‘vague’ significance should suggest the broad scope of metaphoricity rather than a lack of it; it should highlight the tension between iconography and abstraction, not nullify it; the argument should remain within the bounds of iconology, and not slip totally into the psychology of fantasy.

The comparison between these two gardens is striking since not only are the stones of Ryōan-ji unnamed but, as has often been remarked, they are not particularly beautiful or unusual specimens. To the contrary, not only does Daisen-in contain a huge number of stones, all of them named, but many are particularly beautiful. However, this does not necessarily suggest that the iconography of Daisen-in is either unified, coherent or intuitively recognizable. While the symbolism of certain stones and arrangements is immediately apparent (as in the case of easily identifiable forms and configurations found in many gardens, such as the turtle island and the crane islet, the waterfall rock, the treasure boat stone), others are iconographically more obscure (like the bright mirror stone, the water imp stone, the pearl stone). While some stones help establish the scenography (such as the treasure-boat stone, the presence of which suggests that the expanse of sand on which it appears is a huge river leading out into the ocean, or the waterfall rock which lends dynamism to the scene), the sum total of the myths and imagery behind the stones of Daisen-in is certainly beyond the comprehension of all but the most learned specialists, and in any case it does not amount to either a coherent myth or a coherent scene. Rather, the names serve several functions that are not necessarily concordant: to stress the individuality of each stone; to organize the iconography of the scene; to suggest symbolic or mythic significance. The mystery of Ryōan-ji exists because its symbolic value is under-determined; that of Daisen-in exists because it is exceedingly complex and over-determined.

It has been suggested that Ryōan-ji is a sort of concrete kōan, that Zen exercise of question and answer intended to foster enlightenment by circumventing logic and thrusting one into immediate reality. The reduction of this garden to abstraction and minimalism suggested by many modern authors eliminates the equivocation and paradox central to Zen, and diminishes the garden’s complexity and mystery by limiting interpretive possibilities and rationalizing its irrational characteristics. Simply stated, the iconography of Ryōan-ji is implicit, not explicit; allusive, not evident. One of the key Zen principles is yūgen, the mystery behind the suggestiveness that permeates Zen art, the sense of wonder at the profound and poetic mystery of the world, explained by D. T. Suzuki as follows: ‘Yūgen is a compound word, each part, yū and gen meaning “cloudy impenetrability” and the combination meaning “obscurity”, “unknowability”, “mystery”, “beyond intellectual calculability” but not “utter darkness”’.38 However, this in no way suggests that such mystery necessarily obviates consideration of the mythical, representational and iconographic foundations of this garden. Rather, it would seem to offer a yet more profound sense of representation.³⁹ Indeed, even yūgen itself has its emblematic icons. Augustin Berque explains how for Zeami (1363–1443), who elevated Noh to a spiritual practice, an evening snowfall particularly evoked ‘the obscure attraction of the unformulated’, while the Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253) understood such snow to be the very symbol of negation, ‘the emblem of the concepts of kū (the void) and mu (nothingness, or rather absence)’, the very ground of being symbolized precisely as that cold, empty, desolate world that is the epitome of wabi-sabi beauty.⁴⁰ The beauty of such imagery is evidenced in The Tale of Genji:

The snow was very deep now, and more was falling. The waning light set off pine and bamboo prettily from one another, and Genji’s face took on a clearer glow. ‘More than the glory of flowers and fall leaves that season by season capture everyone’s heart, it is the night sky in winter, with snow aglitter beneath a brilliant moon, that in the absence of all colors speaks to me strangely and carries my thoughts beyond this world; there is no higher wonder or delight. Whoever called it dreary understood nothing.’41

This also obtains in relation to material culture. While moss on rocks and the moon partially hidden by clouds, akin to the patina cherished as sabi, are related to yūgen, so too may be artificial effects, as William Theodore de Bary explains:

To achieve the end of yūgen, art had sometimes been stripped of its color and glitter lest these externals distract; a bowl of highly polished silver reflects more than it suggests, but one of oxidized silver has the mysterious beauty of stillness, as Seami [sic] realized when he used for stillness the simile of snow piling in a silver bowl. Or one may prize such a bowl for the tarnished quality itself, for its oldness, for its imperfection, and this is the point where we feel sabi.⁴²

A related image is that of ice, as the fifteenth-century renga poet Shinkei (1406–1475) explains: ‘Nothing is more beautiful than ice. The thin crust of morning ice on the stubbled rice fields, icicles hanging from eaves of aged cypress bark, the feeling of withered trees and grasses locked in hoar frost.’⁴³ One can cherish an object or an effect, an image or sheer materiality: each has its own poetry and its own mystery.

The laws of non-contradiction do not hold in Zen: temptation of the void indeed inspires iconoclasm, but this in no way implies that it does not simultaneously admit iconography. One particularly influential valorization of abstraction was accentuated and disseminated by D. T. Suzuki’s famed lectures at Columbia University, where his interpretations of iconoclastic Rinzai Zen tended to dissimulate – for an American audience on the verge of rejecting representation – the long and complex iconographic history of other forms of Buddhism, as well as non-Buddhist thought, that had long informed the arts in Japan. Rupert A. Cox notes the problems that arose from this reductivist version of Zen:

It is the Zen character of the arts which is stressed in Suzuki’s writings, to the exclusion of all the other religious, social and political influences that we know about from the historical record. Through the theory of pure experience, all of the arts in Japan are made to appear to be the natural expressions of Zen thought, and therefore of the authentic spirituality of the Japanese.44

Ryozanpaku restaurant, Kyoto, 2009, sashimi.

