"The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted - and long battled - viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured.

Reading Zen in the Rocks, the classic essay on the karesansui (dry landscape) garden by French art historian Francois Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, illustrated history of these gardens."--BOOK JACKET.