Professor Graham Parkes will deliver the last lecture, the Annual CMRS Public Lecture, in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.
Abstract: The Japanese karesansui (‘dry landscape’) style of garden, while unique to Japan, has its roots in the Chinese tradition of landscape garden making. This presentation thus begins with a brief overview of the classical Chinese garden, in which rocks, or stone, constitute the basic frame and also the main focal points of the garden. To appreciate the role of these rocks, we need to understand that the Chinese regard them not as inanimate lumps of matter but as powerful configurations of what they call qi energies. The Chinese garden is thus not only a place for social interaction and aesthetic appreciation, but also a site for vitalizing one’s existence.
Garden making in Japan at first tended to follow Chinese ways, but, under the influence of Zen Buddhism, the dry landscape style began to exclude organic material. Ultimately the landscape (the Sino-Japanese term means, literally, ‘mountains and waters’) was presented through rocks and gravel alone. In the context of Buddhist contemplation practices, the dry landscape garden also became a place of initiation into ideas and principles from Japanese Buddhist philosophy.
The presentation concludes with a brief consideration of some implications of the dry landscape garden for our contemporary understanding of the interrelations between the human and natural worlds.
Bio: Graham Parkes, born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, taught Asian and comparative philosophy for thirty years at the University of Hawaii before taking up his present position at Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork, in Ireland, where he is also the founding director of the Irish Institute for Japanese Studies.
Among his publications are: Heidegger and Asian Thought (ed.,1987), Nietzsche and Asian Thought(ed., 1991), Composing the
Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (1994), and translations (with commentaries) of Detlet Lauf’sSecret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead (1974), Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), Reinhard May’s Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work(1996), François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden (2000), and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005). Also over a hundred journal articles and book chapters on topics in Chinese, Japanese and European philosophies.
He is currently writing a book with the working title Climate Change and China: Ways toward Lives Worth Living.
