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• 1 2019-01-13T18:20:29+00:00 Stones are the Bones of the Earth 2 plain 2019-01-13T18:30:31+00:00 In the Dao web of shifting energies, rocks function as concentrated configurations of qi. The 12th-century treatise by Du Wan, The Cloud Forest Catalogue of Rocks, which Parkes deems “the world’s first handbook of rock aesthetics,” begins: “The purest energy of the heaven-earth world coalesces into rock. It emerges, bearing the soil. Its formations are wonderful and fantastic…” (reference). Rock was seen as a specific and integral part of the earth’s living body, its flow of energies.  An entry on stone from an 18th century encyclopedia posits that “The essential energy of earth forms rock . . . Rocks are kernels of energy; the generation of rock from energy is like the body’s arterial system producing nails and teeth . . . The earth has the famous mountains as its support . . . rocks are its bones” (cited in Parkes 81).  Pierre Jardin provided a translation of this cosmology into the vernacular of petriverse, laying out a text as a caption for a rock bearing concentric circle mineral patterns resembling a solar system.