Zen Culture Part 7

And Eternity in an hour.

_William Blake

_Renge-ji Temple, Kyoto

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_Tenryu-ji Temple, Kyoto, ca.1343

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FOR AT LEAST a millennium before the coming of Zen to j.a.pan, gardens had been constructed in China which were founded on underlying religious motives, but only with the rise of Zen in j.a.pan did gardens become deliberately symbolic of the human quest for inner understanding.

During the Heian era j.a.panese aristocrats copied Chinese pleasure parks, and during the Kamakura many of them were translated by pract.i.tioners of the Jodo sect into fanciful reproductions of Amida's Western Paradise. After the rise of Zen influence among artists and intellectuals of the As.h.i.+kaga age, the gay polychrome of these earlier gardens was supplanted by a sober blend of rocks, trees, sand, and water--j.a.panese copies of, first, Sung Chinese gardens and, later, Sung monochrome landscape paintings. In their landscape "painting" gardens, Zen artists captured the reverence for nature which, for them, was a cornerstone of Zen philosophy.

The origins of Far Eastern landscape gardens have been traced to an obscure Chinese legend which predates the Christian Era. It describes five holy islands, situated off the sh.o.r.es of Shantung province, whose peaks soared thousands of feet into the ocean mist and whose valleys were a paradise of perfumed flowers, snow-white birds, and immortals who plucked the trees for pearls. These islanders, who lived in palaces of precious metals, enjoyed eternal youth and had the capacity to levitate at will, although for extended journeys they might choose to ride on the backs of docile flying cranes. However, like Adam and Eve, these paradise dwellers wanted more. Since their islands were floating rather than attached to bedrock, they complained to the ruling deity, requesting more substantial support. The supreme ruler of ancient China was more understanding than the G.o.d of Mesopotamia; instead of evicting the island immortals, he obligingly sent out a flotilla of giant tortoises to hold the islands on their backs and secure them in place.

During the Han era (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) various Chinese emperors reportedly sent out expeditions to locate these islands, but they were always unsuccessful. Finally, the Han Emperor Wu hit upon the notion that if he were to construct an idealized landscape on his estate, the immortals might abandon their misty ocean isles for his park, bringing with them the secrets of eternal life. A garden park was built on a scale intended to rival that of paradise; and to make the immortals feel even more welcome, various rocks symbolizing cranes and tortoises were installed, items the j.a.panese would one day include in their gardens as symbols of longevity. No immortals materialized, but the Chinese landscape garden was launched in considerable style.

During the ensuing Six Dynasties era (A.D. 220-589), Chinese gardens began to reflect the beliefs of the new religion of

Buddhism. The lake-and-island gardens of the aristocracy ceased to represent the legend of the misty isles and became instead a symbol of the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. As time pa.s.sed, the growing influence of Taoism deepened the Chinese feeling for nature itself without reference to any particular legend. In later years, as scholars sought out mountain retreats in the rugged south of China, soaring peaks came to be part of the standard landscape garden, a need sometimes realized by situating the garden against a backdrop of distant mountains or by piling up rocks on the island in the garden lake.

The interest in garden art continued to grow during the T'ang dynasty (618-907), as poets and philosophers increasingly turned to nature for religious and artistic inspiration. Interestingly enough, their perception of nature was not idealized in the manner of the Florentine landscapists but rather emphasized the rugged, untamed qualities of the mountains and streams. It was this sense of nature as the embodiment of a free spirit that they tried to capture in their gardens. Theirs was a reverence for nature as it was in the wild; if it must be domesticated into a garden, the sense of freedom should be preserved as far as possible.

When the s.h.i.+nto nature wors.h.i.+pers of j.a.pan encountered the advanced civilization of China, they may have recognized in the Chinese Taoist feeling for nature a similarity to their own beliefs. It had never occurred to the j.a.panese to construct a domestic abstraction of nature for contemplation, but the new idea of a garden seems to have had its appeal. When a copy of the Chinese capital was created in Nara, the j.a.panese architects were careful to include a number of landscape gardens around the imperial palace. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the regal Heian era, a rage for things Chinese became the consuming pa.s.sion of the j.a.panese aristocracy; Heian n.o.bles built Chinese-style houses and lake-and-island gardens, complete with Chinese-style fis.h.i.+ng pavilions extending out over a lake. Since these pleasure parks were intended for parties of boaters and strollers, they had few religious overtones. Instead the lake became a thoroughfare for pleasure barges, on which idle courtiers cruised about dressed in Chinese costume, and reciting Chinese verses. These gardens were rich with plum and cherry trees, pines, willows, and flowering bushes, and often included a waterfall near at hand, in keeping with Chinese convention. The central island gradually lost its original symbolism as an Elysian holy isle as the n.o.bles linked it to sh.o.r.e with stone footbridges. In these grand parks the Heian n.o.bles gave some of the most sophisticated garden parties ever seen.

