"FORM IS EMPTINESS, AND THE VERY
EMPTINESS IS FORM.”

The Heart Sutra

Chapter 2

GARDENS OF THE HIGHER SELF

The stone garden at Myoshin-ji Temple, in Tsukiyama Teizoden (Building Mountains and Making Gardens). The lines point out the force flows and the relationship between rocks.

The Chinese were probably the first to recognize the use of gardens as places for quiet discourse of a literary nature, and as aids to meditation. The sixth-century BC Taoist philosopher Lao Zi spoke of gardens as spiritual aids that could promote a state of emptiness that would lead to enlightenment.

If creating a likeness of external nature turned in the case of stone gardens to an expression of quint essential, interior nature, the second wave of Chinese influence that characterized the Kamakura era (1185–1333) is noted for the ideas of the Sung Dynasty literati and the arrival of Zen Buddhism and its focus on the inner workings of the mind.

Zen’s stress on self-reliance as opposed to salvation, truth instead of the dogma promulgated through forms of esoteric Buddhism favored by the Heian aristocracy, had great appeal. The common quest of these three movements was to penetrate to the truth hidden beneath the surface reality of life and nature. This drive toward inner truth led to the scouring off of superficial ornamentation, consummated in the reductive garden designs of medieval Zen temples and, to a lesser degree, the gardens attached to warrior villas.

 

The shadow of the truncated cone at Ginkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto. The cone has been compared to Mount Fuji and Mount Shumisen, the central peak in the Buddhist cosmology.

An important conceptual shift took place at this time. While the materials used in garden design continued to be natural, these digests of nature achieved a point of near abstraction. The gardens from this era replicate the inner essence of nature rather than its outer forms. A shift in taste also took place at this time, with the influence of Zen and the rise of a warrior class more drawn to stones of a darker, more austere, subdued and unpretentious nature. Seeking the profoundly subtle, they chose rocks that were more suggestive than explicit.

 

The exquisite Daisen-in from the illustrated garden manual Tsukiyama Teizoden (Building Mountains and Making Gardens). The names of individual stones are listed at the bottom of the illustration.

Consistent with these ideas and tastes, the great Zen priest and garden designer Muso Soseki (1275–1351) pushed the evolution of stone gardens a step further with the design of Saiho-ji in Kyoto and Tenryu-ji in the Arashiyama district on the city’s borders. In this latter garden, Soseki, the first Japanese landscape designer to suggest that gardens could be used as aids for meditation, shifted the viewing mode from one of strolling around the garden to a seated position, usually from the abbot’s quarters, one more suited to contemplation.

 

A solitary rock island in a sea of gravel at Ryoan-ji Temple.

ZEN WAVES

Zen Buddhism’s rejection of superstition transformed stones into more purely artistic, abstract features of the garden. In these Zen-style gardens, an atmosphere conducive to meditation was created. As devices to aid meditation, these gardens were also viewed as works of art, created within set frames designed to be viewed in the same way as a painting or a hanging scroll. Early examples of the contemplation garden are the sublime, now very famous, garden at the Ryoan-ji temple, conceivably built as early as 1499, and another Kyoto landscape, the northern garden of the Ryugen-en, dating from 1517. The Ryoan-ji is the best-known example of the mutei or "garden of emptiness."

Spatial void, the nourishing emptiness that forms the heart of the contemplation garden, is a device like any other, one defined by the word ma. Framed in enclosures that heighten the sense of premeditated art, ma in its Buddhist form is represented by the concept called mu (nothingness), a central precept of Zen Buddhism. Stone garden designers use ma as an aesthetic technique to promote yohaku-no-bi, the beauty of empty but articulate space.

Toshiro Inaji has written that "The ideal form is a ’conceptual prototype’ that is divorced from a real, physical form." Beyond the actual appearance of the garden is a second, transcendent form, one that can inspire multiple interpretations. It is probably fair to guess that these gardens also existed as pleasant rather than solemn retreats for those living in temple monasteries. Garden writer Tachihara Masaaki has commented that "with the development of Zen culture, the dry landscape garden was devised as the Zen monk’s ultimate form of recreation."

