By Jim Frederick

Posted Monday, June 27, 2005; 20:00 HKT
Zen buddhism emphasizes the contem-plation of koans—ostensibly simple but actually baffling riddles—as an aid to me-ditation. And among the most ineffable of koans is the Ryoanji temple rock garden in Kyoto. How does this seemingly random scattering of stones on sand become a work of transcendent beauty? The acme of a Japanese garden style known as karesansui (dry landscape), Ryoanji is deceptively barren. Fifteen oddly shaped rocks of varying sizes lie on a 30-m-by-10-m bed of raked white sand. But there is endless richness in this seeming emptiness. Poets, monks and professors have offered myriad interpretations of the garden's symbolism since its construction in the 16th century. Do the stones represent mountaintops peeking above the clouds? Islands in an ocean? Tigers crossing a pond? Perhaps they are all of these things. Perhaps none. The true significance of the arrangement, like Zen enlightenment itself, is individual, its mysteries unraveled only by silent contemplation. So get there early before the crowds, and ponder in peace what one scholar has called Buddhism's supreme "sermon in stone."

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