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Gentle Acts of Nature, Time and Man

Between dreamtime and time,

Beyond time and thought, the fresh of the morning,

A morning of the afternoon, a morning of the evening,

A morning of life, a sparkling dewdrop,

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.

Japanese gardens do not rely on bright flowers or exotic plants for their beauty, focusing instead on the simplicity of trees, shrubs and moss.

The oldest Japanese garden design manual, Toshitsuna Tachibana’s Sakuteiki (“The Art of Setting Stones”), was published during the late Heian period. This book documents construction methods used in Shinden gardens and mentions techniques for the allotment of land, arrangement of stones and artificial waterfalls, drainage and plantings. It is a compilation of rules that were codified so that designers with less well-developed sensibilities could create a successful garden. The purpose of the ideal garden, according to this treatise, is to evoke nature in its primal form. Stones must be carefully chosen and arranged, since their composition will influence whether they bring good or bad luck. It was apparently partly due to such beliefs that symmetry was avoided. The Sakuteiki suggests that “water should flow east, then south, and finally to the west.” Its rules about setting rocks include suggestions that “there should be more horizontal than vertical stones in a composition; and a stone that appears to be running away should be accompanied by chasing stones; and the leaning stone should be accompanied by supporting stones.”

A radically different concept of garden design emerged during the subsequent Kamakura (1185–1333) and Nanbokucho (1333– 1392) periods. Zen temples or monasteries gradually moved away from towns and up to the mountains. Priestly garden designers called ishi-tate-so or “rock-setting priests” created retreats for Buddhist meditation by arranging rocks in the forest. One of the most famous of these was Soseki Muso (1275–1351) who designed many gardens using sand, gravel and stones, with a reduced emphasis on natural vegetation.

The Muromachi period (1392–1466) is often called the “Golden Age” of Japanese gardens. Trends begun by Soseki Muso and others blossomed into karesansui gardens. These often depicted miniaturized landscapes of mountains, currents of running water, and riverbeds of sand and rocks. The karesansui gardens had meanings inspired by profound Zen concepts or Chinese brush paintings. Ideals such as “the strength to swim against the current” were depicted in specific rock formations. Other gardens were designed to “startle” the mind into a more spiritual state—acting like koan or cosmological riddles such as the famous “sound of one hand clapping” that were meant to trigger a higher consciousness. The sight of raked sand or rock compositions amidst abundant greenery in Kyoto is as mind-bending as an oasis in a desert.

By the middle Muromachi period, ishi-tate-so Zen gardener priests were creating gardens for the elite samurai warrior class in return for financial support for their temples. Artisans of the lower class, called senzui kawaramono (“mountain, water and riverbank men”), constructed gardens under the supervision of Zen monks. Examples of these dry-landscape gardens include Ryoan-ji (page 54) and Daisen-in in Kyoto. The great creative leap in minimalism, understatement and simplicity in the Japanese arts during this period came from the convergence of two powerful forces: Zen Buddhism and Bushido (the “way of the warrior”). Yasegaman no bunka, or the “way of frugality,” was another factor relevant to people who had to deal with a lack of material things and an often meager supply of food. Bushido teachings made the lack of possessions a poetic and heroic virtue by popularizing the concept that the very small and simple can represent the very large and great, and that the possession of worldly things is unnecessary. The powerful warrior class as well as wealthy merchants in this period embraced these principles and emerged as patrons of the Zen arts including Noh theater, tea ceremony and garden design.

During the Warring States period (1467–1573), two new garden types were added to the repertoire of garden designers. One sort popularized by warlords made use of rocks of unique shapes or vivid colors, and exotic plants such as cycads. The other type was tea ceremony gardens popularized by tea masters Shuko Murata, Sen no Rikyu and others. These gardens were embodiments of the philosophy of tea emphasizing simplicity, under-statement, harmony, refinement, and control over one’s ego. All these concepts are expressed in the term wabi sabi. The study of tea in Japan includes not only tea making but calligraphy, flower arrangement, architecture and garden design. Tea gardens have a roji or “dewy path” made of stepping stones leading up to the tea hut, stone lanterns for mood lighting, stone washbasins for visitors to purify themselves, and fences that enclose and separate the world of tea from the outer mundane world. The journey into a tea arbor along the stone roji path is akin to an initiation rite into the world of tea. Inside the tea garden, the hut and other garden elements emphasize rusticity and seek to merge with their natural surroundings.