After relations with China fizzled to a stop around the beginning of the tenth century, the j.a.panese garden began to evolve on its own. It was always an emblem of power, making it essential that when the warrior government moved to Kamakura a leader no less imposing than Minamoto Yoritomo should oversee the creation of the main garden at the new capital. Significantly, the garden in Kamakura was constructed as part of the Buddhist establishment, rather than as an extension of Yoritomo's private estate. Perhaps this transformation of the garden into Buddhist temple art was a consequence of the Western Paradise beliefs of Amadism (a forerunner had been the late-Heian Western Paradise garden outside Kyoto at Uji); perhaps it was the first implicit acknowledgment of the nature mysticism of Zen; or perhaps the Kamakura warriors simply believed that a private garden would smack too much of the decadence of Kyoto. Whatever the reason, the coming of Zen seems to have been coincidental with a new att.i.tude toward the connection between gardens and religion. The frivolous polychrome of the Heian pleasure park was clearly a thing of the past; gardens became solemn and, as the influence of Zen grew, increasingly symbolic of religious ideas.

The monks who visited China to study Ch'an (as well as Ch'an monks who migrated to j.a.pan) were, of course, familiar with the landscape gardens of the Sung Chinese. These gardens had purged many of the more decorative elements of the T'ang-period pleasure parks and reflected the reverential att.i.tudes of the Taoists and Ch'an Buddhists toward the natural world. At least one of these Sung-style gardens was produced in Kyoto during the early years of renewed contacts with China. Oddly enough, however, it was the Sung ink paintings that would eventually have the greatest influence on Zen landscape gardens. The Sung paintings captured perfectly the feeling j.a.panese Zen monks had for the natural world, leading them to conclude that gardens too should be monochromatic, distilled versions of a large landscape panorama.

Not surprisingly, the att.i.tude that a garden should be a three- dimensional painting sparked the long march of j.a.panese garden art into the realm of perspective and abstraction. In fact, the manipulation of perspective advanced more rapidly in the garden arts than in the pictorial. Without going into the Chinese system of perspective in landscape painting, let it be noted that whereas the Chinese relied in part upon conventions regarding the placement of objects on a canvas to suggest distance (for example, the relative elevation of various tiers of landscape elements on the canvas was often an indication of their distance), the Zen artists learned to suggest distance through direct alteration of the characteristics our eye uses to scale a scene. And since many of these gardens were meant to be viewed from one vantage point, they became a landscape "painting" executed in natural materials.

The manipulation of perspective may be divided roughly into three main categories: the creation of artificial depth through overt foreshortening, thereby simulating the effects of distance on our visual sense; the use of psychological tricks that play on our instinctive presumptions regarding the existence of things unseen; and the masterly obliteration of all evidence of artifice, thereby rendering the deception invisible.

Zen gardeners' discovery of the use of foreshortening in a garden took place at almost the same time that the Florentine artist Uccello (1397- 1475) began experimenting with natural perspective in his landscape oils. Although this example of artistic convergence can hardly be more than coincidence, certain of the devices were similar. As the American garden architect David Engel has observed, the j.a.panese learned that the apparent depth of a scene could be enhanced by making the objects in the distance smaller, less detailed, and darker than those in the foreground.1 (In the garden of Yos.h.i.+mitsu's Golden Pavilion, for example, the rocks on the spectator side of the garden lake are large and detailed, whereas those on the far side are smaller and smoother.) As time went by, the j.a.panese also learned to use trees with large, light-colored leaves at the front of a garden and dark, small-leafed foliage farther back. To simulate further the effects of distance, they made paths meandering toward the rear of a garden grow narrower, with smaller and smaller stones. The pathways in a j.a.panese garden curve constantly, disrupting the viewer's line of sight, until they are finally lost among trees and foliage set at carefully alternated levels; streams and waterfalls deceptively vanish and reappear around and behind rocks and plantings. Zen artists also found that garden walls would disappear completely if they were made of dark natural materials or camouflaged by a bamboo thicket, a thin grove of saplings, or a gra.s.sy hillock.

Many methods of psychological deception in a Zen garden exploit instinctive visual a.s.sumptions in much the same way that a judo expert uses his victim's body for its own undoing. A common trick is to have a pathway or stream disappear around a growth of trees at the rear of a garden in such a way that the terminus is hidden, leading the viewer to a.s.sume it actually continues on into unseen recesses of the landscape.

