Kisetsu On living in tune with the seasons
The "Tale of Genji" represents a pinnacle of indigenous Japanese prose-writing It was composed just after 1000 by Shikibu Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting. The novel's heroine, who bears the same name as the authoress, supplies both a wealth of observations on elegant Heian court society and astonishingly detailed accounts of the palace gardens and their (unctions - not least as a setting for romantic encounters.
Japanese art historians have summarized the garden of the Heian period as chisen shuyu teien, which translates literally as "pond-sprmg-boating garden", in other words a garden with a pond whose waters are fed by a spring or garden stream, and which is designed to be enjoyed by boat. If we turn to Chapter 24 of the "Tale of Genji"26, we find a description of a boating party in Murasaki's spring garden which aptly illuminates this concept:
"Numbers of (Murasaki's) young women who were thought likely to enjoy such an outing were therefore rowed out over the south lake, which ran from Murasaki's south-west quarter to her south-east quarter, with a hillock separating the two. The boats left from the hillock. Murasaki's women were stationed in the fishing pavilion at the boundary between the two quarters.
The dragon and phoenix boats were brilliantly decorated in the Chinese fashion. The little pages and helmsmen, their hair still bound up in the page-boy manner, wore lively Chinese dress, and everything about the arrangements was deliciously exotic, to add to the novelty, for the empress's women, of this southeast quarter. The boats pulled up below a cliff at an island cove, where the smallest of the hanging rocks was like a detail of a painting. The branches caught in mists from either side were like a tapestry, and far away in Murasaki's private gardens a willow trailed its branches in a deepening green and the cherry blossoms were rich and sensuous. In other places they had fallen, but here they were still at their smiling best, and above the galleries wisteria was beginning to send forth its lavender. Yellow kerria reflected on the lake as if about to join its own image. Waterfowl swam past in amiable pairs, and flew in and out with twigs in their bills, and one longed to paint the mandarin ducks as they coursed about on the water."
From this point on they composed poem after poem in an attempt to capture the beauty of the moment. Once back indoors the party continued through the night, with poetry and music-making. Then: "Morning came. From behind her fences, Akikonomu listened to the morning birds and feared that her autumn garden had lost the contest."
The gardens of the Heian period were elegant and colourful, and the festivities held within them were infused with a joyous, light-hearted spirit. They inspired their visitors to express their love of nature through poetry and music. Murasaki's description of the boating party is full of references to the natural signs of spring, and this fascination with the passing seasons is a thread which can be found running through the diaries, novels, poems and paintings of the Heian period as a whole. Anyone who has lived in Japan - and particularly Kyoto - for any length of time will know that spring and autumn are the two seasons closest to the Japanese heart: spring because it is the season in which nature awakens to new life in a burst of fresh and strong colours, autumn for its more subdued rush of yellows, reds and purples and its note of sadness.
Prince Genji tells his favourite lady-in-waiting Akiko-numi, whose name literally means "lover of autumn": "But aside from house and family, it is nature that gives me the most pleasure, the changes of the seasons, the blossoms and leaves of autumn and spring, the shifting patterns of the skies. People have always debated the relative merits of the groves of spring and fields of autumn, and had trouble coming to a conclusion. I have been told that in China nothing is held to surpass the brocades of spring, but in the poetry of our own country the preference would seem to be for the wistful notes of autumn. I watch them come and go and must allow each its points, and in the end am unable to decide between song of bird and hue of flower. I go further within the limits allowed by my narrow gardens. I have sought to bring in what I can of the seasons, the flowering trees of spring and the flowering grasses of autumn, and the humming of insects that would go unnoticed in the wilds. This is what I offer for your pleasure. Which of the two, autumn and spring, is your own favourite?"
These and the following passages on Murasaki's spring garden and Akikonomu's autumn garden suggest firstly that Prince Genji saw his courtly ladies as personifications of the qualities of their favourite gardens and, secondly, that he had built his palace in the form of a mandala, with the four gardens of his four favourite ladies corresponding to the cardinal point appropriate to their season:
"The hills were high in the south-east quarter where spring-blossoming trees and bushes were planted in large numbers. The lake was most ingeniously designed. Among the planting in the forward parts of the garden were cinquefoil pines, maples, cherries, wisteria, kerria and rock azaleas, most of them trees and shrubs whose season was spring. Touches of autumn, too, were scattered through the groves. In Akikonomu's garden (occupying the south-west quarter) the plantings, on hills left from the old garden, were chosen for rich autumn colours. Clear spring water went singing off into the distance, over rocks designed to enhance the music. There was a waterfall, and the whole expanse was like an autumn moor. Since it was now autumn, the garden was a wild profusion of autumn flowers and leaves, such as to shame the hills of Oi.
In the north-east quarter there was a cool natural spring and the plans had the summer sun in mind. In the forward parts of the garden the wind through thickets of Chinese bamboo would be cool in the summer, and the trees were deep and mysterious as mountain groves. There was a hedge of mayflower, and there were oranges to remind the lady of days long gone. There were wild carnations and roses and gentians and a few spring and autumn flowers as well. A part of the quarter was fenced off for equestrian grounds. Since the fifth month would be its liveliest time, there were irises along the lake. On the far side were stables where the finest of horses would be kept.
And finally the north-west quarter: beyond artificial hillocks to the north were rows of warehouses, screened off by pines which would be beautiful in new falls of snow. The chrysanthemum hedge would bloom in the morning frosts of early winter, when also a grove of 'mother oaks' would display its best hues. And in among the deep groves were mountain trees which one would have been hard put to identify."
I am tempted to conclude from the above lines that the rules of cjeomancy governed not only the design of the capital and the imperial palace but even the gardens of the nobility, and that these, too, were intended to represent a sort of mandala. an image of the universe. The four gardens described m the "Tale of Genji" attained their fullest glory in their "own" season; m relation to the mam palace, each faced the direction to which it is assigned within the chart of the five evolutive phases. The names of the gardens, indicating their geographical positions, no doubt acted as a helpful means of orientation within the labyrinthine palace complex.
Wybe Kuitert has collected sufficient literary evidence to conclude that the idea of allocating individual gardens to specific cardinal points was not merely "literary fiction but actual practice" in the design of Heian palaces."
The four seasons and their various charms are the subject of constant reference in the novels and diaries of the Heian period, and much Heian poetry is hinged on Makura kotoba, "Pillow Words" which include proverbial descriptions of the seasons. Daily life in the palaces of the nobility was similarly enacted amidst images of the rhythms of nature, both outdoors in gardens and indoors in shiki-e, the "four seasons paintings' executed m the indigenous yamato style.
The palaces of the Hetan period employed a form of post-and-lintel architecture which contained very few permanent partitions and which could be opened onto the garden. Sliding screens and free-standing, movable panels were used to partition off individual areas as required. These were often decorated with scenes from nature, such as the four seasons, seasonal festivals and their locations.
Saburo lenaga summarizes this Heian immersion m nature in the following passage: "The natural was always so interwoven with human life that, in point of fact, the pamtmg ended up as the depiction of recurring seasonal events, some religious, some not. The starting-point for events was the special connection between the unfolding of the seasons and the unfolding of human life."*'" The Heian period saw man as one with nature.
Mono no aware: sensitivity towards beings
The emotional - and not the intellectual or religious -attitude of the Heian nobility towards nature can be summarized in the almost untranslatable concept of mono no aware, sensitivity towards beings. According to Ivan Morris, the term aware occurs exactly 1018 times in the "Tale of Genji'V It is the great theme of Heian aesthetics. The normal rendering of this phrase as the "emotional quality of things" fails, in my opinion, to do justice to the true meaning of the original. "Things" have no emotion. According to Heian thinking, however, rocks, flowers and trees are not simply inanimate objects, but possess their own "being" and their own sensitivity. To be sensitive to their sensitivity is a prerequisite of Heian art. And since the sense of the impermanence of all being was particularly pronounced m the Heian period, the expression mono no aware came to acquire an undercurrent of profound melancholy.
Gardens in an urban palace setting
Nothing today survives of the eighth-century dai-dam, the "great inner interior", as the palace city was originally called. The dairi, or "inner interior", as the imperial residential quarters were known, has similarly fallen victim to time. Only the shinsen-en, the "Park of Divine Springs" to the south of Nijo castle, lives on as a tiny remnant of the imperial pleasure gardens which once covered an area of 2 x 4 city blocks (260 x 520 yards). According to the historical and literary sources of the day, these pleasure gardens provided the setting for imperial poetry competitions, banquets and boating trips on the huge artificial lake. The gardens also hosted the kyokusui no en, or "Feast by the Winding Stream", a literary event highly popular amongst court nobles. Lining both banks of the winding garden stream, they would compose poems upon a seasonal subject while catching tiny cups of rice wine which were floated downstream.
Gosho, literally "the august place" the present term for the imperial palace in Kyoto is a highly-disciplined form of - originally Chinese - palace architecture. It implies a symmetrical arrangement of successive courtyards aligned along a central axis. In the Heian period this form was invoked not only for palaces but also for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and in particular the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise.
At the heart of the imperial living quarters lies the shishin-den, literally "the purple hall of the Emperor", a word borrowed from the seventh-century Da-ming palace complex in Changan. The present shishin-den in Kyoto is a nineteenth-century reproduction of an earlier building from the late Edo era. It employs the now-familiar armchair layout, whereby double-aisled covered corridors extend from the main building to enclose a brightly-lit nan-tei, or "south garden". Carpeted with white sand, the garden contains nothing but a mandarin tree and a cherry tree, placed at either side of the open steps leading up to the shishin-den. Fenced off from the rest of the garden behind a carefully-proportioned wooden lattice, and symmetrically positioned within this ceremonial courtyard, the two trees are treated as pieces of architecture rather than as plants in a garden.
