THREE
ZEN MOUNTAINS, ZEN WATER
The Teramachi shopping mall in Kyoto is the epitome of a certain contemporary vision of Japan: a supercharged, unbridled consumerism couched in an empire of signs. With the exception of its Shinto shrines, this mall consists of storefronts with few decorative touches other than the mostly inexpensive merchandise on display. However, in this aesthetically bleak environment, one shopkeeper could not resist the centuries-old impulse typical of Kyoto, to have a small garden at the front of the shop. The traditional Kyoto shop and house (machiya) is a narrow and elongated structure that generally has three gardens: one in the front, one in the rear, and a courtyard garden – the tsuboniwa, a small garden (measuring at least two tatami, that is, 3.3 square metres) enclosed within the architectural structure. Innumerable Kyoto restaurants have at least one small garden; whether in the entrance or the courtyard, in the window or an alley, just a few square metres suffice. So the shopkeeper designed a sort of Arte Povera garden: a small stone placed alongside a clear bowl of water with plants floating in it, all set on a chair surrounded by several potted plants, the largest of which contained eleven light pebbles set on the soil, and sundry pebbles and large glass beads strewn on a ledge behind. This is an ephemeral garden, since it was necessarily dismantled every evening before the shop closed. Moving in its simplicity and frugality, this bricolage landscape reveals the minimal conditions of a garden: stone, water, plant. One finds, for example, in Zuihō-in (a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji) an iconographic source for such a garden: a bonsai set between a pottery water basin and a small stand of decorative grass.1 Is this a garden? A metaphor of a garden? A plan for a garden? Or simply disparate objects related by garden-inspired circumstances?
Portable garden at Teramachi, Kyoto, 2006.
Zuihō-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji.
The small chair-garden in Teramachi might not be extraordinary, but it nevertheless reveals a striking power of the reductive imagination. One limit of such abstraction exists in Myōshin-ji – head temple of the Rinzai Zen sect, of which Ryōan-ji is dependent – where the entrance to the subtemple Zakke-in is flanked by two absolutely minimal parterres, almost certainly mid-twentieth-century creations. On the left, a flat, square, white stone set into an L-shaped bed of small white pebbles; on the right a thicker, irregular, black stone set into a rectangular bed of small white pebbles. The use of what resemble paving stones as major garden elements is remarkable, for the focus on cut stone is rare in traditional Japanese gardens, having come into vogue only with the influence of modernism. Is this hyperminimal play of binary oppositions – L / I; double rectangle / single rectangle; white / black; regular / irregular; thin / thick; smooth / scored; white-on-white / black-on-white – mere decoration? Or rather the zero-degree karesansui? Or perhaps a three-dimensional conceptualization, an ideal prototype, of the dry garden? Whatever the case, this courtyard is a veritable lesson in stones, since it reveals the diverse practical and symbolic uses of rocks: as border, marker, path, parterre, cairn, sculpture and even sacred object, for there is an altar before which is set a small piles of stones, as if in offering to the gods (visible on the right of the photograph on p. 89). The apparent minimalism of these dry, stony parterres belies the actual complexity of such gardens, which must always be approached according to their play of scale, surroundings, climate, motion, temporality and so on. Otherwise we experience an abstracted picture, not a living landscape. This setting thus simultaneously reveals the minimal conditions of a dry garden and the maximal conditions of visibility, instantiating the claim that ‘the richest site is that which is most closely observed.’ But what are we willing to call a ‘garden’? Might it be the smallest framed unit, whether the frame be physical or conceptual? If we can see a ‘garden’ in a plate of food or on a work of pottery, might we not be obliged to reconsider our manner of observing the natural landscape? At what point in such discussions could we delete the quotation marks from the word ‘garden’? This garden in Zakke-in is most certainly a lesson in the art of observation, revealing that what may appear to be the simplest is in fact the most profound. Is this not a typically Zen intuition?
Zakke-in, a subtemple of Myōshin-ji. |
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Zakke-in. |
The unequivocal focus of the Zen garden is stones. We find stones alongside stones, stones on stones, stones representing mountains, stones crushed to gravel, and often just single exceptional stones that all by themselves constitute a landscape. Lafcadio Hearn, the great nineteenth-century interpreter of Japan, describes the particularly Japanese passion for stones:
Curious, this child love of stones! Stones are the toys not only of the children of the poor, but of all children at one period of existence: no matter how well supplied with other playthings, every Japanese child wants sometimes to play with stones. To the child-mind a stone is a marvelous thing, and ought so to be, since even to the understanding of the mathematician there can be nothing more wonderful than a common stone.2
One might add that this remains true for the adult mind, especially in Japan, where certain stones are raised to the level of priceless treasures, and where the sense of the earth permeates all aesthetics. Hearn also says, ‘Only a very great mind could answer all a child’s questions about stones.’3 In Le Geste et la parole, the French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan shows how the Palaeolithic origins of art stemmed from a fascination with regularity within an overbearingly irregular, chaotic world:
Figurative art as such was preceded by something more obscure or more general which corresponds to the deliberate vision of forms. The unusual within forms, a powerful incentive toward figurative concern, existed only from the time when the subject confronted an organized image of his universe in relation to the objects which enter into his field of perception.4
Such found objects include highly regular things, such as seashells with their complex mathematical forms, polished pebbles which appear as if already reassuringly domesticated (imbued with a natural sabi, one might say) and the occasional crystal with its magical optical qualities. Such is an art of fascination, and the contemplation of these objects is a form of meditation and self-reflection. ‘These concretions directly touch the depths of man’s reflective thought. It is mysterious and even disquieting to discover in nature a sort of congealed reflection of thought of which the unusual is the incentive.’5 A uniquely formed pebble may well have evoked the very first aesthetic reactions among humankind.
