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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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
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
Genji Monogatari: "The Tale of Genji"
Kisetsu On living in tune with the seasons
The "Tale of Genji" represents a pinnacle of indigenous Japanese prose-writing It was composed just after 1000 by Shikibu Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting. The novel's heroine, who bears the same name as the authoress, supplies both a wealth of observations on elegant Heian court society and astonishingly detailed accounts of the palace gardens and their (unctions - not least as a setting for romantic encounters.
Japanese art historians have summarized the garden of the Heian period as chisen shuyu teien, which translates literally as "pond-sprmg-boating garden", in other words a garden with a pond whose waters are fed by a spring or garden stream, and which is designed to be enjoyed by boat. If we turn to Chapter 24 of the "Tale of Genji"26, we find a description of a boating party in Murasaki's spring garden which aptly illuminates this concept:
"Numbers of (Murasaki's) young women who were thought likely to enjoy such an outing were therefore rowed out over the south lake, which ran from Murasaki's south-west quarter to her south-east quarter, with a hillock separating the two. The boats left from the hillock. Murasaki's women were stationed in the fishing pavilion at the boundary between the two quarters.
The dragon and phoenix boats were brilliantly decorated in the Chinese fashion. The little pages and helmsmen, their hair still bound up in the page-boy manner, wore lively Chinese dress, and everything about the arrangements was deliciously exotic, to add to the novelty, for the empress's women, of this southeast quarter. The boats pulled up below a cliff at an island cove, where the smallest of the hanging rocks was like a detail of a painting. The branches caught in mists from either side were like a tapestry, and far away in Murasaki's private gardens a willow trailed its branches in a deepening green and the cherry blossoms were rich and sensuous. In other places they had fallen, but here they were still at their smiling best, and above the galleries wisteria was beginning to send forth its lavender. Yellow kerria reflected on the lake as if about to join its own image. Waterfowl swam past in amiable pairs, and flew in and out with twigs in their bills, and one longed to paint the mandarin ducks as they coursed about on the water."
From this point on they composed poem after poem in an attempt to capture the beauty of the moment. Once back indoors the party continued through the night, with poetry and music-making. Then: "Morning came. From behind her fences, Akikonomu listened to the morning birds and feared that her autumn garden had lost the contest."
The gardens of the Heian period were elegant and colourful, and the festivities held within them were infused with a joyous, light-hearted spirit. They inspired their visitors to express their love of nature through poetry and music. Murasaki's description of the boating party is full of references to the natural signs of spring, and this fascination with the passing seasons is a thread which can be found running through the diaries, novels, poems and paintings of the Heian period as a whole. Anyone who has lived in Japan - and particularly Kyoto - for any length of time will know that spring and autumn are the two seasons closest to the Japanese heart: spring because it is the season in which nature awakens to new life in a burst of fresh and strong colours, autumn for its more subdued rush of yellows, reds and purples and its note of sadness.
Prince Genji tells his favourite lady-in-waiting Akiko-numi, whose name literally means "lover of autumn": "But aside from house and family, it is nature that gives me the most pleasure, the changes of the seasons, the blossoms and leaves of autumn and spring, the shifting patterns of the skies. People have always debated the relative merits of the groves of spring and fields of autumn, and had trouble coming to a conclusion. I have been told that in China nothing is held to surpass the brocades of spring, but in the poetry of our own country the preference would seem to be for the wistful notes of autumn. I watch them come and go and must allow each its points, and in the end am unable to decide between song of bird and hue of flower. I go further within the limits allowed by my narrow gardens. I have sought to bring in what I can of the seasons, the flowering trees of spring and the flowering grasses of autumn, and the humming of insects that would go unnoticed in the wilds. This is what I offer for your pleasure. Which of the two, autumn and spring, is your own favourite?"
These and the following passages on Murasaki's spring garden and Akikonomu's autumn garden suggest firstly that Prince Genji saw his courtly ladies as personifications of the qualities of their favourite gardens and, secondly, that he had built his palace in the form of a mandala, with the four gardens of his four favourite ladies corresponding to the cardinal point appropriate to their season:
"The hills were high in the south-east quarter where spring-blossoming trees and bushes were planted in large numbers. The lake was most ingeniously designed. Among the planting in the forward parts of the garden were cinquefoil pines, maples, cherries, wisteria, kerria and rock azaleas, most of them trees and shrubs whose season was spring. Touches of autumn, too, were scattered through the groves. In Akikonomu's garden (occupying the south-west quarter) the plantings, on hills left from the old garden, were chosen for rich autumn colours. Clear spring water went singing off into the distance, over rocks designed to enhance the music. There was a waterfall, and the whole expanse was like an autumn moor. Since it was now autumn, the garden was a wild profusion of autumn flowers and leaves, such as to shame the hills of Oi.
In the north-east quarter there was a cool natural spring and the plans had the summer sun in mind. In the forward parts of the garden the wind through thickets of Chinese bamboo would be cool in the summer, and the trees were deep and mysterious as mountain groves. There was a hedge of mayflower, and there were oranges to remind the lady of days long gone. There were wild carnations and roses and gentians and a few spring and autumn flowers as well. A part of the quarter was fenced off for equestrian grounds. Since the fifth month would be its liveliest time, there were irises along the lake. On the far side were stables where the finest of horses would be kept.
And finally the north-west quarter: beyond artificial hillocks to the north were rows of warehouses, screened off by pines which would be beautiful in new falls of snow. The chrysanthemum hedge would bloom in the morning frosts of early winter, when also a grove of 'mother oaks' would display its best hues. And in among the deep groves were mountain trees which one would have been hard put to identify."
I am tempted to conclude from the above lines that the rules of cjeomancy governed not only the design of the capital and the imperial palace but even the gardens of the nobility, and that these, too, were intended to represent a sort of mandala. an image of the universe. The four gardens described m the "Tale of Genji" attained their fullest glory in their "own" season; m relation to the mam palace, each faced the direction to which it is assigned within the chart of the five evolutive phases. The names of the gardens, indicating their geographical positions, no doubt acted as a helpful means of orientation within the labyrinthine palace complex.
