Karesansui is the name for Japanese gardens that are made of stones set in raked sand, often found in Zen temples. The name translates literally as Dry-Mountain-Water, in other words a landscape scene created without the use of real water. Mountains are uprising, solid and seemingly eternal — water, conversely, is horizontal, fluid and ever-changing. Because of these qualities, the Daoists described mountains and water as being the quintessential yang and yin elements in nature. In a garden, the balance of stones in field of "water" gives the design its calm and its energy.

"The garden stones are calming; their mute presence somehow reassuring. I sit on the veranda to be closer to them the way one will sit at the edge of the ocean, not needing to enter to be refreshed. The stones cast shadows, marking out dark crescents on the sand. They are brown, but not uniform in color, some rust, others coffee; all gnarled and angular. They have been set out in space to develop a tension, an imbalance that gives the garden its visual vitality, like the positioning of the mountains in an ink landscape, scattered about in the mist. Though many explanations have been attributed to the garden over the years, the meaning remains unclear. Still, an inherit understanding of the potency of imbalance applies, even as it does to the ink landscape paintings that served as models for the garden's design. The natural world has provided many symbols and motifs for artists — plum blossoms to express evanescence, running water to reveal nature's constant flux — but the landscape itself supplies the most compelling philosophy; a single, potent thought. Imbalance is energy."

...from the essay, Balance, in The Art of Setting Stones