I also want to verify [these relationships in] other projects, but I’ll keep it to this. What one can feel from Masuno’s projects regards “relationality” and “object-ness.” However, so there is no misunderstanding here, in many cases depending on their complementarity, things are completed. What is important here is which thinking comes first. In all Japanese culture, relationality comes first.
Nighttime lighting softly illuminates the rock arrangements and raked gravel of the Chōsetsuko courtyard garden at the Ginrinsō Ryōkan.
Two Pairs of Straw Sandals:
Zen Priest Garden Designer
Shunmyo Masuno
Shunmyo Masuno saws off the branches of bamboo stalks to use in the construction of a garden fence.
“The garden is a special spiritual place where the mind dwells.”1 For Shunmyo Masuno, this is the ultimate meaning of the Zen garden, coming from years of training, both as a Zen Buddhist priest and as a garden designer. These two roles are inseparable in his life, as he describes with the Japanese expression “wearing two pairs of straw sandals” (nisoku no waraji wo haku).2 Garden making is a form of mental and physical training for Masuno, an act of self-cultivation akin to the training of a martial artist. Such acts of self-cultivation are required in the practice of Zen Buddhism.
The oldest son of the head priest at Kenkohji temple in Yokohama, Masuno was almost assured a future as a Zen priest, for the first-born son typically follows in his father’s footsteps. Growing up on the extensive wooded grounds of the temple, Masuno was always near nature, unlike many of his peers, who grew up in urban neighborhoods. When he was eleven years old, he traveled with his family to the ancient capital of Kyoto, where they visited a number of important Zen temple complexes that house significant gardens, including Daisenin (constructed in 1513 CE) and Ryōanji (from 1488 CE). These Zen gardens fascinated him, and he wondered why Kenkohji temple, which was full of trees and other greenery, had no such organized garden space.
By the time he was in junior high school, Masuno was tracing photographs of famous Zen gardens, and in high school he was sketching his own designs. This was the point when he met his future mentor, garden designer Saito Katsuo. Saito had been retained by Kenkohji to shape the temple garden, and Masuno asked for the opportunity to assist him. Although Masuno had no formal training in garden design at that time, Saito must have sensed his enthusiasm and strong work ethic and allowed the young man first to observe his work and later to be his apprentice.
The view from the Saikenji temple entrance leads south through the Baikatei approach garden to the stately sanmon (main gate).
Saito himself had found his way to garden making informally, starting with his father’s work as a gardener. Born in 1893, Saito had only an elementary education, but he liked to study and had a strong intellect. His education came from visiting the traditional gardens in Kyoto and studying them firsthand and then by designing and making gardens himself. Saito lived until 1987, still designing gardens into his nineties, many with the assistance of Masuno.
The lessons that Masuno learned from Saito are numerous, and many were transformative for him. Saito taught him that when the workers are on break having tea, Masuno should come up with thirty different designs for a group of rocks or plants. He instilled in Masuno the need to genuinely and fully understand the site—“if you don’t know the site, you can’t design the garden.”3 Saito emphasized that the way to understand and remember the site is by making sketches and notes, not by taking photographs. For the important elements in a garden, the designer must go to see them in situ, to measure and sketch them where they are found—and then these elements must be placed in the garden directly by the designer. These are the lessons Masuno considers every time he designs a garden.
With the strong foundation he received from Saito’s teaching, Masuno entered the Department of Agriculture at Tamagawa University to study the natural environment. After graduating in 1975, he continued his apprenticeship with Saito, and then in 1979 Masuno began intensive Zen training at Sōjiji temple in Yokohama. In 1982 he founded Japan Landscape Consultants Limited and three years later was appointed assistant priest under his father at Kenkohji temple. In this way, he continues moving ahead with his “two pairs of straw sandals,” sometimes stepping forward with one pair and sometimes the other, but always wearing both.
As Masuno continued his duties as assistant priest and his work as a garden designer, he augmented his understanding of the Japanese sense of aesthetics and values by learning the art of the tea ceremony (chadō or sadō, literally “the way of tea”) along with other traditional arts. He studied the writings of Zen scholars such as thirteenth-century Zen monk and garden designer Musō Soseki and Zen priest Ikkyū Sōjun from the fifteenth century. Both Musō and Ikkyū thought and wrote profoundly about Japanese aesthetics and Zen Buddhism. Ikkyū taught Zen to Murata Jukō, who was integral in the formation of the wabi-cha style of tea ceremony4 by incorporating Zen ideals into the art. Masuno explains, “Murata developed the heart of the host to humbly receive guests as an expression of oneself in Zen. This strong emotional tie of Zen and tea has survived through the centuries.”5
As he continued his training, Masuno developed his own design process steeped in Sōtō Zen principles. In Sōtō Zen, enlightenment (satori) is achieved through disciplined training, including zazen meditation, but also through the completion of everyday tasks. It is the repetition and refinement of these acts that leads to a greater understanding of the self and eventual enlightenment. Masuno states, “Designing gardens for me is a practice of Zen discipline.”6 This correlates to the ideas of Musō Soseki, who wrote in his Dream Dialogues (Muchū mondō), “He who distinguishes between the garden and practice cannot be said to have found the Way.”7 In other words, for the garden designer who is a practitioner of Zen, garden making—both design and construction—must be understood as a vehicle for the attainment of truth in Zen.
The Lhiroma hall at the Suifūso guesthouse opens toward the east for a view of the karesansui (dry) garden representing the kusen-hakkai, the nine mountains and eight seas of the Buddhist universe.
Cloud-like beds of ground cover are interspersed with layers of gravel and roughly textured mountain-like rocks in the Tabidachi no Niwa (Garden for Setting Off on a Journey) in the Yūkyūen garden at the Hofu City Crematorium.
Understanding garden making as an act of Zen Buddhism is an important point when considering the definition of a Zen garden in the twenty-first century. Many gardens in Japan and abroad, especially in the United States and Europe, have been labeled “Zen” or “Zen-style,” but according to Masuno, only those created by a disciplined practitioner of Zen Buddhism truly are Zen gardens. In the West, the often copied