Another such device is the placement of intermittent obstructive foliage near the viewer, causing the diminution in perception that the mind a.s.sociates with distance. j.a.panese gardeners further enhance the sense of size and depth in a garden plot by leaving large vacant areas, whose lack of clutter seems to expand the vista. Dwarfing of trees is also a common practice, since this promotes the illusion of greater distance. And finally, flowers are rigidly excluded, since their appearance would totally destroy all the subtle tricks of perspective.

Zen garden masters prefer to display their flowers in special vase arrangements, an art known as Ikebana.

The manipulation of perspective and the psychological deception of the Zen garden are always carefully disguised by giving the garden an appearance of naturalness and age. Garden rocks are buried in such a manner that they seem to be granite icebergs, extruding a mere tip from their ancient depths, while the edges of garden stones are nestled in beds of gra.s.s or obscured by applications of moss, adding to the sense of artless placement. Everything in the garden--trees, stones, gravel, gra.s.s--is arranged with a careful blending of areas into a seemingly natural relations.h.i.+p and allowed to develop a slightly unkempt, s.h.a.ggy appearance, which the viewer instinctively a.s.sociates with an undisturbed natural scene. It all seems as uncontrived as a virgin forest, causing the rational mind to lower its guard and allowing the garden to delude the viewer with its artificial depth, its psychological sense of the infinite.

The transformation in garden art the Zen artists wrought can perhaps best be emphasized by comparing the traditional Chinese garden with the abstract landscape created by j.a.panese artists of the As.h.i.+kaga and later eras. 'The j.a.panese regarded the garden as an extension of man's dwelling (it might be more accurate to say that they saw the dwelling as an extension of the garden), while the Chinese considered the garden a counterpoise for the formality of indoor life, a place to disown the obligations and conventions of society. It has been suggested that the average Chinese was culturally schizophrenic; indoors he was a sober Confucian, obedient to centuries-old dictates of behavior, but in his garden he returned to Taoism, the joy of splendor in the gra.s.s, of glory in the flower.

In spite of this, the Chinese garden was more formal than the type that developed in j.a.pan, and it included numerous complicated corridors and divisions. The Chinese gardens of the T'ang aristocracy were intended for strolling rather than viewing, since the T'ang aesthetes partic.i.p.ated in nature rather than merely contemplating it.

Accordingly, Chinese gardens (and Heian copies of them) included architectural features not included in the later Zen landscapes. The Chinese apparently believed that if one is to duplicate the lakes and mountains, then all the items normally seen in the countryside should be there, including the artifacts of man. The Chinese garden welcomed the physical presence of man, whereas the landscape gardens developed in j.a.pan are at their finest when viewed without people, if only because the presence of man acts as a yardstick to destroy the illusion of perspective and exaggerated distance. (However, a Zen-inspired form of j.a.panese stroll garden for use in connection with the tea ceremony did develop, as will be noted later.)

The plaster wall of a Chinese garden was often an integral element of the decoration, and its shape and topping were part of the overall aesthetic effect. The j.a.panese, on the other hand, chose to de- emphasize the presence of the wall. Stated differently, the purpose of the wall around a Chinese garden was to keep outsiders from seeing in, whereas the wall of a j.a.panese garden was to prevent those inside from having to see out--a fundamental difference in function and philosophy.

The dissimilarity in Chinese and j.a.panese att.i.tudes toward garden rocks also deserves mention. The j.a.panese preferred interesting naturalness in their stones; they avoided blandness, but were wary of freakish, distracting shapes. The Chinese, in contrast, were charmed by curiosities, and they sought out garden rocks with fantastic, even grotesque contours. This preference seems to have grown out of a desire to duplicate the craggy mountainsides so often seen in Sung landscape paintings. They searched for unnaturally shaped stones in lake bottoms, where the action of water had honeycombed them. (In fact, this particular pa.s.sion, which became known as "rockery," led to a bit of forgery during the latter part of the Ming era, when ordinary rocks were carved to the desired shape and then placed under a waterfall until they were smoothed sufficiently to disguise the deception.)