The empty and white characteristics of the south garden in front of the shishin-den have their origins in the dual function of the early Japanese emperors as both political ruler and chief priest. South gardens were originally reserved for religious and state purposes; empty, they provided a suitable stage for the colourful court rituals borrowed from T'ang China; white, they offered a pure setting for sacred dances performed to invoke the gods.
The cosmological orientation of the whole in accordance with Chinese models is again echoed in the names given to the two side gates leading into the south garden. Thus the nikkamon, the "sunflower gate", lies at the centre of the eastern walkway, while the gekkamon, the "moonflower gate", is found on the opposite, western side. They recall the temples of the sun and moon found outside the eastern and western gates of many Chinese cities. In Japan as in China, the layout of the imperial palace and its gardens was to reflect the design of the very cosmos itself.
Providing a stark contrast to the formality and austerity of the ceremonial south garden are the tsubo-niwa, the small "inner-courtyard gardens" found amongst the rectangular arrangement of buildings north of the shishin-den. Intimate in scale, informal and unassuming in character, these are often devoted to one specific plant or plant variety.
The walled garden below the west veranda of the seiryoden, the imperial banqueting rooms, is completely flat and almost empty, containing no more than a few simple plants. Garden scholar M. Hayakawa sees this garden as the perfect expression of the Heian sense of elegance and tranquility. I believe it mirrors precisely those motifs I have described earlier as characterizing the Japanese sense of beauty: namely, the play of delicate natural form against the right angle of Japanese architecture, in this case the wooden lattice.
Expanding upon the simple beauty of the tsubo-niwa within the architectural maze of the imperial complex, another expert on Japanese gardens, Loraine Kuck, observes: "Ladies whose rooms faced these small courts were often called by the name of the flower dominating them, and this same flower was sometimes also used as a decorative motif in the rooms - stencilled or embroidered onto curtains and screens." Kuck also draws our attention to the name of Fuji-tsubo, the "Lady of the Wisteria Court" who appears in the famous "Tale of Prince Genji"
The Heian nobility, equally concerned to emulate the Chinese fashions of the day, modelled their own gardens on those of the imperial palace. The south gardens of these noble residences no longer consisted solely of empty, sandy surfaces, however; they were joined instead by elaborate gardens laid out to the south, featuring large ponds with one or more islands connected by arched bridges.
The architectural style which dominated the early Heian period became known as shinden after the main hall which lay at the centre of palace complexes. It is now generally assumed that the noble residences of this period were highly symmetrical in their design and occupied a site measuring about 130 x 130 yards (one city block). Two suiwata-dono, open corridors, led from the main hall (shinden) to two symmetrical side halls (tainoya). From there, two covered walkways led southwards towards the pond to a tsuri-dono, a fishing pavilion, on one side and an izumi-dono, a spring pavilion, on the other. These two pavilions stood right on the water's edge. Halfway along the covered walkways, chumon - middle gates - gave access to the inner courtyard. The ceremonial southern entrance gate found in the imperial palace has here disappeared.
Japanese scholar Sawada Nadan, an architectural historian of the late Edo era, was the first to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of a noble residence in the Shinden style of the early Heian period. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the drawing published in his 1842 "Kaoku zakko" in reversed form, since it thus better fits the description of the winding garden stream found in the Sakutei-ki. The Sakutei-ki dates from the latter part of the eleventh century and is the oldest surviving text on garden architecture. It contains the clearest description of the first great prototype of Japanese garden: "To ensure good fortune, water must flow in from the east, pass beneath the floor of the house and flow out to the south-west. For in this way the waters of the Blue Dragon will wash away all the evil spirits from the house and garden and carry them to the White Tiger." As already stated, geoman-tic principles were applied not only to the design of cities as a whole, but also to the palaces and gardens within them. The palace complex was also to be a mi-crocosmic reflection of the universe. The language of the Sakutei-ki is full of references to the four heavenly animals and their significance for the building of a house. Thus it writes: "The garden stream should flow into the shinden area from the east; it should then be directed south and should leave the garden flowing westwards. Even where the water has to come in from the north, it should be allowed to flow eastwards and then exit by the south-west. According to an ancient sutra, the land enclosed within a river bend should be considered the belly of the dragon. To build a house on that belly is to be lucky. But to build a house on the back of the dragon is to invite misfortune."
By the end of the Heian period, however, the highly formalized, symmetrical architecture of early Heian palaces had been replaced by a freer and more asymmetric style of building. Whether this transition reflected a respect for natural form, or simply an inborn Japanese dislike of symmetry, must remain a matter for speculation. In the new style of the late Heian period, the buildings composing the palace complex no longer stand isolated and independent, but instead flow each into the next. Japan hereby entered the phase of complete assimilation of the Chinese models it had imported in the past, one which Professor Teiji Itoh has termed a phase of "splendid misinterpretations".
On the basis of careful analyses of scroll-paintings, albeit of slightly later origin, historians have been able to reconstruct both the Tosanjo-den palace belonging to the Fujiwara clan, and the Hojuji palace built by Fujiwara no Tanemitsu (942-992). Their reconstructions suggest that the Fujiwara built palaces of great splendour and impressive stze, running the length of two city blocks from north to south Emperor Goshirakawa chose Hojuji palace as the home of his retirement.
The Fujtwara ("plain of wistena") clan effectively ruled Japan from the mid-ninth to the late eleventh century from their positions as impenal regents and chief ministers. They guaranteed their continuing influence at court by ensuring that every emperor was the son of a Fujiwara mother. Thanks to their political power and generous patronage of the arts, this period of almost two hundred years has become known as the Fujiwara era.
The Fujiwara continued to design their palaces within the design framework of the "armchair", however asymmetrical the overall composition might now appear Their gardens, too, were illustrations of that first great Japanese prototype, featuring a pond with one or more islands, its waters fed by a garden stream entenng and leaving the grounds in accordance with ancient geomantic rules The Tosanjoden palace gardens had three islands and one fishing pavilion to the west, while those of Hojuji-den contained two islands and two pavilions, one at each end of the projecting covered walkways. The eastern pavilion, built upon a cruciform ground plan unique m Japanese architectural history, stood not on the banks of the pond but on one of its islands, and thus represented a further step away from the clear symmetry of the Shinden style.
In both cases the mam hall, the shinden, opens directly onto an empty area of white sand, the site of regular ceremonies and special festivities held on the occasion of imperial visits. Both, too, have garden streams which wind their way through sparsely-planted, slightly undulating ground, and along whose banks that popular banquet of poetry and rice wine, the kyokusui no en, was once held On such festive occasions the islands often provided the location for a gaku-ya, a stage for dancers and musicians.
Gosho, literally "the august place" the present term for the imperial palace in Kyoto is a highly-disciplined form of - originally Chinese - palace architecture. It implies a symmetrical arrangement of successive courtyards aligned along a central axis. In the Heian period this form was invoked not only for palaces but also for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and in particular the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise.
At the heart of the imperial living quarters lies the shishin-den, literally "the purple hall of the Emperor", a word borrowed from the seventh-century Da-ming palace complex in Changan. The present shishin-den in Kyoto is a nineteenth-century reproduction of an earlier building from the late Edo era. It employs the now-familiar armchair layout, whereby double-aisled covered corridors extend from the main building to enclose a brightly-lit nan-tei, or "south garden". Carpeted with white sand, the garden contains nothing but a mandarin tree and a cherry tree, placed at either side of the open steps leading up to the shishin-den. Fenced off from the rest of the garden behind a carefully-proportioned wooden lattice, and symmetrically positioned within this ceremonial courtyard, the two trees are treated as pieces of architecture rather than as plants in a garden.
The empty and white characteristics of the south garden in front of the shishin-den have their origins in the dual function of the early Japanese emperors as both political ruler and chief priest. South gardens were originally reserved for religious and state purposes; empty, they provided a suitable stage for the colourful court rituals borrowed from T'ang China; white, they offered a pure setting for sacred dances performed to invoke the gods.
The cosmological orientation of the whole in accordance with Chinese models is again echoed in the names given to the two side gates leading into the south garden. Thus the nikkamon, the "sunflower gate", lies at the centre of the eastern walkway, while the gekkamon, the "moonflower gate", is found on the opposite, western side. They recall the temples of the sun and moon found outside the eastern and western gates of many Chinese cities. In Japan as in China, the layout of the imperial palace and its gardens was to reflect the design of the very cosmos itself.
Providing a stark contrast to the formality and austerity of the ceremonial south garden are the tsubo-niwa, the small "inner-courtyard gardens" found amongst the rectangular arrangement of buildings north of the shishin-den. Intimate in scale, informal and unassuming in character, these are often devoted to one specific plant or plant variety.
The walled garden below the west veranda of the seiryoden, the imperial banqueting rooms, is completely flat and almost empty, containing no more than a few simple plants. Garden scholar M. Hayakawa sees this garden as the perfect expression of the Heian sense of elegance and tranquility. I believe it mirrors precisely those motifs I have described earlier as characterizing the Japanese sense of beauty: namely, the play of delicate natural form against the right angle of Japanese architecture, in this case the wooden lattice.
