Ginkaku-ji

Yoshimasa (1435-1490), grandson of Yoshimitsu, was installed as the eighth Ashikaga shogun when still a child. Even as an adult, however, he took no particular interest in military and political matters, but proved instead a generous patron of the arts. In the course of the bloody Onin Wars which razed Kyoto and its beautiful palaces to the ground, Yoshimasa handed the reins of power over to his son and retired to devote himself wholeheartedly to the construction of his hillside retreat. This Higashiyama dono, "Villa of the Eastern Hills" as it was known in his lifetime, subsequently became the centre of cultural life in Japan. After Yoshimasa's death, the villa-palace was converted into a Zen temple, called Jisho-ji. The temple is more popularly known as Ginkaku-ji, the "Temple of the Silver Pavilion". We do not know, however, whether the name simply reflected wishful thinking on the part of Yoshimasa or whether the pavilion was indeed silver plated in emulation of its gilded predecessor built some 80 years earlier.

Yoshimasa, like Yoshimitsu before him, found the inspiration for his new pavilion in Saiho-ji, the "Temple of Western Fragrances" - albeit interpreting his model very differently to his shogun grandfather. The Silver Pavilion was based on the ruri-den which Zen master Muso Kokushi has conceived as part of the Saiho-ji complex. In contrast to the three-storeyed Golden Pavilion, the Silver Pavilion has only two floors, and houses a statue of the Buddha of Compassion on the second floor. The ground floor, which commands a magnificent view of the garden beyond, was used for meditation.

The division of the garden into two parts is also taken from Saiho-ji. Thus the lower section contains a garden for strolling centred around a pond, while the steep slopes of the upper section reveal a dry rock garden.

Of the twelve buildings which originally composed Ginkaku-ji temple, the Silver Pavilion and a hall containing a statue of Amida Buddha are the only two to have survived into the present. It is thus no longer possible to appreciate the gardens in their original setting. It is nevertheless clear that here, too, nature was intended to be viewed through, or offset against, the rectangular framework of wooden temple architecture.

The lower part of the garden, with its pond and islands, remains a variation upon the earlier Heian prototype, although its winding paths and stone bridges now encourage strolling rather than boating. The original plan nevertheless included a boat-house. One of the garden's chief attractions is its sengetsu-sen waterfall, the "spring in which the moon washes". It was clearly intended to capture the reflection of the moon "washing" itself in the waters.

The Ginkaku-ji we see today is a mere shadow of the temple which Yoshimasa had originally planned. But building was still unfinished at his death in 1490, and the palace subsequently fell into dispair. Decay was compounded by looting, and it was not until the early seventeenth century that restoration work was begun.

Two specific aspects of Ginkaku-ji's gardens foreshadow the mature form of the dry landscape garden of the late Muromachi era. The first is a dry rock arrangement closely resembling that of Saiho-ji. It is located on a steep hillside in the upper part of the garden, near the ocha no i, the "tea water well". The second is the fact that, for the first time in the history of the Japanese garden, the topographical elements of ocean and mountain are symbolized solely with sand. Thus the ocean is represented by ginshanada, literally "silver sand open sea", an area of white sand raked to suggest the waves of the sea. The "mountain" rising from its centre is the kogetsudai, "platform facing the moon", a cone of sand recalling the shape of Mount Fuji. These two features would have been highly unusual for a garden of Yoshimasa's time and it is uncertain whether he actually planned them himself. No reference to them is found until a hundred years after his death, in a poem composed by a Zen monk at Tenryu-ji temple in 1578.34

Kinkaku-ji

Both the layout and rockwork of the Saiho-ji and Tenryu-ji temple gardens were to provide models for the palace gardens of the Ashikaga shoguns, rulers concerned to emphasize their cultural interests just as much as their political power. They collected Sung paintings and other works of Chinese art and were seen as active patrons of "modernism". They were keenly interested in the newly-arrived Zen Buddhism and, following their abdication of political and military power, took to retiring to palatial villas outside the city in order to live the monastic life. As variations upon the Heian pond-and-island prototype, however, the gardens accompanying these shogunal villas are far too lavish in both their overall design and individual detail to pass for the austere retreat of a Zen monk.