In Chinese and Japanese cosmology – be it Taoist, Buddhist, Shinto or animist – stones are not mere inanimate objects, but rather concentrations of cosmic and telluric energy (chi) flowing in different patterns throughout the universe. Zen master Dōgen insists that pebbles are sentient beings that participate in Buddha’s nature, and according to Shinto tradition, the natural or artificial rock arrangements of certain sites have the function of attracting the kami, those supernatural creatures that inhabit the surrounding forests and mountains. Indeed, the very first ‘garden’ might be deemed the fields of gravel or sacred rocks (iwakura) related to the kami, cordoned off by shimenawa, ropes used to delimit and protect sacred rocks and trees. Such age-old theories of panpsychism have recently been reconsidered on the subatomic level by contemporary science. One theorist suggests that ‘the rock’s innards “see” the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving’, and further proposes that, ‘if you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being’.6 In short, agency is distributed everywhere in the universe.
In both Japanese culture and the earlier Chinese culture that inspired it, rocks are thus valued for both force and form, as Günter Nitschke explains:
Hence individual rock settings became more than simply imitations of famous natural sights or metaphors of mountains and islands within a garden; they now expressed the energetic constellations of nature. They offered the garden-maker a symbolic language in which to state the most profound truths of nature which lay beneath its aesthetic surface.7
Shimogamo Shrine, sacred stone.
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Shimogamo Shrine, sacred tree. |
Rocks are of such great aesthetic importance that one classic Chinese book of painting teaches: ‘In order to learn to paint, one must invariably learn how to paint rocks. Of all the techniques of using the brush, none are more difficult than those required for rocks, and no subject calls for a greater range of techniques than rocks do.’8 Not only have the forms of many different types of mountains been enumerated in the annals of Chinese painting, but there also exists a specific repertory of brushstrokes for representing different aspects of mountains, such as ‘coiled up clouds’, ‘hatchet marks’, ‘devil’s face’, ‘skeleton’s skull’, ‘sesame seeds’, and so on.9 The iconicity of such painting extends down to the very form of the brushstrokes. (We might compare European Renaissance depictions of clothing, with their intricate folds and extravagant decorations, as a prime sign of painterly virtuosity, though in the West, for centuries every effort was made to guarantee the invisibility of the brushstrokes.) In classic Chinese art, the artist first learns to draw stones and rocks, much as the Western artist begins with the human figure. Indeed, following Taoist cosmology, the rock is seen as a dynamic entity, as François Cheng, writing of mountains in Chinese culture, explains:
Moved by breath, nourished with fog and wind, it is capable of metamorphosis. Poets and painters baptised it with the beautiful name, ‘root of the clouds.’ Constantly transformed by the energy of the ground and the sky, it offers multiple facets and incarnates multiple attitudes: placidity and torment, tenderness and savagery.10
With changes in perspective and lighting, framing and atmospheric conditions, the physiognomy of rocks and mountains is transformed at every instant, becoming as fluid as water. Conversely, Loraine Kuck claims that for certain gardens such as Joei-ji in Yamaguchi prefecture, credited to Sesshū (1420– 1506), the painter who revolutionized Japanese art, the choice of rocks in the garden was made so as to simulate his particular form of brushstrokes.11 Painting and stone thus exist in reciprocal iconic relation down to the very level of the brushstroke.
The Chinese love of rocks may even be surpassed by that of the Japanese. Bernard Rudofsky makes a good point (his sarcasms notwithstanding) in claiming that
Maybe we ought to envy the imaginative powers of a people who can distinguish rocks by one hundred and thirty-eight names (if only two sexes); that will court and covet rocks of special appeal, kidnap them, wrap them in silks and brocades like the most precious of sweethearts, and carry them in triumphal procession to their new abode.12
We might remember that in the European tradition, the relics of saints and their spectacular receptacles have long received exactly the same sort of devout, and often criminal, attention. Rudofsky is clearly referring to a specific incident in Japanese history when Nobunaga, the warlord who began the unification of Japan, had a rock garden created at one of his palaces in Kyoto. Regarding the transfer of that particularly coveted stone from one garden to another: ‘Nobunaga had the rock wrapped in silk, decorated with flowers, and brought it to the garden with the music of flute and drums, and the chanting of the laborers.’13 At the other extreme there exist, according to Zōen, the ‘unnamed’, ‘worthless’ or ‘discarded’ rocks, ones that do not have any specific characteristics that warrant naming but that are nevertheless essential in garden composition, whether to enhance the naturalness of the formal composition, to create dynamic balance or to highlight a more prominent stone.
The contemporary landscape architect Marc Peter Keane expresses the manifold aspects of this passion well, writing of the early creators of the dry garden:
they had no word for gardening, simply the expression ishi wo taten koto, ‘the art of setting stones’. Setting stones was so entirely fundamental to the act of garden building that it defined the process, and through the medium of the stone the designers of that era wove various meanings into their gardens. They set a stone and called it Shumisen, Japanese for Sumeru, the central mountain of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology; they set another and called it Fudō-myōō, the Buddhist deity who purges the world of evil; they set still another to evoke the image of a windswept ocean shore and express allegorically the waste and abject loneliness felt by lovers denied their love; and they set stones of specific colors around their home to balance the flow of life-energy based on rules of an ancient Chinese geomancy. The stones were animated with meanings potent and diverse, and yet beyond all those cultural affections, they also remained a testimony to communal work and, deeper still, a symbolic link back to the wilderness. Beyond the superficial sculptural beauty of the stones and the great material value placed on them in later years, the ancient messages lay enfolded within them, informing all else, the way a primordial reptilian center remains at the stem of our brains.14
Zōen’s Illustrations enumerates d7 named rocks, reduced from the 361 of Chinese tradition and from the thousands in certain Indian manuscripts. Rocks are categorized into types according to structure, function (scenic and sensory effects) and symbolism (Taoist, Shinto, Confucian, Buddhist): side rocks, lying rocks, wave-repelling rocks, water-cutting rocks, stepping stones, shadow-facing stones, ducks’-abode rocks, hovering-mist rocks, human-form rocks, mirror rocks, reverence rocks, demon rocks, vengeful-spirit rocks, taboo rocks, triadic Buddhist waterfall rocks, and so on.15 In practice, the total number of named stones is countless. Specific rocks may symbolize mountains, both mythological and real, most often Shumisen and Fuji. Rocks may represent other natural objects as well, like the waterfall rocks (taki-ishi) common in Zen gardens, so named because their striated vertical surface patterns suggest cascading water. Notable rocks are often given unique proper names, such as Twofold World Rock, Rock of the Spirit Kings or Dragon’s Abode Rock. In comparison, while stones do have symbolic resonance in Christian iconography, their significance has hardly touched the popular imagination, and has been lost to all but specialists. Steve McCaffery explains:
The identification of stone as the figure of Christ was a persistent theme throughout the Middle Ages. In his Summa de exemplis et similitudinibus rerum, and with a fecund demonstration of what Saint Jerome calls tropologia libera, Giovanni di San Gimigniano devotes forty chapters to the significance of stones. All stones are figures of Divine love; marble is a figure for Beauty, Goodness, and Prudence; Mary is chalcedony and her virginity asterite; and Christ is chrysolite.16
Katsura Detached Palace, Kyoto, stone arrangement in the form of Amanohashidate.
