This interaction between form and space is one of the keys to Ryoan- ji's compelling suggestiveness. Evoking a sense of infinity in a strictly confined space, it is a living lesson in the Zen concept of nothingness and nonattachment. It expresses a timelessness unknown in earlier landscape gardens, particularly those of the Heian era, which, with their fading blossoms and falling leaves, were attuned to the poignant transience of life. In the Ryoan-ji garden, the Heian aesthetic concept of _aware_, the thought that beauty must die, has been replaced by the Zen idea of _yugen_, which means, among other things, profound suggestiveness, a reduction to only those elements in a creative work that move the spirit, without the slightest concession to prettiness or ornament. The number and placement of stones seem arbitrary, but they are intuitively perfect--like a phrase from Beethoven that, with the alteration of a single note, could be transformed into a comic tune. Like all masterpieces, Ryoan-ji has simplicity, strength, inevitability. Between them, the gardens at Daisen-in and at Ryoan-ji encompass the range of _kare sansui _gardening in Ashikaga Japan. The first is a symbolic landscape of parched waterfalls and simulated streams drawn in monochromatic granite; the second, a totally non-representative abstraction of stone arrangements in the sand-covered "flat-garden" style. The _kare sansui _flat-garden style, in particular, has no real counterpart in world art. Imagine the Egyptians, Greeks, or Florentines collecting rocks, strewing them about a bed of sand in a courtyard, and calling it religious art. Ryoan-ji seems strikingly modern today and in fact it was only after a critical following for abstract art developed in the West that the Zen _kare sansui_ was "discovered." As recently as the 1930s Ryoan-ji was ignored, an unkempt sandpile the monks rarely bothered to rake; and only in 1961 was the garden at Daisen-in restored to what is believed to be its original condition. Ryoan-ji is now the most celebrated site in Japan and so internationally appreciated that a full-sized replica has been constructed in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, New York. Zen gardeners were sophisticated aestheticians, and one can