In the Edo (Tokyo) period, garden designs from earlier periods continued to be practiced, and a synthesis of these hitherto different styles took place. Daimyos (hereditary lords) and warrior landlords constructed large chisen hybrid gardens. Enshu Kobori is the best known designer of this period, and was responsible for one of the most famous examples of this genre, the Katsura Rikyu garden for an imperial prince. Warlords created large “stroll gardens” inside their castles and mansions which usually had a pond or artificial hill at the center with a winding path around it so that visitors could walk from one scenic spot to another, experiencing constantly shifting scenery and viewing inspiring symbols. Chisen stroll gardens were also designed to be admired from inside the house. Examples of this style include Happo-en in Tokyo (page 168) and Koraku-en in Okayama. Unfortunately, many superb gardens belonging to the daimyos were destroyed during the battles leading up to the Meiji Restoration and soon afterwards.

Stone lanterns are wrapped in straw to protect them from the freezing weather in Kanazawa. This is done so skillfully that such wrapped lanterns have become symbolic of Kanazawa gardens.

The Edo period resulted in 250 years of uninterrupted peace. Businesses prospered, resulting in the emergence of wealthy merchants who constructed gardens within the more limited spaces in their townhouses. Tiny gardens inside long, narrow machiya merchant homes are called naka niwa or tsubo niwa. Such gardens were meant to be viewed from a porch or from inside the house. Openings around such gardens were sized and located to provide tantalizing glimpses of the gardens and to suggest interior spaces larger than they actually were. Since merchants were considered lower in social class than samurai, wealthy merchants were eager to express their refinement through the design of gardens and through patronage of the arts.

During the Meiji period, garden design veered sharply away from Japanese traditions under the government’s policy of “uncompromising Westernization.” Former daimyos lost their estates as the government implemented land reform. While some gardens were converted into public parks, others were repurchased and rebuilt by daimyos who had become powerful businessmen and politicians. A well-known garden aficionado of this period was the soldier/politician Aritomo Yamagata, who twice served as the prime minister of Japan. Professional garden designers of that time include the seventh-generation Jihei Ogawa, also known as Ueji. Ogawa is credited with modernizing traditions at gardens such as the International House of Japan in Tokyo (page 200).

Parks open to the public without discrimination exemplified the revolutionary new ideal of a classless society in Meiji-era Japan. The government at this time sought to modernize (read “Westernize”) Tokyo along the lines of the great capitals of the world, and invited British architect Josiah Conder and others to design Western-style buildings and gardens, as well as train Japanese architects in Western techniques and aesthetics. The German firm of Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Bochman was particularly prolific, and proposed a neo-Baroque plan of radial streets and public parks ringed by ministerial buildings for the area south and east of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Hibiya Park was the result of the many changes and compromises to these plans, and it became a major tourist attraction as people flocked to see this first Western-style park. Grassy lawns, rose gardens, flowerbeds, ponds with swans, and promenades for families to stroll in were novel attractions of the time. Planting techniques from England, Germany and France were studied and modified to suit Japanese conditions. These gardens were promoted as a symbol of Japan’s modernity compared to the old gardens of the feudal Japan. A similar philosophy infused the gardens and parks of the pre-and postwar periods, when ambitious public works were undertaken. Yoyogi Park and Komazawa Park in Tokyo, built for the 1964 Olympics, are good examples of this effort. However, the sensibilities of the traditional garden continued to show through in the works of sculptors like Isamu Noguchi and compositions of the ikebana master Teshigahara. Mirei Shigemori is another star designer of this period, who flouted traditional rules while creating bold, modern designs and reinterpretations of traditional principles.

