Bulletin > Volume 50 On the “Moss” in the Dry Landscape Garden of Ryōan Temple

Ōhashi, Ryōsuke

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In “The Aesthetics of ‘Cutting,’” second chapter and core section of my earlier work The Structure of “Kire” (Ōhashi 1986), published forty years ago, I attempted an analysis of the dry landscape garden at Ryōan Temple 龍安寺. Forty years later, while I still essentially stand by that analysis, I also believe there was room to take it a step further. The examination of “moss” that I attempt in this paper is that very step. To offer a bit of an explanation: not only was an examination of moss in Ryōan Temple’s dry landscape garden absent from my earlier work, but it was also uniformly absent from the vast body of literature on the garden that has accumulated since then. The moss in the dry landscape garden had remained completely “forgotten” from the very beginning. And there was a reason for this.