Wybe Kuitert has collected sufficient literary evidence to conclude that the idea of allocating individual gardens to specific cardinal points was not merely "literary fiction but actual practice" in the design of Heian palaces."
The four seasons and their various charms are the subject of constant reference in the novels and diaries of the Heian period, and much Heian poetry is hinged on Makura kotoba, "Pillow Words" which include proverbial descriptions of the seasons. Daily life in the palaces of the nobility was similarly enacted amidst images of the rhythms of nature, both outdoors in gardens and indoors in shiki-e, the "four seasons paintings' executed m the indigenous yamato style.
The palaces of the Hetan period employed a form of post-and-lintel architecture which contained very few permanent partitions and which could be opened onto the garden. Sliding screens and free-standing, movable panels were used to partition off individual areas as required. These were often decorated with scenes from nature, such as the four seasons, seasonal festivals and their locations.
Saburo lenaga summarizes this Heian immersion m nature in the following passage: "The natural was always so interwoven with human life that, in point of fact, the pamtmg ended up as the depiction of recurring seasonal events, some religious, some not. The starting-point for events was the special connection between the unfolding of the seasons and the unfolding of human life."*'" The Heian period saw man as one with nature.
Mono no aware: sensitivity towards beings
The emotional - and not the intellectual or religious -attitude of the Heian nobility towards nature can be summarized in the almost untranslatable concept of mono no aware, sensitivity towards beings. According to Ivan Morris, the term aware occurs exactly 1018 times in the "Tale of Genji'V It is the great theme of Heian aesthetics. The normal rendering of this phrase as the "emotional quality of things" fails, in my opinion, to do justice to the true meaning of the original. "Things" have no emotion. According to Heian thinking, however, rocks, flowers and trees are not simply inanimate objects, but possess their own "being" and their own sensitivity. To be sensitive to their sensitivity is a prerequisite of Heian art. And since the sense of the impermanence of all being was particularly pronounced m the Heian period, the expression mono no aware came to acquire an undercurrent of profound melancholy.
The "Tale of Genji" represents a pinnacle of indigenous Japanese prose-writing It was composed just after 1000 by Shikibu Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting. The novel's heroine, who bears the same name as the authoress, supplies both a wealth of observations on elegant Heian court society and astonishingly detailed accounts of the palace gardens and their (unctions - not least as a setting for romantic encounters.
Japanese art historians have summarized the garden of the Heian period as chisen shuyu teien, which translates literally as "pond-sprmg-boating garden", in other words a garden with a pond whose waters are fed by a spring or garden stream, and which is designed to be enjoyed by boat. If we turn to Chapter 24 of the "Tale of Genji"26, we find a description of a boating party in Murasaki's spring garden which aptly illuminates this concept:
"Numbers of (Murasaki's) young women who were thought likely to enjoy such an outing were therefore rowed out over the south lake, which ran from Murasaki's south-west quarter to her south-east quarter, with a hillock separating the two. The boats left from the hillock. Murasaki's women were stationed in the fishing pavilion at the boundary between the two quarters.
The dragon and phoenix boats were brilliantly decorated in the Chinese fashion. The little pages and helmsmen, their hair still bound up in the page-boy manner, wore lively Chinese dress, and everything about the arrangements was deliciously exotic, to add to the novelty, for the empress's women, of this southeast quarter. The boats pulled up below a cliff at an island cove, where the smallest of the hanging rocks was like a detail of a painting. The branches caught in mists from either side were like a tapestry, and far away in Murasaki's private gardens a willow trailed its branches in a deepening green and the cherry blossoms were rich and sensuous. In other places they had fallen, but here they were still at their smiling best, and above the galleries wisteria was beginning to send forth its lavender. Yellow kerria reflected on the lake as if about to join its own image. Waterfowl swam past in amiable pairs, and flew in and out with twigs in their bills, and one longed to paint the mandarin ducks as they coursed about on the water."
From this point on they composed poem after poem in an attempt to capture the beauty of the moment. Once back indoors the party continued through the night, with poetry and music-making. Then: "Morning came. From behind her fences, Akikonomu listened to the morning birds and feared that her autumn garden had lost the contest."
The gardens of the Heian period were elegant and colourful, and the festivities held within them were infused with a joyous, light-hearted spirit. They inspired their visitors to express their love of nature through poetry and music. Murasaki's description of the boating party is full of references to the natural signs of spring, and this fascination with the passing seasons is a thread which can be found running through the diaries, novels, poems and paintings of the Heian period as a whole. Anyone who has lived in Japan - and particularly Kyoto - for any length of time will know that spring and autumn are the two seasons closest to the Japanese heart: spring because it is the season in which nature awakens to new life in a burst of fresh and strong colours, autumn for its more subdued rush of yellows, reds and purples and its note of sadness.
Prince Genji tells his favourite lady-in-waiting Akiko-numi, whose name literally means "lover of autumn": "But aside from house and family, it is nature that gives me the most pleasure, the changes of the seasons, the blossoms and leaves of autumn and spring, the shifting patterns of the skies. People have always debated the relative merits of the groves of spring and fields of autumn, and had trouble coming to a conclusion. I have been told that in China nothing is held to surpass the brocades of spring, but in the poetry of our own country the preference would seem to be for the wistful notes of autumn. I watch them come and go and must allow each its points, and in the end am unable to decide between song of bird and hue of flower. I go further within the limits allowed by my narrow gardens. I have sought to bring in what I can of the seasons, the flowering trees of spring and the flowering grasses of autumn, and the humming of insects that would go unnoticed in the wilds. This is what I offer for your pleasure. Which of the two, autumn and spring, is your own favourite?"
These and the following passages on Murasaki's spring garden and Akikonomu's autumn garden suggest firstly that Prince Genji saw his courtly ladies as personifications of the qualities of their favourite gardens and, secondly, that he had built his palace in the form of a mandala, with the four gardens of his four favourite ladies corresponding to the cardinal point appropriate to their season:
"The hills were high in the south-east quarter where spring-blossoming trees and bushes were planted in large numbers. The lake was most ingeniously designed. Among the planting in the forward parts of the garden were cinquefoil pines, maples, cherries, wisteria, kerria and rock azaleas, most of them trees and shrubs whose season was spring. Touches of autumn, too, were scattered through the groves. In Akikonomu's garden (occupying the south-west quarter) the plantings, on hills left from the old garden, were chosen for rich autumn colours. Clear spring water went singing off into the distance, over rocks designed to enhance the music. There was a waterfall, and the whole expanse was like an autumn moor. Since it was now autumn, the garden was a wild profusion of autumn flowers and leaves, such as to shame the hills of Oi.
