CHAPTER FOUR

Temple Gardens

IN THE DIM GARDENS OF MOLDERING BUDDHIST MONASTERIES one may still find, as in the temples themselves, hints of the old Japan. The sacred tradition that has preserved the original forms of eighth century architecture through a long sequence of structures built only to be consumed and again restored, has held as well in the surrounding gardens, and though nothing may remain of the ancient originals, save only the fantastic stones (farsought and eagerly treasured), the curves of the walks are still the same, the placing of the shrubs and flowers and gnarled, dwarf trees unchanged, and even the patterns traced in the silver sand are the patterns of long ago.

They are very fascinating, these temple gardens, and they have a character wonderful in its diversity. Sometimes they are nothing more than the necessary fore-courts of minor temples: a terrace, a few steps, a lantern or two (PLATE 23), a grinning stone dog or benignant image of Jizo “The Helper,” and perhaps a crabbed tree or bush of scented box. Then they become solemn and ghostly graveyards crowded with ranks of gray and mosscovered monuments of strangely beautiful shapes, leaning, all of them, from the jostling of endless earthquakes; the newer ones—yes, and some of those hoary with antiquity—blurred by the thin smoke of burning incense sticks and fronted by sections of bamboo holding freshly cut flowers. Again they blossom into the full glory of the stately and hieratic garden, the domain of nature glorified by consummate art, where rocks and sand and water, lotus, iris, peony, azalea and the royal fuji, box and maple, pine and cherry, are all blended into one wonderful setting for the scarlet temple that flames in the midst against its background of forest or serrated hill.

Yet, whatever its estate, the temple garden is less a pleasaunce than a framework; it is like every good garden, a modulation from pure nature to pure art. In the old temple of Horenji at Shiogama (PLATE 24), you may see how finely everything leads up to the lofty temple, and the effect must have been finer yet when the shrine was still Buddhist and before the Shinto priests who now control it raised the rather clumsy torii at the foot of the dizzy flight of steps. Again at Nara, rocks, box, lotus, palm, and pine are all placed just where they will do most honor to the temple itself, and together with this compose into the picture that is perfect and complete.

A picture always, you must note: line, texture, form, and color, all are duly and delicately considered, and a space of garden is composed with all the laborious study that goes to the making of a screen or kakimono. How perfectly the whole thing composes at Narita (PLATE 25), the curve of the bridge, the sharp angle of the steps, the convolutions of volcanic rock, the clean cleavages of the slate chased with exquisite ideography; and in color, silver-gray slate stones and lichened granite, green bronze, and the deeper green of cryptomeria leaves. Or again in the shrines of Uyeno consider how wisely the garden itself is reduced to the simplest forms, gravel and flat stones and a few big bronze lanterns. Here the cherry trees are supreme and they are given full sway; flowers and shrubs are banished for they are unnecessary. The great trees do their full work; yet this is good gardening, and quite as legitimate as would be the case were all the flowers of the earth brought under requisition.

A Japanese gardener can work with anything—or almost nothing.

There is a legend of a royal garden, built long ago by a man who gave to the task ten years of his life and half the wealth of a great daimyo, a garden that appealed to every varying emotion of the soul, and worked its will like a great symphony, where only one of the products of the earth was employed, and that was simply and only: rocks. Even now these are sought carefully from every province, and some curious or beautiful specimen is hoarded like a jewel. How valuable, indeed how quite indispensable these may be, can be seen, though imperfectly, from almost any of the illustrations, particularly from those of Ishi-yama-dera. (PLATE 26.) The name of this ancient temple on Lake Biwa means simply, “The Temple of the Rocky Mountain,” for there is a curious outcropping here of black and contorted basalt, and every crag has been used as part of a scheme of gardening.

It would be hard to imagine anything more delicate and crafty than the manner in which the monks have built up their picture. Every native quality of the rock is emphasized and its effect enhanced by a clever and ingenious art. The smooth foreground of shining sand, the fluffy green of the forest, the soft verdure of delicate shrubs sprouting from rocky crevices, the smooth velvet of hinoki thatch and weathered wood, the clean angles of chiseled stone, all these things are handled like the colors of a painter’s palette, they are placed with discretion, fused and blended, and finally composed into perfectly united wholes.

Almost every temple garden has a peculiar quality, some one feature that is dominant and sets the keynote, as it were. Here at Ishiyama it is volcanic rock, in Uyeno it is the cherry, at Kamakura the lotus, at Nara the purple fuji, at Nikko druidic cryptomeria guard the shrines of the dead Shogun. At the Nishi Hongwanji in Kyoto, again, water seems almost to play the principal part, while at the gardens of the Ginkakuji it is white sand wrought into mounds and delicate pavement patterns. Here is “The Platform of Silver Sand” and beyond it “The Mound that Looks Toward the Moon” consecrated by the lordly Yoshimasa and still heaped as for the great Shogun’s enthronement, though four centuries and more have passed since he became one with the gods.

