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THE NATURE OF REALITY

“Particularly in the confined space of everyday life, I believe there is meaning in making gardens.… And within contemporary urban areas, I endeavor to make spaces that restore each person’s humanity. To regain stillness in one’s kokoro [literally “spirit, heart, and mind”], to calmly return to oneself, only gardens—nature—can offer the space to feel such grace. Especially for working people of today, who spend 24 hours a day inside buildings with a regulated room temperature, where it’s difficult to sense the changes in time and season, such a space is essential.”¹

Zen Buddhist priest Shunmyo Masuno starts his day before the sun rises, quietly sweeping the grounds of the Kenkohji temple in Yokohama, Japan, where he serves as head priest. Wearing waraji, or straw sandals, and dressed in his samue, monk’s work clothing of loose pants and a matching top that crosses in the front and ties on the side, Masuno looks like any other Buddhist monk going about his morning chores. The deep indigo color of his clothing blends into the darkness of the wooded temple grounds, and the soft sound of his breathing aligns with the rhythm of his sweeping movements, punctuated now and again by the trills and tweets of early morning birdsong.

The word samue literally means clothing for samu, which is the Buddhist term for the physical work done in a Zen temple as part of a spiritual practice. More than simply helping with the upkeep of the temple, such as preparing meals, polishing wood floors, or sweeping the garden, samu is the mindful practice of finding Buddha-nature in all aspects of everyday life. The meditative act of samu, despite involving physical activity, is not so different from another type of Zen training that Masuno performs every day, the seated form of meditation known as zazen.

For both samu and zazen, the goal is to free the mind of worldly cares and work toward spiritual awakening, or satori. Both forms of meditation lead the practitioner to “celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life directed toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature.”² These forms of meditation start with the adjustment of the body. Correct posture, whether sitting in zazen or standing at a counter chopping vegetables, allows for the mind to be calmed and the focus to turn toward breathing. Observing each breath as it is first brought in and then exhaled, “has the effect of infusing one’s mind-body with fresh life-energy and expelling a negative toxic energy out of the practitioner’s system.”³ Correct posture and breathing then allow for a conscious mental shift to a meditative state. Whether through the unmoving posture of zazen or the active posture of samu, which relies on muscle-memory gained through repetitive training, the practitioner uses posture and breathing to immobilize the conscious mind.

At a private residence in Kamakura, shoji screens slide open to reveal the sight and sound of water dripping from a bamboo spout into the tsukubai water basin in the Chōshintei garden.

Like all Zen practitioners, Shunmyo Masuno incorporates samu and zazen as part of his daily training, or shugyō, the ascetic practice which also can be understood as “self-cultivation.” Unlike most other Zen practitioners, however, Masuno is also a master garden designer, and he considers his design practice to be an integral part of his shugyō. In this case, Masuno’s self-cultivation comes through his practice of understanding the intrinsic nature of each element of each project—not only understanding the characteristics of each rock, tree, and plant, but also the specific site and the client’s particular needs and desires. While there is a long history of Zen priests engaging in aesthetic pursuits, including designing gardens at temples and teahouses, and Masuno himself notes the influence of Musō Soseki,⁴ Ikkyū Sōjun,⁵ and Murata Jukō,⁶ in particular, today Zen priest garden designers are nearly non-existent. Yet, for Shunmyo Masuno, a life without both roles is unimaginable.

Overlooking the city of Shenzhen, China, on the 48th floor of a high-rise office tower, the En to En no Niwa features a dramatic combination of geometric and naturalistic elements with island-like rough rocks set within a rectangular pool of water and a tiered elliptical stone platform.

In a quiet corner of the extensive Ryūuntei garden, which surrounds four residential condominium towers in Qingdao, China, sculpted blocks of dark granite mediate between the stone-clad façade of one of the towers and the exterior space of the garden.

After completing his university degree in agriculture in 1975 and his formal Zen Buddhist training in 1979, Masuno opened his design firm, Japan Landscape Consultants, in 1982. Since then Masuno has integrated his practice and teaching of Zen Buddhism with his process of designing and constructing gardens and landscapes. While his day starts in his waraji and samue, once he completes his morning shugyō, he changes into his priest robes with geta wooden sandals and moves fluidly back and forth between leading ceremonies at the temple and leading his design team in his adjacent office. If the day includes a visit to a construction site, Masuno changes back to samue and pulls on jika-tabi split-toed work shoes. The time spent placing rocks and plants at the construction site is exciting for Masuno as it draws on all his knowledge as a priest and a garden designer and is the culmination of his Zen training. Masuno’s goal is to understand and best express the essence, indeed the kokoro, of each garden element in order to create places where viewers can experience a similar mindful connection to their own consciousness that is part of Zen practice.