Kitayama dono, the "Villa of the Northern Hills" dating from Kamakura times, was originally built by Saionji Kintsune in the Shinden style. It was subsequently converted in the early 1390s into a personal retreat for sho-gun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who renamed it Rokuon-ji, "Temple of the Deer Park", after the famous deer park near Benares where Gautama Buddha delivered his first sermon after his enlightenment. Today the palace is called Kinkaku-ji, the "Temple of the Golden Pavilion", a name inspired by the gilded roofs of one of its pavilions. The golden pavilion which can be seen today is a rebuilt version of the original, destroyed by fire in 1950.

This elegant, three-storeyed wooden pavilion is clearly based on models from southern China. The ground floor comprises a reception room for guests, the second floor a study and the third a private temple for zazen meditation. While the open plan of the ground floor looks back to the Shinden-style palaces of the Heian era, the bell-shaped windows on the top floor herald a new style, that of Zen temple architecture.
Although a small path winds its way around the pond, the garden was designed to be appreciated from the water rather than on foot, as revealed by contemporary records of the boating parties and festivities organized in honour of Emperor Gokoma-tsu, who visited the garden in 1408. The garden could also be admired from the three storeys of the Golden Pavilion, from where it was framed within a rectangular architectural structure of harmonious proportions. The pond is subdivided into an inner and an outer zone. The inner zone lies directly in front of the lavishly-decorated pavilion, virtually cut off from the outer zone by a large peninsula and the pond's main island. The outer zone contains just a few small rock islands; its banks are lined with stones. To the viewer in the pavilion, this outer zone appears to lie a great distance away. Directly in front of the Golden Pavilion to the south lie small-scale versions of the traditional turtle and crane islands. Opposite the small boat jetty to the west are two larger turtle islands of particular iconic significance: the "arriving turtle", whose rock head looks towards the pavilion, and the "departing turtle", who faces away from it.

Two springs rise at the foot of the hills to the north of the Golden Pavilion, each marked by rock compositions. The Dragon Gate waterfall nearby features the legendary carp stone inherited from the original Kama-kura garden built by Saionji Kitsune. After Yoshimi-tsu's death, the palace complex which had been his home in retirement was converted into a Buddhist temple.

Enryu-ji: the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon

The gardens of Tenryu-ji, the "Temple of the Heavenly Dragon", stand, like Saiho-jl, on the threshold of a new epoch. Tenryu-ji was built on the former site of a country villa belonging to the powerful Emperor Gosaga, commonly known as Kameyana dono, the "Mansion of the Turtle Mountain". The grounds of this enormous residence just outside Kyoto extended from the Oi river to the Arashiyama hills, an area much loved even today for its beautiful cherry blossoms in spring and its glorious autumn colours. Gosaga moved to the villa in 1256 following his official abdication. From here he was to continue his unofficial rule for another forty years, until he was eventually forced to flee to the Yoshino mountains, where he died in exile.

Ashikaga Takauji, the man who had ousted him and seized supreme political power, nevertheless feared the avenging wrath of Gosago's spirit. By way of appeasement, therefore, he built a Zen temple within the grounds of the imperial palace. As abbot of this new Tenryu-ji temple he appointed none other than Muso Kokushi, builder of Saiho-ji.

Muso Kokushi thus once again supervised the conversion of imperial quarters and pleasure gardens for Buddhist use. It seems unlikely, however, that he was responsible for the garden's central waterfall and its outstanding rockwork. Compared to those credited to Muso Kokushi in the Saiho-ji dry garden, these Tenryu-ji rock arrangements could not be more different. Japanese art historians see them as the first evidence of the foreign influence of the artistic techniques of the Sung dynasty. And although there is still no agreement as to their designer, it is not impossible that the hand behind these compositions was in fact Chinese.

While the pond in Tenryu-ji's garden still contains water, it is clearly too small for the boating parties and large-scale festivies of the Heian era. A path around the pond and small stone bridges crossing miniature ravines instead encourage the visitor to explore the charms of the garden on foot. Despite the replacement of the original buildings by more recent Meiji architecture, the scale of the garden can still be recognized as tailored to that of the hojo, the abbot's quarters. Thus the garden is best seen from the hojo, whose rectangular architecture frames the garden like a huge, three-dimensional painting.