TURMOIL AND ORDER

Stone gardens evolved as much from religious and aesthetic preferences as from changing social-political conditions, principally the ascendancy of a warrior class and their aesthetic of frugality. Marc P. Keene, in his book Japanese Garden Design, makes a strong case supporting the view that the confined, almost escapist designs of stone gardens were a response to the turbulence of the times. "Gardens, in keeping with the nature of society in general," he writes, "became withdrawn, tightly enclosed, and introverted," personifying themes which were often closer to the fabulist landscapes of China’s Tang poets than to the embattled and ravaged countryside of feudal Japan. Curiously, the backdrop of social instability and the tendency toward denial and seclusion seen in gardens was matched by a period of economic growth and a flowering of the arts. In a climate of fear and uncertainty, Zen temples became unofficial sponsors of the arts, providing a relatively safe haven for those still able to contemplate the finer things in life, including the creation of Noh dramas, linked verse and gardens.

Savage internecine struggles, known as the Onin War, which raged from 1467 to 1477, left half of Kyoto destroyed. The new city that grew from the scorched earth and ash of highly inflammable wooden buildings was strongly influenced by Zen priests, who advanced the development of dry landscape gardens. Economics may also have played a part in the advocacy for smaller, more easily maintained gardens, as land and construction costs rose. The gardens that emerged during this period were more refined and abstract in nature, a style believed to have been developed at Myoshin-ji and Daitoku-ji Temples.

As the focus of cultural life also shifted from the palaces of the aristocracy to the residences of samurai and the Zen monasteries which they supported, architectural priorities also changed. The shinden-zukuri architecture of the Heian palaces, with their pond gardens, changed to the shoin-zukuri designs of Zen temples, where gardens were placed in front of the abbot’s quarters. Built in an irregular design, temples, monasteries and villas had less space for the disposition of gardens. For the Zen adept, this posed few problems as, according to Zen thinking, scale is a relative matter. Infinite space, a magnum universe and a miniature one are equally accommodated.

The gardens are characterized by an absence of ornamentation and an acute relationship between sculptural rocks and the luminous expanse of sand and gravel on which they sit. The overstimulation experienced in the Japanese paradise and stroll garden, where visual and narrative details are bountiful, is exchanged for a severe reduction of nature and the cosmos to a small planar unit where, distraction-free, a state of awareness through meditation becomes possible. In this newly induced state of mind, the essential symbolism of the garden elements, stones standing for the eternal structure of the universe, sand and gravel for the temporary nature of the phenomenal world, reveals itself.

A large tatami mat room used by visitors for a moment of quiet contemplation faces onto this inner garden at Kennin-ji Temple, Kyoto.

 

A fluid movement of space at Shisen-do, from its time-worn verandah to the carefully clipped bank of azaleas in the distance.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND ALLEGORY

The stone and sand gardens most commonly found in the courtyards of Zen temples were now expressly referred to as karesansui. The literal meaning, "dry-mountain-water," refers to the nature and composition of the garden in which mountains, rivers and seascapes are created solely with the use of rocks, sand and gravel. Stone gardens existed during the Heian period as features of larger gardens that could be entered and viewed from differing angles, but the medieval stone gardens of the late Muromachi period were designed to be viewed from an adjacent hall. These kansho niwa (contemplation gardens) represented one of the great creative leaps in the history of the Japanese garden. Viewers were now required to explore the garden and its depiction of scenes allegorical to Zen Buddhism mentally rather than physically.

Garden designers left Zen Buddhist implants in their works in the form of allegorical references that could be used not only for contemplation but also instruction in Zen teachings. The transfiguration of allegories into physical form through the use of rocks is nicely illustrated in the stone arrangement called ryu-mon-baku ("dragon’s-gate-waterfall"), a popular motif in the dry landscape garden. The arrangement is based on a Chinese anecdote in which a legendary river flows toward an almost insurmountable three-tiered waterfall. If a fish proves strong enough to swim to the top, it will be turned into a dragon. The Japanese reinterpreted the story as an allegory of Zen study, by which meditation and fierce self-training could lead to enlightenment.

The diminutive garden at the Daisen-en temple in Kyoto represents a highly visual allegory for the passage of life, starting with a dusting of white sand threading its way through the upright boulders at the rear of the scene, a river head that spurts out of a mountain ravine that symbolizes the source of life, reality and truth. The stream of sand gains in strength and complexity, flowing around tortoise and crane islands standing as symbols of longevity, before debauching into a wide expanse of raked sand representing an ocean, which might also be understood as the peace of eternal paradise. Although flowering trees and bushes are occasionally planted in these gardens, essentially the gardens are not concerned with seasonal change as they represent the concept of timelessness.

