A garden of the soul, a garden in the soul,
A garden
Gentle acts of nature, time and me
Woven in beauty, a soul nurtured
A hoe, a shear, a seed, held for now
In my transparent hands, then simply let go
From me the past, to me the future
A garden
—Geeta K. Mehta
At their best, gardens are reminders of our own divinity. A beautiful garden resonates into the depths of our soul, fresh as the early morning any time we care to be fully present in it. Once it is internalized, you can return to such a garden many times, and be surrounded with a fresh, nurturing energy. How does one create and care for such a garden? This is the central question that the best Japanese gardeners have been persistent in asking and answering.
The authors of this book embarked on a beautiful journey to understand the Japanese garden. We looked at enchanting gardens where the efforts of man, nature and time complement each other, and we saw many more gardens of exquisite beauty than fit into this book. Many of these have evolved well beyond their original concept, so that the designers would scarcely recognize them now. A good example is the “moss garden” of Saiho-ji in Kyoto, where moss was not even a part of the original design, but has grown over hundreds of years, and now defines the garden.
While human ingenuity and geometric perfection inform most other garden traditions, Japanese gardens are different. Most gardens around the world are hierarchical, arranged around a building—which is often the main reason for the garden’s existence. In Japan, it is the other way around. In the best Japanese gardens, tea huts and other buildings are tucked to one side of the garden so as to be as unobtrusive as possible. It is said that aristocrats of the Heian period located their gardens on a site first, and then constructed villas in the space left over.
Japanese gardens are very different from Chinese gardens, to which they nevertheless owe a large debt. Things Chinese were revered in Japan prior to the Meiji period. Yet while some coveted plant materials used in Japanese gardens today may be traced back to China, the essence of the Japanese garden harks back to Japan’s pre-Buddhist roots where nature was deeply understood and held sacred. Every stone was believed to have a soul then, and the best gardeners then as now sought to understand and set each stone to express its soul. Trees are pruned back to their essence, and the leaves of autumn are prized. Plants that articulate the beauty of seasonal changes are carefully selected and situated to highlight the rhythms of nature.
A characteristic feature of Japanese gardens is their close relationship to architecture. Each element is designed keeping the others in mind. Simply sliding away walls made of shoji doors can combine the interior and exterior spaces. Views of the garden are a major consideration in situating the buildings on the site.
Japanese gardens may be classified broadly into two groups: those meant to be experienced by entering and walking in them, and “visual gardens” meant to be experienced mainly with the eyes and the mind. The former category includes stroll gardens, Pure Land Jodo gardens, and tea gardens. Visual gardens were designed for contemplation and meditation and include the karesansui or dry-mountain-water gardens, and naka niwa interior courtyard gardens. Visual gardens are usually viewed from one side only, from inside a shin -style room, and are composed like three-dimensional paintings depicting an ideal landscape or a complex philosophical concept. One of the best examples of this is the abbot’s rock garden at Ryoan-ji temple (page 54).
A Brief History of the Japanese Garden
The earliest Japanese gardens, known as niwa, were sacred natural objects or places such as trees, mountains or rocks with unusual or extraordinary shapes. Mountains and rocks that rose straight up from the plains were thought to possess sacred qualities or ominous power. Groupings of natural rocks were frequently worshipped as iwasaka or iwakura, places where gods or sacred spirits descended or lived. White sand or rope ties were often used to demarcate such areas.
The entire shoji wall has been slid away to unite this formal room with the garden outside, alive with the glory of spring. The delicate bamboo sudare screens shade the room from excessive sun.
Shinto, the native pre-Buddhist religion of Japan, focused on nature and ancestor worship. From these early developments, with added influences from Korea and China, the Japanese developed the religious and aristocratic gardens of the Yamato period in the sixth century A.D. Japanese texts from this period mention these early gardens although no examples remain. Archeological records at Nara suggest that such gardens had a pond with one or more islands in the middle. Some scholars believe that these gardens represented seascapes interspersed with islands that early migrants may have seen on arriving at the Yamato plains by boat. It is possible that women designed these early pre-Buddhist gardens. Shinto priestesses and shamans in early Japan are likely to have played a key role in the establishment of such sacred places. The role of women in garden design, as well as in Japan in general, appears to have declined with the arrival of Buddhism in the Asuka period (second half of the sixth century) and Nara period (710–794).
Known gardens from the Asuka and Nara periods express Buddhist and Taoist visions of the sacred world. Emissaries who brought Buddhism to Japan added continental elements such as bridges to the repertoire of Japanese designers. During the Heian period (794–1192) aristocratic mansions with gardens in the shinden-zukuri style modeled after Chinese gardens became popular. In this style, a garden was created on the south side of a villa and included a water channel or yarimizu that flowed into a pond at the center of the garden.
Gardens were constructed on a larger scale during the late Heian period, imitating more variegated landscapes with artificial hills, ponds and streams. A small hill in a pond was likened to Shumisen, the abode of Buddhist deities in India. Formal receptions called “water poetry ceremonies” or kyokusui no utage were introduced, where courtiers composed poetry and floated cups of rice wine to each other along a stream winding through the garden. In a game popular at that time, a guest had to drink rice wine as a penalty if he could not finish composing a poem before the sake-filled cup reached him. Garden streams were linked to other water features such as waterfalls and large ponds for boating. Areas in between buildings were filled with sand, which aided drainage control.
Besides entertainment, these gardens were used for contemplative strolling, chanting Buddhist sutra texts, and as places of initiation into the spiritual life. In this respect, Heian gardens are the forerunners of the stroll gardens of today. The best sources for information about these gardens are the texts of this time, such as the first Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji. Pure Land or Jodo Buddhism in the late Heian period referred to the Buddhist “Western Paradise” where ultimate unification with the Buddha occurred in heavenly eternity. Pure Land temple and aristocratic house gardens were thus created in the image of the Western Paradise. The villas in these gardens consisted of one-room living spaces connected to each other by open pavilions, and the entire arrangement was surrounded by a garden. The stream flowing through a Pure Land garden symbolically separated this earth and the afterlife. Islands and bridges were symbolic of the stages of life in passing from the world of earthly pleasures to that of eternal faith. The ponds were often constructed in the shape of the character for heart or kokoro.
Gardens in the later Heian period usually included an Amitabha Buddha hall and a pond. Byodo-in in the town of Uji near Kyoto, Jyoruri in Kyoto and Motsu-ji in Hiraizumi in Iwate Prefecture are examples of this advanced style. Taoist and Onmyodo (animistic) beliefs influenced the aristocratic social life of this period, so gardens followed the theme of shijinso, the ideal composition according to Taoism where directional gods are located in appropriate places to invoke good luck. This system held that hills or mountains should be in the north, rivers should be in the east, ponds in the south, and roads in the west.