Expanding upon the simple beauty of the tsubo-niwa within the architectural maze of the imperial complex, another expert on Japanese gardens, Loraine Kuck, observes: "Ladies whose rooms faced these small courts were often called by the name of the flower dominating them, and this same flower was sometimes also used as a decorative motif in the rooms - stencilled or embroidered onto curtains and screens." Kuck also draws our attention to the name of Fuji-tsubo, the "Lady of the Wisteria Court" who appears in the famous "Tale of Prince Genji"
The Heian nobility, equally concerned to emulate the Chinese fashions of the day, modelled their own gardens on those of the imperial palace. The south gardens of these noble residences no longer consisted solely of empty, sandy surfaces, however; they were joined instead by elaborate gardens laid out to the south, featuring large ponds with one or more islands connected by arched bridges.
The architectural style which dominated the early Heian period became known as shinden after the main hall which lay at the centre of palace complexes. It is now generally assumed that the noble residences of this period were highly symmetrical in their design and occupied a site measuring about 130 x 130 yards (one city block). Two suiwata-dono, open corridors, led from the main hall (shinden) to two symmetrical side halls (tainoya). From there, two covered walkways led southwards towards the pond to a tsuri-dono, a fishing pavilion, on one side and an izumi-dono, a spring pavilion, on the other. These two pavilions stood right on the water's edge. Halfway along the covered walkways, chumon - middle gates - gave access to the inner courtyard. The ceremonial southern entrance gate found in the imperial palace has here disappeared.
Japanese scholar Sawada Nadan, an architectural historian of the late Edo era, was the first to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of a noble residence in the Shinden style of the early Heian period. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the drawing published in his 1842 "Kaoku zakko" in reversed form, since it thus better fits the description of the winding garden stream found in the Sakutei-ki. The Sakutei-ki dates from the latter part of the eleventh century and is the oldest surviving text on garden architecture. It contains the clearest description of the first great prototype of Japanese garden: "To ensure good fortune, water must flow in from the east, pass beneath the floor of the house and flow out to the south-west. For in this way the waters of the Blue Dragon will wash away all the evil spirits from the house and garden and carry them to the White Tiger." As already stated, geoman-tic principles were applied not only to the design of cities as a whole, but also to the palaces and gardens within them. The palace complex was also to be a mi-crocosmic reflection of the universe. The language of the Sakutei-ki is full of references to the four heavenly animals and their significance for the building of a house. Thus it writes: "The garden stream should flow into the shinden area from the east; it should then be directed south and should leave the garden flowing westwards. Even where the water has to come in from the north, it should be allowed to flow eastwards and then exit by the south-west. According to an ancient sutra, the land enclosed within a river bend should be considered the belly of the dragon. To build a house on that belly is to be lucky. But to build a house on the back of the dragon is to invite misfortune."
By the end of the Heian period, however, the highly formalized, symmetrical architecture of early Heian palaces had been replaced by a freer and more asymmetric style of building. Whether this transition reflected a respect for natural form, or simply an inborn Japanese dislike of symmetry, must remain a matter for speculation. In the new style of the late Heian period, the buildings composing the palace complex no longer stand isolated and independent, but instead flow each into the next. Japan hereby entered the phase of complete assimilation of the Chinese models it had imported in the past, one which Professor Teiji Itoh has termed a phase of "splendid misinterpretations".
On the basis of careful analyses of scroll-paintings, albeit of slightly later origin, historians have been able to reconstruct both the Tosanjo-den palace belonging to the Fujiwara clan, and the Hojuji palace built by Fujiwara no Tanemitsu (942-992). Their reconstructions suggest that the Fujiwara built palaces of great splendour and impressive stze, running the length of two city blocks from north to south Emperor Goshirakawa chose Hojuji palace as the home of his retirement.
The Fujtwara ("plain of wistena") clan effectively ruled Japan from the mid-ninth to the late eleventh century from their positions as impenal regents and chief ministers. They guaranteed their continuing influence at court by ensuring that every emperor was the son of a Fujiwara mother. Thanks to their political power and generous patronage of the arts, this period of almost two hundred years has become known as the Fujiwara era.
The Fujiwara continued to design their palaces within the design framework of the "armchair", however asymmetrical the overall composition might now appear Their gardens, too, were illustrations of that first great Japanese prototype, featuring a pond with one or more islands, its waters fed by a garden stream entenng and leaving the grounds in accordance with ancient geomantic rules The Tosanjoden palace gardens had three islands and one fishing pavilion to the west, while those of Hojuji-den contained two islands and two pavilions, one at each end of the projecting covered walkways. The eastern pavilion, built upon a cruciform ground plan unique m Japanese architectural history, stood not on the banks of the pond but on one of its islands, and thus represented a further step away from the clear symmetry of the Shinden style.
In both cases the mam hall, the shinden, opens directly onto an empty area of white sand, the site of regular ceremonies and special festivities held on the occasion of imperial visits. Both, too, have garden streams which wind their way through sparsely-planted, slightly undulating ground, and along whose banks that popular banquet of poetry and rice wine, the kyokusui no en, was once held On such festive occasions the islands often provided the location for a gaku-ya, a stage for dancers and musicians.
Sino - Japanese geomancy as holistic design theory
As one of the - what we would now view as - unorthodox sciences practised in China, geomancy was most generally known as feng-shui. literally "wind-water", or simply as ti-li, "land patterns" In Japan this same body of knowledge was called chiso, "land physi ognomy", or kaso. "house physiognomy". Geomancy seeks to determine the most favourable design and location of human artefacts - a house, a grave, even a whole city - within the natural or man-made environment
Smo-Japanese geomancy is based on a holistic view of the cosmos, in which man is seen as an integral part of nature and its energy fields. It correlates geophysical factors - geographical land forms, climate, magnetic fields - and astral phenomena - movements of the stars, solstices, lunar phases - with the psychosomatic welfare of the human being We shall be examining this science in some depth not only because it differs considerably from the indigenous Shinto geomancy discussed earlier in this book, but because it was to prove highly significant for Japanese garden design Indeed, it influenced not only the positioning of artefacts (including entire gardens) in geographical space, but even governed the movement of human beings m time During the reign of Emperor Temmu, a central government organ was created within the imperial city to supervise Smo-Japanese geomancy This was the Ommyo-ryo, the Office of Yin and Yang For all its superstitious overtones, geomancy reflects a profound awareness of the ecological relationship between man and the forces of nature.
The logic of Chinese geomancy, of feng-shui, is not easily grasped by the Western mind. Like other branches of the traditional Chinese natural sciences, it employs methods of cognition which are best described as inductive, synthetic or synchronistic, if we may borrow from the terminology of Porkert and Jung. Such procedures are foreign to the Western mind, which employs causal, analytic and diachronistic processes of thought.
To the uninitiated, Smo-Japanese geomancy appears to consist of a vast collection of rules and precepts whose roots can ultimately be traced both to human fears - fear of the uncontrollable forces of nature, fear of hostile neighbours - and human greed. But it also conceals a fundamental acknowledgement of the interdependence of all levels of reality, both natural and man-made. It recognizes, too, the energetic quality underlying all reality - a concept unknown to the Western mind until the advent of modern physics.
The Chinese geomancy introduced into Japan was itself a complex amalgam of two schools of thought, one based on more rational cosmology, the other intuitive. The chief instrument of the former was the geo-mancer's "compass", a condensed image of the cosmos in its spatial and temporal relationships - a sort of Chinese mandala.
The Chinese geomantic compass was frequently subdivided into three levels - Heaven, Earth and Man.
It thus reflected the tripartite division of the Chinese universe. In line with ancient Chinese speculation on the cosmos, the compass shows heaven as round and the earth as square. There is a magnetic needle at its centre. Concentric rings circling this needle relate the concepts of Yin and Yang, which express the polarity of all natural phenomena, to the concept of go-gyo, the five evolutive phases of Chinese natural science, to the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams of the l-Ching and to the cycles of the Chinese solar-lunar calendar. These correlations apply equally to outer nature and inner man. Practical geomancy might thus be described as a kind of acupuncture applied to nature, and acupuncture as as kind of geomancy applied to the human body. In view of this holistic understanding of the world, it is not supnsing that the design of Japanese gardens was also subject to the dictates of geomancy.
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this cosmology was the fact that the gardens, cities and palaces of China, and subsequently Japan, were all oriented due north. The Chinese believed that all power was derived from a non-personal Heaven and was transmitted to earth via the emperor, until he grew too weak to perform his celestial mandate. Just as the stars and constellations in the sky appeared to rotate around the Pole Star - referred to in ancient Chinese texts as the "Great Heavenly Emperor" -, so on earth all state and religious affairs revolved around the figure of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. He was the axis mundi of the earth just as the Pole Star was that of the firmament. Since the Pole Star lies almost due north, the itually correct position of the emperor was accepted as also being either to the north or at the centre of his capital and palace complex. This cosmological axiom led the Japanese to orient their capital cities, palaces, noble residences, gardens and even the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise all towards the north.
At the centre of the intuitive school of Chinese geomancy lay the search for an ideal site upon which to build an ancestrial burial vault, a house or even an entire town in harmony with the complex configurations of nature already existing or made by man. The Chinese visualized such ideal locations in the form of a comfortable armchair, its "back" a mountain and its "armrests" hills. In certain cases the "back" might be provided by artificial enclosures such as walls, hedges and buildings. The Chinese word for such an ideal site isxue, which means "lair", "den" or "cave", thereby emphasizing its protective function. Significantly, too, the same ideogram represents an acupuncture point in both the Chinese and Japanese languages.