A polished stone shelf emerges from a textured boulder in the Sansui Seion Ari garden in Hong Kong, with its smooth surface and rectilinear form in quiet contrast to the rough, irregularly shaped rock.

With the aim of helping people achieve a balanced life in the twenty-first century, Masuno’s objective of creating space, both physical and mental, for meditation and contemplation within the chaos of daily life, now drives his work as a priest and a designer. He sees the toll that the stress and pressures of today’s busy urban lifestyles take, and he endeavors to provide access to calm and tranquility through his gardens and landscapes, as well as his writings. Having authored more than 100 books on the practice and teachings of Zen Buddhism, as well as on his own design process and completed gardens, Shunmyo Masuno is a well-respected authority on the topic of mindful living.

Zen Garden Design explores Shunmyo Masuno’s design ideas and processes through a conversation with Masuno and architect Terunobu Fujimori and an in-depth review of Masuno’s philosophy of garden design and design process. By focusing on fifteen unique gardens and contemplative landscapes in six different countries, designed by Shunmyo Masuno since 2012, Zen Garden Design provides an in-depth examination of Masuno’s gardens and landscapes as spaces for meditation and contemplation—places for the mindful consideration of one’s own life.

Shunmyo Masuno understands the contemporary world to leave little time or space for self-reflection, which causes people to suffer greatly. In his words, “The garden is a special spiritual place where the mind dwells”⁷—a place to leave behind the information-laden contemporary world and spend time with one’s thoughts, searching for truth and serenity. This is well summarized by Stephen Addiss and John Daido Loori in The Zen Art Book: The Art of Enlightenment (2009):

Most important, what is being offered in the powerful and profound teachings of the Zen arts is simply a process of discovery and transformation. If we can appreciate that process and are willing to engage it, we will find before us a way to return to our inherent imperfection, the intrinsic wisdom of our lives. And that is no small thing.⁸

In an unusual location on the roof of a train station, the dry karesansui-style Zagetsutei garden provides a serene space for meditation, separated from the buzz and activity of the Tsurumi area within the city of Yokohama.

A Note on Language

Japanese names in the text are written to follow the typical Japanese order of the family name followed by the given name (the opposite of English). Exceptions are made in the case of people who are well known outside of Japan by their given name followed by the family name, such as Shunmyo Masuno, Terunobu Fujimori, and Toyo Ito.

Japanese words used in the text are written in Roman script (romaji), based on phonetic pronunciation using a modified Hepburn system. Consonants are pronounced similarly to English, with a g always hard. A macron is used to denote a long vowel, except in words like Tokyo and Kyoto, which have become common in English. An exception is Kenkohji, the temple where Masuno presides as head priest, which uses an h following the o rather than a macron (ō). Vowels are pronounced as follows:

a is ă as in father (ā denotes a lengthened sound; also written as aa)

i is ē as in greet (ī denotes a lengthened sound; also written as ii)

u is ū as in boot (ū denotes a lengthened sound; also written as uu)

e is ĕ as in pet (also written as é)

o is ō as in mow (ō denotes a lengthened sound; also written as oo or ou)

The glossary includes Japanese characters for each word—kanji ideographs originating from China and the two kana syllabaries based on phonetics, hiragana (now used for Japanese words or parts of Japanese words) and katakana (now used primarily for loanwords from other languages).

Japanese nouns can be either singular or plural.

For clarity, I have included the word temple following the name of a temple, for example, “Ryōanji temple” and “Daisenin temple,” even though ji in Ryōanji and in in Daisenin mean “temple.” Similarly, the word garden may follow the name of a garden, as in “Chōkantei garden,” although tei means “garden.”

I utilize the definitions of rock and stone laid out by David A. Slawson in Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles and Aesthetic Values (1987, p. 200). He states: “Japanese ishi (seki) I translate as ‘rock(s)’ when they are used in the garden to suggest rock formations in nature, and ‘stone(s)’ when they are used (for their naturally or artificially flattened upper surfaces) as stepping-stones or paving stones, or when they have been sculpted (stone lanterns, water basins, pagodas) or split or sawed (stone slabs used for bridges, paving, curbing).”

Mira Locher

One of many varied views of the Sansui Seion Ari garden at a condominium complex in Hong Kong, a long rectangular window frames a rock arrangement designed to be seen at eye level when sitting in the adjacent common area.