Contemporary Western customs regarding birthstones have become a pale version of what was once a rich theological symbolism.
Some Zen gardens are representations of the natural landscape, especially the rocky shores of the Inland Sea and the environs of the five mountains surrounding Kyoto.17 Perhaps the most famous example is the pebble arrangement in the pond set before the Shokin-tei tea house at the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto, which is in the image of the great sandbar Amanohashidate, one of the three great scenic views of Japan, located in Miyazu Bay in northern Kyoto prefecture. Indeed, Japan itself is basically a huge stone that rises from the ocean, and Mount Fuji has long been a formal archetype in all the Japanese arts. Conversely, our means of viewing the landscape are always inflected by art. The Zen garden was influenced by the natural landscape as seen through both the poetry and iconography of Chinese Song dynasty landscape painting, which featured representations of China’s extraordinary mountain ranges and incredible rock formations, not unlike the manner in which the English picturesque garden was influenced by Italian, French and Dutch landscape painting. (The English garden might have developed quite differently if British collectors of the epoch had been more enthralled by those Italian Renaissance paintings which depicted fantastic rock formations.) Thus Japanese Zen gardens are informed not only by Chinese, Korean and Japanese landscapes, but also by their traditions of landscape painting. Furthermore, a favoured representational technique is the literary landscape, such as the garden in the Katsura Detached Palace that represents a landscape described in The Tale of Genji. Another famous example is the garden of Tenryū-ji (Kyoto), where, as Itoh Teiji notes, the pond and its rock arrangements suggest a painting in the style of the Chinese northern Song dynasty, while its famed captured view of Arashiyama with its blossoming cherry trees resembles a traditional Japanese painting of the yamato-e style.18 Painterly templates, however hybridized in style and iconography, are of the essence.
Japanese and Chinese gardens are informed both by natural landscapes and by their idealized representation in landscape painting, with mountainous islands central to their iconography. But since perception is always culturally conditioned, and there is no untutored ‘natural’ vision, no ‘artless’ sight, one must always seek the cognition behind the perception, the myth behind the image, which in Japanese gardens are derived from Chinese fantasies of mythological paradises: Taoist paradises such as the Isles of the Immortals, also known as the ‘Turtle Islands’; Buddhist utopias such as Amida’s Western Paradise; and Mount Sumeru, the axis mundi, represented in gardens by rocks called Shumisen. As in so many myths worldwide, the mountain is considered to be the primal manifestation of form, the origin of the cosmos emerging from amidst universal chaos. It has sacred value and iconographic privilege. Curiously, in terms of the broader metaphoric value of stones, it should be noted that in Zōen’s list, at least twenty refer to water-related effects, while only three represent mountains, which in itself suggests the highly metaphoric value of such rocks. Zōen’s Illustrations divides all stones into five major ‘colours’ or types, organized according to the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) such that wood stones are tall and vertical, and are usually placed at the back of groupings; metal stones are low and vertical, related to wood stones; fire stones arch dynamically towards the sides, and are placed on one of the sides towards the front of the arrangement; water stones are flat and horizontal; and earth stones recline, and are used in the foreground.
These sundry forms of landscape metaphoricity are extraordinarily concentrated in ceramics, that art form which most sensually and most directly links the hand of artist and collector to the earth. Indeed, glaze and scorch patterns that resemble landscapes are simply referred to by the term keshiki (landscape). The transformative alchemy of ceramics parallels and symbolizes the geological work of creating rocks and mountains. Stony landscapes are decomposed over the centuries into clay, which is then fired to once again become stone. In the kiln, the extraordinarily violent interaction of the elements conspires to create new forms: the earth and water that make up clay are transmogrified by the forces of air and fire to create stone, whence the term ‘stoneware’ for high-fired works. The hyperbolic instance of this passion for clay is the preference among many pottery lovers for unglazed stoneware, most famously Bizen and Shigaraki works, where the immediate action of fire and ash on undecorated clay is most evident.