Ideally, the "armchair" will be open and sloping towards the south, and flanked by mountains or buildings on its three remaining sides. These specifications are met both by the old capital of Heian-kyo, which is located within the broad Yamashiro basin (yamashiro literally means "mountain castle") and by the dairi, the imperial palace within the city itself.
Unlike the cosmological school, however, with its geomantic compass, the more intuitive school had no technical aids to fall back on. Locating ideal sites required instead an intuitive feel for what the Chinese callki, and what M. Porkert translates as "configurative energy", the energy flow within a complex natural or man-made configuration. An intuitive feel for this energy flow could only be acquired through practical training under the supervision of an experienced geomancer.
It is interesting to note that this same concept of ki is employed by traditional Chinese medicine, both in diagnosis and treatment. This and other points of similarity have led to the suggestion that acupuncture may have developed out of the historically older science of geomancy. Many of the names assigned to acupuncture points make clear references to geographic and topological features - "bubbling spring", "sea of energy", "small swamp", "bending pond", "inner garden", "outer hill", "receiving mountain" and more besides.
According to the formal school of geomancy, a location is characterized in terms of a dragon. The dragon's "belly" thereby represents the most auspicious site. The contours of the dragon's body are described by mountain ranges and winding rivers, which also represent the components of Yin and Yang. As mentioned earlier, the word for "landscape" - adopted into the Japanese from the original Chinese - is san-sui, which means literally "mountain-water". This conceptual and visual differentiation is utterly lost in translation. San-sui means the polarity of mountain and water and is one of the most important metaphysical concepts inspiring the formal language of Sino-Japanese garden architecture and its blood-brother, painting. The geomantic, or better, topomantic location of Heian-kyo is said to have been selected with regard to the mythological heavenly animals residing in the four "corners" of the universe. As writings dating from as far back as the Han dynasty reveal, it was believed that these animals, like all heavenly phenomena, manifested themselves on earth. Thus the Azure Dragon supposedly lived in a mountain stream in the east, the region of morning and spring. The home of the White Tiger lay in the mountains of the west, the region of evening and autumn. Morning and spring thereby represent the time of ascending Yang, while evening and autumn represent the period of ascending Yin. The Black Tortoise was thought to dwell in the mountains of the north, the direction of midnight and winter, while the Red Bird resided in the plains of the south, the direction of noon and summer.
Behind this notion of the four heavenly animals lies the ancient Chinese system of inductive correlations, known as wu-xing in Chinese and go-дуо in Japanese. Long translated as "five elements", the concept has more recently been rendered as "five activities" or "five evolutive phases". This system originated in the fourth century BC and existed alongside the traditional Chinese notions of Yin and Yang. As the latter represented an understanding of the universe in terms of polar opposites, so wu-xing proposed an equally dynamic interpretation of all reality in terms of five phases. These phases were symbolized by the ideograms for earth, wood, fire, metal and water. As shown in the diagram on page 43, the earth lies at the centre. The four segments of the circle correspond to the four cardinal points, to which are assigned wood (east), metal (west), water (north) and fire (south). Each of these go-дуо elements is attributed its own colour: earth is represented as yellow, wood as green, metal as white, water as black and fire as red. As visible in the diagram, these elements are part of a five-stage sequence of concentric circles, and are followed by rings containing the five main bodily organs, five human emotions, the four seasons and four times of day, until finally arriving at the four mythological animals. Everything under the sun found its place within these five stages of transformation, from the five planets and five basic types of animal to the elements of inner man: the five tastes, five voices and five major organs, which in turn correspond to five emotions - anger, joy, sorrow, terror and thoughtful reflection.
This five-phase system of correspondences thus constitutes both a macrocosmograph and a psychogram. It creates continuous cross-references between the outer world of nature and the inner world of man. Even today, the many Chinese pharmacies still practising at a local level in Japan will invariably have on display a chart of these correspondences. A further indication of the importance of this system may be seen in the fact that both the city and gardens of Heian-kyo were laid out in the form of Chinese mandalas, and can thus be interpreted as microcosmic replicas of the universe.
The ancient Japanese belief that evil spirits always come from the north-east, from the ki-mon, the Devil's Gate, probably had its roots in a natural phenomenon: in China and Japan, the bitterly cold winter winds come from the north-east. China furthermore suffered barbarian attacks from this same direction throughout its history, while the hostile and militant tribes who populated the north-eastern regions of Japan were only finally subdued by the Yamato clan. Heian-kyo was safely protected from any such "threat" by Mount Hiei, the highest peak in the armchair of mountains cradling the former Japanese capital and lying exactly north-east of the city.
The gardens of the Heian period may be found in three different types of setting. Some are contained within the palaces of the emperor and the aristocracy and thus fully subordinate to their architectural surroundings. Others are sited on the city outskirts, acting as a kind of intermediary between the urban environment and unspoilt nature. Others still adorn the main courtyards of Pure Land Buddhist temples.
Smo-Japanese geomancy is based on a holistic view of the cosmos, in which man is seen as an integral part of nature and its energy fields. It correlates geophysical factors - geographical land forms, climate, magnetic fields - and astral phenomena - movements of the stars, solstices, lunar phases - with the psychosomatic welfare of the human being We shall be examining this science in some depth not only because it differs considerably from the indigenous Shinto geomancy discussed earlier in this book, but because it was to prove highly significant for Japanese garden design Indeed, it influenced not only the positioning of artefacts (including entire gardens) in geographical space, but even governed the movement of human beings m time During the reign of Emperor Temmu, a central government organ was created within the imperial city to supervise Smo-Japanese geomancy This was the Ommyo-ryo, the Office of Yin and Yang For all its superstitious overtones, geomancy reflects a profound awareness of the ecological relationship between man and the forces of nature.
The logic of Chinese geomancy, of feng-shui, is not easily grasped by the Western mind. Like other branches of the traditional Chinese natural sciences, it employs methods of cognition which are best described as inductive, synthetic or synchronistic, if we may borrow from the terminology of Porkert and Jung. Such procedures are foreign to the Western mind, which employs causal, analytic and diachronistic processes of thought.
To the uninitiated, Smo-Japanese geomancy appears to consist of a vast collection of rules and precepts whose roots can ultimately be traced both to human fears - fear of the uncontrollable forces of nature, fear of hostile neighbours - and human greed. But it also conceals a fundamental acknowledgement of the interdependence of all levels of reality, both natural and man-made. It recognizes, too, the energetic quality underlying all reality - a concept unknown to the Western mind until the advent of modern physics.
The Chinese geomancy introduced into Japan was itself a complex amalgam of two schools of thought, one based on more rational cosmology, the other intuitive. The chief instrument of the former was the geo-mancer's "compass", a condensed image of the cosmos in its spatial and temporal relationships - a sort of Chinese mandala.
The Chinese geomantic compass was frequently subdivided into three levels - Heaven, Earth and Man.
It thus reflected the tripartite division of the Chinese universe. In line with ancient Chinese speculation on the cosmos, the compass shows heaven as round and the earth as square. There is a magnetic needle at its centre. Concentric rings circling this needle relate the concepts of Yin and Yang, which express the polarity of all natural phenomena, to the concept of go-gyo, the five evolutive phases of Chinese natural science, to the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams of the l-Ching and to the cycles of the Chinese solar-lunar calendar. These correlations apply equally to outer nature and inner man. Practical geomancy might thus be described as a kind of acupuncture applied to nature, and acupuncture as as kind of geomancy applied to the human body. In view of this holistic understanding of the world, it is not supnsing that the design of Japanese gardens was also subject to the dictates of geomancy.
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this cosmology was the fact that the gardens, cities and palaces of China, and subsequently Japan, were all oriented due north. The Chinese believed that all power was derived from a non-personal Heaven and was transmitted to earth via the emperor, until he grew too weak to perform his celestial mandate. Just as the stars and constellations in the sky appeared to rotate around the Pole Star - referred to in ancient Chinese texts as the "Great Heavenly Emperor" -, so on earth all state and religious affairs revolved around the figure of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. He was the axis mundi of the earth just as the Pole Star was that of the firmament. Since the Pole Star lies almost due north, the itually correct position of the emperor was accepted as also being either to the north or at the centre of his capital and palace complex. This cosmological axiom led the Japanese to orient their capital cities, palaces, noble residences, gardens and even the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise all towards the north.
At the centre of the intuitive school of Chinese geomancy lay the search for an ideal site upon which to build an ancestrial burial vault, a house or even an entire town in harmony with the complex configurations of nature already existing or made by man. The Chinese visualized such ideal locations in the form of a comfortable armchair, its "back" a mountain and its "armrests" hills. In certain cases the "back" might be provided by artificial enclosures such as walls, hedges and buildings. The Chinese word for such an ideal site isxue, which means "lair", "den" or "cave", thereby emphasizing its protective function. Significantly, too, the same ideogram represents an acupuncture point in both the Chinese and Japanese languages.
Ideally, the "armchair" will be open and sloping towards the south, and flanked by mountains or buildings on its three remaining sides. These specifications are met both by the old capital of Heian-kyo, which is located within the broad Yamashiro basin (yamashiro literally means "mountain castle") and by the dairi, the imperial palace within the city itself.
Unlike the cosmological school, however, with its geomantic compass, the more intuitive school had no technical aids to fall back on. Locating ideal sites required instead an intuitive feel for what the Chinese callki, and what M. Porkert translates as "configurative energy", the energy flow within a complex natural or man-made configuration. An intuitive feel for this energy flow could only be acquired through practical training under the supervision of an experienced geomancer.