Such gardens neatly embody one of the main principals of Zen period gardens, which are not imitations of nature but a transcendent form of it, which, through artifice of design, reveals its essence. Revealingly, there are no explicit links made in illustrated Japanese garden manuals between Zen and stone gardens. It is rather a matter to be implicitly understood, the gardens being created primarily as heightened cultural ambiences.

RIVERBANK PEOPLE

Contact with soil was considered unclean in Japan, particularly for the upper class. The exception seems to have been the working conditions of Zen priests who, less affected by social attachments and rank, were expected to maintain gardens: rake gravel surfaces, collect fallen leaves, weed, and remove dead animals. Originally, semiprofessional gardeners connected with two stone-setting schools trained a class of semiprofessional garden-making priests known as ishi-tate-so. Ninnaji temple in Kyoto was the headquarters of one of the two principal organizations, the other the Saga School headed by Muso Soseki. The expression sprang from ishi wo taten koto, "the art of setting stones," the term used by Kyoto aristocrats who, having no specific expression for gardening, defined it by the central process of stone placement.

 

The design at Zuiho-ji represents the world of Chinese mythology. The large rocks at the back ascend to the central rock symbolizing Mount Horai, home of the Immortals.

 

Banryutei, the dry landscape garden attached to Kongobun-ji Temple on Mount Koya, comprises 140 granite rocks, making it the largest stone garden in Japan.

Garden assembly, once the province of these rock-setting priests, gradually passed into the hands of sensui kawaramono, the riverbank underclass of garden builders, some of whom were able through their immense talents to earn the respect of both the priesthood and the shogun, the military rulers of the time. The mono of the designation stands for "thing," clearly stigmatizing this pariah class as "non-humans." A combination of Buddhist and Shinto taboos against the killing of animals and other unclean acts placed these people, forced to undertake the most obnoxious and sordid forms of work (the slaughtering and skinning of horses and cows, the execution of criminals and the burial of the dead), well beyond the sphere of a rigidly hierarchical class system, with the nobility and clergy at the apex and, in descending order, warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants. The trade of stripping and tanning hides for armour, another impure livelihood, required large quantities of water, forcing them to build their abodes along the banks of waterways, such as the Kamo River in Kyoto.

The kawaramono were essentially corvée laborers, who were also employed in the physically demanding work of digging irrigation ditches, trenches, terraces and wells, in addition to the excavation of areas for garden ponds and hills. In a work by Madenokoji Tokifusa entitled Kennaiki, stigma becomes prohibition in a passage that states: "In the past, outcasts (kawaramono) have been permitted in the imperial palace to do gardening; but, since these people are unclean, as of last year such permission is no longer granted. This year, among the menial laborers, only those of the class called shomoji will be employed in palace gardening." Though both groups belonged to the lower orders, it seems that the shomoji, who made their living by going from door to door reciting sutras for the good fortune of the dwellers within, were regarded as a notch higher in the social scale.

With time, however, kawaramono became indispensable because of their great skill in selecting and planting trees and placing rocks, in many cases surpassing their masters in the art of gardening. Their rise was in part due to the help of Zen priests who, besides being their garden patrons, guided them in Zen philosophy. Denied access to the secrets of the ancient garden manuals, but with Zen priests as their mentors, a new collaborative style of dry landscape garden evolved.

Though to a considerable degree it was these men who were responsible for the exquisite stone gardens of the Muromachi period, their work has gone largely unacknowledged. The Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto, for example, routinely attributed to Soami, is quite likely to have been either designed or to have had a significant design input from two of Japan’s kawaramono whose names, Seijiro and Kotaro, are carved into the concealed back part of a rock in the garden. Although their skills were acknowledged by the warrior class and later aristocracy who commissioned the building of gardens, their contributions remain largely unaccredited. Ironically, it may very well be that that some of Kyoto’s "purest" gardens were created by the hands of men regarded as impure to the point of being inhuman.

