October 01, 2002

So these scientist guys have apparently "solved" the mystery of Ryoanji, the famous Zen rock garden in Kyoto. I asked my dad, a scholar of Buddhism and longtime admirer of the garden, if he agreed with these findings. His reply:

No. I don't know whether some kind of order can be subliminally perceived in this place. But what Buddhism is about at the deepest level is the digging out of trust--supra-liminal or sub-liminal--in unchangingness as support for who one is; if the garden's designer intended to support these researchers' sense of who they are by preparing something for them to "prove" centuries later, then the designer would not be in accord with Buddhadharma after all. If what the researchers say is true, i.e., that order is subliminally present in the garden, then the garden is not as profound an expression of that dharma after all.
      When I first glimpsed the place, I had an impression of the arrangement of rocks moving in blinding speed away from me. The contrast of that impression to the stasis of the components of the garden has always struck me as the essence of the place.
      And "withered landscape?!!" The writer of the article needs to go to school to find out what Zen is all about.