Japanese Zen Gardens: The Art of Emptiness
The Japanese dry garden ( karesansui — literally "dry mountain water") is one of the most radical aesthetic achievements in the history of sacred art: a garden that contains no water, depicts water through raked gravel; a garden that suggests mountains through stones too small to climb; a garden that creates an experience of infinite space within an area measurable in meters. The Ryōan-ji garden in Kyoto — fifteen stones arranged in five groups on a rectangular bed of raked white gravel, enclosed by earthen walls — has been studied by aestheticians, psychologists, and physicists for centuries without yielding the secret of why it produces in viewers the specific quality of mental stillness it produces. The stones are positioned so that from any viewpoint within the viewing platform, one stone is always hidden behind another — the garden is never fully visible at once, and the mind's attempt to see the whole draws it past the individual elements into a quality of attentio...