Suiseki: Personal Reflections

Suiseki is the Japanese art of the viewing stone. Stones are exhibited on a wooden base called a daiza or in a shallow ceramic bowl called a suiban. Since the latter is generic, I prefer the daiza, which is constructed uniquely for each stone. The translation of suiseki is "water stone," referring to a stone that has been moderately weathered or aged, traditionally described as a stone in a stream half-way down a mountain. It is neither too "green" nor too worn, as it would be on an ocean beach. While less popular than its sibling art, bonsai, suiseki has a parallel history. Both arts can be traced to millennia BCE in China, and both rely heavily on illusions of age and scale. I am particularly fond of the image in folklore of the lonely Buddhist monk on the road with a bonsai in one hand and a suiseki in the other.

My initial attraction to suiseki, some twenty-five years ago, derived from my love of wood and its creative potential when combined with beautiful stones. The year that I began suiseki I made over 150 dais, of which I may have three left. At the time, the literature in English on suiseki was exhausted by Vincent T. Covello and Yuji Yoshimura's The Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation: Suiseki and Its Use with Bonsai, which I devoured. Not only was its information incomplete, but it contained inaccuracies as well. For instance, it stated that the underside of the dai need not be completely removed, and that cheap species of wood could be used and then painted or stained. It is through the close examination of high-quality suiseki, primarily in Japan, and through sheer practice, patience, and persistence, that I have been able to create and produce serious suiseki dais.

In classic Japanese style, suiseki stock is hard, dark stone, such as black basalt. Stones can be of two types: rubbing stones (which are oiled) and dry. The former is traditional in Japan: the story is that if every day you rub a good suiseki with the oil from the side of your nose, over the years it will acquire a spectacular patina. America has two indigenous kinds of suiseki stone: Murphys stone from California, which is minimally weathered, and desert stone from the Southwest, which is weathered by wind and sand rather than by water. Neither of these two is a rubbing stone.

For the novice, the experience of viewing stones likely begins by recognizing the subject matter revealed in the suiseki. Particularly popular subjects are near mountain, distant mountain, waterfall, plateau, and water stone. Other suiseki have a variety of physiognomic and erotic subjects. My experience is that as I become familiar with an art form, I gravitate toward more abstract images and those which depend less upon their subject matter. Today the only "mountain" stones I keep are those that have significant historical value for me. My favorites now are quite abstract and would not fit into any of the categories mentioned above.

Some suiseki craftsmen in the U.S. believe that the bottom of a stone can be cut, and for many of my earliest suiseki I used cut stones. But the most important suiseki lesson that I learned from my first trip to Japan was: "No cut stones!" Though I did not know this when I began suiseki, a crucial cultural dimension for the Japanese is the spirit of kami (gods) intrinsic in the stones. While many of the particulars of the art of suiseki, like other Japanese arts, came from China, values central to Japan's indigenous Shinto religion are present in the spirit of these stones. Cutting the stone's bottom destroys this spirit, and with it, the stone's suiseki potential. (See my piece on "Cutting Stones.")

A critical aspect of the relationship between the stone and its daiza is that of proportion: the depth of the feet to the depth of the dai; the height of the stone to the depth to which the stone is buried in the dai; and, most important, the depth of the dai to the overall height of the stone. Among the ratios I take into account is the Golden Section (1:: 1.618), which has the legitimacy of millennia behind it in both East and West. For daiza depth to stone height, the ratio of one to seven has served me well.

Only the very best exotic hardwoods are appropriate. For me, these include Brazilian rosewood, ebony, teak, and old mahogany; in fact, any "old" wood is satisfactory. I have also used walnut, cherry, and fine-grained oak. The criterion here is that the wood must accommodate an exquisite finish: after it has been sanded with at least five grades of sandpaper and given thirty coats of tung oil, it must exhibit the evidence of this effort.

Unless a stone has an established history and/or a recognized pedigree, it is simply a "stone" until it is placed upon a daiza. At that point it becomes a suiseki and a serious artifact. While the process of stone choice is critical to suiseki, collectors basically locate and pick up rocks; there is very little art involved here. It is the daiza that not only brings life to the stone, but presents it to the world. The wood's species, color, and grain, as well as the size, shape, and depth of the daiza, capture and convey a distinctive sense of the stone.

During the past quarter century, my daiza have evolved through three generations. The first generation was conservative, with a vertical profile and feet squarely under the primary weight points. The second was more free-form, with a mixed profile and the daiza reflecting prominent features in the stone. In virtue of my using only natural-bottom stones, the third was an island format (inspired by the fifteenth-century Kyoto rock garden Ryoan-ji); with these daiza, the profile opened out into the horizontal plane with their feet hidden or, in the last couple of years, subtly exposed for aesthetic emphasis and balance. It is a sheer joy to work with these gorgeous stones from around the world and with the great wood that I use.

(Daiza I have designed are in the National Arboretum, Washington, D.C.; the Takagi Bonsai Museum, Tokyo; and the book Suiseki: The Japanese Art of Miniature Landscape Stones, by Felix G. Rivera.)

March, 10, 2008