In the north-east quarter there was a cool natural spring and the plans had the summer sun in mind. In the forward parts of the garden the wind through thickets of Chinese bamboo would be cool in the summer, and the trees were deep and mysterious as mountain groves. There was a hedge of mayflower, and there were oranges to remind the lady of days long gone. There were wild carnations and roses and gentians and a few spring and autumn flowers as well. A part of the quarter was fenced off for equestrian grounds. Since the fifth month would be its liveliest time, there were irises along the lake. On the far side were stables where the finest of horses would be kept.
And finally the north-west quarter: beyond artificial hillocks to the north were rows of warehouses, screened off by pines which would be beautiful in new falls of snow. The chrysanthemum hedge would bloom in the morning frosts of early winter, when also a grove of 'mother oaks' would display its best hues. And in among the deep groves were mountain trees which one would have been hard put to identify."
I am tempted to conclude from the above lines that the rules of cjeomancy governed not only the design of the capital and the imperial palace but even the gardens of the nobility, and that these, too, were intended to represent a sort of mandala. an image of the universe. The four gardens described m the "Tale of Genji" attained their fullest glory in their "own" season; m relation to the mam palace, each faced the direction to which it is assigned within the chart of the five evolutive phases. The names of the gardens, indicating their geographical positions, no doubt acted as a helpful means of orientation within the labyrinthine palace complex.
Wybe Kuitert has collected sufficient literary evidence to conclude that the idea of allocating individual gardens to specific cardinal points was not merely "literary fiction but actual practice" in the design of Heian palaces."
The four seasons and their various charms are the subject of constant reference in the novels and diaries of the Heian period, and much Heian poetry is hinged on Makura kotoba, "Pillow Words" which include proverbial descriptions of the seasons. Daily life in the palaces of the nobility was similarly enacted amidst images of the rhythms of nature, both outdoors in gardens and indoors in shiki-e, the "four seasons paintings' executed m the indigenous yamato style.
The palaces of the Hetan period employed a form of post-and-lintel architecture which contained very few permanent partitions and which could be opened onto the garden. Sliding screens and free-standing, movable panels were used to partition off individual areas as required. These were often decorated with scenes from nature, such as the four seasons, seasonal festivals and their locations.
Saburo lenaga summarizes this Heian immersion m nature in the following passage: "The natural was always so interwoven with human life that, in point of fact, the pamtmg ended up as the depiction of recurring seasonal events, some religious, some not. The starting-point for events was the special connection between the unfolding of the seasons and the unfolding of human life."*'" The Heian period saw man as one with nature.
Mono no aware: sensitivity towards beings
The emotional - and not the intellectual or religious -attitude of the Heian nobility towards nature can be summarized in the almost untranslatable concept of mono no aware, sensitivity towards beings. According to Ivan Morris, the term aware occurs exactly 1018 times in the "Tale of Genji'V It is the great theme of Heian aesthetics. The normal rendering of this phrase as the "emotional quality of things" fails, in my opinion, to do justice to the true meaning of the original. "Things" have no emotion. According to Heian thinking, however, rocks, flowers and trees are not simply inanimate objects, but possess their own "being" and their own sensitivity. To be sensitive to their sensitivity is a prerequisite of Heian art. And since the sense of the impermanence of all being was particularly pronounced m the Heian period, the expression mono no aware came to acquire an undercurrent of profound melancholy.
Gardens in an urban palace setting
Nothing today survives of the eighth-century dai-dam, the "great inner interior", as the palace city was originally called. The dairi, or "inner interior", as the imperial residential quarters were known, has similarly fallen victim to time. Only the shinsen-en, the "Park of Divine Springs" to the south of Nijo castle, lives on as a tiny remnant of the imperial pleasure gardens which once covered an area of 2 x 4 city blocks (260 x 520 yards). According to the historical and literary sources of the day, these pleasure gardens provided the setting for imperial poetry competitions, banquets and boating trips on the huge artificial lake. The gardens also hosted the kyokusui no en, or "Feast by the Winding Stream", a literary event highly popular amongst court nobles. Lining both banks of the winding garden stream, they would compose poems upon a seasonal subject while catching tiny cups of rice wine which were floated downstream.
Gosho, literally "the august place" the present term for the imperial palace in Kyoto is a highly-disciplined form of - originally Chinese - palace architecture. It implies a symmetrical arrangement of successive courtyards aligned along a central axis. In the Heian period this form was invoked not only for palaces but also for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and in particular the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise.
At the heart of the imperial living quarters lies the shishin-den, literally "the purple hall of the Emperor", a word borrowed from the seventh-century Da-ming palace complex in Changan. The present shishin-den in Kyoto is a nineteenth-century reproduction of an earlier building from the late Edo era. It employs the now-familiar armchair layout, whereby double-aisled covered corridors extend from the main building to enclose a brightly-lit nan-tei, or "south garden". Carpeted with white sand, the garden contains nothing but a mandarin tree and a cherry tree, placed at either side of the open steps leading up to the shishin-den. Fenced off from the rest of the garden behind a carefully-proportioned wooden lattice, and symmetrically positioned within this ceremonial courtyard, the two trees are treated as pieces of architecture rather than as plants in a garden.
The empty and white characteristics of the south garden in front of the shishin-den have their origins in the dual function of the early Japanese emperors as both political ruler and chief priest. South gardens were originally reserved for religious and state purposes; empty, they provided a suitable stage for the colourful court rituals borrowed from T'ang China; white, they offered a pure setting for sacred dances performed to invoke the gods.
