Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

MUSIC, CULTURE AND THE MIND

"Consider this experiment. Place any person from nearly any culture in a locked room. Play a piece of music written in any style. It might, at first, seem as alien and incomprehensible as an untranslated copy of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' for a non- Russian speaker. But while the novel could be understood only if a dictionary was provided, for the music no dictionary is necessary. As the composition is heard again and again, it gradually begins to make sense. The listener starts to hear similarities and differences; complex textures become familiar; rhythmic variations take shape. The music essentially teaches itself. It does so by revealing patterns of repetition and change...

Then, as other compositions are heard, the listener begins to assess the patterns being heard: this piece 'works,' that one is crude, this one resembles something already known, that one is extraordinarily difficult to understand. Yes, if the listener knows about the composer who wrote the work, the community that performed it, the era in which it was written, the nature of its audiences and its relationship to its musical tradition, yes, of course, the listening will be more comprehensive, the particular nature of the patterns will be better understood. But stripped of all this apparatus, a meaning can still be transmitted.

This experiment does not require a radical feat of the imagination. It is, after all, how Western popular music has become a lingua franca in cultures with very different ideas of song (and vice versa); it is also how Chinese opera and Indian ragas become familiar to Western listeners. And it means that one important aspect of music is indeed... autonomous, free of a particular time and place. It is an aspect of music that is transcendental."

Edward Rothstein - NY Times 20 December 2000

Ryoan-ji

“It's the kind of thing you simply have to experience for yourself.

Otherwise, the Zen rock garden of the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, a United Nations World Heritage site, simply defies the imagination.

The garden, after all, has no plants—no flowers, no trees, not even any weeds.

It's a 30- by 10-meter (roughly 98- by 32-foot) rectangle surrounded by earthen walls on three sides and a wooden veranda on the fourth. Inside the rectangle is a vista of white pebbles and 15 rocks. And it is world famous for the peace and serenity anyone and everyone who visits it feels.

The Ryoanji Temple (Temple of the Peaceful Dragon), is a Zen place of worship and meditation first built sometime during the 1450s. the rock garden, which fronts the abbot's quarters, was laid out around this time as a place for the monks to meditate.
Thought by many to be the quintessence of Zen art, the garden is in the dry landscape style called Karesansui ("withered landscape").

The garden's 15 rocks are of various sizes, placed in five separate groupings. The white gravel that surrounds them is raked every day; perfect circles around the rocks, perfectly straight lines in the rest of the space. The rocks are arranged so that no matter where a visitor stands, only 14 can be seen. It is said that only when you attain spiritual enlightenment as a result of Zen meditation will you see the 15th stone. . . .

However, it's the empty space created by the placement of the rocks and the void created by the white gravel that has long intrigued visitors.

Now the mystery may have been resolved.

Visual-imaging scientists say they've figured out what it is about the garden that engenders this serenity. The secret: The more than 500-year-old garden is harboring a subliminal message in the form of a tree.

Gert van Tonder, a postdoctoral fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science at Kyoto University, and Michael J. Lyons, a senior scientist at ATR Media Information Labs in Kyoto, applied a shape-analysis technique that can reveal hidden structural features to the garden's empty space.

His analysis indicates that the same unconscious sensitivity is able to discern the image of a trunk and branches of a tree within the Zen garden's pattern of rocks and stones. Viewed from the verandah, the image is apparent to the subconscious but is invisible to the eye . . . . the unconscious perception of this pattern is the source of the garden's calming effect. . . .Van Tonder believes the garden's designer intended to create the subliminal feature—demonstrating an understanding of the physics of the human eye and subconscious hundreds of years ago.”
______

A friend, knowing of my interest in Japan, recently sent me the above article.

I have spent several occasions of quiet contemplation at Ryoan-ji. A unique experience which can not be easily expressed within the limitations of everyday vocabulary.

One of the quaint expressions which I picked up during my five years in Japan was ‘baba’ — one consonant removed from the well known expression in Spanish of ‘caca’, and meaning much the same.

Just a personal opinion, but it would appear that Messrs Van Tonder and Lyons are full of it. Ryoan-ji is Ryoan-ji. Really quite simple. Why is it so difficult for some people to accept the orient on its own terms?