The landscape painting of the Chinese Sung dynasty exerted a strong influence not simply on the rock compositions around Tenryu-ji's waterfall, but indeed upon the design of the garden as a whole. One of the major concerns of Sung landscape painting was to evoke spatial depth; Tenryu-ji Garden seems to aim at this same compositional effect. When viewed, as described above, "framed" by the porch of the abbot's quarters, the garden presents itself in a succession of three horizontal planes. The first and lowest is the foreground strip of sand between the porch and the edge of the pond, the second contains the pond and rock compositions m the middle distance, and the third and topmost plane captures the mountain in the background, in a conscious "borrowing" of distant scenery called shakkei. The vertical layering of these planes creates an impression of receding space and thus achieves the same depth of ground as a Sung-dynasty painting.

Layenng as a means of creating an illusion of depth is employed in other parts of the garden, too, as for example in the ryumon no taki, the Dragon Gate waterfall. Viewed from the small stone bridge directly before it, the - by Heian standards, unusually high - waterfall presents itself as a tiered sequence of steps. The sophistication of its rockwork is similarly suggestive of Chinese landscape painting. The "carp stone" halfway up the waterfall - a stone in the shape of a carp attempting to leap up to the next level - is a clear borrowing from the motifs of Chinese art In China, a carp passing the Dragon Gate was a metaphor for a student successfully passing the qualifying examinations for government service.

CAS. Williams writes: "The carp, with its scaly armor, which is regarded as a symbol of martial attributes, is admired because it struggles against the current, and it has therefore become the emblem of perseverance. The sturgeon of the Yellow River are said to make an ascent of the stream in the third moon of each year, when those which succeed in passing above the rapids of the Dragon Gate become transformed into dragons; hence this fish is a symbol of literary eminence or passing examinations with distinction."

Directly in front of the waterfall, a bridge of three flat stone slabs leads to a narrow path, which in turn passes across a miniature ravine spanned by a single stone. Art historian Wybe Kuitert sees clear evidence of Chinese influence both in the course of this path, with its varying widths and bordering rocks, and in the miniature ravine over which it passes directly opposite the main building.

Tenryu-ji betrays further influence of the garden architecture of the Chinese Sung dynasty in the island group of seven rocks towering out of the pond near the waterfall. In what is probably the finest arrangement of its type in the entire period, these seven rocks symbolize the Isles of the Blest. The bold combination of carefully-selected rocks poetically evokes the soaring peaks of these mystical isles.
The Saiho-ji and Tenryu-ji temple gardens each point the way forward to a new style in Japanese garden architecture - Saiho-ji with its dry waterfall and flat zazen meditation stone, Tenryu-ji with its islands, bridge and waterfall inspired by the compositional techniques of Sung-dynasty landscape painting. Common to both gardens is their increasing abstraction of natural scenery. In this they foreshadow the new garden prototype of the Muromachi era.

Palace gardens of the Kitayama and Higashiyama shoguns

The gardens of the early Zen temples

Saiho-ji: the Temple of Western Fragrances
The gardens of Saiho-ji Temple in west Kyoto may be seen as marking the point of transition from the Heian prototype of the Pure-Land "paradise" garden to a new garden prototype. Popularly known as Kokedera, the "Moss Temple", thanks to the many varieties of moss which have since been planted on its grounds, the garden is floored with a thick, moist carpet of intense green. Compared with those of the Heian gardens of Osawa no Ike or Motsu-ji, Saiho-ji's pond is only small.

There is a dual character to the Saiho-ji garden which identifies it as the product of a phase of cultural transition. It is divided into two parts. The lower half is a pond garden with three large and four small islands, four peninsulas, the celebrated night-mooring stones and a number of islands consisting simply of single rocks. The upper half contains a series of rock arrangements which are accepted, by some Japanese scholars at least, as being the first examples of Japanese garden architecture inspired by Zen Buddhism. Saiho-ji garden is certainly the earliest extant example of kare-sansui, which literally means "withered mountain-water".