Later, an even more extreme and reductive version of this position was brought to the awareness of a broad art-world public by Suzuki’s most famous student, John Cage, whose theory and practice of indeterminacy in the arts is a direct offspring of the Zen tradition. Finally, this viewpoint culminated in the Deleuzian-Cagean position of the philosopher-musicologist Daniel Charles, who espoused a radical denial of iconography by a priori excluding ‘anthropomorphic’ readings so as to dismiss all representational possibilities.⁴⁵ There is an anecdote that Cage, a great lover of Ryōan-ji, suggested that the positions of the stones were not chosen according to carefully determined aesthetic, symbolic or metaphysical calculations, but that the emptiness of the sand permitted them to be placed anywhere whatsoever. This Duchampian supposition reveals more about Cage than about the Zen garden. In 1983 he created the first of several versions of a musical composition entitled Ryoanji, and in 1992 he produced Where R = Ryoanji, a series of graphite-on-paper works consisting of fifteen pebbles randomly placed on a page and encircled to create the graphic elements. This schematic representation of the garden in fact eliminates the tension between abstraction and figuration, as well as the iconographic mystery, both of which contribute to the richness of the garden.

Cage had always said that he wished to work not in imitation of nature, but in imitation of nature’s processes. However, given the infinite complexity of natural systems, it would be impossible to prove if he ever succeeded, and we thus cannot assume that any of his works, the Ryōan-ji-inspired pieces included, had been created in this manner. Yet it was not nature, but men, who created Ryōan-ji, and we simply do not know how the gardeners conceived this site. In any case, Cage had no intention of imitating the gardeners, since this would have entailed a vast project of historical, mythical, ritual and iconographic analysis that was certainly antithetical to Cage’s modes of production, and which would have been a hyperbolically representational process. In fact, it is not a foregone conclusion that the process of creating Ryōan-ji the garden and Where R = Ryoanji the drawings have anything in common other than a final count of fifteen stones on a more or less blank slate. The immediate extrapolation of Cage’s claim about the random placement of the stones would be that any fifteen stones arranged in any manner on any flat surface would be the aesthetic equivalent of Ryōan-ji, and the ultimate extrapolation would be a reductio ad absurdum confusing singularity with genre, such that any disposition of a given number of objects on any empty field would be aesthetically equivalent. The problem is that Cage valorized the indeterminacy of the process over the equivocation of the object. Perhaps this situation arose from the fact that Cage identified with the creator rather than the spectator, valuing process over object. He sought the potential indeterminacy of the creative moment, all the while ignoring the determinate indeterminacy separating abstraction and iconography. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, one may indeed attempt to establish an iconography of the void, just as twentieth-century musicology has established an inventory of silences.

Ryōan-ji.

John Cage, 3R/17 (Where R = Ryoanji), 1992, pencils on handmade Japanese paper, with computer-based I Ching score, 25.4 × 48.3 cm.

Part of the beauty of the Zen garden – and in particular the sublime beauty of Ryōan-ji, which exemplifies an extreme sublimation of such forms – rests precisely on equivocation, as Günter Nitschke explains:

In the opinion of garden expert Mirei Shigemori, the kare-sansui garden reflects two aesthetic ideals fundamental to Muromachi thinking: yugen, a profound and austere elegance concerning a multi-layered symbolism, and yohaku no bi, the beauty of empty space.46

Somewhat atypically, according to his reading, Shigemori stresses the symbolic depth of yūgen rather than its sense of mystery, ineffability and unspoken connotation. But what he makes clear is its relation to the void, perhaps the ultimate mystery. Such is not the difference between representation and abstraction, but rather between two levels of representation: that of the world and that of the void, the latter of which is also contingent on varied symbolic levels. At stake are types of metaphors and degrees of metaphoricity. The Zen garden is equivocally symbolic. That Ryōan-ji has been referred to as a ‘garden of emptiness’ (mutei) is hardly proof of its abstraction, since emptiness is both physical and metaphysical, as Zen masters and Western philosophers have long taught. Nitschke claims that ‘it belongs to the art of the void’, but he is also aware of the aura of symbolism that surrounds this nothingness.47 A prime goal of theology is to reconcile us with this void, whether through anguish or joy. The void may be pure nothingness, or it may be the empty spaces between objects and the empty time between events, the ma that operates as both spatial gap and temporal interval creating a perfect natural balance. Furthermore, the iconography of the dry Japanese garden shares one major feature with that of painting and calligraphy, the elaborated background on which the figures are set. Just as the empty fields of raked gravel gain significance from texture and patterning, Japanese washi paper – flecked with mica and gold, threaded with silver, watermarked, patterned, coloured – reaches extraordinary heights of creativity. Here the ‘void’ takes on a very palpable, even sensual, form. The void may be metaphoric or it may be real. Emptiness may be a sign of iconoclasm, or yet another icon.

Tōfuku-ji, raked sand.