The cosmological orientation of the whole in accordance with Chinese models is again echoed in the names given to the two side gates leading into the south garden. Thus the nikkamon, the "sunflower gate", lies at the centre of the eastern walkway, while the gekkamon, the "moonflower gate", is found on the opposite, western side. They recall the temples of the sun and moon found outside the eastern and western gates of many Chinese cities. In Japan as in China, the layout of the imperial palace and its gardens was to reflect the design of the very cosmos itself.
Providing a stark contrast to the formality and austerity of the ceremonial south garden are the tsubo-niwa, the small "inner-courtyard gardens" found amongst the rectangular arrangement of buildings north of the shishin-den. Intimate in scale, informal and unassuming in character, these are often devoted to one specific plant or plant variety.
The walled garden below the west veranda of the seiryoden, the imperial banqueting rooms, is completely flat and almost empty, containing no more than a few simple plants. Garden scholar M. Hayakawa sees this garden as the perfect expression of the Heian sense of elegance and tranquility. I believe it mirrors precisely those motifs I have described earlier as characterizing the Japanese sense of beauty: namely, the play of delicate natural form against the right angle of Japanese architecture, in this case the wooden lattice.
Expanding upon the simple beauty of the tsubo-niwa within the architectural maze of the imperial complex, another expert on Japanese gardens, Loraine Kuck, observes: "Ladies whose rooms faced these small courts were often called by the name of the flower dominating them, and this same flower was sometimes also used as a decorative motif in the rooms - stencilled or embroidered onto curtains and screens." Kuck also draws our attention to the name of Fuji-tsubo, the "Lady of the Wisteria Court" who appears in the famous "Tale of Prince Genji"
The Heian nobility, equally concerned to emulate the Chinese fashions of the day, modelled their own gardens on those of the imperial palace. The south gardens of these noble residences no longer consisted solely of empty, sandy surfaces, however; they were joined instead by elaborate gardens laid out to the south, featuring large ponds with one or more islands connected by arched bridges.
The architectural style which dominated the early Heian period became known as shinden after the main hall which lay at the centre of palace complexes. It is now generally assumed that the noble residences of this period were highly symmetrical in their design and occupied a site measuring about 130 x 130 yards (one city block). Two suiwata-dono, open corridors, led from the main hall (shinden) to two symmetrical side halls (tainoya). From there, two covered walkways led southwards towards the pond to a tsuri-dono, a fishing pavilion, on one side and an izumi-dono, a spring pavilion, on the other. These two pavilions stood right on the water's edge. Halfway along the covered walkways, chumon - middle gates - gave access to the inner courtyard. The ceremonial southern entrance gate found in the imperial palace has here disappeared.
Japanese scholar Sawada Nadan, an architectural historian of the late Edo era, was the first to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of a noble residence in the Shinden style of the early Heian period. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the drawing published in his 1842 "Kaoku zakko" in reversed form, since it thus better fits the description of the winding garden stream found in the Sakutei-ki. The Sakutei-ki dates from the latter part of the eleventh century and is the oldest surviving text on garden architecture. It contains the clearest description of the first great prototype of Japanese garden: "To ensure good fortune, water must flow in from the east, pass beneath the floor of the house and flow out to the south-west. For in this way the waters of the Blue Dragon will wash away all the evil spirits from the house and garden and carry them to the White Tiger." As already stated, geoman-tic principles were applied not only to the design of cities as a whole, but also to the palaces and gardens within them. The palace complex was also to be a mi-crocosmic reflection of the universe. The language of the Sakutei-ki is full of references to the four heavenly animals and their significance for the building of a house. Thus it writes: "The garden stream should flow into the shinden area from the east; it should then be directed south and should leave the garden flowing westwards. Even where the water has to come in from the north, it should be allowed to flow eastwards and then exit by the south-west. According to an ancient sutra, the land enclosed within a river bend should be considered the belly of the dragon. To build a house on that belly is to be lucky. But to build a house on the back of the dragon is to invite misfortune."
By the end of the Heian period, however, the highly formalized, symmetrical architecture of early Heian palaces had been replaced by a freer and more asymmetric style of building. Whether this transition reflected a respect for natural form, or simply an inborn Japanese dislike of symmetry, must remain a matter for speculation. In the new style of the late Heian period, the buildings composing the palace complex no longer stand isolated and independent, but instead flow each into the next. Japan hereby entered the phase of complete assimilation of the Chinese models it had imported in the past, one which Professor Teiji Itoh has termed a phase of "splendid misinterpretations".
On the basis of careful analyses of scroll-paintings, albeit of slightly later origin, historians have been able to reconstruct both the Tosanjo-den palace belonging to the Fujiwara clan, and the Hojuji palace built by Fujiwara no Tanemitsu (942-992). Their reconstructions suggest that the Fujiwara built palaces of great splendour and impressive stze, running the length of two city blocks from north to south Emperor Goshirakawa chose Hojuji palace as the home of his retirement.
The Fujtwara ("plain of wistena") clan effectively ruled Japan from the mid-ninth to the late eleventh century from their positions as impenal regents and chief ministers. They guaranteed their continuing influence at court by ensuring that every emperor was the son of a Fujiwara mother. Thanks to their political power and generous patronage of the arts, this period of almost two hundred years has become known as the Fujiwara era.
The Fujiwara continued to design their palaces within the design framework of the "armchair", however asymmetrical the overall composition might now appear Their gardens, too, were illustrations of that first great Japanese prototype, featuring a pond with one or more islands, its waters fed by a garden stream entenng and leaving the grounds in accordance with ancient geomantic rules The Tosanjoden palace gardens had three islands and one fishing pavilion to the west, while those of Hojuji-den contained two islands and two pavilions, one at each end of the projecting covered walkways. The eastern pavilion, built upon a cruciform ground plan unique m Japanese architectural history, stood not on the banks of the pond but on one of its islands, and thus represented a further step away from the clear symmetry of the Shinden style.
In both cases the mam hall, the shinden, opens directly onto an empty area of white sand, the site of regular ceremonies and special festivities held on the occasion of imperial visits. Both, too, have garden streams which wind their way through sparsely-planted, slightly undulating ground, and along whose banks that popular banquet of poetry and rice wine, the kyokusui no en, was once held On such festive occasions the islands often provided the location for a gaku-ya, a stage for dancers and musicians.
