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Frangois Berthier - I W Reading in the Roc\s Franfois Berthier Reading in the Rochs THE JAPANESE DRY LANDSCAPE GARDEN Translated and with a Philosophical Essay by Graham Parses ALlS i ON BRANCH LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO AND LONDON — Francois Berthier is professor of Japanese art and history at the Institut Nationale des Langues et Civilizations Orientales in Paris. Graham Parkes is professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii. Originally published as Lejardin du Ryoanji: Lire le Zen dans les pierres, © 1989, 1997 Societe Nouvelle Adam Biro The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2000 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2000 Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 1 2 3 4 5 Photo Credits: frontispiece, 8, 28, 29: Edouard Boubat/Top; 1 : courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; 5: Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo; 13: Inge Morath/Magnum; 14: Toni Schneiders/Rapho; 15: Jean- Philippe Charbonnier/Top; 20: Pan-Asia Photo News/Rapho; 25: Frederic Rapho; 26: Rene Burri/Magnum; 34: Else Madelon Hooykaas/Rapho ISBN: 0-226-04411-4 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berthier, Francois. [Jardin du Ryoanji. English] Reading Zen in the rocks : the Japanese dry landscape garden / Francois Berthier ; translated and with a philosophical essay by Graham Parkes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-226-04411-4 (cloth) 1. Rock gardens, Japanese —Zen influences. 2. Rock gardens—Japan Kyoto. 3. Ryoanji Teien (Kyoto, Japan). I. Parkes, Graham, 1949- II. Title. SB458.B4713 2000 712'.6'0952 —dc21 99-043678 © The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. CONTENTS Translator s Preface vii Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden 1 Chronology 79 The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden by Graham Parkes 85 Notes 147 Selected Bibliography 157 Index 159 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/readingzeninrockOObert TRANSLATOR S PREFACE To begin at the end, on the back cover of the French original of Francois Berthier’s book on the Japanese “dry landscape” garden: Is there a language of stone? A few unhewn rocks distributed on an expanse of gravel —could they be delivering a message? This is ultimately the question posed by the garden at Ryoanji in Kyoto. This garden is disconcerting through its not really being a garden: there is no green of trees to be seen, no scent of flowers to be caught, nor any birdsong to be heard. This desertlike space is enig- matic, an arid area where just fifteen rocks measure themselves against the immensity of the void. Five centuries old, the garden of Ryoanji is a surprisingly modern work of art. It is also a place where the human being can read, in the dark mirror of stone, the 1 mystery that he carries within . vii — These are provocative suggestions, for we don’t normally think of rocks as having language, nor of gardens devoid of vegetation as posing questions, nor of stone as something that can be read, and possessing surfaces reflecting something in the depths of human being. But rock and stone in the Japanese dry landscape garden are and do just these things. A brief word first on the distinction between “stone” and “rock”: both terms are mass nouns (as in “outcrop of rock” or “staircase of stone”) as well as singular nouns (“a precious stone,” “a strangely shaped rock”), and they are often used interchangeably. Although rocks are originally found in nature, unlike stones they remain rocks when moved into a garden. (We speak of “rock gardens” rather than “stone gardens.”) “Rock” generally retains a connota- tion of naturalness by comparison with “stone,” insofar as we talk sooner of stone as being worked— or else unhewn and at the extreme of being worked we call them “precious stones” (which unfortunately, in the case of diamonds, are colloquially referred to as “rocks”). “Rocks” are in general larger than “stones,” and in Japanese gardens it is usually the larger components that draw our attention. Although Profes- sor Berthier writes almost exclusively ofpierres and only occa- sionally of rocs, I have rendered both terms mostly as “rocks” in the belief that this is more consonant with English usage. Japanese studies in the West have often been intoxi- cated by exoticism, to the point of uncritical adulation of their subject, while the corresponding field in Japan has frequently taken the form of Nihonjinron, beginning as discussions of what it means to be Japanese but then degen- erating into “theories of Japanese uniqueness.” Some of the writing on Japanese gardens has tended to overemphasize their uniqueness in terms of generalized oppositions of the “Western gardens are