The Sakutei-ki, the classic garden manual of the Heian era, mentions a type of garden in which the element of water is neither physically nor even symbolically present. This has led many Japanese garden scholars to see the kare-sansui not as an invention of the Kamakura or Muromachi eras but simply as the extension of an existing garden type. The Sakutei-ki states:

"There are cases where rocks are placed in settings where there is no pond or stream of water. This is called каге-sansui. In this type of dry mountain-water garden, part of the hill is shaped like a cliff or undulating landscape, on which rocks are then placed. Should you wish to recreate the scenery of a mountain village, you must provide a high mountain near the main building. You should then place rocks in a stepped fashion from the summit to the foot of the mountain, so that part of the mountain appears to have been removed in order to erect the building. Rocks which are thus excavated in real life have a wide, deep base Hence it is impossible to extract and remove them from the site. One column of the building should therefore be made to rest on or beside one such stone."

According to contemporary accounts, Zen master Muso Kokushi took over Saiho-ji temple in 1334 and turned it into a Zen monastery. Saiho-ji originally meant "westerly temple"; by modifying its ideogram, although without altering its pronunciation, Muso Kokushi changed "westerly temple" to "temple of western fragrances". He had a number of new buildings constructed within the complex; their own architecture, together with the corridors connecting them, must have superimposed upon the gardens outside a rectangular grid through which the viewer inside saw nature. Sadly, none of the original temple buildings have survived.

Japanese art historians differ as to whether the dry rock arrangement in the upper part of Saiho-ji Temple Garden was indeed created by Muso Kokushi, just as it remains unclear whether the garden represents the new prototype of a Zen garden or the logical extension of an already existing, relatively minor Heian model. Whether the dry landscape garden is solely and exclusively the brainchild of a Zen mind will no doubt equally remain a matter for debate. What can be said, however, is that Saiho-ji Garden arose under the supervision of a Zen priest who was deeply interested in gardening, and that as a product of the Kamakura era it stands, stylistically and chronologically, halfway between the typical Pure-Land paradise garden of the Heian era and the most austere gardens of the Muromachi period.

In Saiho-ji, unlike later Muromachi temple gardens, the visitor is still invited to discover the beauties of the garden in the course of a leisurely stroll along the path around the lake and across the small bridges to the islands.

In the hillier part of the garden, the soft, undulating carpet of moss is interrupted by three extraordinary rock compositions which have fascinated Japanese garden lovers throughout the centuries. The first is the kame-shima, a "turtle island" group of rocks floating in this case not in a pond of water but in a sea of moss. Slightly higher up the slope lies the zazen-seki, a flat-topped meditation stone suggesting the silence and calm which accompany meditation. The third and last of these famous attractions is the каге-taki, a dry waterfall again composed largely of flat-topped granite stones in a stepped arrangement. Not even a trickle of water travels its rocky course, yet it seems to roar louder than the fullest cascade. So, too, the academic voices debating the historical origins of this dry rock waterfall are drowned beneath the overwhelming beauty of its presence.

Transition to a new garden prototype

The Heian garden prototype, with its pond and islands, continued to flourish during the early years of the Muromachi era, and found a new variation in the chisen kaiyu teien, a "pond-spring-strolling garden" designed to be enjoyed on foot rather than from a boat as before. This probably reflected the dwindling size of the ponds in such gardens, making boat rides unnecessary.

The Muromachi era

In 1333 Emperor Godaigo succeeded in overthrowing the Kamakura shogunate and restoring imperial rule. After a mere three years, however, Ashikaga Takauji, a member of the Minamoto clan, established a new military government in Kyoto itself.

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, grandson of Takauji, moved his shogunate headquarters to the Muromachi district of north-east Kyoto. Thus the period of Ashikaga rule also became known as Muromachi bakafи, "Muromachi feudalism". The palace which Yoshimitsu subsequently built in the Muromachi district in 1378 was popularly known as Hana no gosho, the "Flower Palace", because of its countless numbers of cherry trees. Its buildings and gardens, with a large pond, islands, bridges and various pavilions, were indebted to the traditional Shinden style of the late Heian era. Sadly, however, neither the "Flower Palace" nor the palaces of the Ashikaga nobility were to survive the Onin civil wars (1467-1477). The present imperial palace in Kyoto stands on approximately the same site as one such palace of Muromachi times.

