Contact:

Russell Goodman, (505) 277-4024 Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821

November 8, 2001

UNM Philosophy Department Sponsors Multimedia Presentation by University of Hawaii Professor

Graham Parkes, a photographer and videographer and professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, will present a multimedia presentation on “The Eloquent Stillness of Stone: The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden,” Saturday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m.

The presentation, sponsored by the UNM Philosophy Department, will be held in the Franklin Dickey Theatre located on the first floor of the Humanities building at UNM. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Parkes has presented the “The Eloquent Stillness of Stone” to audiences interested in landscape architecture and Asian religions and philosophies as well as in Japanese gardens. In the last year it has been presented to enthusiastic acclaim in France, Germany, Italy, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in the U.S. It recently drew an audience of almost 300 people to the Honolulu Academy of Arts in conjunction with the eighth annual East-West Philosophers Conference.

“The Japanese ‘dry landscape’ garden is a unique cultural product that has long fascinated but also baffled viewers in the West,” said Russell Goodman, chair of the Philosophy Department. “The key to opening up the mystery of this distinctive genre of garden is an understanding of the historical, religious, and philosophical backgrounds to its development.”

The first part of the presentation is a fifty-minute slide lecture which begins by showing some precursors of this kind of rock garden in China and explaining the distinctive East-Asian understanding of stone as a certain configuration of the psycho-physical energy known as qi (ch’i). The relevant principles from fengshui (Chinese environmental science), Daoism and Buddhism are then outlined and illustrated.

The development of the dry landscape (karesansui) garden in Japan is recounted against the background of the indigenous religion of Shinto and the earliest surviving manual on garden-making (the Sakuteiki), and illustrated with slides of the most outstanding karesansui gardens in Kyotoat Saihôji (Kokedera), Tenryûji, Ryôanji, Daisen-in, and Kinkakuji, all in Japan. Special attention is paid to the rock garden at Ryôanji, which is justly regarded as the paragon of the karesansui style, through the application of some distinctively Japanese aesthetic notions deriving from Zen Buddhism.

The overwhelming sense from all these gardens that the rocks somehow “speak” to us (in a language of stone) is accounted for in terms of the Japanese Buddhist idea that landscape is the body of the cosmic Buddha expounding the truths of Buddhism through speech and inscription.

The second part of the presentation (20 minutes) exemplifies the ideas presented in the first part and also celebrates, in music and images, the power of the dry landscape garden to move us toward revisioning our relations to the natural worldand especially to the mineral realm.

It consists of 50 slides projected through a lapse-dissolve technique that brings the depicted rocks to life, and is played to a remarkable piece of music by the Japanese composer Somei Satoh, Mandara (a work deeply influenced by Buddhist ideas).
The ideas in the presentation are drawn from Parkes’ essay “The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden,” which accompanies his translation of François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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The University of New Mexico
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Telephone: (505) 277-5813
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