Gosho, literally "the august place" the present term for the imperial palace in Kyoto is a highly-disciplined form of - originally Chinese - palace architecture. It implies a symmetrical arrangement of successive courtyards aligned along a central axis. In the Heian period this form was invoked not only for palaces but also for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and in particular the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise.
At the heart of the imperial living quarters lies the shishin-den, literally "the purple hall of the Emperor", a word borrowed from the seventh-century Da-ming palace complex in Changan. The present shishin-den in Kyoto is a nineteenth-century reproduction of an earlier building from the late Edo era. It employs the now-familiar armchair layout, whereby double-aisled covered corridors extend from the main building to enclose a brightly-lit nan-tei, or "south garden". Carpeted with white sand, the garden contains nothing but a mandarin tree and a cherry tree, placed at either side of the open steps leading up to the shishin-den. Fenced off from the rest of the garden behind a carefully-proportioned wooden lattice, and symmetrically positioned within this ceremonial courtyard, the two trees are treated as pieces of architecture rather than as plants in a garden.
The empty and white characteristics of the south garden in front of the shishin-den have their origins in the dual function of the early Japanese emperors as both political ruler and chief priest. South gardens were originally reserved for religious and state purposes; empty, they provided a suitable stage for the colourful court rituals borrowed from T'ang China; white, they offered a pure setting for sacred dances performed to invoke the gods.
The cosmological orientation of the whole in accordance with Chinese models is again echoed in the names given to the two side gates leading into the south garden. Thus the nikkamon, the "sunflower gate", lies at the centre of the eastern walkway, while the gekkamon, the "moonflower gate", is found on the opposite, western side. They recall the temples of the sun and moon found outside the eastern and western gates of many Chinese cities. In Japan as in China, the layout of the imperial palace and its gardens was to reflect the design of the very cosmos itself.
Providing a stark contrast to the formality and austerity of the ceremonial south garden are the tsubo-niwa, the small "inner-courtyard gardens" found amongst the rectangular arrangement of buildings north of the shishin-den. Intimate in scale, informal and unassuming in character, these are often devoted to one specific plant or plant variety.
The walled garden below the west veranda of the seiryoden, the imperial banqueting rooms, is completely flat and almost empty, containing no more than a few simple plants. Garden scholar M. Hayakawa sees this garden as the perfect expression of the Heian sense of elegance and tranquility. I believe it mirrors precisely those motifs I have described earlier as characterizing the Japanese sense of beauty: namely, the play of delicate natural form against the right angle of Japanese architecture, in this case the wooden lattice.
Expanding upon the simple beauty of the tsubo-niwa within the architectural maze of the imperial complex, another expert on Japanese gardens, Loraine Kuck, observes: "Ladies whose rooms faced these small courts were often called by the name of the flower dominating them, and this same flower was sometimes also used as a decorative motif in the rooms - stencilled or embroidered onto curtains and screens." Kuck also draws our attention to the name of Fuji-tsubo, the "Lady of the Wisteria Court" who appears in the famous "Tale of Prince Genji"
The Heian nobility, equally concerned to emulate the Chinese fashions of the day, modelled their own gardens on those of the imperial palace. The south gardens of these noble residences no longer consisted solely of empty, sandy surfaces, however; they were joined instead by elaborate gardens laid out to the south, featuring large ponds with one or more islands connected by arched bridges.
The architectural style which dominated the early Heian period became known as shinden after the main hall which lay at the centre of palace complexes. It is now generally assumed that the noble residences of this period were highly symmetrical in their design and occupied a site measuring about 130 x 130 yards (one city block). Two suiwata-dono, open corridors, led from the main hall (shinden) to two symmetrical side halls (tainoya). From there, two covered walkways led southwards towards the pond to a tsuri-dono, a fishing pavilion, on one side and an izumi-dono, a spring pavilion, on the other. These two pavilions stood right on the water's edge. Halfway along the covered walkways, chumon - middle gates - gave access to the inner courtyard. The ceremonial southern entrance gate found in the imperial palace has here disappeared.
Japanese scholar Sawada Nadan, an architectural historian of the late Edo era, was the first to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of a noble residence in the Shinden style of the early Heian period. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the drawing published in his 1842 "Kaoku zakko" in reversed form, since it thus better fits the description of the winding garden stream found in the Sakutei-ki. The Sakutei-ki dates from the latter part of the eleventh century and is the oldest surviving text on garden architecture. It contains the clearest description of the first great prototype of Japanese garden: "To ensure good fortune, water must flow in from the east, pass beneath the floor of the house and flow out to the south-west. For in this way the waters of the Blue Dragon will wash away all the evil spirits from the house and garden and carry them to the White Tiger." As already stated, geoman-tic principles were applied not only to the design of cities as a whole, but also to the palaces and gardens within them. The palace complex was also to be a mi-crocosmic reflection of the universe. The language of the Sakutei-ki is full of references to the four heavenly animals and their significance for the building of a house. Thus it writes: "The garden stream should flow into the shinden area from the east; it should then be directed south and should leave the garden flowing westwards. Even where the water has to come in from the north, it should be allowed to flow eastwards and then exit by the south-west. According to an ancient sutra, the land enclosed within a river bend should be considered the belly of the dragon. To build a house on that belly is to be lucky. But to build a house on the back of the dragon is to invite misfortune."
By the end of the Heian period, however, the highly formalized, symmetrical architecture of early Heian palaces had been replaced by a freer and more asymmetric style of building. Whether this transition reflected a respect for natural form, or simply an inborn Japanese dislike of symmetry, must remain a matter for speculation. In the new style of the late Heian period, the buildings composing the palace complex no longer stand isolated and independent, but instead flow each into the next. Japan hereby entered the phase of complete assimilation of the Chinese models it had imported in the past, one which Professor Teiji Itoh has termed a phase of "splendid misinterpretations".
On the basis of careful analyses of scroll-paintings, albeit of slightly later origin, historians have been able to reconstruct both the Tosanjo-den palace belonging to the Fujiwara clan, and the Hojuji palace built by Fujiwara no Tanemitsu (942-992). Their reconstructions suggest that the Fujiwara built palaces of great splendour and impressive stze, running the length of two city blocks from north to south Emperor Goshirakawa chose Hojuji palace as the home of his retirement.
