It had been customary since Nara times for the families of the nobility to build their villas and gardens on the outskirts of the city Here they could escape the con straints of the urban grid layout and design their houses and gardens with greater respect for local topo graphical conditions. From the Heian period onwards, these estates became known as rikyu. "detached pal aces", or sento-gosho. "palaces for retired emperors".
One of the few suburban gardens still surviving from these times is Osawa no Ike, literally the "large swampy pond" created by Emperor Saga (809-S23) in the north-west of the capital. Heian-kyo The emperor dammed an existing river to produce a lake with a sur face area of some five acres. It formed the central at traction of hts detached Saga-in palace in the country to which he retired after his abdication in 823. In 876 Saga-in was converted into a Buddhist temple for the Shingon sect. The temple, called Oaikaku-ji. can still be seen today
Saga-in was undoubtedly a palace of outstanding beauty. The elegant right angles of its pavilion architec ture and their reflections in the pond must have of fered an exquisite counterpoint to the undulating con tours of the surrounding landscape. A popular Japa nese pastime even today is to sail out onto Osawa pond in early autumn and admire the moon. The ground rises gently towards the mountains to the north of the pond, while flat rice paddies lie to the east, west and south. The northern half of the pond contains the relatively large benten island, while the smaller kiku-shima, "chrysanthemum island", lies to the east. The charms of this delightful garden inspired poems such as the one below, taken from the Kokin-shu, an anthology of poety from the Heian period:
hito moto ga I had thought there was omoishi kiku wo but a single chrysanthemum here.
osawa no Who could have planted ike no soko the other one made, there in the dare ga uheken depths of Osawa pond?
The size and shape of the pond have changed little over the centuries, although its water level was raised by means of a higher dam in Meiji times, when it was used mainly to irrigate the local rice fields. Most of the rock settings on the banks of the pond were probably washed away as a result. Mirei Shigemori believes that rockwork which he uncovered during excavations in the north of the pond may represent a dry rock water fall.
Sacred islands and ponds
The gardens built during the Asuka. Nara and Heian eras clearly reflect the first great wave of Chinese influ ence to reach Japanese culture. The scenery of the ear liest Japanese garden prototype is dominated by islands and ponds. As such it quite literally illustrates the Smo-Japanese word for "landscape", san-sui. or "moun tain-water" At the same time it reflects the ancient Chinese dual pnnciple of Yin and Yang, in terms of gar dening. The Heian garden is large in scale; it is more a seascape than a landscape garden designed to be en joyed by boating The later gardens of the Heian period are usually sited within the rectangular framework of the Shmden-style architecture of early Heian palaces and temples of Pure Land Buddhism. Such gardens were generally designed by their noble owners them selves as a setting for courtly festivities, whereby the elements of the garden sought to imitate the external forms of nature.
The Heian period
The gardens and architecture of the Heian period (794-1185) reflect, in the first half of the period, the processes of Japanese remterpretation of Chinese cul ture and. m the latter half, the results of us complete assimilation
In 794. at the command of Emperor Kammu, the capital of Japan was moved to Heian-kyo (present-day Kyoto). It remained m this "Capital of Peace and Tran quility" until 1868. when it moved to Edo, which was in turn renamed Tokyo. "Capital of the East".
The grid layout structuring both the imperial resi dence and the city as a whole is derived from Heian-kyo's great - and considerably larger - Chinese model, Changan, which was the capital of China under the Sui and T'ang dynasties from 583 to 904 The rules of Chinese geomancy also dictated Heian-kyo's siting and geographical orientation within the natural landscape The same rules governed the gardens within the impe-nal palace complex and the palaces of the nobility.
Triadic compositions: The harmonious balance of odd numbers
Arrangements of rocks in groups of three probably date as far back as the gardens of the Nara era. The Sakutei-ki, the oldest text on Japanese garden architec ture, distinguishes between two different types of such rock compositions: hinbunseki-gumi and sanzonseki-gumi. The first, hinbunseki-gumi, is an arrangement of rocks based on the shape of the Chinese character for "articles", whereby the triadic composition is devel oped chiefly within the horizontal plane. Sanzonseki-gumi, on the other hand, is the name given to compo sitions recalling sculptures of the Buddhist Trinity. Here the triadic composition is developed within the vertical plane. Such rock triads appear throughout the history of the Japanese garden - both in splendid isolation and as part of a larger sequence, perhaps beside a waterfall or on the banks of a pond.