It is interesting to note that this same concept of ki is employed by traditional Chinese medicine, both in diagnosis and treatment. This and other points of similarity have led to the suggestion that acupuncture may have developed out of the historically older science of geomancy. Many of the names assigned to acupuncture points make clear references to geographic and topological features - "bubbling spring", "sea of energy", "small swamp", "bending pond", "inner garden", "outer hill", "receiving mountain" and more besides.
According to the formal school of geomancy, a location is characterized in terms of a dragon. The dragon's "belly" thereby represents the most auspicious site. The contours of the dragon's body are described by mountain ranges and winding rivers, which also represent the components of Yin and Yang. As mentioned earlier, the word for "landscape" - adopted into the Japanese from the original Chinese - is san-sui, which means literally "mountain-water". This conceptual and visual differentiation is utterly lost in translation. San-sui means the polarity of mountain and water and is one of the most important metaphysical concepts inspiring the formal language of Sino-Japanese garden architecture and its blood-brother, painting. The geomantic, or better, topomantic location of Heian-kyo is said to have been selected with regard to the mythological heavenly animals residing in the four "corners" of the universe. As writings dating from as far back as the Han dynasty reveal, it was believed that these animals, like all heavenly phenomena, manifested themselves on earth. Thus the Azure Dragon supposedly lived in a mountain stream in the east, the region of morning and spring. The home of the White Tiger lay in the mountains of the west, the region of evening and autumn. Morning and spring thereby represent the time of ascending Yang, while evening and autumn represent the period of ascending Yin. The Black Tortoise was thought to dwell in the mountains of the north, the direction of midnight and winter, while the Red Bird resided in the plains of the south, the direction of noon and summer.
Behind this notion of the four heavenly animals lies the ancient Chinese system of inductive correlations, known as wu-xing in Chinese and go-дуо in Japanese. Long translated as "five elements", the concept has more recently been rendered as "five activities" or "five evolutive phases". This system originated in the fourth century BC and existed alongside the traditional Chinese notions of Yin and Yang. As the latter represented an understanding of the universe in terms of polar opposites, so wu-xing proposed an equally dynamic interpretation of all reality in terms of five phases. These phases were symbolized by the ideograms for earth, wood, fire, metal and water. As shown in the diagram on page 43, the earth lies at the centre. The four segments of the circle correspond to the four cardinal points, to which are assigned wood (east), metal (west), water (north) and fire (south). Each of these go-дуо elements is attributed its own colour: earth is represented as yellow, wood as green, metal as white, water as black and fire as red. As visible in the diagram, these elements are part of a five-stage sequence of concentric circles, and are followed by rings containing the five main bodily organs, five human emotions, the four seasons and four times of day, until finally arriving at the four mythological animals. Everything under the sun found its place within these five stages of transformation, from the five planets and five basic types of animal to the elements of inner man: the five tastes, five voices and five major organs, which in turn correspond to five emotions - anger, joy, sorrow, terror and thoughtful reflection.
This five-phase system of correspondences thus constitutes both a macrocosmograph and a psychogram. It creates continuous cross-references between the outer world of nature and the inner world of man. Even today, the many Chinese pharmacies still practising at a local level in Japan will invariably have on display a chart of these correspondences. A further indication of the importance of this system may be seen in the fact that both the city and gardens of Heian-kyo were laid out in the form of Chinese mandalas, and can thus be interpreted as microcosmic replicas of the universe.
The ancient Japanese belief that evil spirits always come from the north-east, from the ki-mon, the Devil's Gate, probably had its roots in a natural phenomenon: in China and Japan, the bitterly cold winter winds come from the north-east. China furthermore suffered barbarian attacks from this same direction throughout its history, while the hostile and militant tribes who populated the north-eastern regions of Japan were only finally subdued by the Yamato clan. Heian-kyo was safely protected from any such "threat" by Mount Hiei, the highest peak in the armchair of mountains cradling the former Japanese capital and lying exactly north-east of the city.
The gardens of the Heian period may be found in three different types of setting. Some are contained within the palaces of the emperor and the aristocracy and thus fully subordinate to their architectural surroundings. Others are sited on the city outskirts, acting as a kind of intermediary between the urban environment and unspoilt nature. Others still adorn the main courtyards of Pure Land Buddhist temples.
The Japanese sense of beauty:
The veneration of the unique in nature and the perfection of the man-made type
The early Chinese gardens attached to imperial palaces served as hunting grounds. Such gardens were less the object of architectural design than their Near Eastern contemporaries, but were nevertheless enclosed by walls. Here, too, nature was moulded and monitored; even the animals within the park were subject to human control. The ancient gardens of the Near and Far East represented no opposite extremes of "unnatural" and "natural". They differed simply in the type and degree of their artificiality.
The Japanese garden displays this same figurative symbiosis of right angle and natural form in ever new variations throughout the five major epochs of its history. In his seminal essay on Japanese design, Walter Dodd Ramberg expresses his view that beauty is perceived and venerated in Japan either as a property of natural accident or as the perfection of man-made type. In Shintoism, the oldest native Japanese religion, the unique or extraordinary in nature is often venerated as go-shintai, the abode of a deity. Go-shintai may be an unusually-shaped rock, a tree weathered over the centuries, a strikingly jagged mountain or a waterfall of rare shape or size. In later periods of Japanese history artists made deliberate use of the beauty of natural chance, as revealed in the sophisticated flaws of their pottery glazing and the splashes in their calligraphy.
At the same time, however, the Japanese culture also perceives and pursues beauty in the perfection of the man-made type - in the delicate proportions of the diaphanous paper screen, the wooden lattices on the facades of traditional town houses and the clear linearity of the modular system of classic Japanese architecture. The constructed artefact is viewed as a sort of building set, whose individual blocks are combined according to fixed rules with ever greater functionality and aesthetic perfection. Man's play instinct naturally prompts him to explore and expand these self-imposed systems in ever new permutations.
These two ways of perceiving beauty - as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type - are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious supenmposition that best characterizes the traditional Japanese perception of beauty.
I see this overlapping of the rational and the random, the right angle and the natural form, at all levels of Japanese design: in ornamental tea-house niches (tokonoma) hung with scrolls of calligraphy, in a composition of natural, moss-covered rocks viewed through the rectangular frame of a traditional paper sliding screen, or in a theatrical decor of lions bounding through a bamboo grove which takes up the regular rhythm of the sliding internal partitions below. At their best, these two opposites of random and imposed order complement each other like the Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other. Without the contrast provided by a rectangular visual frame or rectilinear background, it would not be possible to recognize a handful of boulders, however carefully selected, as a garden. Thus the "garden" in Japan cannot be treated independently of architecture. The fortuitous order of nature serves to reinforce the rational order imposed by the right angle, and vice versa. In the quest for the perfect fusion -physical and intellectual - of these two opposites, in the quest for a kind of aesthetic unio mystica, I see a recurrent motif of the Japanese sense of beauty, one which runs like a hidden thread through the great works of Japanese art right up to the present day.
The early Chinese gardens attached to imperial palaces served as hunting grounds. Such gardens were less the object of architectural design than their Near Eastern contemporaries, but were nevertheless enclosed by walls. Here, too, nature was moulded and monitored; even the animals within the park were subject to human control. The ancient gardens of the Near and Far East represented no opposite extremes of "unnatural" and "natural". They differed simply in the type and degree of their artificiality.
The Japanese garden displays this same figurative symbiosis of right angle and natural form in ever new variations throughout the five major epochs of its history. In his seminal essay on Japanese design, Walter Dodd Ramberg expresses his view that beauty is perceived and venerated in Japan either as a property of natural accident or as the perfection of man-made type. In Shintoism, the oldest native Japanese religion, the unique or extraordinary in nature is often venerated as go-shintai, the abode of a deity. Go-shintai may be an unusually-shaped rock, a tree weathered over the centuries, a strikingly jagged mountain or a waterfall of rare shape or size. In later periods of Japanese history artists made deliberate use of the beauty of natural chance, as revealed in the sophisticated flaws of their pottery glazing and the splashes in their calligraphy.
At the same time, however, the Japanese culture also perceives and pursues beauty in the perfection of the man-made type - in the delicate proportions of the diaphanous paper screen, the wooden lattices on the facades of traditional town houses and the clear linearity of the modular system of classic Japanese architecture. The constructed artefact is viewed as a sort of building set, whose individual blocks are combined according to fixed rules with ever greater functionality and aesthetic perfection. Man's play instinct naturally prompts him to explore and expand these self-imposed systems in ever new permutations.
These two ways of perceiving beauty - as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type - are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious supenmposition that best characterizes the traditional Japanese perception of beauty.
I see this overlapping of the rational and the random, the right angle and the natural form, at all levels of Japanese design: in ornamental tea-house niches (tokonoma) hung with scrolls of calligraphy, in a composition of natural, moss-covered rocks viewed through the rectangular frame of a traditional paper sliding screen, or in a theatrical decor of lions bounding through a bamboo grove which takes up the regular rhythm of the sliding internal partitions below. At their best, these two opposites of random and imposed order complement each other like the Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other. Without the contrast provided by a rectangular visual frame or rectilinear background, it would not be possible to recognize a handful of boulders, however carefully selected, as a garden. Thus the "garden" in Japan cannot be treated independently of architecture. The fortuitous order of nature serves to reinforce the rational order imposed by the right angle, and vice versa. In the quest for the perfect fusion -physical and intellectual - of these two opposites, in the quest for a kind of aesthetic unio mystica, I see a recurrent motif of the Japanese sense of beauty, one which runs like a hidden thread through the great works of Japanese art right up to the present day.