The Fujtwara ("plain of wistena") clan effectively ruled Japan from the mid-ninth to the late eleventh century from their positions as impenal regents and chief ministers. They guaranteed their continuing influence at court by ensuring that every emperor was the son of a Fujiwara mother. Thanks to their political power and generous patronage of the arts, this period of almost two hundred years has become known as the Fujiwara era.
The Fujiwara continued to design their palaces within the design framework of the "armchair", however asymmetrical the overall composition might now appear Their gardens, too, were illustrations of that first great Japanese prototype, featuring a pond with one or more islands, its waters fed by a garden stream entenng and leaving the grounds in accordance with ancient geomantic rules The Tosanjoden palace gardens had three islands and one fishing pavilion to the west, while those of Hojuji-den contained two islands and two pavilions, one at each end of the projecting covered walkways. The eastern pavilion, built upon a cruciform ground plan unique m Japanese architectural history, stood not on the banks of the pond but on one of its islands, and thus represented a further step away from the clear symmetry of the Shinden style.
In both cases the mam hall, the shinden, opens directly onto an empty area of white sand, the site of regular ceremonies and special festivities held on the occasion of imperial visits. Both, too, have garden streams which wind their way through sparsely-planted, slightly undulating ground, and along whose banks that popular banquet of poetry and rice wine, the kyokusui no en, was once held On such festive occasions the islands often provided the location for a gaku-ya, a stage for dancers and musicians.
Sino - Japanese geomancy as holistic design theory
As one of the - what we would now view as - unorthodox sciences practised in China, geomancy was most generally known as feng-shui. literally "wind-water", or simply as ti-li, "land patterns" In Japan this same body of knowledge was called chiso, "land physi ognomy", or kaso. "house physiognomy". Geomancy seeks to determine the most favourable design and location of human artefacts - a house, a grave, even a whole city - within the natural or man-made environment
Smo-Japanese geomancy is based on a holistic view of the cosmos, in which man is seen as an integral part of nature and its energy fields. It correlates geophysical factors - geographical land forms, climate, magnetic fields - and astral phenomena - movements of the stars, solstices, lunar phases - with the psychosomatic welfare of the human being We shall be examining this science in some depth not only because it differs considerably from the indigenous Shinto geomancy discussed earlier in this book, but because it was to prove highly significant for Japanese garden design Indeed, it influenced not only the positioning of artefacts (including entire gardens) in geographical space, but even governed the movement of human beings m time During the reign of Emperor Temmu, a central government organ was created within the imperial city to supervise Smo-Japanese geomancy This was the Ommyo-ryo, the Office of Yin and Yang For all its superstitious overtones, geomancy reflects a profound awareness of the ecological relationship between man and the forces of nature.
The logic of Chinese geomancy, of feng-shui, is not easily grasped by the Western mind. Like other branches of the traditional Chinese natural sciences, it employs methods of cognition which are best described as inductive, synthetic or synchronistic, if we may borrow from the terminology of Porkert and Jung. Such procedures are foreign to the Western mind, which employs causal, analytic and diachronistic processes of thought.
To the uninitiated, Smo-Japanese geomancy appears to consist of a vast collection of rules and precepts whose roots can ultimately be traced both to human fears - fear of the uncontrollable forces of nature, fear of hostile neighbours - and human greed. But it also conceals a fundamental acknowledgement of the interdependence of all levels of reality, both natural and man-made. It recognizes, too, the energetic quality underlying all reality - a concept unknown to the Western mind until the advent of modern physics.
The Chinese geomancy introduced into Japan was itself a complex amalgam of two schools of thought, one based on more rational cosmology, the other intuitive. The chief instrument of the former was the geo-mancer's "compass", a condensed image of the cosmos in its spatial and temporal relationships - a sort of Chinese mandala.
The Chinese geomantic compass was frequently subdivided into three levels - Heaven, Earth and Man.
It thus reflected the tripartite division of the Chinese universe. In line with ancient Chinese speculation on the cosmos, the compass shows heaven as round and the earth as square. There is a magnetic needle at its centre. Concentric rings circling this needle relate the concepts of Yin and Yang, which express the polarity of all natural phenomena, to the concept of go-gyo, the five evolutive phases of Chinese natural science, to the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams of the l-Ching and to the cycles of the Chinese solar-lunar calendar. These correlations apply equally to outer nature and inner man. Practical geomancy might thus be described as a kind of acupuncture applied to nature, and acupuncture as as kind of geomancy applied to the human body. In view of this holistic understanding of the world, it is not supnsing that the design of Japanese gardens was also subject to the dictates of geomancy.
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this cosmology was the fact that the gardens, cities and palaces of China, and subsequently Japan, were all oriented due north. The Chinese believed that all power was derived from a non-personal Heaven and was transmitted to earth via the emperor, until he grew too weak to perform his celestial mandate. Just as the stars and constellations in the sky appeared to rotate around the Pole Star - referred to in ancient Chinese texts as the "Great Heavenly Emperor" -, so on earth all state and religious affairs revolved around the figure of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. He was the axis mundi of the earth just as the Pole Star was that of the firmament. Since the Pole Star lies almost due north, the itually correct position of the emperor was accepted as also being either to the north or at the centre of his capital and palace complex. This cosmological axiom led the Japanese to orient their capital cities, palaces, noble residences, gardens and even the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise all towards the north.
At the centre of the intuitive school of Chinese geomancy lay the search for an ideal site upon which to build an ancestrial burial vault, a house or even an entire town in harmony with the complex configurations of nature already existing or made by man. The Chinese visualized such ideal locations in the form of a comfortable armchair, its "back" a mountain and its "armrests" hills. In certain cases the "back" might be provided by artificial enclosures such as walls, hedges and buildings. The Chinese word for such an ideal site isxue, which means "lair", "den" or "cave", thereby emphasizing its protective function. Significantly, too, the same ideogram represents an acupuncture point in both the Chinese and Japanese languages.
Ideally, the "armchair" will be open and sloping towards the south, and flanked by mountains or buildings on its three remaining sides. These specifications are met both by the old capital of Heian-kyo, which is located within the broad Yamashiro basin (yamashiro literally means "mountain castle") and by the dairi, the imperial palace within the city itself.