The significance of these Buddhist-influenced rock arrangements lies not in their religious symbolism but in their aesthetic composition: a large rock in the cen tre with two smaller rocks on each side. I do not accept the prevalent theory that "aesthetic values generally originate in a religious sphere; they develop and gain autonomy as religious values decline'"0. It fails to take account of the triad, a deep-rooted archetype of aes thetic composition which was only later adopted by a variety of religious iconographies.
In Japan, the use of three components - one large, one small and one medium-sized - to create a dynamic balance of odd numbers is not merely limited to gar den architecture, but lies at the heart of Noh theatre and the art of flower arrangement (ikebana). Thus three basic compositional elements of ikebana are the "branch of truth" (the tallest), the "accompanying branch" (slightly shorter) and the "flowing one" (the shortest). They are usually referred to as fen (heaven), chi (earth) and jin (man), the archetypal Chinese defini tion of the tripartite structure of the universe. A later text on garden architecture defines this same compositional archetype as a trinity of forces, one hori zontal, one diagonal and one vertical, which corre spond to the triad of Heaven, Earth and Man
The significance of these Buddhist-influenced rock arrangements lies not in their religious symbolism but in their aesthetic composition: a large rock in the cen tre with two smaller rocks on each side. I do not accept the prevalent theory that "aesthetic values generally originate in a religious sphere; they develop and gain autonomy as religious values decline'"0. It fails to take account of the triad, a deep-rooted archetype of aes thetic composition which was only later adopted by a variety of religious iconographies.
In Japan, the use of three components - one large, one small and one medium-sized - to create a dynamic balance of odd numbers is not merely limited to gar den architecture, but lies at the heart of Noh theatre and the art of flower arrangement (ikebana). Thus three basic compositional elements of ikebana are the "branch of truth" (the tallest), the "accompanying branch" (slightly shorter) and the "flowing one" (the shortest). They are usually referred to as fen (heaven), chi (earth) and jin (man), the archetypal Chinese defini tion of the tripartite structure of the universe. A later text on garden architecture defines this same compositional archetype as a trinity of forces, one hori zontal, one diagonal and one vertical, which corre spond to the triad of Heaven, Earth and Man
The agricultural archetype: shinden
The daily offerings of rice and sake which are made to the deity of sun and food in the shrines of the Imperial Ancestors at Ise are prepared from rice specially grown in the so-called "Divine Fields", or shinden. These fields represent a last surviving example of Japanese geo-mancy as it existed prior to its replacement by the Chinese system imported with the first wave of Chinese influence in the Nara and Heian eras. It was the agricultural cycle of rice-growing (introduced in Japan in the Yayoi era, between 200 BC and 250 AD) which, together with the territorial practices described earlier, contributed most to the architecture of the sacred precincts and religious rites of Shintoism.
The geomantic relations between the various elements of the Divine Fields are simple and clear: on one side there is a mountain, from which water flows down to the fields; on the other lies the torii, the typical Shinto gate signalling the entrance to a sacred precinct and isolating it from the secular outside world. No attempt is yet made to orient the entire complex due north, as later stipulated by the rules of imported Chinese geomancy. The whole constitutes a kind of first garden, where deity and human being meet. Rice paddies were integrated into the large-scale gardens of the daimyo nobles from the early Edo era onwards, frequently in the form of a magic square - with 3x3 squares giving one magic square.
Behind the religious practice of growing and tending sacred gardens lies the belief, found throughout Japan, that the local guardian deities live in the mountains in the winter, from where they are ceremonially fetched in spring and taken to spend the summer in the rice paddies, until being returned to the mountains in autumn, after the harvest.