During the postwar Showa period, Japan was gripped by a frenzy of nation-building. Modernist methods of landscaping by looking at scale models from above became widespread, and the traditional concern for user experience and human scale were disregarded. Buildings were set on concrete platforms, and the traditional Japanese art of creating gardens around them gave way to vast concrete plazas around tall buildings. The landscape of Makuhari Messe, the new business center in Chiba, is a good example of this national phenomenon that is only now being recognized for its environmental damage. The many treeless plazas designed by Kenzo Tange Associates are another example. One can only imagine what the landscaping in these places would be like if traditional Japanese garden sensibilities had been applied instead.

Symbolism and Abstraction in Japanese Gardens

Since the time of the Sakuteiki, the ancient garden treatise, a good Japanese garden is said to have six attributes: seclusion, antiquity, spaciousness, human ingenuity, water, and scenic views. Other important concepts have been added to this list over time. While the skill to make the garden soulful must be inculcated over time, concepts that make the Japanese garden special are discussed in the paragraphs below.

Besides the many elements from Onmyodo, Buddhism and Taoism touched on above, there are other aspects of the Japanese garden that can deepen the experience of the visitor. For example, certain plants are imbued with meanings. Pines and evergreens indicate permanence or longevity, while bamboos symbolize truth and vigor. Although Zen priests in the Muromachi period spurned the “superstitious” beliefs expressed in the Sakuteiki, their gardens retain many abstract values related to the phenomena of nature or mind discussed in the Sakuteiki over a millennium earlier. For example, water has always been a symbol of purification. Whereas in pre-Zen gardens it may have symbolized the dragon god, in Zen gardens it symbolizes the cooling effect of rain in summer. White sand symbolizes the ocean while stones symbolize islands. Stone lanterns, and particularly the “hour jewel” atop lanterns, are a symbol of enlightenment. However looking for symbols in Japanese gardens is not always necessary and may even be counterproductive. Gardens like Ryoan-ji (page 54) were designed to free the mind from thought, though the temptation to associate meanings to this garden seems irresistible, and interpretations of it certainly abound.

No concept in Japanese design is more expressive and harder to explain than wabi sabi. This aesthetic and philosophical idea seeks to express the inherent beauty of things that are imperfect and impermanent. It derives from Buddhist teachings about the contemplation of imperfection, constant change due to passage of time, and the impermanence of all things. Words used to describe wabi sabi include simplicity, minimalism, understatement, rusticity and loneliness. Appreciation of the passage of time and of the impermanence of things is reflected in the choice of garden materials that are imperfect, old or worn out, and compositions that seek to recall the lonely depths of remote forests. Ornamentation is avoided, and the essence of nature highlighted. Human vulnerability, fragility of existence, and the soft but inexorable passage of time are expressed through the deliberate use of old and worn materials. Taikan Yokoyama, the famous Japanese artist known for his views of Mount Fuji, commented that the Japanese worship imperfection. Driven by Zen ideals that seek to look beyond temporary physical perfection, Japanese gardens seek a “perfect imperfection” by, for example, raking a perfect geometric pattern and then sprinkling a few dead leaves over it. The spirit of wabi sabi is found equally in a large tea garden or a small garden in a tray.

The views in a Japanese garden are often conceived in terms of foreground, mid-ground and background. The background views often consist of a shakkei, or “borrowed scenery,” that is outside the garden itself. Distant mountains, forests, plains, or sea visible from the garden are taken into account while laying out the garden. The mid-ground is designed to provide a sense of continuity between the distant background and the plants or objects in the immediate foreground, so as to make the shakkei an integral part of the garden, and greatly enhance the perception of space within it.

There may be places in the garden where the designer would like the visitor to pause and admire a particular view or an object with fresh eyes. This is achieved by placing a particularly uneven or large stone at that place in the garden path, so that the guest is most likely to look down before looking up again with fresh eyes at the object or view presented.

Japanese gardeners also use reduction in scale as a scenic technique. Stroll gardens often recreate and miniaturize natural views or scenic places of interest such as sacred mountains, rivers, or ponds. Reduction in scale is adopted in Zen gardens through the use of abstract symbols. Small mounds may represent large mountains, and wave patterns in the sand express miniaturized seas. Tea gardens, naka niwa interior gardens and bonsai are miniaturized and idealized versions of nature. Miniaturization is particularly useful in the limited spaces in urban gardens.

