Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 112-122 [Access article in PDF] Being in the Dry Zen Landscape Reading Zen In The Rocks — The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, by François Berthier, trans. with a philosophical essay by Graham Parkes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 166 pp., $20.00. The austere simplicity of Zen rock gardens is also an allusive and elusive one, as the two enjoyable essays that comprise Reading Zen in the Rocks — The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden eloquently indicate. More so than the phenomena they describe, these essays appeal to a wide audience, and they read easily, invitingly, and informatively. In this textual performance, the French art-historian, François Berthier, stands side-by-side with the Scottish philosopher of comparative East-West studies, Graham Parkes, to provide a textual and visual presentation that intends, via an appropriate complementarity of content, to introduce the karesansui (dry landscape) style of Japanese garden to the general reader. Parkes — a masterful and accomplished translator — renders into English, Berthier's 1989 work, Le jardin du Ryoanji — Lire le Zen dans les pierres [The Garden of Ryoanji — Reading Zen in the Rocks], and fills some philosophical gaps with his own equal-length [End Page 112] essay, "The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden." Though judiciously focused to achieve expository economy, the two essays jointly provide a handy introduction to the complicated artistic, philosophic, religious, and cultural phenomenon popularly known as the "Zen rock garden."As a distinguishing landscape-architectural feature of many Zen monasteries in Japan and abroad, the karesansui garden reinforces the contemplative religious atmosphere and, as the frequent photographs of meditating monks quietly positioned in their rock gardens tend to suggest, they guide the perceiver into the calm and earthy mentality typical of Zen Buddhism. Berthier notes, accordingly, that the gardens provide "an image of the [Buddhistically interpreted] universe in its most condensed form" in which people can discern their "true faces" (p. 6). Ideally, one could contemplate a Zen garden and, if one were equipped with the proper background in Zen training, be stimulated to experience a Zen Buddhist enlightenment.Such are the immediate expectations elicited from a book whose cover depicts a Zen monk contemplating an expanse of bare gravel, and which sets the title word "Zen" in large letters over the monk's back. It comes as a surprise, then, that there is far less pure Zen in these essays than one would anticipate from this English-language presentation of Berthier's book. In the French version, as can be seen above, the word "Zen" appears only in the book's subtitle, and the Zen-specific anticipations are more submerged as a result.It would be an overstatement to identify the phrase "Zen rock garden" as a misnomer, but Berthier and Parkes implicitly demonstrate that the karesansui style of Japanese garden is not an exclusively Zen phenomenon, but is intimately linked with Chinese Daoism, Shintoism, not to mention versions of Buddhism that historically precede, and are significantly different from, Zen Buddhism. Perhaps unintentionally, this book raises the question, "What measure of Zen, in fact, do the paradigmatic "Zen" rock gardens such as the garden at Ryoanji (c. 1500, in Kyoto, and the archetype of Japanese dry landscape gardens) embody?"We can approach this question by considering the meaning of the Japanese word, "karesansui," which Parkes translates accurately as "dry landscape." The title of the book announces that the subject is "the Japanese dry landscape garden," but it is important to recall (as one learns briefly in the final pages) the further linguistic resonances of the prefix "kare." What does not emerge through in the usual translation of "kare" as "dry," is the added association to the English term "withered," for one would translate, for instance, the Japanese terms "kare kusa," "kare ashi," "kare giku," and "kareha," as "withered grass," "withered reed," "withered chrysanthemums," and "withered leaves," respectively. The term "kareki" (bare tree), along with the others, also indicates how the prefixed "kare" suggests wintertime, withering, drying out, something that has...