The Muromachi era was to last some two and a half centuries, from 1336 to 1573. It was a period plagued by constant internal conflicts and civil wars, reducing Kyoto to ashes by 1477. At the same time, however, the era proved one of the most creative in Japan's history, giving birth to some of the greatest forms of Japanese culture. The tea ceremony, Noh theatre, landscape painting, Shoin architecture and the dry landscape garden, all innovations of the Muromachi era, have since come to represent traditional Japanese culture as such. Equally remarkable is the fact that the culturally most important phases in Muromachi history are named after the gardens created by the shoguns of the day.

Thus the Kitayama epoch derives its name from the northern hills in which Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358 — 1408) created the garden famous for its Golden Pavilion, while the Higashiyama epoch refers to the eastern hills in which Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490) built a pond garden similarly renowned for its Silver Pavilion.

The great new garden prototype to emerge during the Muromachi era is the kare-sansui, the dry landscape garden. Its austere architecture reflects the tastes of the Zen priests and samurai for whom it was principally created. It is designed not as a pleasure garden, but as an object of contemplation to be viewed from fixed vantage points.

The second large wave of Chinese influence on Japan

It was during the Kamakura era (1185-1336) that the second large wave of Chinese influence reached the shores of Japan. Both the shoguns - the new political rulers - and the influential samurai welcomed the arrival of Chinese Zen Buddhism, in part for its emphasis upon meditational discipline, and in part for the magnificent Sung dynasty works of art it brought with it, which they first collected and later imitated as a conscious means of documenting their new power and wealth. "Modern art" quickly came to mean Chinese art, such as tea utensils, paintings, incense burners and lacquerware. The main vehicles in this process of cultural importation were Japanese Zen monks returning from China, where they had gone in search of purer schools of Buddhist thought owing to their dissatisfaction with the Pure Land Buddhism and smaller esoteric sects patronized by the imperial court. A number of Chinese monks had in turn come to Japan following the invasion of the Mongols. Thus the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism was founded in Japan by the monk Eisai (1141-1215) and the Soto sect by the monk Dogen (1200-1253).

The name Zen is derived from the Sanskrit dhyan, meaning "meditation". Zen meditation is based on the belief that the only means to enlightenment is ji-riki, "power from oneself", and thus contrasts sharply with Pure Land Buddhism and its hope for salvation by means of external aid, or ta-riki, "power from outside".

Meditation is neither concentration nor contemplation, two activities which rely on the mind, on thought. Meditation means passing beyond the limits of mind ти-shin, "no-mind". But no means implies mindless-ness; ти-shin is accompanied by full awareness. But the thinking, questioning and judging self has gone. For Zen Buddhism, the "experience" of thus disbanding the self (which can hardly been termed an experience, since the personality experiencing it has disappeared) is enlightenment.

Occidental language has no adequate name for this "experience" of enlightenment, apparently unknown in the West, where there are no records of anyone having achieved ти-shin. Nor have any methods been devised with which enlightened masters may help their pupils to achieve such an experience. But although this "experience" remains almost impenetrable to the West, it forms the essence of Eastern-Asian spirituality. The reports of men and women who have attained enlightenment in India, China and Japan are legion. It is this tradition, this understanding of meditation, which represents Eastern Asia's greatest contribution to the development of human consciousness.

It was not the case, however, that Zen temples and their gardens led Zen adepts, through contemplation of their art and architecture, to enlightenment. The reverse was sooner true: garden architects and their creations were profoundly influenced by the enlightenment and psychological insights gained through meditation.

The Kamakura era

Just as the "Tale of Genji" transports us back to the cultured world of the Heian court and allows us to glimpse the delight with which the privileged classes saw nature, so the "Tale of Heike", a Kamakura war epic, captures the the mood of the tumultuous age which followed - the age of the warrior.
"The Gion Temple bell echoes the evanescence of all. The colour of the flowers of the Saraso Tree discloses the law of the fall of the prosperous. The proud last not long, but are like a spring night's dream. The mighty soon pass just like dust before the wind.