The presence of so many unnatural features in Chinese gardens tended to give them a rococo quality, which Zen artists were careful to avoid, and the hemispherical, symmetrical motif of Chinese gardens was transformed into the angular, asymmetrical style that suited Zen aesthetic theory. The fundamental impression a Chinese garden gives is that of skilled artifice, of being a magical, slightly fabulous landscape of dreams. Zen artists transformed this into a symbolic experience of the world at large, distilled into a controlled s.p.a.ce but suggesting the infinite. The result was to change a form that has been essentially decorative into something as near to pure art as can be wrought with the primeval elements of tree, water, and stone. Gardens had been used before to approximate this or that monarch's conception of paradise, but never before had they been employed to express an otherwise ineffable understanding of the moral authority of the natural world.

Zen gardens differ even more greatly from Western garden

design. The geometrical creations of Europe, such as the palace garden at Versailles, were fas.h.i.+oned to provide wide-open vistas reaching toward the horizon, while the naturalistic Zen garden is closed in upon itself like a form of curved s.p.a.ce, producing the illusion of an infinite wilderness in a few acres. It is intended primarily for viewing; there are no gra.s.sy dells for loitering. It is expected to serve functions ordinarily reserved for art in the West: it both abstracts and intensifies reality, being at once symbolic and explicit in design, and the emotion it evokes in the viewer gives him a deeper understanding of his own consciousness.

The four gardens in Kyoto that perhaps best demonstrate the principles of early Zen landscape were all constructed under the patronage of the As.h.i.+kaga: the first two, Saiho-ji (ca. 1339) and Tenryu-ji (ca. 1343), were designed by the Zen monk Muso under the reign of Takauji; the garden of the Golden Pavilion (1397) was executed under the influence of Yos.h.i.+mitsu; and the garden of the Silver Pavilion (1484) was guided by Yos.h.i.+masa. All four were created on the sites of earlier gardens dating from the Heian or Kamakura eras which Zen artists both purified and modified, making changes roughly a.n.a.logous to the reworking of a rococo marble statue of a rotund courtier into a free-standing muscular nude. It is also ill.u.s.trative of the age that these one-time private estates were transformed into what were to become essentially public parks, albeit under the management of Zen temples.

The first of the gardens to be designed was the one at Saiho-ji, a temple on the western edge of Kyoto, popularly known as the "Moss Temple," or Kokedera. During the Heian and Kamakura eras this site belonged to a prominent family who constructed two temple gardens toward the close of the twelfth century in honor of Amida and his Western Paradise. Fas.h.i.+oned long after contacts with China had been broken, these Amida gardens already disowned many of the decorative motifs in the earlier, Tang-style parks. They were self-contained and natural and had no pretense of being symbolic. This was to change, however, around the time that As.h.i.+kaga Takauji a.s.sumed power, when the owner hit upon the notion of converting these gardens of the Jodo sect into something appropriate to the new school of Zen. The project was begun with the understanding that the famous Zen priest Muso Soseki would come to preside over the new temple as abbot, and work was begun under his guidance.

The resulting garden is on two levels, like the original dual garden of Amida, but the Zen designer used the levels to suggest many of the features of a larger universe. It was not yet a fully developed landscape, but rather a contemplative retreat for strolling which strove to emphasize minor aspects of the natural features of rocks, ponds, trees, gra.s.ses, and moss. Even so, many of the features of later landscape gardens are traceable to Muso's design here, particularly the rugged rockwork of the islands in the large lake on the lower level, which later inspired the rockwork of Yos.h.i.+mitsu's Golden Pavilion garden. Located up the hill is a "dry cascade," suggested by the skillful arrangement of round, flat-topped stones carefully set in a place where water never ran. Already, the obligatory waterfall of the Chinese garden had been abstracted into a quiet symbolism. The garden bespeaks a sober, ancient grace and dignity--and reveals aesthetic concepts peculiar to Zen.

The garden of Tenryu-ji is at the temple founded by Takauji, at the suggestion of Muso, as a site for the repose of the soul of the Emperor G.o.daigo, whom Takauji had driven out of Kyoto. It will be recalled that the expense a.s.sociated with building this temple was the occasion of Takauji's again opening trade with China, an act that led to the real explosion of Zen art. Muso also became the official abbot of the temple and is thought to have contributed to the redesign of its garden--it had previously been part of an imperial country villa. Muso's contribution is questionable, however, since the garden shows evidence of influence from the "landscape-painting" design of Sung China and the peculiarly Sung usage of "rockery." It may have been laid out earlier by some emigrant Chinese Ch'an monk who was aware of the latest Sung garden theory. The rock shapes are not grotesque, however, but rather show the crisp angularity later to become a j.a.panese trademark. A small islet of three stones suggests the three levels of a landscape painting, and at the back there is a simulated waterfall of rugged dry stones. The lake and its islands are monochromatic and severe, and the footbridge traditional to Sung landscape gardens is represented by three long flat stones crossing a narrow portion of the rear part of the lake. This garden is probably the only Sung-style creation in j.a.pan, but its impact on Zen gardeners was considerable, since it showed the effects Ch'an Buddhism had had on Chinese garden art. Muso undoubtedly recognized the garden as a worthy model for Zen artists, and he probably did no more than put a few final j.a.panese touches on the work.