It was still a rare exception when art was placed ahead of social prejudice, but this happened with the garden master Zen’ami (1386–1482), a protégé of the enlightened shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Zen’ami lived in a riverbed area with other kawaramono and with outcast refugees from peasant uprisings. These were places where thousands of corpses were deposited during famines. The man described as foremost under heaven in the planting and setting of rocks had to wait to the age of 73 before being officially recognized. The possessor of a truly transcendent intellect, it is almost impossible to imagine, as Teiji Itoh has observed, what thoughts may have run through Zen’ami’s head as he pondered garden designs in his riverbed home surrounded by wretchedness and death. The two laborers who constructed the garden at Ryoan-ji may well have been his apprentices.

As works of religious art, gardens owed a debt not just to Zen precepts but also to the Chinese ink-wash painting of the Southern Sung and Yuan periods, sufficiently predating the Muromachi era for their influence to have become entrenched. Many of these paintings were landscapes depicting the figure of a hermit scholar against the backdrop of a vast natural world of mountains, ravines and thundering waterfalls, a world of compressed rock relieved only by a solitary tree or two, the convention usually requiring one or two suitably gnarled pines. The sparseness of the design elements and the implied search for inner truth coincided with a prevailing taste for austerity that held enormous appeal for Japanese priests and the painters who benefited from the enthusiastic patronage of the Zen temples of Kyoto. Temples were less interested in the paintings per se than in acquiring landscape images that could be viewed as metaphors for religious principals or tools for personal growth and enlightenment.

Garden designers appropriated the large spaces left empty on canvases with expanses of white sand. By setting stones in this blank, gardeners replicated ink paintings by creating depth of field and an angularity and tension between the surfaces and edges of rocks that echoed the almost cubist rock clusters seen in ink painting. By choosing white or gray sand, dark stones and subdued emerald-colored plants, an effect similar to the semi-monochromatic tones of the paintings was achieved.

The austerity of Muromachi era stone gardens was supplanted by a more flamboyant approach during the later Momoyama and Edo periods, which saw a renaissance of the dry landscape garden. More lavish concentrations of rock are seen and rich clumps of exotic plants appear in gardens now intended more for appreciation than contemplation.

The Edo period (1600–1868) garden replaced the stripped down austerity of a previous age with the playful ornamentation of stone lanterns, miniature bridges, water basins and exotic plants. These were augmented with religious touches: carved bodhisattvas, temple tiles and half-buried sections of roof pediments. Though this period is often criticized for its superficiality and paucity of ideas, the Edo era was not without its brilliant individual gardens, its own innovations. One design principal introduced at this time was the deliberately random placing of rocks to create a sensation of spontaneity. These rocks are referred to as suteishi, "nameless" or "discarded" rocks.

It was during this period also that another innovation, o-karikomi (topiary art), was introduced in the form of clipped bushes and evergreen shrubs representing clouds, stormy seas, treasure-laden ships or the outline of Mount Horai. The gardener who perfected this form was Kobori Enshu (1579– 1647). There are fine examples of Enshu’s living sculptures at the Daichi-ji Temple garden in Minakuchi and at Raikyu-ji, a Zen temple in Bitchu Takahashi.

 

A sand mound at Honen-in, a Jodo sect temple located on a wooded slope in Kyoto. Priests periodically change the design to reflect the seasons.

 

The stepped banks of azalea at Kyoto’s little-visited Kompuku-ji Temple create the illusion of a mountain valley. The restored cottage at the top of the garden once was the temporary home of the great haiku poet Basho.

 

The magnificent topiary at Daichi-ji Temple in Minakuchi, Shiga Prefecture, represents a treasure ship buffeted by waves. The design is attributed to Kobori Enshu but may have been created by one of his pupils.

 

Autumn light filters through a persimmon tree at Shisen-do in Kyoto. Fruit trees, even as borrowed views, are relatively rare in stone gardens.

STONE AMBIGUITIES

For those who visit Japan’s karesansui, seeing things in the dark mirror of the stones has become a requisite part of the experience. The analogy between such gardens and states of mind is, perhaps, inevitable: human nature, if left unchecked, turns into an unweeded wilderness; stone gardens, making a virtue of opposing nature, overcoming, even improving on it, are by contrast models of order and astringency.

Prominent gardens have acquired an intellectual commentary that was largely absent before the advent of cultural tourism. Starved of the mysticism older societies took for granted, stone gardens, like Stone Age monuments, are now lauded for their depth and complexity, for their metaphysical and iconographic qualities. In Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art, however, author Wybe Kuitert, remarking on the assumed link between gardens and Zen precepts, contends that temple gardens and those attached to samurai residences were commissioned with the intention of merely producing an "enhanced cultural ambience."