Seclusion and space are luxuries in Japan, and the best architecture and gardens strive to achieve them. Japanese gardens use the principle of “hide and seek” to create intimate spaces. Gardens are designed so that the visitors do not see all the components of a garden at once. A building or a view may be highlighted and revealed and then again hidden from view only to reappear later, creating a sense of mystery and discovery referred to as yugen in Japanese.

Since natural landscapes are never symmetrical, Japanese gardens follow this rule in their representation of nature. Rare natural things such as Mount Fuji that are nearly symmetrical were worshipped as sacred objects in Shintoism, but symmetrical compositions were otherwise avoided in favor of asymmetrical designs with a dynamic balance. Symmetrical balance is considered too easy and static. This aspect of Japanese design sets it apart from nearly all other aesthetic traditions in the world, including Western and Chinese.

Heightened sensitivity to seasonal change is another important element of Japanese gardens, flower arrangements, tea ceremony and cooking. The colors and moods of the seasons are celebrated with enthusiasm. Kiyomori Taira, a powerful warlord from the Heian period, established a palace for each season: a flowery palace for spring, a watery palace for summer, a palace for moon viewing in fall, and a palace for snow viewing in winter. Chinese geomancy also promoted an emphasis on seasonality in gardens. According to Shijinso theory, seasons relate to the four directions. Spring is to the east, summer to south, autumn to the west, winter to the north. Different plants thus represent these seasons in a garden.

The ideal for a Japanese gardener, architect, artist or craftsman of the past was to be as invisible in their creations as possible, and to create something that looked like it had always been there. This goal was accomplished by understanding materials deeply, and using them in a way that a person’s hand would be least obvious. Once planted, gardens were meticulously maintained to imitate casual, natural growth. Good gardeners seek to get guidance from a stone as to where it wishes to be placed, while builders pray to the land in a ceremony called Jichinsai before starting construction. This is a ceremony of gently seeking permission from the land to build upon it, rather than the groundbreaking ceremony observed elsewhere. The ideal of the past was not to control nature, but coexist with it, with an understanding that nature will outlast the hand that shapes it.

Japanese gardens and buildings are designed to complement each other. A uniquely Japanese space called engawa borders rooms facing a garden, and provides a transitional space that can be opened to the inside or outside, and made into a part of the garden depending upon the seasons. In summer, storm shutters and sliding screens are pushed away, and the engawa becomes a pleasant place to sit and enjoy the garden. Sliding away a few screens removes the barrier between inside and outside. The garden may come right into the tea hut, as shown in the example of Seison-kaku (page 176). When snow shutters are removed from the wide eaves of Mimou House (page 74) in summer, the garden, the engawa and the interior flow into each other and the sounds of birds chirping permeate every corner.

How do you pour eternity into a teacup? How do you evoke the feeling of uninterrupted deep forests and shaded valleys in the narrow confines of a warrior residence or an urban Zen temple? This was the real problem in historically crowded Japan, and the solutions to this constitute the real genius of Japanese garden design. Japan is a condensed country. Three-quarters of Japan is mountains, so the people have historically lived in the other one-quarter that is relatively easy to cultivate and build on, often in very close proximity to each other. This proximity has deeply influenced the society, arts, architecture and garden design in Japan. In their quest to bring the beauty of the outdoors to the more heavily-populated urban areas, Japanese gardeners studied and mimicked nature in great detail. This was not analytical study, but an empathetic journey to the essence of an old tree, a stone, or a bamboo fence.

Putting all that has been said above aside, we hope that the readers of this book will go into their next garden with a mind empty of thought. It is important to see what the garden is at any given moment, rather that what and why it was and what it can be. In the words of Dogen (1200–1253), “there are those who, attracted by grass, flowers, mountains and waters, flow into the Buddha Way.”

It is customary to water roji stone paths, rock gardens and shrubs as a sign of welcome just before the arrival of guests. Some stones change their color when wet, and are selected for use in gardens for this reason.