The "Tale of Heike" is a lively account of the decline of the Taira clan who once dominated the imperial court. They suffered final defeat at the hands of the Minamoto clan, whose power bases lay in the provinces. In the east of Japan, far from the imperial capital of Kyoto, commander-in-chief Minamoto Yoritomo succeeded in setting up an independent military government, or bakafu. In 1185 he founded his capital, Kamakura, from where he subsequently ruled as Sho-gun. Although Kyoto remained the official capital of Japan for another hundred and fifty years, the now politically powerless emperor was reduced to no more than a figurehead.

Rocks in the sand

The gardens of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras are dearly indebted to the second large wave of Chinese influence on Japanese culture, and an particular to Zen Buddhism and the landscape painting of the Sung and Yuan dynasties. The age finds its garden prototype m the scenery of the kare-sansui. the small-scale dry landscape garden attached to and bordered by Shom-style architecture Such gardens are designed to be contem-plated, like a painting, from a number of fixed vantage pants in the Kamakura era. gardens were laid out by special priests - called ishitateso - from the esoteric Shmgon sect, who thereby effectively acted as semiprofessional garden-makers. Their role was later taken over by Zen priests During the Muromachi era. kawaramono. lowclass "nverbank workers", slowly rose to the status of professional garden designers They were held in high esteem by the Ashikaga sho-guns Although the materials employed tn the gardens of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras may still be called "natural", their final forms increasingly abridged nature almost to the point of abstraction The gardens of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras thus imitate the inner essence of nature, not its outward forms.

Japanese garden archetypes

The Japanese landscape - Shintoism - Hindu cosmology - Taoist myth -Buddhist faith - Triadic compositions

Shinto beliefs: sacred archetypes

Permanent shrine buildings appear relatively late in Shintoism; they probably arose during the fifth and sixth centuries AD, when "nature Shinto" slowly entered its second phase of "shnne Shinto". Such was the formal clarity and simplicity of the earliest sanctuanes and the universality of their ritual imagery that they produced specific archetypes of holy site and sacred nte m the collective Japanese subconscious, archetypes which have survived the passage of time and whth continue to cast a spell over foreign tourists even today.

Gardens in ancient Japan

Almost nothing has survived of the gardens of ancient Japan. Their forms and functions can thus only be infer­red from a limited number of literary sources, archeolo-gical excavations and hypothetical reconstructions by Japanese scholars.

The Nihon shoki, the Chronicles of Japan of 720 AD whose records span a period from prehistoric Japan up to 697 AD, contains sporadic references to gardens which, when taken together, add up to a surprisingly clear picture of the first palace gardens in Japan. Below is a selection of these entries:

In the spring of 74 AD, so the Nikon shoki relates, Emperor Keiko "resided in the Kuguri Palace and, let­ting loose carp in a pond, amused himself by looking at them morning and night."'3 In 401 AD Emperor Richu had a pond built at his palace in lhare. In Novem­ber 402 "the Emperor launched the two-hulled boat on the pond of Ichishi at lhare and went on board with the imperial concubine, each separately, and feasted."14 In around 413, the consort of Emperor Ingio was "walking alone in the garden" when a nobleman on horseback looked over the hedge and said: '"What an excellent gardener thou art. Pray, madam, let me have one of those orchids.'"15 In 486 Emperor Kenzo "went to the park, where he held revel by the winding streams".

In 612 an emigre from Korea faced banishment to an island because of his flecked skin. Empress Suiko pared him, however, when she heard his plea that he could "make the figures of hills and mountains". Thanks to his remarkable talents, he was subsequently employed to create a "Mount Sumeru" and a "Bridge of Wu" in the southern courtyard of the imperial pal­ace.'7 It is thought that this Bridge of Wu may have been an ornamental bow-shaped bridge such as is frequently found in Chinese gardens. The shape and nature of Mount Sumeru remains, however, a mystery.