According to research by Nobuzane Tsukushi into ancient folk beliefs in the Ise region, the sun deity at be was ongmally beloved to descend once a year from heaven to a high mountain peak near the Isuzu nver at Ise. From there the villagers earned it down to the vat-ley in the form of a newtyfelled tree, and dragged it across the river at the foot of the mountain The village community then celebrated the arnval of the deity on the opposite shore, with a local maiden serving the deity as priestess and spouse for one night The earliest place of worship of the deity thus lay at the river's edge, and probably consisted of little more than a tree temporarily installed at the centre of a patch of pebbled ground marked by a sacred rope.
Much has been conjectured about the mystenous shiki no himorogt, which we know only to be a sacred precinct strewn with pebbles m which ritual purifications are performed. Such sites are mentioned in chronicles from as earty as the eighth century, and can be seen even today in almost every Shinto shrine - there are a particularly fine examples of shiki no himotogi m the shrines at Ise.
I believe that the origins of these shiki no himorogt lie m those ancient ablution sites on a nverbank where the mountain deity "appeared" to the community of believers for the first time Pebble beaches or pebbled areas in Japanese gardens are more than mere copies of a natural phenomenon They are archetypes of the hallowed ground of Shinto theophany.
The geomantic relations between the various elements of the Divine Fields are simple and clear: on one side there is a mountain, from which water flows down to the fields; on the other lies the torii, the typical Shinto gate signalling the entrance to a sacred precinct and isolating it from the secular outside world. No attempt is yet made to orient the entire complex due north, as later stipulated by the rules of imported Chinese geomancy. The whole constitutes a kind of first garden, where deity and human being meet. Rice paddies were integrated into the large-scale gardens of the daimyo nobles from the early Edo era onwards, frequently in the form of a magic square - with 3x3 squares giving one magic square.
Behind the religious practice of growing and tending sacred gardens lies the belief, found throughout Japan, that the local guardian deities live in the mountains in the winter, from where they are ceremonially fetched in spring and taken to spend the summer in the rice paddies, until being returned to the mountains in autumn, after the harvest.
According to research by Nobuzane Tsukushi into ancient folk beliefs in the Ise region, the sun deity at be was ongmally beloved to descend once a year from heaven to a high mountain peak near the Isuzu nver at Ise. From there the villagers earned it down to the vat-ley in the form of a newtyfelled tree, and dragged it across the river at the foot of the mountain The village community then celebrated the arnval of the deity on the opposite shore, with a local maiden serving the deity as priestess and spouse for one night The earliest place of worship of the deity thus lay at the river's edge, and probably consisted of little more than a tree temporarily installed at the centre of a patch of pebbled ground marked by a sacred rope.
Much has been conjectured about the mystenous shiki no himorogt, which we know only to be a sacred precinct strewn with pebbles m which ritual purifications are performed. Such sites are mentioned in chronicles from as earty as the eighth century, and can be seen even today in almost every Shinto shrine - there are a particularly fine examples of shiki no himotogi m the shrines at Ise.
I believe that the origins of these shiki no himorogt lie m those ancient ablution sites on a nverbank where the mountain deity "appeared" to the community of believers for the first time Pebble beaches or pebbled areas in Japanese gardens are more than mere copies of a natural phenomenon They are archetypes of the hallowed ground of Shinto theophany.
The territorial archetype: shime
The earliest Shinto sanctuaries combine different facets of ancient Japanese civilization, such as respect for territorial rights, the worship of nature, the sense of purity and the cultivation of rice.
The art of knotting and binding was probably one of the first manual skills mastered by the early inhabitants of East Asia. The binding of grasses, bushes and trees was used to signal a personal claim to land or other property. It set a shime, a mark of occupation or possession and hence of power. I have already set out, in a number of publications, the complex set of deductions which have led me to conclude that from the archaic Japanese shime is derived the Japanese word shima, "garden". Shime literally means a "bound artefact", which in turn signifies "occupation" (the verb shimeru possesses all three meanings). The word shima, derived from shime, means "land" or, more specifically, "land which has been taken possession of". It later acquired the meaning of "garden", or rather "a section of nature fenced off from the wilderness". It finally came to mean "island", a "piece of land floating in the untamed ocean". In the noun shime-nawa, (literally "rope of occupation"), used to describe the ropes delimiting a sacred area or sanctifying a holy object within a Shinto shrine, we find a use of the word shime which goes beyond the politico-economic sense of possession as expressed by binding to assume a religio-magical significance.