Unlike the cosmological school, however, with its geomantic compass, the more intuitive school had no technical aids to fall back on. Locating ideal sites required instead an intuitive feel for what the Chinese callki, and what M. Porkert translates as "configurative energy", the energy flow within a complex natural or man-made configuration. An intuitive feel for this energy flow could only be acquired through practical training under the supervision of an experienced geomancer.
It is interesting to note that this same concept of ki is employed by traditional Chinese medicine, both in diagnosis and treatment. This and other points of similarity have led to the suggestion that acupuncture may have developed out of the historically older science of geomancy. Many of the names assigned to acupuncture points make clear references to geographic and topological features - "bubbling spring", "sea of energy", "small swamp", "bending pond", "inner garden", "outer hill", "receiving mountain" and more besides.
According to the formal school of geomancy, a location is characterized in terms of a dragon. The dragon's "belly" thereby represents the most auspicious site. The contours of the dragon's body are described by mountain ranges and winding rivers, which also represent the components of Yin and Yang. As mentioned earlier, the word for "landscape" - adopted into the Japanese from the original Chinese - is san-sui, which means literally "mountain-water". This conceptual and visual differentiation is utterly lost in translation. San-sui means the polarity of mountain and water and is one of the most important metaphysical concepts inspiring the formal language of Sino-Japanese garden architecture and its blood-brother, painting. The geomantic, or better, topomantic location of Heian-kyo is said to have been selected with regard to the mythological heavenly animals residing in the four "corners" of the universe. As writings dating from as far back as the Han dynasty reveal, it was believed that these animals, like all heavenly phenomena, manifested themselves on earth. Thus the Azure Dragon supposedly lived in a mountain stream in the east, the region of morning and spring. The home of the White Tiger lay in the mountains of the west, the region of evening and autumn. Morning and spring thereby represent the time of ascending Yang, while evening and autumn represent the period of ascending Yin. The Black Tortoise was thought to dwell in the mountains of the north, the direction of midnight and winter, while the Red Bird resided in the plains of the south, the direction of noon and summer.
Behind this notion of the four heavenly animals lies the ancient Chinese system of inductive correlations, known as wu-xing in Chinese and go-дуо in Japanese. Long translated as "five elements", the concept has more recently been rendered as "five activities" or "five evolutive phases". This system originated in the fourth century BC and existed alongside the traditional Chinese notions of Yin and Yang. As the latter represented an understanding of the universe in terms of polar opposites, so wu-xing proposed an equally dynamic interpretation of all reality in terms of five phases. These phases were symbolized by the ideograms for earth, wood, fire, metal and water. As shown in the diagram on page 43, the earth lies at the centre. The four segments of the circle correspond to the four cardinal points, to which are assigned wood (east), metal (west), water (north) and fire (south). Each of these go-дуо elements is attributed its own colour: earth is represented as yellow, wood as green, metal as white, water as black and fire as red. As visible in the diagram, these elements are part of a five-stage sequence of concentric circles, and are followed by rings containing the five main bodily organs, five human emotions, the four seasons and four times of day, until finally arriving at the four mythological animals. Everything under the sun found its place within these five stages of transformation, from the five planets and five basic types of animal to the elements of inner man: the five tastes, five voices and five major organs, which in turn correspond to five emotions - anger, joy, sorrow, terror and thoughtful reflection.
This five-phase system of correspondences thus constitutes both a macrocosmograph and a psychogram. It creates continuous cross-references between the outer world of nature and the inner world of man. Even today, the many Chinese pharmacies still practising at a local level in Japan will invariably have on display a chart of these correspondences. A further indication of the importance of this system may be seen in the fact that both the city and gardens of Heian-kyo were laid out in the form of Chinese mandalas, and can thus be interpreted as microcosmic replicas of the universe.
The ancient Japanese belief that evil spirits always come from the north-east, from the ki-mon, the Devil's Gate, probably had its roots in a natural phenomenon: in China and Japan, the bitterly cold winter winds come from the north-east. China furthermore suffered barbarian attacks from this same direction throughout its history, while the hostile and militant tribes who populated the north-eastern regions of Japan were only finally subdued by the Yamato clan. Heian-kyo was safely protected from any such "threat" by Mount Hiei, the highest peak in the armchair of mountains cradling the former Japanese capital and lying exactly north-east of the city.
The gardens of the Heian period may be found in three different types of setting. Some are contained within the palaces of the emperor and the aristocracy and thus fully subordinate to their architectural surroundings. Others are sited on the city outskirts, acting as a kind of intermediary between the urban environment and unspoilt nature. Others still adorn the main courtyards of Pure Land Buddhist temples.
Smo-Japanese geomancy is based on a holistic view of the cosmos, in which man is seen as an integral part of nature and its energy fields. It correlates geophysical factors - geographical land forms, climate, magnetic fields - and astral phenomena - movements of the stars, solstices, lunar phases - with the psychosomatic welfare of the human being We shall be examining this science in some depth not only because it differs considerably from the indigenous Shinto geomancy discussed earlier in this book, but because it was to prove highly significant for Japanese garden design Indeed, it influenced not only the positioning of artefacts (including entire gardens) in geographical space, but even governed the movement of human beings m time During the reign of Emperor Temmu, a central government organ was created within the imperial city to supervise Smo-Japanese geomancy This was the Ommyo-ryo, the Office of Yin and Yang For all its superstitious overtones, geomancy reflects a profound awareness of the ecological relationship between man and the forces of nature.
The logic of Chinese geomancy, of feng-shui, is not easily grasped by the Western mind. Like other branches of the traditional Chinese natural sciences, it employs methods of cognition which are best described as inductive, synthetic or synchronistic, if we may borrow from the terminology of Porkert and Jung. Such procedures are foreign to the Western mind, which employs causal, analytic and diachronistic processes of thought.
To the uninitiated, Smo-Japanese geomancy appears to consist of a vast collection of rules and precepts whose roots can ultimately be traced both to human fears - fear of the uncontrollable forces of nature, fear of hostile neighbours - and human greed. But it also conceals a fundamental acknowledgement of the interdependence of all levels of reality, both natural and man-made. It recognizes, too, the energetic quality underlying all reality - a concept unknown to the Western mind until the advent of modern physics.
