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