The art of knotting and binding was probably one of the first manual skills mastered by the early inhabitants of East Asia. The binding of grasses, bushes and trees was used to signal a personal claim to land or other property. It set a shime, a mark of occupation or possession and hence of power. I have already set out, in a number of publications, the complex set of deductions which have led me to conclude that from the archaic Japanese shime is derived the Japanese word shima, "garden". Shime literally means a "bound artefact", which in turn signifies "occupation" (the verb shimeru possesses all three meanings). The word shima, derived from shime, means "land" or, more specifically, "land which has been taken possession of". It later acquired the meaning of "garden", or rather "a section of nature fenced off from the wilderness". It finally came to mean "island", a "piece of land floating in the untamed ocean". In the noun shime-nawa, (literally "rope of occupation"), used to describe the ropes delimiting a sacred area or sanctifying a holy object within a Shinto shrine, we find a use of the word shime which goes beyond the politico-economic sense of possession as expressed by binding to assume a religio-magical significance.
The Japanese landscape: divine islands, divine ponds
It is difficult to imagine a better portrait of Japan than that painted by this poem, written by the twelfth-century poet Saigyo and perhaps inspired by a view over the Inland Sea. Japan is a country of countless isles in the earthquake belt of the eastern Pacific. Over 70 percent of its terrain is mountainous, with live volcanoes and hot springs, and cleft by deep valleys. The coastline is rocky and fissured, offering only occasional sandy bays. There are almost no flat plains. "Small islands in the sea", "winding rivers between mountains", "rugged rocks along the seashore", "stepped waterfalls" and "pebbles in mountain streams" are all terms in the vocabulary of visual archetypes describing Japan. The Japanese garden employs this same vocabulary; its language of forms reflects that of the landscape of Japan.
It is thus no surprise that the topography of the country should also be reflected m Japanese cosmogony in the beginning, so the Kojikichronicles of 712 relate, two deities gave birth to eight islands. Only later did they add other natural elements such as the sea. rivers, mountains, trees and herbs. According to Mirei Shigemori. this ancient theory derives from the impression made by the Japanese landscape on the first settlers arriving by sea. This impression subsequently left a deep impnnt upon the collective Japanese subconscious Man-made recreations of shinto. divine islands, and shmchi. divine ponds, are found even in the earliest prehistoric shnnes. and have proved one of the most fruitful archetypes m the history of the Japanese garden
The Japanese garden in history
From prototype to type and stereotype
The evolution of religious, artistic and social thinking in Japan ts mirrored in the role assigned to rocks and plants by Japanese garden designers. This rale has changed greatly over the course of history It began as the imitation of the external forms of nature, but as the laws of nature became increas ingly understood, its focus shifted to the imitation of the essence of nature and its internal mode of operation, only to move on. m modern times, to the superimposition of man's egoistic will on nature
Each major epoch in the history of the Japanese garden has approached the garden archetypes described in the preceding pages from the stand point of its own understanding of form and function, with the result that each has given birth to its own new. unique prototype. The development of the formal language of these prototypes was thereby directly related to changing attitudes to nature, to socio-political conditions and to religio-philosophical trends; in short, to the intellectual climate as a whole.
The invention of a new garden prototype and its exploration in various types does not imply a renunciation of the previous prototype; rather, it represents a dynamic remierpretaiion and combination of the old with the new. With historical hindsight it is thus often possible to discover the germ of a later prototype still dormant in a much earlier one At the same time, however, there are inevitable instances of mere mechanical repetition, where gardens simply copy the stereotypes of the past
With reference to Е Ambaszs "Theory of Formal Types". I see the proto type as the product of the gardener as artist, the type as the product of the gardener as craftsman and the stereotype as the product of the gardener as purely commercially-minded designer"
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