I’m writing about bonsai for a creative writing class, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that The World in Miniature was about bonsai, too! Stein draws on different traditions, especially Chinese and Vietnamese mythologies and practices, to illustrate the spirituality ensconced within bonsai. He compares the process of dwarfing bonsai trees to the Daoist traditions of twisting one’s body to achieve certain animal-like figures. From my own research about bonsai, I learnt that the first bonsai were discovered on high mountains where conditions were insufficient for healthy growth, leading to a twisted appearance. These twisted trees, miniature and warped, were considered especially 靈. I found it interesting that the recreation of a landscape in a rock pool or ceramic pot is more perfect than the “natural,” environmental landscape due to the inexhaustibility of its 靈, enhanced by its miniature size and completeness within itself. There’s something about the “appearance of weathered old age” developing “spontaneously” (116) under carefully controlled conditions that appeals to spiritual enlightenment. Stein acknowledges that this process aims to “create the impression of old trees and luxuriant forests,” (116) but unlike our everyday conceptions of truth and beauty, the artificial (the bonsai) is not lesser than the real (the old forest). According to Watson’s Zhuangzi, “the Way makes them all into one” (11). In some ways, the “artificial” miniature is perhaps even more 靈 than the “real” forest, being a complete, closed-circuit world of hibernation (110). Or perhaps to compare the two is to miss the point: the art of bonsai is not one of imitation, but of creation of 靈 and life where those might not have been able to exist (such as from the “rock womb” (96)). In this sense, nature is both beyond the human and unequivocally man-made, threatening our binaries of nature VS human.