This connection to the earth was deeply felt by Isamu Noguchi, whose pottery, along with that of Picasso, was among the major post-war influences on Japanese ceramics. He expresses this in an almost mystical account of his identification with nature:
A fine balance of spirit with matter can only occur when the artist has so thoroughly submerged himself in the study of the unity of nature as to truly become once more a part of nature – a part of the very earth, thus to view the inner surfaces and the life elements.19
In 1952 Noguchi embarked on an intensive period of pottery production, while living in the Kamakura compound of Kitaōji Rosanjin, the great potter, calligrapher and restaurateur. Perusal of the catalogue of Noguchi’s landmark exhibition of 1952 at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura is revelatory, for not only are the pieces categorized by regional pottery types (Bizen, Karatsu, Kasama, Seto, Shigaraki), but of the 119 pottery objects, 77 are either Bizen or Shigaraki. His preference for these austere and undecorated styles reveals a keen interest in the immediate relations between the landscapes of pottery and of the earth. Indicative of this proclivity was his studio at Kamakura where, dug out of the cliffside, Noguchi left the back earth wall in its raw state, leaving the scars of the heavy metal machines that hollowed out the space and letting soot accumulate over time.20 The aesthetic relation between pottery and the immediate environment of studios and kilns is worthy of extended study. Noguchi’s subsequent career is interesting in this regard, since after his last intense foray into pottery he concreted on sculpture based on Japanese stones, circumventing the allegorical relation between kiln and nature to go directly to the source. There exists, however, one late work that serves as an allegory of this choice, and of the artistic sublimation of matter in general. While working at the American Academy in Rome in 1962, he created Lessons of Musokokushi, in honour of Musō (1275–1351), a Zen priest reputed to have created two of the most famous gardens in Kyoto, Tenryū-ji, site of the first ‘borrowed view’ in Japan, and Saihō-ji (Kokedera, the Moss Temple), which contains a grouping of stones believed to be the earliest dry waterfall arrangement. Lessons of Musokokushi consists of five rock-like moulds of clay that were formed on the floor and then cast in bronze, resulting in a work that recalls so many karesansui rock groups, and to which Noguchi referred as ‘my own Ryoanji’. Yet here the earth is transmogrified into metal, the landscape disappears, and the bronze ‘rocks’ are destined for the museum. What remains is but a simulacrum of Noguchi’s favourite materials, those that constitute the Japanese earth.
This should remind us that pottery may function as either pure material surface or as a tabula rasa for calligraphy and painting. A fascinating example of purely material metaphoricity is a series of guinomi created by Jeff Shapiro, an artist now based in upstate New York who long worked in Japan, where the cups appear as igneous stones, suggesting the correspondence between kiln and volcano. He explains the technique:
It is carved from a chunk of clay that is placed over a simple cylindrical form and then carved and scraped to make the outside and inside shape. The surface in this case is from two glazes. The light color is a shino glaze and the black is a black oribe that I heavily reduce to give it the slightly ‘volcanic’ look. It is fired in the small down draft wood fired kiln . . . The approach to making the guinomi and other work is to keep a strong organic characteristic aspect to the work but to transcend this into something that is my own and perhaps more abstract.21
There also exists another technique for creating a similar effect termed koge, where the work is buried in embers for a prolonged period so that texture is developed as ash continues to deposit while running into the ember bed. Further ash saturation leads to ishi-koge, which, as the name suggests, is a rock-like appearance.22 The lesson here is diametrically opposed to that of the Lessons of Musokokushi: ash turned to stone decorates the stoneware surface in imitation of stone. A simulacrum that is a sign of pure materiality, a tautology that marks the confluence of the object and its representation. Not unlike the soot on the walls of Noguchi’s studio at Kamakura, it reveals what he calls ‘the shadow of materiality’.23 Is this shadow anything other than sabi, proof that even stone suffers that beauty and that melancholy caused by the passing of fire and time?
Isamu Noguchi, Lessons of Musokokushi, 1962, bronze.
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Jeff Shapiro, guinomi, 2008, detail. |
Given the primacy of the lithic in Zen gardens, one of the key antinomies of the dry garden is that its symbolism is so profoundly aquatic. The very notion of a ‘sea’ of sand or a ‘waterfall’ rock, a contradiction in terms, is particularly appropriate to the Zen spirit of paradox. For in the Zen garden – where landscape is never dissociated from metaphor, symbolism, transcendence – contradiction is of the essence, as both metaphysical underpinning and design feature. Indeed, the great twentieth-century garden historian and landscape architect Shigemori Mirei insists that ‘until one can silently meditate on it, until one can hear the sound of waves emanating from the entire garden, one has not understood the garden at Ryōanji’.24 The ancient Japanese word for garden is shima (island), and the term for landscape is senzui or sansui (literally ‘mountains and waters’, from the Chinese shanshui). This amalgam of mountain and water, vertical and horizontal, rugged opacity and liquid smoothness, volumetric and planimetric, alludes to the key component of the Zen garden. Gary Snyder states it most succinctly:
Yamada Kazu, Shino ‘dancing fire’ glaze guinomi, c. 2010, detail. |
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Mountains and Waters are a dyad that together make wholeness possible. . . There is an obvious fact of the water-cycle that mountains and rivers indeed form each other . . . that landforms are a play of stream-cutting and ridge-resistance and that waters and hills interpenetrate in endlessly branching rhythms . . . ‘Mountains and waters’ is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature.25
Indeed, as Augustin Berque explains, the gods reside in the depths of both the mountain forest and the sea: ‘This homologue is directly expressed in language by the doublet oku /oki: the “bowels” of the mountain, oku, and the “high sea,” oki, come from the same verbal root. Thus, from one part to the other of the ecumene, the mountain and the sea bipolarise the sacred.’26
The precedent for this symbolic and visual conflation of water and rock is already found in the Chinese antecedents of Japanese art. According to ancient Chinese cosmology, far too complex to examine here in detail, the reciprocity between water and mountain is a function of the void. Things are metaphysically transformed by passing through the void, a process pictorially represented, in the Song landscape painting that so influenced Japanese aesthetics, by the function of the blank canvas. Here, water and mountain do not exist in rigid antithesis, but rather in fluid reciprocity, where the cloud is a condensation of water that takes on geological form as it incarnates the dynamics of the real, such that ‘water can virtually evaporate into clouds and inversely clouds can virtually fall back as water, and mountains are finally capable of changing into waves and waves of forming mountains.’27 This has long been noted by painters. To give one example among many, consider the words of Wang Chih-yuan of the late Qing dynasty:
A rock is certainly a stable entity. And yet one must represent it like a presence as mobile as breath, as fluid as water. This is not easily expressed in words, and the painter must feel it. The Ancients called mountains ‘the roots of the clouds’, so as to say that these mountains, with their tormented or joyful, fantastic or peaceful aspects, seem to change their physiognomy at every moment. One sees by this that the spirit of the mountain is entirely one of mobility and fluidity.28
Matsuo Shrine, waterfall, garden created by Shigemori Mirei, 1974.
