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.