Sakutei-ki: "The Classic of Garden-Making"
The Sakutei-ki opens with an excellent introduction to the ground rules of garden architecture in the Heian period:
„The main points to be observed when erecting rocks are:
- Design the pond with respect to its position in the land, follow its request; when you encounter a poten tial site, consider its atmosphere; think of the moun tains and waters of living nature and reflect constantly upon such settings;
- When copying the gardens of famous masters of old, bear in mind the intention of your patron and de sign your version according to your own taste.
-When recreating in your garden the famous natu ral sights of other parts of the world, assimilate such places of beauty so that they become truly your own. Let your garden express their overall effect. Rocks should thus be erected and harmoniously interrelated."
I have translated the first words of the scroll, ishi wo tateru, as "to erect rocks". This literal, perhaps unusual rendering is based on T Tamura's revised version of the Sakutei-ki. Tamura believes that the expression ishi wo tateru, and hence the practice of erecting rocks, lies at the heart of Japanese garden architecture of the Heian period. The author of the Sakutei-ki himself seems rather baffled by the concept, and observes: "It is gen erally speaking rare to erect rocks. Rocks are usually laid. We do not seem to use the phrase to lay rocks' in Japanese, however." I see this as just another example of the very concrete and direct language of historical texts. Abstractions such as "landscape", "scenery" or even "garden" were not yet common currency in Heian times. Instead, words which described a con crete, central activity within the garden-making process were used to denote garden design as a whole. Ishi wo tateru is thus used in other contemporary Heian sources as a synonym for garden architecture perse.30 The elements within a garden are not seen as inani mate objects but as beings with their own character and even their own faces. The Sakutei-ki states: „When erecting rocks you should first carry big and small rocks into the garden and assemble them at one spot. Then you should place the standing rocks head upwards, and the lying rocks face upwards, and distribute them across the garden..."
The design principles discussed within the Sakutei-ki fall into two types, reflecting two parallel attitudes to garden architecture. The first type are principles im ported from China; they clearly reflect the relatively strict precepts of Chinese geomancy, employ the mythological metaphors of crane and turtle and the Buddhist triad - all proof of the Heian "craze" for things Chinese. Principles of the second type describe -in considerably vaguer terms - the somewhat more in tuitional approaches appropriate to garden architec ture. According to Japanese scholar Masahiro Tanaka, this second type of principle reveals the "Japanese soul" of the Sakutei-ki.
Amongst these principles Tanaka identifies four con stantly recurring expressions, which are examined be low; they are also italicized in the translation above.
- Shotoku no sansui: literally "mountain-water of liv ing nature". To be borne in mind when erecting rocks, building waterfalls or creating streams and ponds. The expression implies that a garden should be created in the likeness of real nature.
- Kohan nishitagau: literally "following the request". When building a garden stream, an island or a water fall, it is vital to "follow" the "request" of rocks already existing on the site. The concept is frequently expressed simply with the word "follow". Heian gardeners saw rocks not as inorganic matter, but as beings with their own personalities to be treated with love and respect. A precondition of true creativity was the ability to achieve an inner stillness and emptiness within which their "requests" could be heard.
-Suchigaete: "asymmetrical" or "off-balance". Rocks, islands and ponds should always be placed asymmetrically within the otherwise highly symmetrical framework of Shinden-style palaces. The asymmetry of
nature is thereby set against the symmetry of the man-made artefact.
-Fuzei: literally "a breeze of feeling". In Heian times this term was used to describe the genius loci, the aes thetic spirit of a particular place. Fuzei may be discov ered in nature or created in the garden. Confusingly, perhaps, the same word is used to denote the personal artistic taste of the garden architect or his client. Fuzei somehow unites in one concept two apparent oppo-sites: the objectively-given aesthetic spirit of a place, and the subjectively-experienced aesthetic taste of the gardener or his patron.
Tanaka takes these four expressions as proof that the garden architects of the Heian period strove to become one with nature and then to follow its requests. Their aims naturally went far beyond merely copying nature. Their final compositions inevitably reflected the "tastes" of the garden-maker and client, themselves the subjects of cultural conditioning. The gardens most popular in the Heian period are gardens of islands in a pond, based as closely as possible on a natural scene. Often designed to illustrate the charms of the four sea sons or famous natural sights, their lyrical themes are the same of those of Heian poetry and yamato paint ing. The garden architecture of the Heian period is the art of the empathetic imitation of the external forms of nature.
Hindu cosmology: The mountain as axis mundi
The arrival of Buddhism in Japan led to the adoption of a particularly potent archetypal image from the cos mology of a foreign culture: the image of Mount Meru (Shumi-sen in Japanese), the cosmic mountain at the centre of the universe. Representations of this moun tain can be found in many Japanese gardens. The earli est written Buddhist sources, themselves based on even older concepts of Hindu cosmology, see the universe as "a single, circular world system surrounded by a mountain range of iron, cakravala, from which its name is derived"
Buddhist cakravala cosmology exists in a number of forms, varying according to tradition. All, however, ap pear to share the same central concept of the universe as a circular disk with Mount Meru at its centre. Lying in concentric circles around this axis mundi are seven golden mountain ranges and an eighth and last moun tain range of iron, the cakravala. There are oceans be tween the mountains; only in the ocean between the seventh mountain range and the cakravala are there four islands inhabited by man. A further eight unin habited islands float in the other oceans. The disk rests on a foundation of golden earth, which in turn floats on water.
It is important to remember that this image portrays the universe as a whole, and not just our own earth. Mount Meru is the axis of that universe; the golden mountain ranges which encircle it denote the various realms of meditation and heavenly spheres.5This origi nally Indian cosmography was taken up by the Japa nese garden. Mount Meru can thus often be found as a single, towering rock, sometimes surrounded by sub sidiary stones, prominently located within an individual garden. In other cases, the representation of all nine mountains and eight oceans underlies the design of an entire garden. One of the most beautiful examples here is the garden in front of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, where the various islands and rocks in Mirror Lake can be seen as an illustration of an originally Hindu concept of the universe.
Touching the soul of the Japanese islanders even more profoundly than the details of Buddhist-Hinduist cosmology was, however, the powerful image of the mountain at the centre of the universe and of the wafers of both life and death. Mountain and water converge in the image of the island, which appears in Japanese cosmology - as indeed elsewhere - as the first manifestation of land, indeed of form as such.
The recurrent appearance of the cosmic mountain throughout the history of the Japanese garden points to the resonance which the simplicity, power and beauty of this pre-scientific model of the universe finds in the collective Japanese subconscious. What I have here termed an "archetypal image", Mircea Eliade calls a "symbol". A true "symbol", says Eliade, "speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelli gence". The concept of the island in the ocean is pre cisely such a symbol.
Just as the ancient civilizations of East Asia built stupas, temples, even entire cities in the shape of the mandala, symbol of the structural principles of the cos mos as a whole, so it comes as no surprise to find this same mandala, with the axis mundi at its centre, inspir ing the design of many a Japanese garden.
Sakutei-ki: "The Classic of Garden-Making"
The Sakutei-ki, the classic manual of garden architec ture, provides another inexhaustible fund of informa tion regarding Heian attitudes towards nature and gar den design. Japanese scholars consider it probable that the treatise was written in the latter half of the elev enth century by Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a son of Fujiwara no Yonmichi. the builder of Byodo-m temple This attribution would make the author not a profes sional gardener but a member of the Heian nobility, and probably one who avidly followed - and perhaps actively oversaw - the creation of many a palace gar den. The Sakutei-h appears to be simply a compilation of the contemporary rules of garden-making Whether these rules were already common knowledge and found in other books now lost to us. whether they were passed from teacher to pupil as part of an oral tradition, or whether they were stnctly secret, remains a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, the book by Tachibana originally consisted of two scrolls and bore the more appropriate title of Senzai hisho. "Secret Dis courses on Gardens".
The colophon of the scroll, a tailpiece which tradi tionally identifies the writer and place of composition, reads: "A foolish old man. This is a very precious treas ure; it should be kept stnctly secret'." There is reason
to believe, however, that this colophon was only added much later, when the knowledge contained in the scroll had acquired commercial value for a Japanese nobility which had lost most of its power to the samu rai warrior class.
At one point in the Sa'kutei-ki the author himself ad mits: "I have recorded here, without attempting to judge what is good or bad, what I have heard over the years concerning the erecting of rocks The priest En no Enjan acquired the secrets of rock-setting by mutual transmission. I am in possession of his scriptures Even though I have studied and understood its mam princi ples, its aesthetic meaning is so inexhaustible that I frequently fail to grasp it Nor is anyone still alive to day who knows all there is to know about the subject By taking natural scenery of mountains and water, but forgetting the rules and taboos of garden architecture, I fear we will end up with gardens upon which we have forcibly imposed our own forms "
In Heian times, "mutual transmission", like "secret transmission", probably meant simply the passing of knowledge between members of the nobility and Bud dhist priests, the two classes of Heian society actively involved in the study and practice of the arts, and par ticularly garden design Furthermore, "secret" in a Buddhist context did not mean that a text was physically hidden away, but rather that a "key" was necessary to its understanding This "key" would be transmitted orally from master to disciple only when the latter was deemed worthy to receive it
The Sakutei-ki discusses garden art and architectural details within the context of the Shinden-style palace. Sadly it contains no illustrations. The book opens with an introduction to the general principles of garden de sign, and then proceeds to describe the five types of garden which may be laid out along the banks of ponds and streams. It distinguishes between eight types of island and offers some practical advice on ac tual construction. The author further identifies nine ba sic types of waterfall, discusses the various possibilities of garden streams, the different forms of rock settings, and concludes with a jumbled assortment of orally-transmitted dos and don'ts.