The articulation of mountain and cloud is effected by yet another form of water: mist and fog. Not only does fog create that sense of indistinctness and mystery central to Chinese and Japanese art, but it also plays a cosmologically transformative role, establishing an active, dynamic principle within the scene. Thus, as another painter of the same epoch, Tang Tai, put it: ‘It is not so much a matter of imitating nature as of taking part in the very process of Creation.’29
Cognizance of vast formal homologies is crucial in approaching the Zen garden. Metaphor, abstraction and stylization are always a matter of degree, and they all make up what we generally call representation. However, incompatibilities and contradictions may be of more interest than resemblances. The famed Zen adage attributed to the Chinese master Qingyuan Weixin is particularly apt in this context: before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; during the quest for enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters; after enlightenment, mountains are just mountains and waters are just waters. Such is the very structure of metaphoricity and literalness. We might well apply this adage to the stones (mountains) and raked gravel (sea) of Ryōan-ji, in order to reveal the profound polysemy of this garden, and to insist that it can simultaneously represent utopia and the void, energy and ocean, landscape and painting. For in art, especially Zen art, the Aristotelian laws of non-contradiction no longer hold. This might well explain a fundamental irony in Ryōan-ji, the fact that the bed of gravel on which the stones rest prefigures what the stones will one day themselves become, mere sand.
The metaphoricity of the karesansui is vast, and the void is but one aspect of its symbolism. On this model, perhaps the most minimal garden of all is to be found in Tokai-an, a subtemple at Myōshin-ji: the rectangular space merely contains gravel with a simple wave pattern raked into it, and no other stones. Only the pebble-covered areas at Shinto shrines are simpler, as they do not even have the raked patterns, but it would probably be anachronistic to call these ‘gardens’. However, such simplicity does not obviate the possibility of representation, as Zōen explains in Illustrations, by going so far as to suggest that sand alone may suffice to create a landscape scene:
Another type of shoreline scenery is the ebb-tide beach, which has no striking features but simply creates the impression of the tide constantly ebbing and flowing. Here, if just by spreading fine and coarse grades of sand and without setting any rocks you can visually re-create a single scenic ambience.30
This paradoxically aquatic effect of dry gardens is well described by art historian Yoshinobu Yoshinaga: ‘The garden is an attempt to represent the innermost essence of water, without actually using water, and to represent it at that even more profoundly than would be possible with real water.’31
Without appreciating such ambiguous and contradictory metaphors and representations, essential iconographic features are lost, and these gardens are reduced to purely formal enterprises. Furthermore, a typically Zen equivocation also disappears by eliminating the sense of wet dryness and dry wetness. Historically, it is certainly not without importance that gardeners have always used aquatic metaphors in describing the karesansui, and many of those who have contributed to renewing the study of these gardens continue to see them according to such metaphors. This long history turns the stone–water metaphor into a conceptual palimpsest. Consider, for example, the captions to Mizuno Katsuhiko’s Landscapes for Small Spaces, from which is collated the following expressions: ‘stream that meanders’, ‘“river” of white sand’, ‘“sea” of the main garden’, ‘ripples from a single drop of water’, ‘mighty ocean’, ‘the sea and rocks bordered by “waves” representing islands’. Noguchi characteristically cuts to the essence of the matter: ‘Stone in nature is the thing which undergoes the least change, and water the most change – because of this contrast they belong together.’32 Indeed, the very notion of a ‘sea’ of sand or a ‘waterfall’ rock, a contradiction in terms, is particularly appropriate to the Zen kōan spirit of illogic and paradox.
The extraordinarily complex arrangement of stones and shrubs at Daisen-in (a subtemple of Daitoku-ji), perhaps the most condensed and complex of all dry Zen gardens, represents in stones and pebbles a waterfall that cascades under a small bridge to divide into two branches of a river flowing in one direction out towards the open ocean where there floats a ‘treasure ship’ stone, in the other direction to a pool. Here, relative scale is a function of iconography and not perspective, such that the ocean to the right is not much larger than the stream to the left, and the varied use of stones and pebbles suggests the need of a typology to differentiate such effects: the large, irregular, striated, vertical stone (taki-ishi) demarcating the waterfall; the small regular pebbles representing cascading water; the slightly larger, slightly more irregular pebbles delineating the white water where the waterfall breaks under the flat stone of the bridge; the wave patterns of the small white pebbles depicting the flowing waters of the river. Perhaps most astonishing of all, at the left side of the garden, the small white pebbles of the flowing river end in a basin, formed by a circle of medium-sized stones filled with large black pebbles, the latter representing deep, still water, with several ferns and a stone in the centre. (Here the central stone seems to be not a metaphor, but just a stone.) This represented pond is juxtaposed to a large stone with a hollowed top (it is impossible to determine whether this hollow is natural or artificial, and such ambiguity is of the essence), in which there often rests a small pool of rainwater: a real, miniature ‘pond’ alongside a figurative one.33 One might compare Ryōan-ji, where the real and the figurative are similarly juxtaposed, since the border of the dry garden – two parallel rows of rectangular stones within which are set a larger and darker grade of pebbles – is actually a drainage ditch, into which the ‘ocean’ threatens to overflow during the next high tide. This is the threshold between macrocosm and microcosm, cosmic and worldly, metaphor and reality.
Diagram of Daisen-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji.