In 625, during the reign of the same Empress Suiko, a minister by the name of Soga no Umako - a member of the powerful Soga clan - owned a palace "on the bank of the river Asuka. A small pond had been dug in the courtyard, and there was a little island in the mid­dle of the pond. Therefore, the men of that time called him shima no oho omi, which translates as 'Lord of the Island(s)'."'8 This palace later passed into the hands of the imperial family and acquired the name of Shima no miya, "Palace of the Isles". It is mentioned in a number of poems in the earliest anthology of Japanese poetry, the Manyoshu or "Collection of a Myriad Leaves" which was compiled in the mid-eighth century.

However fragmentary these literary references, they nevertheless enable us to piece together a fairly accu­rate portrait of the first Japanese garden prototype. The earliest palace gardens were clearly of impressive size. Why else should a powerful minister be called af­ter his garden? They were located in or near the south­ern courtyards of royal or noble residences. Their chief scenic elements included a pond with one or more is­lands, symbolic representations of an ocean landscape, together with man-made mountains and a winding stream with rocks placed along its banks.

It is not known precisely where within Fujiwara-kyo. capital of the Fujiwara clan (694-710), or Heijo-kyo. "Capital of the Castle of Tranquility" (710-784). these gardens were located, nor where they lay in relation to the imperial palaces themselves. Only a few such gar­dens have been excavated, and much remains hypo­thetical It is generally believed that the two above-named capitals, with their palaces and Buddhist tem­ples, were modest imitations of the architecture of the Chinese T'ang dynasty. Thus it may be surmised that their gardens, too, were influenced by those of the T'ang, which ranged from huge pleasure gardens, via rock gardens copying mountains and gorges, to the gardens of court nobles and ministers.

552 AD is widely accepted as the year in which Ja­pan began seriously to copy China's far superior cul­ture. Japans oldest chronicles, the Kojiki of 712 and the Ninon shoki of 720. both agree that this was the year m which Buddhism officially reached Japan. To­gether with Buddhism (which was imported from the kingdom of Korea) came the Chinese script and various works of Chinese art. This by no means implies there were no contacts with Korea or China before this date With time, relations between the Japanese islands and the mainland were strengthened by official missions to the Chinese court. P Varley writes:

"The Japanese dispatched a total of four missions to Sui China during the period 600-614 and fifteen to T'ang between 630 and 838. The larger missions usually consisted of groups of about four ships that trans­ported more than five hundred people, including offi­cial envoys, students, Buddhist monks and translators. Some of these visitors remained abroad for long stret­ches of time - up to thirty or more years - and some never returned The trip was exceedingly dangerous, and the fact that so many risked it attests to the avidity with which the Japanese of this age sought to acquire the learning and culture of China."

This first large wave of Chinese influence left traces m Japanese thought and art which can still be felt to­day Sierksma divides acculturation processes into three phases: first, a phase of identification, of simple imita­tion of the foreign culture. This is succeeded by a phase of remterpretation and. finally, by a phase of complete assimilation and absorption I see the Japa­nese absorption of Chinese culture as following this same rogression, whereby the first phase corresponds to the Tumulus (250-552) and Asuka (552-710) eras, and the second to the Nara era (710-794) and the early years of the Heian period. Sierksma writes of this second phase: "Acculturation is always characterized by remterpretation Objects and ideas are taken over from the strange culture, but derive their meaning from the context of the old culture within which they are now placed. Or again, indigenous elements of cul­ture are given a new meaning in the context of the new strange culture."

Such regular cultural exchanges with China exerted a profound influence upon the religion, arts, govern­ment, economic system and social structure of Japan In 894, however, one hundred years after the founding of Heian-kyo. they came to an abrupt end Japan broke off all diplomatic and cultural relations with China shortly before the collapse of the T'ang dynasty

This simultaneously marked the beginning of the third phase of the acculturation process, which reached its climax approximately a century later with Japan's complete assimilation of Chinese values and forms

Pure-Land paradise garden of Byodo-m Temple. Kyoto, seen from the soutfi-easf The right angles of the Hoodo, the Phoenix Hall built in W52, are reflected m the man-made water-lily pond This contrast between the right angle and the irregular forms of cultivated nature expresses the aesthetic principle underlying the garden as a whole