StonesWest
Suiseki - Viewing Stones
Nigel Atkinson

SUISEKI – VIEWING STONES

Suiseki has gained in popularity in conjunction with Bonsai around the world over the last ten to fifteen years or so. You can tell by reading magazines, attending conventions and exhibitions. They all now say  “Bonsai and Suiseki” not just “Bonsai”.

Suiseki are stones admired for their beauty and for their power to suggest a scene from nature or an object closely associated with nature.

The art of Stone Appreciation is believed to have originated some two thousand years ago in China, where small stones of great natural beauty were set on stands to represent famous mountains and legendary islands of immortality associated with Buddhist and Taoist beliefs. In the beginning of the thirteenth century radical changes occurred in Japanese aesthetic taste that caused a major divergence from the Chinese tradition of stone appreciation. Under the influence of Zen - with its emphasis on austerity, concentrated meditation, intuitive insight, experience of absolute "nothingness" and direct communion with nature - a different type of stone came to be admired. Unlike the older Chinese stones, these new stones were subtle, profoundly quiet, serene, austere and unpretentious. In order to perceive more clearly the essence of the stone, there developed a taste for stones stripped of all distracting elements and unnecessary detail. This in turn led to a preference for stones that were more suggestive than explicit, more natural and irregular than artificial and symmetrical, more austere, subdued and weathered than ostentatious, colored, bright and new. Reduced to its bare essentials, the stone became a means of spiritual refinement, inner awareness and enlightenment. Suiseki have become stones admired for their beauty or an object  closely associated with nature.

I have been bought up with bonsai and the Japanese philosophy.  When I view a bonsai display, I study the exhibit and if it is good, it will capture my mind and take me to somewhere in nature that I have been before that the tree or landscape reside. Or it will force my mind to assume what I believe would be that place in nature that I would find that scene.

Similarly, when I view Suiseki, I study the stone and if it is a good example, I wait for it to grab me and take me somewhere in nature. It stirs my memory of places I’ve been or images of places resembling them. I am amazed that I can envisage mountain ranges, steep crags, rivers, waterfalls, plains and lakes by just looking at a stone no more than 20cms in length on a table in front of me. Nature at it’s finest. Object or pattern stones also give a chance to envisage a situation that I can recall or make a story of what is depicted in front of me.

Suiseki – Viewing Stones are here for all of us to enjoy.