What are we to make of all this dry, overly stylized water, notably at Ryōan-ji, with its dramatic relation between ripple patterns – longitudinal across the garden, concentric around the rock groups – seeming to illustrate the laws of wave mechanics? (A modernist version of these ripples created by Shigemori Mirei at Tōfuku-ji uses spirals instead of concentric circles, offering yet another metaphor and another contradiction, as the spirals may be construed as whirlpools, accentuating the dynamism of the waters in this motionless arrangement.) These wave patterns seem to be contradictory, because only waves seen from high altitudes appear motionless, yet those at Ryōan-ji, still as stone, are within touching distance. This would seem to indicate a conflation of viewpoints: the real, proximate, human viewpoint (close enough so that the waves should be moving, but are not) and an ideal viewpoint, either of a human on a high mountain crest (or today in an aeroplane), or that of a deity in the heavens, far enough to still the waves.34 But more profoundly, the stillness and timelessness of these unchanging forms is troubled by the suggestion of an originary moment. The circular patterns around the rock formations seem to represent that very instant, that eternally irrevocable event – unique and decisive like a calligraphic mark – when the stones rose from or were cast into that great, empty, primal, wave-filled sea: an ever-present representation of the mythic creative instant when the stones were posed once and for all eternity. While on one level they represent waves surrounding islands, on another they are the patterns of energy emanating from the stones themselves. The wave patterns seen as manifestations of originary telluric energy in Ryōan-ji are more primal than the metaphoric ocean they are said to represent. Frozen time, or eternal stillness? Permanence or transcience? It is as if the horizontal waves were those of the chaos before creation, and the circular ones traces of the origins of the world, both existing in contradictory perpetuity. Such is the space of dry water, still waves, proximate distance — the space of the impossible, the space of paradox, the space of Zen enlightenment.
Tōfuku-ji, Abbot’s Hall, garden created by Shigemori Mirei, 1939.
The hyperbolic dryness (and metaphoric wetness) of the karesansui at Ryōan-ji is counterbalanced by two ponds. One enters the temple complex in full view of the vast and beautiful Kyōyōchi Pond, with its ‘water-dividing’ stones that prefigure the forms of the dry garden and its metaphoric aquatic quality. Then, though rarely mentioned in studies of the site, just a few metres away from the famed dry garden, on the opposite (north) side of the abbot’s quarters, near the tea hut, is a small lotus pond, a tiny wetland to counterbalance the metaphoric vastness of the dry sea of its infinitely more famous counterpart. Also rarely mentioned is the fact that the dry garden of Ryōan-ji is contiguous to a modest moss garden, perpendicularly situated on the west side, and connected by the veranda that surrounds the entire building. The subtle transition between the two gardens, utilizing low shrubbery to blur the threshold that separates them, is an articulation of both real and metaphorical relationships: both disparities and correspondences are manifest.
The moss garden, like the dry one, is itself a genre among Japanese landscapes. The minuscule amount of moss that covers parts of the rocks in the dry garden exists in stark contrast to the luscious bed of moss that covers the entirety of the adjacent garden. The moss and lichen of the ‘dry’ garden – a veritable contradiction in terms, since abundant water is necessary for the growth of plants of the Musci class – appear as accidents, stains, imperfections, living shadows on the rocks perpetually exposed to the open sky. But this is already an improper qualification, since the core of Zen depends on the perfection of imperfection. Rather, these ‘stains’ should be seen as an integral part of the beauty of the rocks, their sabi. To the contrary, in the adjacent garden, moss is of the very essence, living its existence in perpetual shade. The function of the moss and lichen in these two gardens highlights differences in scale, quantity, quality, design: from the living, weathered patina on a few rocks to an entire ground covering. Furthermore, compared to the simplicity of this moss garden – barely more than an irregular lawn – can one really speak of the karesansui as ‘minimal’?35
Kyōyōchi Pond, Ryōan-ji, ‘water-dividing’ stones, 31 December 2010.
Ryōan-ji, chōzubachi (laver). |
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IT IS SAID that in the dry garden of Ryōan-ji, at the moment one attains satori, the sound of water can be heard. The relation of the sound arts to landscape offers many fascinating anecdotes. During the Showa period (1925–89) there existed the custom of gathering during early summer at the Shinobazu-no-ike pond in Tokyo’s Ueno Park to listen to the sound of lotus flowers blooming. This is described by the musician and composer Imada Tadahiko:
However, the frequency of that sound is approximately 9–16 Hz. As we normally hear sounds within a frequency range from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, people were unable to actually hear the sound of the bloom of a lotus flower. But they loved and wanted to listen to that phantom sound. The experience was a kind of communal auditory hallucination.36
Musicologist David Toop comments on this particular experience: ‘A prime listening site can be extraordinarily revealing. Minute actions click into focus. The clarity can slow pulse rate and perceived time. But loneliness may loom into view, also, and the deathly absence of significant activity.’37 Perhaps, since the sound of lotus flowers blooming is so close to the threshold of audibility, for some it is audible, for others inaudible; or perhaps it depends on the particular flowers, or the acoustics. Witness the opening of Kawabata Yasunari’s short story ‘The Hat Incident’ (1926): ‘It was summer. Every morning the lotuses in Ueno’s Shinobazu Pond opened their flowers with a lovely bursting sound.’38 What is foregrounded is the threshold between listening for and listening to: since the sound in question is just at the threshold of human auditory sensitivity, the event is not only about flower music. The extreme concentration demanded by this exercise teaches one to hear the entire soundscape, such that background sounds are foregrounded, and the usually unheard sonic subtleties of the environment become the subject of attention. This is therefore a festival, striking in its extreme minimalism, that teaches one to hear anew, not unlike John Cage’s famous Zen-inspired silent composition 4´33˝ (1952), in which the musicians are instructed to make no sounds whatsoever, such that the ambient noise constitutes the music. We need to rethink the entire environment of the Zen garden according to such Zen-inspired ways of listening.
In fact, the ‘ocean’ of sand about to spill over into the drainage ditch at Ryōan-ji has as its archetype the ever-present overflowing rice paddies characteristic of the Japanese landscape, which in turn is encountered in many other forms, for example, the way sake is often served in contemporary restaurants, either overflowing a crystal glass into a wooden box (masu), or overflowing the wooden box into a saucer. (What is standard practice in one cultural context may be disconcerting in another. In one Kyoto restaurant I witnessed a waiter who consistently poured red wine precisely to the brim in a standard wine glass, forming a meniscus without ever letting the wine overflow. The visual effect was as striking and unexpected as the oenological effect was disquieting.) The horizontal plane is materialized at the rim in an evanescent shimmering of liquid, while the vertical line of the receptacle is dynamized by the overflow, forming a small pool at the base, like the overflowing of wells, fountains, sculptures, baths, basins, hollowed rocks and lavers (chōzubachi), everywhere apparent in Japanese architecture and gardens.
