In the Aesthetics & Symbols video lecture I was really amazed by the cross-cultural connections between the East and West that I have never considered. I was enchanted by the comparison between Japanese room layouts and Mondrian paintings. The purity of art that Mondrian spent his whole life chasing has been right there in Japan.  I never noticed the similarities because I've always been too involved looking at the use of colors in his work.

I also really liked the light diagram contrasting the use of light in Eastern and Western spiritual buildings. I'm curious how this embrace of darkness is connected to the Eastern religions? 

I knew a couple from New Zealand who lived in the same small city in Japan that I did.  The wife had been hired to teach English at a small, family-run English school, and one of the benefits of her employment was that she and her husband got to live rent-free in the old-but-beautiful traditional Japanese house that the family used for the school.  (She would teach lessons in the house during the daytime while her husband commuted to another job; at night, the house was for the two of them only.)  They loved the house and were dismayed to learn that the family owners were planning to eventually tear the house down.  Their reason for doing so was very straightforward: taxes.  The inheritance taxes at the time -- the then-owner was very old -- made preservation financially impossible, whereas if the owners just tore the structure down and replaced it with a small, metered parking lot they would pay much less in taxes and earn income to boot.  My friend couldn't believe it.  "In New Zealand, the government does everything it can to make sure old houses like this are saved," she said.

Sure, the Luo Book diagrams could identify yin and yang, place the five elements correctly, and identify favorable and unfavorable directions for qi -- but did the authors realize how close they were to inventing sudoku?

I'm intrigued by the concept of the garden as an abstraction, as art to be contemplated. Also I am left thinking about modern attempts to create zen-inspired Japanese gardens that are not really for the same purpose... what I am left wondering is, is there anything wrong with that? And also, it is really NOT for the same purpose? I have been to the San Diego Japanese Friendship Garden many times, and take my students there every year. When I go on my own, I feel calmed by the visual aspects of different tones of green, grey, and brown, the stone lanterns and short cropped grass, the gravel raked into waves and the beautiful rocks that were specially selected and brought from Japan for this purpose, the sound of the waterfalls in the koi pond and near the tea house, the concentration required to follow the winding path, and the discovery of small pleasures as I walk around each turn.  There are places to sit and contemplate, and if you are lucky, to empty your mind.

When I take students, we study these various elements and consider the vertical and horizontal aspects of design, the symbolic use of turtle and frog shapes, the specific variety of pines that are pruned so only the needles pointing upward are left, the trees whose branches are bound in a way that they will grow more horizontally, the selective use of splashes of color against a larger palette of green and grey, and lanterns, bridges, and sculptures. We also discuss the mix of Buddhist and Shinto features. I'm always afraid these 12-year-olds will be bored, but it is always one of their favorite experiences. I am wondering, though, what might I add to this field trip to make it more meaningful?

Finally, I have visited the Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, and while it is beautiful, I did not find it as peaceful as the much smaller one in San Diego.  I wonder if Dr. Bharne has thoughts on why this might be?  Is it something about the way it is laid out?

As I read the article about feng-shui and the Beijing courtyard dwellings, I wondered if feng-shui didn't make it to Japan, or if it transformed into other similar concepts?  On the one hand, we see the courtyard idea in both cultures, and the private family space protected toward the back or on upper floors, but I have not seen any mention of directionality or management of Qi in Japanese spaces.

Also, the directionality in China makes sense, but does it change on this side of the Pacific? My water flows west because that's where the ocean is. Does that change all the orientation principles?

My husband wondered about expanding the houses as families grew- specifically thinking about China. If two or three sons stay in the family home, do they expand the house? And if so, how does that affect the feng shui?

A question I had about the open nature of the Japanese moveable walls was regarding security- were there not issues of people breaking down flimsy shoji walls? Also, I get the summers are hot, but the winters are cold... weren't these homes awfully cold?

I would like to know more about the pit dwellings. Are these just in that one place? How are they for size, comfort, etc? Are there conservation efforts to protect them?

The two lectures let me to think about Chinese dwellings a little bit. It is easy to understand that different dwellings like Tu Lou/土楼or Yaodong/窑洞 were built to meet different needs. These needs can be safety, weather/climate  or social economy reasons etc,. However, Confucius said in the “Analects”, The wise delight in water and the benevolent delight in mountains. Because of this Confucius culture, people usually interpret the water as the personality and the mountains as the moral conduct of a person. Therefore, Chinese people love to live by water or mountain area, or add water/ mountain (rocks instead sometimes) elements to inside or around of their houses, some plants as well to be harmony with nature.

At the conclusion of this segment of the book, I found myself saying, "Yep. Yep. Yep." Meaning that I agree. It said that the authenticity of the Zen garden was not what mattered, but the state of mind in perceiving it, and internalizing it, and then experiencing different states of mind, in essence, was what mattered.

In other words, I feel that some people may have come to worship the Zen garden itself, and lost sight of it's purpose. I found it interesting that an artist who wanted his will, his hands, to be seen in his carving of stone saw himself as different, more modern, than every other man who went before him in creating Zen gardens. The fact of the matter is that every Zen garden was created with the will of the man who made it. Men created every garden by deliberately placing, manicuring, and maintaining the sand, rocks, stones, moss, shrubs, trees, walls, and etc.

In simplest form, a monk could meditate by looking at whatever was in front of him. There was no actual need to frame the mountain in the distance with a low wall, trees, and bamboo. That was an unnecessary construct of man. However, I can see that if you are in an urban area, and you want to recreate a scene you admired in nature, then it would make meditating easier.

So I guess I see Zen gardens as facilitators of meditation, just as they always have been, but I also see the value in the seconds of meditation that a person passing by a photograph of a Zen garden may have, if I truly believe that time is not linearly defined, but layered. To one, a few seconds of meditation in a busy or unexpected place may bring as much cleansing as a few hours in a monastery. We should never limit the sublime by requiring it to meet our preconceived definitions of it's acquisition.