‘Seeing forms and hearing sounds’ in Japanese garden design

Abstract

The landscape features of the karetaki or dry waterfall, and karesansui or dry garden style have been well codified in Japanese garden design since at least the appearance of the 11th century treatise Sakuteiki (Records of garden making) by Tachibana Toshitsuna (1028–1094). Numerous contemporary scholars have suggested how encounters with these features literally evoke the sound of water even though they exist in the absence of water and are constructed primarily from carefully selected stones and gravel. In this article, I develop an interpretive semantics of these features by drawing on the influence of Buddhist philosophy on Japanese garden design. This semantic framework emerges from a non-canonic utilization of the logic of the catuṣkoṭi (Jp. shiku) or tetralemma — a series of four propositions that is most famously associated to the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna (c. 150–c. 250 CE). I introduce examples in Zen discourses on sound and then use the catuṣkoṭi as a novel reasoning tool to investigate the ontology of sound as it pertains to the relationship between sound-images and landscape forms in the karetaki and karesansui.