By WILLIS STOESZ
March 17, 2003

But then, after that got posted to The Blue Hammer, we had the rare experience of sitting on the veranda in front of the actual stone garden at the actual Ryoanji temple in Kyoto. After gazing a while at the arrangement of rocks in the level raked sand we noticed how people were reacting.

Some of them were counting the rocks. “10, 11, 12…do you see fifteen?” A tall English speaker, noticing us using English, said the progression of rocks from right to left exactly represented the growth of plants and that it was remarkable someone in the early 16th century should have such scientific insight. Some of the guidebooks say the rocks represent a mother tiger and its cubs swimming toward a dragon that might gobble them up (an idea that was also mentioned in the National Geographic article).

The article was mostly about a more recent interpretation. Two scientists have come up with the idea that a large empty space in the left front produces in the mind of the viewer an image of a tree--not so you can actually see it there, but at a subliminal level. It is the mind’s need for a sense of orderly calm, they say, artfully stimulated by the garden’s layout, that makes this effect possible.

However, if you start from the fact that the arranger of the garden was a Buddhist, versed in the teaching of the Buddha, you must see the garden differently from any of these interpretations. The fundamental insight of Buddhism is that everything changes: I change, you change, all things around us are changing. There is no unchanging core in anything, in me or in you or in anyone. Everything flows, and it does so according to a definite moral law (the Four Noble Truths). But, against the fact of constant change, we all hold on to something. This mental act of holding on doesn’t alter that everything changes, but it produces an illusion of unchangingness. We hold on to some self-image, to who we think we are or hope to be, and thus all our thinking is pervaded by our presumption that we are in fact an unchanging self. Then, since change keeps happening in spite of our illusion, we are anxious and experience suffering.

The Buddha showed by his own example that we can become free of this illusion and achieve the wisdom in which suffering is overcome. Wisdom is the full acceptance that all changes; it is enlightenment and a bliss beyond every mundane happiness.

That’s half the story of the Buddha’s teaching. The other half is also shown by his example. Being released into wisdom means being released into unbounded compassion for others, into continuing attention to the suffering of others, of all others anywhere in the world. His personal quest had begun with the question, “Why do I experience suffering; why does anyone experience suffering?” When he reached enlightenment, the compassion in his question became boundless, unobstructed by illusory self-concepts. He was then connected with the full particulars of everyday existence, his own and that of everyone else.

The Buddha’s teaching does not revolve around the search of a sense of calm in the inner self. The inner self’s calm is relational and not solitary, and its compassion takes in, finally, the totality of all those who suffer. The two halves of his teaching are one and the same, both aspects of the mind of the Buddha.

The Zen garden at Ryoanji has always intrigued people, drawn them into wondering what it means. People then try to explain it from what they know before they come to it, from whatever they think gives them reason to believe they are competent explainers. It is an idea about themselves that gives them satisfaction, and they want to hold on to it. But the garden frustrates every such attempt to explain its meaning. This is probably why the designer made it impossible to see all fifteen of the rocks from any one place on the veranda, saying quite directly that there is more to the garden than can be seen from any one viewpoint. Every interpretation of the garden but one leaves part of it unaccounted for. Only the Buddha’s message about letting go of attachment to a short-sighted, egoistic view of one’s self has the force of the full garden behind it.

The genius of the garden’s design is that it leads people into wondering about its meaning. It can lead them, if they are willing to concede that their self-satisfying attempts at explanation are incomplete, to understand the Buddha’s message of wisdom and compassion.

So, a sense of orderly calm-—from having a subliminal image of a tree, or whatever image leads you to think you have an invulnerable basis for your self-—is not exactly what the garden is about. The scientists need to take another look at basic Buddhism.