Zen Landscapes: Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics

197 Pages·2013·4.77 MB·English

by  Allen S. Weiss

ZEN LANDSCAPES
ZEN LANDSCAPES
Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics
ALLEN S. WEISS
REAKTION BOOKS
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Allen S. Weiss 2013
Book design by Simon McFadden
The publishers would like to thank The Great Britain Sasakawa
Foundation for its support in the publication of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.
Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
eISBN: 9781780232317
CONTENTS
Introduction: Transformations of Vision
Transient Symbols
ONE
On the Circulation of Metaphor
TWO
Zen Mountains, Zen Water
THREE
Cracks
FOUR
Pottery Landscapes
FIVE
The Tea Bowl and the Toilet Bowl
SIX
Impossible Possibles
SEVEN
Postscript: A Leaf
REFERENCES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
Ryōan-ji, Kyōyōchi pond.
To understand the rose, one person uses geometry
while another employs the butterfly.
,
PAUL CLAUDEL
L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant
Ryōan-ji, snowstorm of 31 December 2010.
INTRODUCTION
TRANSFORMATIONS OF VISION
he dry garden of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto is one of the most analysed and
T
photographed works of art in the world. Thus, well before my first visit in
November 2006, I felt I knew the garden intimately, and was thoroughly
prepared to elaborate on the knowledge I had attained from dozens of books and
hundreds if not thousands of images. As soon as I stepped onto the veranda of
the temple overlooking the garden, I was stupefied, first by its sublime beauty
and soon afterwards by the fact that it hardly corresponded to any description I
had read of it. How could this be? Could all previous commentators have been
so wrong? Could I have been so blinded by my own prejudices and paradigms?
Could I have fallen into the textual trap of confusing image and description for
the garden itself? Certainly my attraction to Japanese dry gardens stems from the
fact that they corroborate my aesthetic principles, wishes and utopias. But might
this passion, hitherto untested against its objects, have falsified my vision? I
immediately suspected that my disorientation went far beyond mere culture
shock. With each discovery about Japanese culture, my bewilderment seemed to
multiply even as my knowledge expanded, and I seemed further from aesthetic
enlightenment than ever, as Ryōan-ji led me to consider other art forms and
other viewpoints: the stones had their antecedents in Chinese and Japanese
painting; the surrounding walls evoked unglazed pottery surfaces; the stone
borders hinted at the complicated issues of inside and outside in Japanese
architecture; the sparse moss suggested the need for water in an otherwise dry
garden, thus pointing to the essential role of atmospheric effects in Japanese art;
the raked gravel stressed the role of stylization and stereotype in image and
word; and the overhanging cherry tree evoked the crucial interpenetration of art
and world. I was to discover that these correspondences were not mere free
associations, but are deeply ingrained in Japanese aesthetics. After nearly two
decades of meditation on Western gardens and landscape from the Baroque
through the modern and postmodern eras, I realized that I had to reorient my
ways of seeing completely in order to be able to elucidate my initial
astonishment before Ryōan-ji.1
As a result I offer here a certain number of principles, composed in the form
of a ‘Manifesto for the Future of Landscape’, to give a sense of my attitudes and
hopes – often against the grain of contemporary theory and practice – regarding