The colophon of the scroll, a tailpiece which tradi tionally identifies the writer and place of composition, reads: "A foolish old man. This is a very precious treas ure; it should be kept stnctly secret'." There is reason
to believe, however, that this colophon was only added much later, when the knowledge contained in the scroll had acquired commercial value for a Japanese nobility which had lost most of its power to the samu rai warrior class.
At one point in the Sa'kutei-ki the author himself ad mits: "I have recorded here, without attempting to judge what is good or bad, what I have heard over the years concerning the erecting of rocks The priest En no Enjan acquired the secrets of rock-setting by mutual transmission. I am in possession of his scriptures Even though I have studied and understood its mam princi ples, its aesthetic meaning is so inexhaustible that I frequently fail to grasp it Nor is anyone still alive to day who knows all there is to know about the subject By taking natural scenery of mountains and water, but forgetting the rules and taboos of garden architecture, I fear we will end up with gardens upon which we have forcibly imposed our own forms "
In Heian times, "mutual transmission", like "secret transmission", probably meant simply the passing of knowledge between members of the nobility and Bud dhist priests, the two classes of Heian society actively involved in the study and practice of the arts, and par ticularly garden design Furthermore, "secret" in a Buddhist context did not mean that a text was physically hidden away, but rather that a "key" was necessary to its understanding This "key" would be transmitted orally from master to disciple only when the latter was deemed worthy to receive it
The Sakutei-ki discusses garden art and architectural details within the context of the Shinden-style palace. Sadly it contains no illustrations. The book opens with an introduction to the general principles of garden de sign, and then proceeds to describe the five types of garden which may be laid out along the banks of ponds and streams. It distinguishes between eight types of island and offers some practical advice on ac tual construction. The author further identifies nine ba sic types of waterfall, discusses the various possibilities of garden streams, the different forms of rock settings, and concludes with a jumbled assortment of orally-transmitted dos and don'ts.
Heian attitudes towards nature and garden design
Neither the few surviving remains of gardens of the Heian period nor the hypothetical reconstructions of those lost to us provide sufficient bases upon which to judge contemporary Heian attitudes towards nature and garden architecture. We are thus obliged to rely on historical records of the day, of which two literary sources of particular relevance shall be discussed here The first illustrates the social function of palace gar dens, while the second paints a useful picture of gar den design and construction.
Japan has four distinct seasons, and their transition
Japan has four distinct seasons, and their transition
can be predicted to within one or two days The subtle transformations taking place during these periods of natural change are the central themes of Japanese poetry and painting and the Japanese festival calendar Thus the patterns of kimonos, the flower arrangements in the decorative alcoves of traditional houses, even the type and timing of food served in tradition-conscious Japanese restaurants all reflect the time of year. It is rare even today to receive a letter which does not open with a reference to a seasonal flower or the currently-prevailing humidity or cold
Although the Japanese garden has. over the course of the centuries, evolved through a remarkable variety of sizes and styles, it nevertheless displays a design logic which rs intimately bound up with the genius too of the Japanese landscape - in other words, with the essence of the country as it appears to the human imagination.
Buddhist faith:The paradise of Amida Buddha
Meditation and magic were not the only paths traced in the architecture of Japanese gardens. A third path, that of devotion, inspired a vision of paradise which found concrete correlation in the pond islands within 8uddhist temple precincts
Mahayana Buddhism speculates that space is divided into ten realms which contain countless numbers of world systems Some of these systems lie under the influence of specific Buddhas One such system is Sukhavaii. or Jodo in Japanese, a "Pure Land" under the influence of Amida (Amitabha). a transhistoncal Buddha of infinite light and eternal life. It is located, according to this cosmology, at the "provisional limit of the worlds to the West" in an otherwise "unlimited universe".
To be reborn m Amida's Pure Land after ones death m this world was considered a significant step towards Buddhahood. Belief in Amida and his paradise can be traced back to three Indian sutras, which arose be tween the second and fifth centuries AD, m which Shakyamunt tells of Amida's vow to save anyone who faithfully devotes their life to him. Shakyamum then proceeds to give a vivid description of Amida's para dise, where magnificent palaces are set m beautiful gardens of shady terraces and lotus ponds
The Mahayana Buddhism from which this idea stems is often called the "Great Vehicle" of Buddhism. In place of the arduous meditalional practices of other Buddhist seas, it employs "easier" methods such as chant, prayer and the contemplation of images Per haps this explains why Pure Land Buddhism has at tracted the largest following of all the Buddhist sects m China and Japan It is only natural, therefore, that it should also have the largest number of temples in Ja pan. When looked at more closely, however, the mod els underlying human representations of Amida's para dise reveal themselves to be worldly rather than heav enly in origin The visions of Amida's Pure Land both as painted on mandalas and recreated in garden architec ture bear close resemblance to the royal pleasure gar dens of the ancient Middle East. It is probable, there fore, that Ihe mythological Pure Land of the original Indian sutras was based on descriptions of Middle-Eastern palaces; this would in turn explain why the legendary country lies in the West, and not in the East. The fear of death, as we have already said, runs deeper than all other fears, and goes beyond the bounds of mere history. And thus these last three archetypes of Japanese garden architecture, based respectively on Hindu cosmology, Chinese myth and Buddhist faith, all have one thing in common: they are expressions of man's desire to outwit the laws of nature to which he is subject and to escape death. Paradoxically, man seeks to transcend Nature by means of man-made nature.
The rock archetype: iwakura and iwasaka
The Japanese fascination, indeed obsession with binding, manipulating and even crippling plants for gardens or miniature landscapes thus has its roots in a cultural phenomenon dating back literally thousands of years.
The appreciation of the beauty of natural rock has been one of the most pronounced characteristics of the Japanese garden throughout its history. Rocks are employed in garden composition for their sensory, scenic and symbolic effects, a distinction David Slawson introduced. Many Japanese and Western academics trace this love of pure, unadulterated stone to the worship - possibly dating from neolithic times - of huge boulders and rocky outcrops such as those found in ancient Shinto shrines. These rocks were often bound with the shime-nawa ropes mentioned above to indicate their sacred character, as is the case in the Omiwa shrine near Nara. Rocks thus identified are accepted as go-shintai, the abode of a deity, leading many to conclude that prehistoric Shintoism must have undergone an animistic phase. It is my opinion, however, that the appreciation of the beauty of rocks, and the worship of a divine presence concealed behind them, is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of Shintoism. Such rocks were originally called iwakura and iwasaka, literally meaning "rock seat" and "rock boundary", suggesting that they were placed in preanimistic times as markers, denoting occupation of land or property. At some stage their original meaning and function were forgotten, and they acquired religious as well as territorial significance. Later still even similar naturally occurring (not man-made) rock-formations came to be seen as abodes of deities.
Mirei Shigemori, on the other hand, argues that certain unique natural stone and rock formations were considered sacred from the very beginning. To these were added, over the course of time, other rocks, thereby creating a sacred precinct which was at least in part man-made. In the final phase, a particular sanctuary might have all its rocks imported. This marked the beginning of Japanese garden architecture proper.
However different these standpoints, both underline the special status afforded the natural rock in Japan. Castle walls aside, natural stone has never played a mapr role as a building material in traditional Japanese architecture. On the contrary, stone is finely appreciated for the subtle distinctions of its form, colour and texture, and an individual rock may even be assigned the human characteristics of head and feet, front and back. Rock has thereby acquired archetypal status, and a Japanese garden without an unusual rock or rock group, natural or carved, is quite inconceivable.
Gardens within temples of Pure Land Buddhism
The urban temple complexes of the Asuka and Nara eras were built around large, open inner courtyards, which functioned as a setting for religious ceremonies and thus paralleled those in the imperial palace used for state ceremonials. Indeed, in the highly formal and symmetrical alignment of its lecture halls, pagodas and corridors, the sacred architecture of these early Bud dhist temples largely followed the secular model of imperial Chinese palaces.
The inner courtyards of these early temples were largely devoid of gardens, a situation which began to change as from the middle of the eleventh century, when the Fujiwara princes started funding the building of Pure Land temples inside and outside Heian-kyo. These new temples all included ornamental pond-and-island gardens of the first Japanese prototype category, and sought to emulate the Shinden-style palace archi tecture of the early Heian period.
In order to understand the temple architecture of the Heian and Fujiwara eras, it is important to consider the underlying mood of the times. There reigned, at least amongst the privileged classes, the feeling of mujokan, a sense of the impermanence of the world and of the dreamlike quality of one's own existence. Japanologist Ivan Morris cites a number of images from the litera ture of the Heian period which reflect such preoccupa tions. In a poem by lady-in-waiting Akashi addressed to Prince Genji, life is described as akenu yo no yume,
a "night of endless dreams"; in another example, the last volume of Murasaki's famous "Tale of Genji" is entitled Yume no ukehashi, "the floating bridge of dreams" over which man passes from one life to the next.
