Zen gardeners were sophisticated aestheticians, and one can
recognize in their work at least two artistic techniques that the West did not discover until this century. The first is the Surrealist principle, derived from the earlier Dadaist idea, of objets trouves, that is, the use of aesthetically interesting natural or accidental materials as part of an artistic composition. The stones of Ryoan-ji and other Ashikaga gardens were left in the condition in which they were discovered and used in the gardens as stones, yet they were also symbols for something larger than themselves. The second "modern" artistic principle found in Zen gardens is the reliance on abstract expressionism. Flat gardens like Ryoan-ji are not meant to depict a natural scene; they are exercises in the symbolic arrangement of mass and space. The Zen gardeners actually created a new mode of artistic expression, anticipating the West by several centuries.
Perhaps Ryoan-ji went unnoticed for so long because it was not explicitly intended as a work of art, but rather as a statement in physical terms of the essence of mystical truth. One's reaction upon first coming into the presence of Ryoan-ji is like the famous Western mystic Meister Eckhart's description of the realization of Oneness, called satori in Zen: "Then at once, God comes into your being and faculties, for you are like a desert, despoiled of all that was particularly your own. . . ." Ryoan-ji presents this desert in physical terms, a place of no attachments and no antagonistic polarities. This is Zen art at its most noble; beauty and aesthetics are present, but they are secondary to a realm of the spiritual.