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