A river of rocks runs under an asymmetrical stone bridge, spanning banks of lush moss in the Fushotei garden at the Renshōji temple.
Many of the gardens from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including those at Kinkakuji (constructed in 1397 CE) and Ginkakuji (from 1482 CE), known as the Golden Pavilion and Silver Pavilion respectively, still showcase aspects of Pure Land aesthetics, such as pleasure pavilions set within extensive gardens. Paths lead between grouping of rocks and plants, passing ponds and passing over streams on stone or wood bridges. But by the late fifteenth century, gardens such as Ginkakuji started to incorporate other design principles, including miniaturization and compositions of dry rock arrangements, which became hallmarks of Zen gardens.
Zen Buddhism took hold in Japan during the Muromachi period (1392–1568 CE) and began to influence the arts. Buddhism had been introduced into Japan partly for its system of education, which included a written language. Temples were places of learning, and monks spent time studying Buddhist texts. The arts, including painting and sculpture stimulated by Chinese Buddhist aesthetics, flourished at the temples. Under Zen Buddhism, the arts developed distinctively, reflecting the ideas of discipline of the mind and the body that were important in Zen. Enlightenment came from within through strict training. Zen focused on understanding (and through the arts, expressing) the spirit embodied in all things. Meditation was the vehicle for achieving this, and artistic practices, like brush painting, served as training. In the Zen arts, ornament was eschewed in favor of simplicity, and a tendency toward abstraction developed.
During this time Zen monks, inspired by Chinese Sung era paintings of craggy mountains and winding rivers, began to create gardens reflecting the landscapes in the paintings. These gardens often were made using only a few materials—rocks, pea gravel, and perhaps a few plants. By the late fifteenth century, the karesansui (literally, “dry mountain water”) gardens at Daisenin at the Daitokuji temple and at Ryōanji, two of the most well-known gardens of this style, expressed landscapes very abstractly utilizing miniaturization and symbolism. Rock groupings were situated to represent landscape elements such as islands and waterfalls, but they also could be representational, depicting an image of sacred Mount Shumisen, the center of the Buddhist universe, for example, or perhaps even the Buddha. These karesansui gardens were not used for entertainment and enjoyment as previous gardens had been. Rather they had strong religious connotations and were used by the monks for meditation. Garden historian Loraine Kuck describes the Zen ink brush painting that inspired these gardens—but she easily could be describing the gardens themselves. “Simple as were these materials, in the hands of a master they were capable of suggesting the mistiness of distant mountains or rivers, the bold forms of rocks and crags, the dark textures of pines, and the whiteness of a waterfall.”21
A sculpted stone marker, one side roughly textured with the marks of the artist’s hand-work and the other side smoothly polished to a reflective surface, expresses the connection between old and new at the Opus Arisugawa Terrace and Residence.
Another garden type that developed under the influence of Zen Buddhism was the tea garden. As the wabi-cha style of tea became fully developed in the late sixteenth century (the Momoyama period), ceremonial teahouses and gardens were constructed to fit into existing estates, often tucked into an unused corner. These gardens typically express a refined or restrained nature and are designed around a pathway, the roji (literally “dewy ground”), leading from an entry gate past a waiting bench to a small teahouse. “The roji was a carefully designed environment, a corridor whose true purpose was to prompt the mental and spiritual repose requisite to the tea gathering.”22
Although the karesansui Zen gardens moved away from replicating known landscapes in miniature form to representing an abstract idea of a landscape, and the more naturalistic tea gardens acted as a series of physical and mental thresholds, the key to the design of all Zen gardens was the human attitude to nature. From early times, the Sakuteiki had advised to design a garden by “Paying keen attention to the shape of the land and the ponds, and create a subtle atmosphere, reflecting again and again on one’s memories of wild nature.”23
Wild nature in Japan can mean steep heavily forested mountains, rivers flowing swiftly along rocky banks, rough winding coastlines, and small islands full with greenery. These are some of the natural elements that inspire garden designers, but the Japanese attitude toward nature also is an important influence. This notion is deeply rooted in the Shintō reverence for nature as well as the idea supported by both Shintō and Buddhist teachings that humankind is not separate but rather a part of nature, combined with a profound respect for the power inherent in nature. Shintō focuses on particular objects in specific places, like the sacred iwakura. However, the typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunami that are part of life in the island country categorically demonstrate nature’s force—a force with which the Japanese people have learned to coexist. Thus the attitude toward nature is very specific to an unchanging place—a rock or a waterfall, for example—while also being bound up with changing and unpredictable natural conditions. The Japanese garden “displays a design logic which is intimately bound up with the genius loci of the Japanese landscape—in other words, with the essence of the country as it appears to the human imagination.”24 This essence incorporates both elements understood to be mostly unchanging together with those that are transient and impermanent.
The design of the Fūma Byakuren Plaza at the National Institute for Materials Science expresses the spirit of the scientists working nearby and features a meandering river of small rocks connecting gridded and grass-covered surfaces.
A sharp peninsula of stone projects over a still reflecting pool representing the Pacific Ocean in the fourth-story garden at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo.
“The Japanese find beauty in impermanence, the constant transformation. The light and shadow, winds, the flowing of time, the changing of seasons.... I find it so appealing that we are part of this vast nature, with its state of constant change and uncertainty of the times.”25 This “constant transformation” or impermanence of all living things is expressed by the Buddhist concept of mujō (transience). Mujō is integrated into every garden with the seasonal transformations of the flowering plants and colored leaves of the trees, as well as the ever-changing shadows cast by the trees and rocks. While transience is an important principle in both garden design and garden viewing, other aesthetic concepts, such as the seven identified by Hisamatsu Shinichi also are at work in gardens. Of those, yūgen is important in connecting the viewer of the garden to the kokoro—the spirit—of the garden elements. Yūgen has been translated as “subtle profundity,”26 “a profound and austere elegance concealing a multilayered symbolism,”27 and “the mood of great tranquility.”28 “Yūgen is called into being by atmosphere, one of hazy unreality that creates in a mind attuned to it the feeling of kinship with nature, the sense of one’s spirit merging with the spirits of other natural things and the eternal behind them all.”29
Without training and study, yūgen, like many other Zen aesthetic principles, is not an easy concept to grasp. According to Masuno, the creation of a garden or other artistic work embodying such principles, such as the choice of rocks and plants to create the atmosphere of the Zen garden, comes only through kankaku (feeling or sense) and kunren (training or discipline).30 The point of incorporating these principles is not for the sake of the principles themselves, but rather to create a place where people can leave behind the yutakasa (richness, abundance) of everyday life that is strongly focused on goods and consumption. Instead, while experiencing the garden, visitors can encounter their “kokoro no yutakasa” (the richness of their spirit).31
The contrasting colors and forms of two rocks