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.