Whatever the keynote it holds throughout the composition, as at Shiogama the tall gray masts of the cryptomeria are echoed and emphasized by the vanishing lines of the enormous steps, the slim verticals of the white staffs, and the uprights of the granite torii.

And how wonderful a thing in itself is this same consummate form of the torii. It is the noblest and simplest gateway ever devised and it adds a crowning touch to many a temple garden, though it is the sign of religious and philosophical primitivism. When scores of these vermilion torii are grouped together over gray stone steps in the midst of bronze-green cryptomeria, the effect is one of splendid color hardly to be matched elsewhere.

It is not around the great and famous temples that one finds the most alluring gardens, but in out-of-the-way spots, in forgotten valleys where foreign feet have seldom trod. Across the river from Uji I found one such garden in a hill temple I had never heard named before, Koshoji. There is a river road up to where the tumbling Ujigawa bursts through a cleft in the hills, and following this one suddenly comes upon a long straight path cut through dense black trees, rising steep from the river, and closed at the summit by a gleaming white Korean gateway. (PLATE 27A) As one approaches, nothing is visible but this same gate with its arched opening in the white plastered base, surmounted by the intricate bracketing of its curved roof, long, plastered walls reaching away on either hand, and above, the low sweeping roofs of gray-green tile, and, in April, as when I saw it, a great cloud of pink vapor poised over all, the amazing blossoming of an ancient cherry.

One comes out from under the white arch with a sudden catching of the breath. It is not a large temple, indeed it is hardly more than a toy, one of those still, little monasteries asleep in a forgotten eddy of the turbulent river of change; but it is the more charming for all that. The Nishi and Higashi Hongwanji temples of Kyoto, the almost terrifying monster belonging to the latter sect in Nagoya, the complex and amazingly elaborate Obaku-san just a little way down the river, these vast and ceremonious structures crush one with the very majesty of their noble architecture; but for charm and fascination and keen appeal, one must search out tiny sanctuaries like this of Koshoji.

One enters first a little fore-court surrounded by buildings on three sides, the fourth being filled by the wall and gateway. (PLATE 28A.) The hondo or preaching hall is in front, a low simple building; on the left is the residence, on the right the library and the bell cage. All the buildings are raised on low stone-walled terraces: there are few flowers, and the gardening is made up almost wholly of box and white sand. Of course there is the great pink tree, but its glory lasts for a short ten days in the spring, and for the rest of the year the scented box is supreme. Nothing could be finer than these great rounded masses of bronze green: they rise from the white sand like tropical islands from a phosphorescent sea, and their clean-cut contours come crisp and fine against the pearly plaster of the convent walls.

In this fore-court all is trim and formal, but if you pass through a little gate in the farther left-hand corner, you come upon a very different scene. (PLATE 28B.) Here everything is wildly picturesque, though still on a tiny scale; the monastic buildings wander off at all angles until they are brought up standing against the wall of a beetling hill from which the trees lean down, thrusting their twisted branches out over the tiled roofs with their long, keen curves. From under the very temple, it seems, springs a minute mountain torrent threading its way through the midst of the garden at the bottom of a Lilliputian crevasse. Toy stone bridges are flung across it, little trees twisted into most impossible curves and angles jut from its banks, velvety box runs along the mossy stone embankment, and strange little wild flowers seek the edge of the water. There are bronze lanterns and vases also, and on the farther side the moss-blackened gravestones begin and lead one away over the flat stepping stones to the hill base, then up the slope where the whole forest is full of similar memorials of the dead.

This Koshoji is full of some kind of enchantment, once there one would never leave. We had heard each evening down at our inn at Uji (our inn that was built far back in the days of Hideyoshi) the velvety boom of some enormous bell, a sound that seemed to draw one irresistibly to rise up in the still night and search for its source under the great, pale moon. In Koshoji we found the bell, and much more; a little oasis in the desert of steam trams and beer and liberal politics, and we wanted to stay there forever. The old Japan has this charm, and I think it concentrates itself and becomes really quite irresistible, in the form of a scented temple garden in some forgotten monastery, where the odor of incense mingles with that of box, where the patterned sand retains the lines of a thousand years ago, where tonsured bonzes in yellow robes move silently through the shed petals of a pink cherry, and a thunderous bell gives tongue at the rising of the moon.