By the time of As.h.i.+kaga Yos.h.i.+mitsu, builder of the third Zen landscape garden, Ch'an garden concepts were undoubtedly

better understood in j.a.pan than in China. Yos.h.i.+mitsu had often gone to Saiho-ji to meditate in the garden, and he knew exactly what was required for the landscape garden to surround his Golden Pavilion. He selected a site known as the North Hill Villa, an estate originally built by an aristocratic family using funds they had got serving as spies to report the activities of the Kyoto aristocracy to the Kamakura warlords. Constructed in 1224, the original garden represented the last flowering of the Heian- (or T'ang Chinese) style garden; that is, it was a purely decorative boating pond. When Yos.h.i.+mitsu acquired the site, he immediately demolished the Chinese-style residence with its fis.h.i.+ng pavilion projecting out onto the lake. Then he turned his attention to the garden, paring down the central island and adding smaller islands by bringing in ma.s.sive stones from the surrounding hills. To obtain the necessary trees, he simply selected those that caught his eye in the gardens of the powerless aristocracy.

Today the garden at the Golden Pavilion covers approximately four and a half acres (although it seems much larger), with a lake occupying about one-third of the total area. The pavilion sits at the lake's edge, but in past times before the waters s.h.i.+fted, it was in its midst.

When viewed from the pavilion, as was the original intention, the garden seems a landscape vista. Several of the small islets scattered about the lake have their own dwarf pines, while others are no more than ma.s.sive protruding stones, chosen for an abstract resemblance to a tortoise or cane. In the portion of the lake closest to the pavilion everything is wrought in great detail, whereas stones on the far side are vague and diffuse, so that the distant sh.o.r.eline seems lost in misty recesses. The hillsides surrounding the garden are covered with foliage, and there is no clear demarcation between the garden and the hills. Executed at a time when resources were almost limitless, the garden of the Golden Pavilion is one of the finest Zen landscape gardens ever created. It stands as a watershed between the modification of Chinese styles and the maturity of j.a.panese Zen art.

Yos.h.i.+masa, architect of the fourth great Zen landscape garden, was also fond of Saiho-ji and had studied its garden, as well as that of the Golden Pavilion, with great care. But the Silver Pavilion and its garden were built after the disastrous Onin War, when the available resources were nothing like those of the earlier As.h.i.+kaga shoguns.

Although he was surrounded by a coterie of Zen aestheticians, it appears Yos.h.i.+masa designed the garden himself, a.s.sisted by a new cla.s.s of professional garden workers drawn from the outcast _eta_ cla.s.s (outcast because they were a.s.sociated with the meat and hides industry and thus pariahs to all good Buddhists), who had been engaged by the Zen priests to take care of the heavy work involved in stone movement and placement. Many of these _eta_ became famous for their artistic discernment, and one, the famous Zen-ami, is regarded as one of the foremost garden architects of the As.h.i.+kaga era.

The garden at the Silver Pavilion was modeled after the one at Saiho-ji and made the same use of bold, angular stones-- a mixture of flat- topped, straight-sided "platform" rocks and tall slim stones reminiscent of Sung landscape paintings of distant mountains. Like Saiho-ji, the garden is on two levels, with the rear reminiscent of a mountain waterfall. At one side of the garden the pond is spanned by a stone footbridge connecting either side of the sh.o.r.e with the central island. Shaped dwarf pines abound, and the surface of the water, interrupted here and there with ma.s.sive stones, is peaceful and serene.

Little wonder Yos.h.i.+masa preferred his tasteful pavilion and its distilled microcosm of landscape to the ravaged ruins of Kyoto. Here he could rest in meditation, letting his eye travel over the placid waters, past the flowering trees which framed the symbolic waterfall, upward to the silhouette of the towering pines on the far hillside to watch the moon rise in the evening, bathing his world in silver. In this peaceful setting he could relish the last, closing years of the great As.h.i.+kaga age of Zen art.

The art of the landscape garden did not end with Yos.h.i.+masa, of course; rather, it s.h.i.+fted in its direction and purpose. Already beginning was the next phase of Zen garden art, the abstract sand-and-stone gardens.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Stone Gardens of Zen

_ And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones . . .

_As You Like It