This sense of impermanence was largely inspired by the widespread belief that the world had entered the last phase of its history. According to Pure Land Bud dhist thinking, humankind had passed through shobo, the period of true law covering the first 500 years after Buddha's death, and zobo, the period of false law which had lasted the 500 years after that, to reach mappo, the period of ending law. It was believed that salvation could only be attained in this final stage through contemplation of the Buddha or by simply uttering the name of Amida Buddha.
This sense of fin-de-siecle gloom, of the futility of all human endeavour, was the inevitable fate of a wealthy society seeking to cure the problem of endless free time with cultural pursuits such as poetry competitions, calligraphy, banquets, semi-religious rituals and state ceremonies, as well as the more physical sports of horse racing, cockfighting and archery. Mujokan, the sense of impermanence, and eiga, the sense of worldly pomp, are simply two sides of the same coin. But true religion, the understanding of the self, is the greatest luxury of all. Only when man's material and aesthetic needs are met does he become aware of his spiritual deficiences.
Rather than leading to hopeless immobility, however, the worldy boredom and religious despair of the Heian period resulted, paradoxically, in a blossoming of the arts. It produced some of the finest poetry and novels m Japanese literary history, and some of the most beautiful sculpture and gardens.
The temple gardens of the Fujiwara era were seen as representations of that Pure Land believed to be located somewhere in the West. Just as two-dimen sional, painted mandalas of Amida's paradise had ear lier taken imperial Chinese architecture as their inspira tion, so the architects of the later Heian period similarly looked back to concrete models when composing their three-dimensional mandalas of buildings and gardens. But these models were now the Shinden-style palace complexes of the early Heian period, with their rectan gular "armchair" design and pond gardens enclosed within a south garden. Thus the Buddhist temple com plex may be seen as a logical continuation of that first Japanese garden prototype. But whereas it was for merly a mere backdrop for courtly entertainments, it now assumed a new, religious significance.
Nothing survives of the early temples of Pure Land Buddhism in present-day Kyoto. A hypothetical recon struction of Hojo-ji temple suggests that Buddhist com plexes shared the same north-south orientation and symmetrical ground plan as the palaces of the aristoc racy. Hojo-ji was begun in 1019 by Fujiwara no Michi-naga, who is also said to have died within its walls reciting Amida's name. The large temple covered an area of nearly 300 square yards. New to Buddhist tem ple architecture was the size and position of its Amida Hall, west of the mam court, with its eleven bays and
nine Amida statues each some fifteen feet tall. New, too, was its pond garden with a central island, housing a stage for religious ceremonies and concerts.
The splendour of the Heian vision of paradise on earth can still be glimpsed outside the former capital in Byodo-in, the "Temple of Equality and Impartiality" built in 1052 by Fujiwara no Yorimichi on the banks of the Uji river. This temple centred entirely around the Hoo-do, the famous Phoenix Hall. Inside the Phoenix Hall was a large statue of Buddha; since cosmological considerations required it to face east, the entire com plex was in turn oriented east-west. We know from historical sources that the Buddha statue was wor shipped from a platform in the pond, the worshipper thereby facing due west, the direction in which the Pure Land of Amida was believed to lie. Musicians would play from decorated barges floating on the wa ters. The pond itself has changed shape a number of times in its history, but continues to fulfil its original function: to mirror in its waters the elegant symmetry of the temple architecture.
Towards the end of the eleventh century, a northern branch of the Fujiwara clan built a dazzling succession of temples and Pure-Land paradise gardens. The major ity lay in Hiraizumi in northern Honshu; all employed the familiar armchair ground plan, in which a garden is cradled by surrounding buildings, and were thus illus trations of the first Japanese garden prototype. Little has survived of these gardens, however. Only Motsu-ji Temple, built by Prince Fujiwara Motohira (died 1157), still preserves something of the original shape of its pond and islands. The bold rock settings on its shores are amongst those best preserved from Heian times
Garden and temple were treated as an integral unit throughout the entire era of Fujiwara temple-building. Over time, however, certain changes nevertheless took place Whereas the gardens of Hojo-ji temple, which marked the beginning of the great phase of Fujrwara building, are entirely subordinate to the right angle of the temple architecture, the architecture of Motsu-ji Temple, which closed this magnificent era. is entirely subordinate to the design of the garden. The nght an gle has abandoned its framing function to the garden's powerful embrace.
The inner courtyards of these early temples were largely devoid of gardens, a situation which began to change as from the middle of the eleventh century, when the Fujiwara princes started funding the building of Pure Land temples inside and outside Heian-kyo. These new temples all included ornamental pond-and-island gardens of the first Japanese prototype category, and sought to emulate the Shinden-style palace archi tecture of the early Heian period.
In order to understand the temple architecture of the Heian and Fujiwara eras, it is important to consider the underlying mood of the times. There reigned, at least amongst the privileged classes, the feeling of mujokan, a sense of the impermanence of the world and of the dreamlike quality of one's own existence. Japanologist Ivan Morris cites a number of images from the litera ture of the Heian period which reflect such preoccupa tions. In a poem by lady-in-waiting Akashi addressed to Prince Genji, life is described as akenu yo no yume,
a "night of endless dreams"; in another example, the last volume of Murasaki's famous "Tale of Genji" is entitled Yume no ukehashi, "the floating bridge of dreams" over which man passes from one life to the next.
This sense of impermanence was largely inspired by the widespread belief that the world had entered the last phase of its history. According to Pure Land Bud dhist thinking, humankind had passed through shobo, the period of true law covering the first 500 years after Buddha's death, and zobo, the period of false law which had lasted the 500 years after that, to reach mappo, the period of ending law. It was believed that salvation could only be attained in this final stage through contemplation of the Buddha or by simply uttering the name of Amida Buddha.
This sense of fin-de-siecle gloom, of the futility of all human endeavour, was the inevitable fate of a wealthy society seeking to cure the problem of endless free time with cultural pursuits such as poetry competitions, calligraphy, banquets, semi-religious rituals and state ceremonies, as well as the more physical sports of horse racing, cockfighting and archery. Mujokan, the sense of impermanence, and eiga, the sense of worldly pomp, are simply two sides of the same coin. But true religion, the understanding of the self, is the greatest luxury of all. Only when man's material and aesthetic needs are met does he become aware of his spiritual deficiences.
Rather than leading to hopeless immobility, however, the worldy boredom and religious despair of the Heian period resulted, paradoxically, in a blossoming of the arts. It produced some of the finest poetry and novels m Japanese literary history, and some of the most beautiful sculpture and gardens.
The temple gardens of the Fujiwara era were seen as representations of that Pure Land believed to be located somewhere in the West. Just as two-dimen sional, painted mandalas of Amida's paradise had ear lier taken imperial Chinese architecture as their inspira tion, so the architects of the later Heian period similarly looked back to concrete models when composing their three-dimensional mandalas of buildings and gardens. But these models were now the Shinden-style palace complexes of the early Heian period, with their rectan gular "armchair" design and pond gardens enclosed within a south garden. Thus the Buddhist temple com plex may be seen as a logical continuation of that first Japanese garden prototype. But whereas it was for merly a mere backdrop for courtly entertainments, it now assumed a new, religious significance.
Nothing survives of the early temples of Pure Land Buddhism in present-day Kyoto. A hypothetical recon struction of Hojo-ji temple suggests that Buddhist com plexes shared the same north-south orientation and symmetrical ground plan as the palaces of the aristoc racy. Hojo-ji was begun in 1019 by Fujiwara no Michi-naga, who is also said to have died within its walls reciting Amida's name. The large temple covered an area of nearly 300 square yards. New to Buddhist tem ple architecture was the size and position of its Amida Hall, west of the mam court, with its eleven bays and
nine Amida statues each some fifteen feet tall. New, too, was its pond garden with a central island, housing a stage for religious ceremonies and concerts.
The splendour of the Heian vision of paradise on earth can still be glimpsed outside the former capital in Byodo-in, the "Temple of Equality and Impartiality" built in 1052 by Fujiwara no Yorimichi on the banks of the Uji river. This temple centred entirely around the Hoo-do, the famous Phoenix Hall. Inside the Phoenix Hall was a large statue of Buddha; since cosmological considerations required it to face east, the entire com plex was in turn oriented east-west. We know from historical sources that the Buddha statue was wor shipped from a platform in the pond, the worshipper thereby facing due west, the direction in which the Pure Land of Amida was believed to lie. Musicians would play from decorated barges floating on the wa ters. The pond itself has changed shape a number of times in its history, but continues to fulfil its original function: to mirror in its waters the elegant symmetry of the temple architecture.
Towards the end of the eleventh century, a northern branch of the Fujiwara clan built a dazzling succession of temples and Pure-Land paradise gardens. The major ity lay in Hiraizumi in northern Honshu; all employed the familiar armchair ground plan, in which a garden is cradled by surrounding buildings, and were thus illus trations of the first Japanese garden prototype. Little has survived of these gardens, however. Only Motsu-ji Temple, built by Prince Fujiwara Motohira (died 1157), still preserves something of the original shape of its pond and islands. The bold rock settings on its shores are amongst those best preserved from Heian times
Garden and temple were treated as an integral unit throughout the entire era of Fujiwara temple-building. Over time, however, certain changes nevertheless took place Whereas the gardens of Hojo-ji temple, which marked the beginning of the great phase of Fujrwara building, are entirely subordinate to the right angle of the temple architecture, the architecture of Motsu-ji Temple, which closed this magnificent era. is entirely subordinate to the design of the garden. The nght an gle has abandoned its framing function to the garden's powerful embrace.
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