Abstract
The rock garden of the Ryoanji temple is a representative rock garden of Japan, of which the time of origin and the design concept have been a mystery without established consensus.
The author expressed its view in No. 22 of the journal of The Academic Society of Japanese Garden (2011) that the design concept of the rock garden of the Ryoanji temple was the representation of Mt Wutai in China.
This paper along the line of the previous paper reviews the past research and literature with regard to various explanations about the garden-making concept as comprehensively as possible and examines the most convincing theories. As a result, it has been shown that there has been no conventional theory that refers to the relation with Mt Wutai in the explanation of the design concept of the Ryoanji rock garden and that none of the conventional theories can explain the garden-design concept of the Ryoanji rock garden more clearly than Mt Wutai theory.
