Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation. Vincent T. CovelloЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Foreword

      Who among us, when walking along the banks of a river or the shores of a sea, is not drawn to collect stones, be they small pebbles, or rocks just within our carrying capacity. The collecting itself is akin to meditation, for the preoccupations of our busy minds fade away as we focus on distinguishing the minute differences between the stones at our feet. What a moment before was an undifferentiated mass, becomes a community of individuals, each with its own marvelous suchness. Thus begins appreciation. This book is devoted to the Japanese art of appreciating such small-scale stones, known as suiseki.

As the chapter on historical background touches upon, the appreciation of stone has a long history in China, which can be dated back to pre-history and the veneration of jade. Disks and other jade objects constitute one of the important categories of pre-historical artifacts in China. The first term for special stones in Chinese vocabulary, guaishi 怪石 “fantastic stones” appears in a list of imperial tribute dating back to the middle of the first millennium B.C.1 It most likely referred to semi-precious stones like jade, but came to be the general term for stones and boulder-size rocks with unusual attributes. The term itself is instructive, however, because the Chinese taste for stone was marked from the beginning with a predilection for the strange. The prevalence of limestone along Chinese rivers and sea coasts has resulted in the natural production of stone in writhing shapes, full of hollows and holes. These twisted, verging on grotesque, forms have always been the mainstay of Chinese garden design. For more than a thousand years, huge stones of this type have been shipped from one end of China to the other for the creation of “stone forests” and “grottos for immortals.” Fortunes were spent on these enterprises and their owners fretted over the difficulty, despite the enduring quality of stone, to preserve these gardens for posterity. One of the most famous cases of this was Li Deyu (787-850) whose villa at Pingquan outside of Luoyang was legendary for its rock and plant collection. Li Deyu wrote in an exhortation to his descendents, “Whoever sells even one rock or a single plant will not be considered a good offspring of mine.”2 Yet, no sooner had he died than economic and political exigencies forced his descendents to sell off the treasures, including one of his favorites, the “Rock for Sobering Up from Intoxication.” Apparently Li Deyu used to lean against it, as though it were a servant, whenever he got drunk. Such notorious cases mark the point where petrofilia crosses over into petromania; readers of this book beware, it may be catching! I once had the opportunity to witness the arrival of a container load of Chinese fantastic boulders ranging in size from half a ton to five tons for the garden of a friend in England who is a dealer in Chinese art. He had long been seduced by the smaller scale “scholar stones” (of the type illustrated in figure 2), but he dreamed of creating a Chinese stone garden for himself. The rocks themselves apparently were not so expensive, but shipping them half-way round the world was, needless to say, a fantastic extravagance. When they arrived in Britain, the credulity of Her Majesty’s Customs’ agents was strained by the bill of lading listing the contents of the container as only “Chinese rock” and ordered a thorough check of the shipment. When it was revealed to be just what it said, my friend was still charged for the inspection on the grounds that he had “caused mischief,” presumably with such a whimsical import. Such are the dangers of petromania.

      The appreciation for stone in Japan has a long history too. While it has been influenced deeply by the Chinese tradition, it also, as is pointed out in the introductory chapter, has its own independent root in the native religion of Shinto. Animistic beliefs in Shinto led to the veneration of natural stones in situ as dwelling places of spirits. Perhaps this explains to some degree why the taste in stone in Japan from the beginning has tended to a preference for the restrained and simple, a predilection subsumed under the wabi, sabi, shibui, and yugen aesthetics dealt with in Chapter 2 of this volume. It is certain that immense sums have been expended in Japan for the creation of private gardens, but such creations have not generally achieved legendary status. Even the affection felt for stones has had a more restrained character in Japan. As evident above in the example of Li Deyu, a personification of stones in China has been part of their appreciation. Here is a charming example of that kind of anthropomorphic view from the conclusion of a poem by Bai Juyi (772-846), who is coincidentally the most beloved of all Chinese poets in Japan. In this long poem, Bai Juyi eulogizes a pair of rocks in his garden and ends with the following:

      Each man has his own preferences:

      All things seek their own companions.

      I have come to fear that the world of youth

      Has no room for one with long white hair.

      I turn my head and ask this pair of stones:

      “Can you be companions for an old man?”

      Although the stones cannot speak,

They agree that we three shall be friends.3

      By contrast, traditional Japanese poetry tends to present rocks and stones simply as part of a natural landscape. Here is one example by Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204),

      In one place, frozen,

      in another, breaking up,

      the mountain river

      sobs between boulders,

a voice in dawn’s light.4

      There is a slight feeling of personification in the verb “sobs” but the boulders are not depicted as having human attributes. Rather than anthropomorphize the natural elements in this scene, the poet’s mind has merged with the scene. This is also evident in one of the most famous haiku on stone and sound by Basho (1644 to 1694),

Such stillness, sinking into the stones, the cicadas’ cries.5

      Perhaps this long tradition in Japan, nurtured by poetry, of cultivating attentiveness to the special qualities in the most ordinary of natural scenes has contributed to a love for stones characterized by a quiet, unexaggerated beauty.

      The greater part of this book is reserved for an overview of the Japanese canons of stone