this” versus “Japanese gardens are not- this” variety. But recent scholarship on Japan in the United States has sometimes overreacted to the silliness of the Nihon- jinron literature by claiming that in fact the Japanese aren’t as different from us as they like to think, thereby dissolving all cultural practices (and corresponding discourses) into a flat postmodernist melange of indifferance. There is a danger here in overlooking what is genuinely different about Japa- nese culture, which makes it eminently worth studying. The history of the Japanese garden is, as Berthier’s text suggests, a long and complex one, and the reflections that follow concern only those aspects that will enhance our appreciation of the karesansui (dry landscape) style in particu- lar. Since stone has in general been understood differently in the Western traditions from the way it has been regarded in East Asia, a focus on the role of rock in these cultures may be especially helpful for the foreign viewer of—or reflector upon— such gardens. My complementary essay pursues Berthier’s suggestion that stone speaks to us, by asking what kind of voice rocks may have and what they might be saying. Histories of Japanese garden making naturally acknowledge the influences of Chinese ideas and practices on the development of the art in Japan, but it is beyond the scope of Berthier’s project to treat this topic at any length. However, since the Japanese understanding of stone is more IX — or less continuous with the Chinese, and since Chinese culture manifests a petromania — not to mention litholatry unparalleled in any other (except Japanese), I have seen fit to treat this distinctively East Asian understanding at some length. In the context of the Japanese dry landscape garden (and its prototypes in China) the focus is on stone revered for its own sake, for the pleasure and understanding derived from simply being in the presence of rocks and contemplat- ing them, rather than for their usefulness as tools or raw material, their medicinal value as minerals, their role in alchemical practices, or their worth as precious stones. In this respect there is little in the Western tradition to compare with the traditional reverence for stone in Chinese and Japa- nese culture. Nor have more than a few thinkers in Europe or America deemed unhewn stone worthy of philosophical reflection. The rare exceptions will be worth a brief discus- sion, since attitudes toward rock turn out to serve as a kind of touchstone on a point of significant cultural difference. The ground of this cultural difference appears to lie in the traditional Western dichotomy between the animate and inanimate realms, which has no counterpart in the East Asian traditions. Aesthetic appreciation in China and Japan thus has a greater range than in the West, insofar as it extends to (what we call) “inanimate” matter in art— works that have not been worked by the artist’s hand. But the revi- sioning of our conception of stone that is prompted by contemplation of East Asian rock gardens has implications that go beyond the aesthetic to the ecological. Any shift in our thinking that weakens anthropocentrism is likely to have beneficial consequences for the natural environment, so that contemporary movements such as “deep ecology” advocate biocentrism as a salutary antidote to human domination and exploitation of nature. But the respect for rock on the part of East Asian makers and connoisseurs of dry landscape gardens, and that is exemplified in the Daoist and Buddhist philosophies underlying the art of garden making, makes biocentrism look narrow and parochial by contrast. Names are given in the Japanese order, which is usually the family name followed by the given name. In the captions for the photographs, and sometimes elsewhere, I have added the word “temple” to the Japanese temple names, even though those names already contain the word: for example, “Shojuji Temple” (where yV means “temple”). This verges on the sole- cism committed by saying “Mount Fujisan” (which means “Mount Fuji Mountain”), but is worth risking for purposes of clarity. I am grateful to William R. LaFleur, who read the entire manuscript for the Press, for providing several most helpful comments and suggestions. A trip to Japan for the purpose of contemplating some examples of the dry land- scape garden was supported by a research award from the University of Hawaii Japan Studies Endowment, funded by a grant from the Japanese government. XI Zen and the Arts I speak of naked stones ... in which there is both concealed and revealed a mystery that is slower, more vast, and heavier than the destiny of a transitory space. ROGER CAILLOIS Zen is not, properly speaking, a religion: it is one of a dozen or so main branches of Buddhism.

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