The connection between Zen and stone gardens, then, is to some extent an assumed one. There are few direct allusions to "Zen gardens" in Japanese texts before the 1950s. The yoking together of the two ideas as a popular concept in print occurs for the first time in American Lorraine Kuck's 1935 publication, One Hundred Kyoto Gardens. Kuck, it seems, was a temporary neighbor of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the foremost exponent of Zen in the West. Suzuki, a paragon in his writing of non-attachment and self-restraint, stops short of using the term "Zen gardens" but affirms that the dry landscape form is an embodiment of "the spirit of Zen."

Alan Watts, in his influential book, The Way of Zen, characterizes the gardens not so much as paradigms of Zen thinking but as works of art inspired by them, the "media the simplest imaginable; the effect is as if man had hardly touched it, as if it had been transported unchanged from the seashore; but in practise only the most sensitive and experienced artist can achieve it." This seems a fair assessment for any art sufficiently accomplished that it transcends its own techniques. Echoing and advancing the characterizations of Kuck and Suzuki, Watt’s book was, tellingly, first published in 1957. Introducing a new term, the "Zen gardener," the writer asserts, in the manner of appealing Zen oxymorons like "formless form," that the gardener "has no mind to impose his own intention upon natural forms, but is careful rather to follow the ’intentionless intention’ of the forms themselves," that the gardener "ever ceases to prune, clip, weed, and train his plants, but he does so in the spirit of being part of the garden himself rather than a directing agent standing outside. He is not interfering with nature because he is nature, and he cultivates as if not cultivating."

The melding of gardens and Zen in the popular imagination, the assigning of a presentational mode, a commentary, to explain them, was all but complete by 1939 when Shigemori Mirei landscaped the garden of the abbot's hall at the Tofuku-ji temple in Kyoto, the designs expressly intended to represent "the simplicity of Zen in the Kamakura period with the abstract construction of modern arts."

Unlike the verifiable Zen influences found in arts and disciplines such as archery, the tea ceremony and ink-wash painting, the process of garden design is highly premeditated and deliberate. As Leonard Koren has stated in his book, Gardens of Gravel and Sand, "The gardens are not the result of mystical insights or spontaneous action.... It is unlikely that any ’flash of insight’ is involved, or that the gardens are meant to inspire such."

While taking stock of the obvious Zen elements that gardens have acquired in the course of time, Zen principals have been consciously applied to the gardens. There is very little historical commentary to support claims that the gardens were originally designed with Zen notions in mind. The expression "Zen garden," used epithetically, is one that writers have been happy to adopt. Interestingly, the Japanese themselves have now started to adopt the description in preference to the more exacting karesansui.

Although the link between the two things is now firmly entrenched in the mind, the effusive sobriquet "Zen garden" can be potentially misleading. The world-famous garden at Ryoan-ji provides a cautionary example. Here is a design that has somehow acquired almost talismanic properties. There are even those who believe that this trance-inducing installation is not simply a garden but an ancient instrument, a sorcerer’s lodestone, a navigational tool into the mystic.

 

The present site of Manshu-in, a temple tucked into the Higashiyama hills of northeast Kyoto, dates from 1656. The garden is delightful in autumn when trees blend with the hillside forest.

David A. Slawson, commentating in his Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens on how and why Ryoan-ji has acquired so much respect in the West, suggests that it is because of "its presumed similarity to non-representational minimalist or abstract art," but that, in the context of the Japanese aesthetics that were responsible for the creation of the garden, "it would be more accurate to recognise its quality-oriented design as having been inspired by a direct encounter with the powerful forms and kinetic energies actually present in the natural environment."

The more humdrum or routine maintenance and upkeep of gardens and the transmission of garden practices is still the domain of monks. Zen thinking and gardens connect in the act of daily cleansing and maintenance. The beloved image of rows of Zen priests and acolytes sitting in the lotus position meditating before sand cones in a Zen garden may be a rare sight, but the daily chore of raking sand into aquatic patterns, a task assigned to promote self-discipline and humility, is a common one for those up early enough to see it. So too the rigors of monotonous food, unheated rooms, alms collecting, seated and walking meditation, and menial tasks like rubbish collecting, toilet cleaning and digging ditches, all seen as good opportunities for Zen practice.