Dry Mountain Water

My series is an invitation to explore Zen rock gardens, often referred to in Japanese as "karesensui," or dry landscape gardens. In Japanese, "karesensui" means “dry mountain water.” Resorting to simplest materials – rocks, gravel and sand – designers of these gardens create three-dimensional landscapes, in which water is represented by its material opposite – sand, while rocks, revered by the Japanese as sacred objects, symbolize mountains and islands. Inspired by traditional ink wash or sumi-e paintings, in which condensed meanings are expressed with most limited means and in which absence or empty space is as important as what is present, these dry rock gardens are also to be experienced as works of art – they need to be interpreted and contemplated, rather than simply used for recreation. Framed and separated from the outside world, they offer visitors a chance to experience distilled version of the Cosmos. Rather than walk or touch anything, viewers are invited to confront multiple contradictions, mysteries and riddles, which more often than not cannot be solved. But in Zen, it’s the process – the Way -- that is far more important than the end result. It is often (wrongly) assumed that kare-sansui gardens are meant for meditation. In fact, their importance for Zen spirituality is related to patient maintenance, often performed by monks – meticulous raking, sweeping, brushing, cleaning, weeding. Sisyphean absurdity of such endeavors – tentativeness, ephemerality and instability commonly associated with moving sand – can be viewed as a metaphor of something trivial and futile. But this is exactly what Zen elevates and what forms basis of its spiritual discipline. Paradoxically, it’s through mundane, repetitive tasks that man is able to challenge and tame powerful Nature, while at the same time approach it with reverence and humbleness. Every sweeping and re-raking of gravel and sand creates the garden anew even though nothing becomes different from what it was before. Thus, against the passage of time -- despite the wind, rain, earthquakes, gravity and weeds – karesensui garden maintains its identity; it does not change, does not grow old, doesn’t disappear. The monochromatic, highly abstract Zen gardens seem to lend themselves well to black and white photography in which forms are condensed and abstracted to offer some interpretation rather than realistic depiction of reality. My images taken in multiple temples of Kyoto and Kamakura over the span of three years are not intended to represent any particular place or garden. Instead, they focus on the metaphoric nature of the karesensui gardens – the contradictions that we are invited to confront, riddles that we are not quite able to solve, repetitiveness of our experiences and fragmentary nature of our perceptions.