One of the most stunning examples of such dry water is to be seen in Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1964 film adaptation of Abe Kōbō’s novel Woman in the Dunes (1962), in which the protagonist is held prisoner in a town situated in deep sand pits located on a beach, where the constantly flowing, spilling, falling, whorling sand acts just like water, a continuous cascade from the beach into the pit, with the constant menace of burying the occupants alive. The perpetual removal of the sand is the major preoccupation of the inhabitants, a veritable task of Sisyphus, setting the existential theme of the tale. And in case the spectator does not quite get the metaphor, at one point, to protect the dinner table from the sand leaking through the roof, the woman of the house opens an umbrella above the table, and afterwards she washes the dishes not in water, but sand. Teshigahara writes of this experience: ‘In the course of struggling with the sand, I realized that sand flows like liquid, possesses will, and represents beauty and solitude. My creativity was stirred by the struggle with the sharply pointed, stinging sand.’39 The composer Takemitsu Tōru, rather than using a blatantly aquatic soundtrack like his composition Water Music (1960) – a work of musique concrète based on a variety of water sounds, creating effects not unlike those of a water zither – devised a more dramatic and abstract score. One particularly subtle and disquieting aspect of this manifestation of the sand-as-water metaphor in Woman in the Dunes is the fact that whereas on a sandy beach one hears the blending of both sand and water sounds, in the film – where water is the most precious commodity in the terribly arid landscape – the visual cues suggest sand-for-water, while the soundscape is one of pure sand and wind.
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Still from Woman in the Dunes (dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1964). |
Writing of the age-old question of the origins of music, Leonard Bernstein claimed: ‘I believe that from the Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal.’40 This also obtains in Japan, where the relations between music and natural sounds have been highly codified according to very precise seasonal symbolism, as famously expressed in The Tale of Genji, when during a discussion about the relative merits of spring and autumn, Genji praises the latter: ‘To my mind, autumn with its touching beauty weaves the instruments together with cricket songs to make the music truly sublime.’41 Such music takes many forms, some of them paradoxically aquatic. One of the most beautiful, though relatively unknown, types of Japanese sonic installations is the suikinkutsu (water zither cave), said to have been invented by the great tea master Kobori Enshū (1579–1647). The water that is used to purify the hands and mouth before the tea ceremony overflows from the chōzubachi (laver) into the tsukubai (the stone arrangement in which the laver is placed), and is then evacuated into the suikinkutsu, a small buried jar or chamber, where the water drips into a pool at the bottom, creating sounds akin to those of the koto or kin, types of zither. As the guests kneel down in a gesture of ablution, they are met with a mysterious aquatic music emanating from the earth. The suikinkutsu is usually made of pottery, with an irregular unglazed surface that causes numerous droplets of water to form and drip in irregular patterns, thus creating a complex sonic environment, where the earth resonates with the song of water. This aleatory music, as if of liquefied earth, variously serves as purification of body and soul, anticipation of the pleasures of the tea ceremony and prefiguration of the rare sounds that punctuate the stillness of the tea hut.
It is said that while the tea ceremony should be performed in total silence, so as to increase awareness of the setting and performance, there are still the three sounds of tea: the clink of the lid on the kettle, the tap of the tea bowl on the mat and the clink of the teaspoon on the tea bowl – metal on metal, pottery on straw, wood on pottery – a sonic combination of the materials intrinsic to tea.42 But there is yet another sound, metaphoric and metonymic, one that links inside to outside, microcosm to macrocosm: the strains of the boiling kettle, as described by Kawabata Yasunari in the following scene from Snow Country:
The innkeeper had lent him an old Kyoto teakettle, skillfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from it came the sound of wind in the pines. He could make out two pine breezes, as a matter of fact, a near one and a far one. Just beyond the far breeze he heard faintly the tinkling of a bell.43
This passage recalls (and might well be based on) another, from Okakura Kakuzo’s classic, The Book of Tea:
The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.44
Occasionally this sonic trope is inverted – a sign of its equivocation and sonic polyvalence – as is the case in the account of Hideyoshi’s great tea ceremony at Kitano, where he summoned all the tea masters of the country to appear with their best wares for a ten-day outdoor festival. After the first day, however, a rebellion broke out, and the rest of the event was cancelled, the tea booths taken down and, following a contemporary account: ‘the glade resumed its wonted quiet. And only the sound of the wind in the pines, which again resumed their sovereignty over the landscape, remained to recall the bubbling of a thousand kettles.’45 Here the natural metaphor takes precedence over the cultural one, with the sound of the wind in the pines being the most renowned of all, perhaps best heard in Matsukaze (wind in the pines), one of the most famous compositions for shakuhachi flute.
