By Don George
I have seen Ryoanji in spring, when the cherry trees bloomed, and in fall, when their branches were bare; in winter, when snow covered the moss, and in summer, when cicadas buzzed beyond the wall. I have been there among giggling teenagers and gaping farmers, bemused Westerners and beatific monks. By now it has become a part of me—and it still eludes me.
I love the place partly because it is so emphatically not a ten-minute tourist stop. It makes you sit and study, slow down and stare until you really see it—in its particularity and in its whole, simultaneously.
And yet—and here the enigma expands—you cannot see all of Ryoanji at one time: The rocks are so arranged that you can see only fourteen of the stones wherever you stand. You have to visualize, imagine, the final one.
How wonderful! It is in this sense that Ryoanji is, for me, the essential sacred place: It is complete in itself, but for you to completely perceive it, you have to transcend the boundary between inner and outer—to travel inward as well as outward, to find and finish it in your mind.
And the gigglers, the camera-clickers, and the squawking loudspeakers are all, in their exasperating reality, part of this completion. Beyond a great irony of modern Japan—loudspeakers instructing you to appreciate the silence—they embody a much larger meaning. You must embrace them all—the monks and the moss and the trees, the schoolkids and the stones—to really be there, to be whole.