In The Tale of Genji, the locus classicus of so many paradigms of Japanese art, on one hot summer night we find Tamakazura, one of Genji’s favourites, listening to him play the wagon, a form of koto. Amazed at his beautiful touch, she wondered: ‘What wind can be blowing, then, to make it sound so beautifully?’46 A note in the recent annotated English translation explains that in the Shūishū, an eleventh-century anthology of court poetry, the reciprocity of natural and cultural forms is constantly evoked, as in the verse by Saigū no Nyōgo, referring to another string instrument: ‘The sound of the pines on the mountain wind mingles with the music of the kin; and, for this concert, which string was tuned to which?’47 These sonic tropes from Japanese poetry and music set the emotional and metaphoric stage for the performance of the tea ceremony. D. T. Suzuki also evokes such sounds: ‘The breeze passing through the needles of the old pine tree harmoniously blends with the sizzling of the iron kettle over the fire.’48 The sizzling kettle indeed onomatopoetically harmonizes with the sound of the breeze, but here Suzuki is more philosopher than poet, and hears no correspondences between sounds, seeks no poetic resonances and imagines no musical variations. Ultimately, one could go so far as to say, as Dairin Sōtō taught his pupil Jōō, the great tea master: ‘Realize that the taste of tea and the taste of Zen are the same and absorb the wind in the pines. Then will your mind be undefiled.’49
Japanese poetry depends on such sonic correspondences. Listening for the mimetic music of the world, where one of the central sonic figures of this infinite matrix of interconnections and resemblances is the sound of water, we conceive of the kettle as both musical instrument and proto-synthesizer. In this regard, the particular sounds of the suikinkutsu are described with a specific vocabulary, like the attack, sustain and decay of musical tones: the attack of the first drops caused by the splash of the ladle upsetting the normal water flow, the crescendo of the cataract and the final diminuendo as the water settles back into its normal trickle. But any description of the suikinkutsu must not remain totally abstracted from the environment in which it is found, and thus should be imagined within the broader sound-scape of a Zen temple, with the ambient sounds of the wind, birds, crickets, chants, gongs and perhaps even the sudden clack of a deer scarer (shishi-odoshi) – a pivoted bamboo tube that slowly fills with water delivered by a spout, and which suddenly falls back on a rock or basin with a sharp sound (not unlike the percussion in Noh theatre) once the centre of gravity is surpassed – all serving as external counterpoint to the rarefied sounds of the inner sanctum of the tea room. The deer scarer, with its unique timbre and constant metre, provides a sort of sonic frame for the more diverse and aleatory sounds of the garden, a single metred beat set against the infinite sonic complexity of the world. Once again, the work of John Cage is useful in grasping these issues in a Western musical context. In the late 1940s, before beginning his studies under Suzuki, Cage realized that rhythm need not be bound to metrics, to a sense of temporal regularity: ‘Rhythm is not at all something periodic and repetitive. It is the fact that something happens, something unexpected, something irrelevant.’50 Rhythm, in its broadest definition, is the temporal relation between any two sound events whatsoever (no matter how many other sounds, or how much silence, or how much time or space, intervenes between the two), and relations between different sounds are not so much polyrhythmic as what one might call ‘hetero-rhythmic’. Rhythm has to do with framing rather than counting.51
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Shisen-dō, shishi-odoshi (deer scarer). |
The most famous suikinkutsu extant is to be found in the Enkō-ji temple in Kyoto. However, the changes wrought by modernization – vastly increased ambient noise and intensive tourism – have resulted in a radical transformation of the social and symbolic functions of this instrument, as well as changes in its form. No longer does it offer an occult surprise for the happy few chosen to attend a tea ceremony, since for the vast majority of tourists it has been turned into the mere curiosity of an unusual musical instrument. The secret, symbolic, esoteric sounds previously linked to the tea ceremony have been transmogrified into a public sonic event, a new form of music. This change is allegorized in the revised form of the instrument. Previously, the entirety of the suikinkutsu was underground, an invisibility that led to astonishment; but now wooden bamboo tubes have been inserted into the echo chamber to amplify and transmit the sound, so as to counter the noisy ambiance. Ironically, this tube system also serves as a barrier, so that the laver cannot be approached and utilized, a situation reinforced by the fact that the ladle that normally would be laid across the bamboo support spanning the chōzubachi is usually absent. The suikinkutsu thus loses its surprise effect just as the chōzubachi is deprived of its purifying function. It is no longer the splashing of the ladle into the water that creates the music, but rather the water’s constant flow. We experience modern music, not poetic correspondence.52
Enkō-ji, suikinkutsu (water zither). |
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These sounds can be heard on a beautiful electroacoustic composition by Steven Feld, Suikinkutsu, which begins with the ‘raw’ recording of the sound that lasts 2 minutes 41 seconds, and continues as a constructed sound environment. Feld describes the composition:
I made the recording in august when there was maximum interaction acoustically between the water frequencies and the 2–zemi cicada species that paint all that ZZZZZZZZZZZZ acoustic humidity . . . ZZZZZZZ is my acoustic memory of aburazemi and kumazemi i think that recording is a bit more dominated by kumazemi ZZZZZZZZZZ.53
The mixing procedure consisted of a Cage-inspired cut-up of seventeen different lengths sampled from the original raw recording and interwoven onto eight tracks through a randomizing programme, ‘successfully catching the intensity of the cicadas interacting with the drips, and the relationship between rhythmic random and the suggestion of a dance time’.54 The poignancy of the combination of water and cicada (whose tones signify the end of summer and the onset of autumn, that melancholic season) is evident to every lover of tea, as we are reminded by the sounds that accompanied Sen no Rikyū’s final tea ceremony preceding his suicide, described by Okakura Kakuzo: ‘The singing kettle, as it boils over the brazier, sounds like some cicada pouring forth his woes to departing summer.’55
Japanese art and aesthetics are imbued with equivocation and paradox, and our description, rhetoric and criticism should demand no less. This conclusion is thus inspired by one of the classics of Japanese literature, Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. At one point he describes his visit to the temple Ryūshaku-ji near Obanazawa in Yamagata prefecture:
As I moved on all fours from rock to rock, bowing reverently at each shrine, I felt the purifying power of this holy environment pervading my whole body.
In the utter silence
Of a temple,
A cicada’s voice alone
Penetrates the rocks.56
Written before the massive rock formation that faces the locked door of Ryūshaku-ji, this poem is a prelude to meditation. The sound of the cicada as it is absorbed by the rock redoubles the silence, and the fact that the temple door is locked stresses the sacredness and isolation of the precinct. But unlike the cicada’s cry that enters the stone, the poet could only stand before the gate. Both the water music of Enkō-ji (an aquatic music that emerges from the earth) and the cicada chant at Ryūshaku-ji (an entomological music that penetrates the earth) are signs that one need prepare oneself to enter a higher spiritual plane (where the powers of the earth permeate the body). Such spiritual music stems from the vibrations of both stone and water, which in Japan may very well be the same thing.