The Chinese geomancy introduced into Japan was itself a complex amalgam of two schools of thought, one based on more rational cosmology, the other intuitive. The chief instrument of the former was the geo-mancer's "compass", a condensed image of the cosmos in its spatial and temporal relationships - a sort of Chinese mandala.
The Chinese geomantic compass was frequently subdivided into three levels - Heaven, Earth and Man.
It thus reflected the tripartite division of the Chinese universe. In line with ancient Chinese speculation on the cosmos, the compass shows heaven as round and the earth as square. There is a magnetic needle at its centre. Concentric rings circling this needle relate the concepts of Yin and Yang, which express the polarity of all natural phenomena, to the concept of go-gyo, the five evolutive phases of Chinese natural science, to the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams of the l-Ching and to the cycles of the Chinese solar-lunar calendar. These correlations apply equally to outer nature and inner man. Practical geomancy might thus be described as a kind of acupuncture applied to nature, and acupuncture as as kind of geomancy applied to the human body. In view of this holistic understanding of the world, it is not supnsing that the design of Japanese gardens was also subject to the dictates of geomancy.
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this cosmology was the fact that the gardens, cities and palaces of China, and subsequently Japan, were all oriented due north. The Chinese believed that all power was derived from a non-personal Heaven and was transmitted to earth via the emperor, until he grew too weak to perform his celestial mandate. Just as the stars and constellations in the sky appeared to rotate around the Pole Star - referred to in ancient Chinese texts as the "Great Heavenly Emperor" -, so on earth all state and religious affairs revolved around the figure of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. He was the axis mundi of the earth just as the Pole Star was that of the firmament. Since the Pole Star lies almost due north, the itually correct position of the emperor was accepted as also being either to the north or at the centre of his capital and palace complex. This cosmological axiom led the Japanese to orient their capital cities, palaces, noble residences, gardens and even the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors in Ise all towards the north.
At the centre of the intuitive school of Chinese geomancy lay the search for an ideal site upon which to build an ancestrial burial vault, a house or even an entire town in harmony with the complex configurations of nature already existing or made by man. The Chinese visualized such ideal locations in the form of a comfortable armchair, its "back" a mountain and its "armrests" hills. In certain cases the "back" might be provided by artificial enclosures such as walls, hedges and buildings. The Chinese word for such an ideal site isxue, which means "lair", "den" or "cave", thereby emphasizing its protective function. Significantly, too, the same ideogram represents an acupuncture point in both the Chinese and Japanese languages.
Ideally, the "armchair" will be open and sloping towards the south, and flanked by mountains or buildings on its three remaining sides. These specifications are met both by the old capital of Heian-kyo, which is located within the broad Yamashiro basin (yamashiro literally means "mountain castle") and by the dairi, the imperial palace within the city itself.
Unlike the cosmological school, however, with its geomantic compass, the more intuitive school had no technical aids to fall back on. Locating ideal sites required instead an intuitive feel for what the Chinese callki, and what M. Porkert translates as "configurative energy", the energy flow within a complex natural or man-made configuration. An intuitive feel for this energy flow could only be acquired through practical training under the supervision of an experienced geomancer.
It is interesting to note that this same concept of ki is employed by traditional Chinese medicine, both in diagnosis and treatment. This and other points of similarity have led to the suggestion that acupuncture may have developed out of the historically older science of geomancy. Many of the names assigned to acupuncture points make clear references to geographic and topological features - "bubbling spring", "sea of energy", "small swamp", "bending pond", "inner garden", "outer hill", "receiving mountain" and more besides.
According to the formal school of geomancy, a location is characterized in terms of a dragon. The dragon's "belly" thereby represents the most auspicious site. The contours of the dragon's body are described by mountain ranges and winding rivers, which also represent the components of Yin and Yang. As mentioned earlier, the word for "landscape" - adopted into the Japanese from the original Chinese - is san-sui, which means literally "mountain-water". This conceptual and visual differentiation is utterly lost in translation. San-sui means the polarity of mountain and water and is one of the most important metaphysical concepts inspiring the formal language of Sino-Japanese garden architecture and its blood-brother, painting. The geomantic, or better, topomantic location of Heian-kyo is said to have been selected with regard to the mythological heavenly animals residing in the four "corners" of the universe. As writings dating from as far back as the Han dynasty reveal, it was believed that these animals, like all heavenly phenomena, manifested themselves on earth. Thus the Azure Dragon supposedly lived in a mountain stream in the east, the region of morning and spring. The home of the White Tiger lay in the mountains of the west, the region of evening and autumn. Morning and spring thereby represent the time of ascending Yang, while evening and autumn represent the period of ascending Yin. The Black Tortoise was thought to dwell in the mountains of the north, the direction of midnight and winter, while the Red Bird resided in the plains of the south, the direction of noon and summer.
Behind this notion of the four heavenly animals lies the ancient Chinese system of inductive correlations, known as wu-xing in Chinese and go-дуо in Japanese. Long translated as "five elements", the concept has more recently been rendered as "five activities" or "five evolutive phases". This system originated in the fourth century BC and existed alongside the traditional Chinese notions of Yin and Yang. As the latter represented an understanding of the universe in terms of polar opposites, so wu-xing proposed an equally dynamic interpretation of all reality in terms of five phases. These phases were symbolized by the ideograms for earth, wood, fire, metal and water. As shown in the diagram on page 43, the earth lies at the centre. The four segments of the circle correspond to the four cardinal points, to which are assigned wood (east), metal (west), water (north) and fire (south). Each of these go-дуо elements is attributed its own colour: earth is represented as yellow, wood as green, metal as white, water as black and fire as red. As visible in the diagram, these elements are part of a five-stage sequence of concentric circles, and are followed by rings containing the five main bodily organs, five human emotions, the four seasons and four times of day, until finally arriving at the four mythological animals. Everything under the sun found its place within these five stages of transformation, from the five planets and five basic types of animal to the elements of inner man: the five tastes, five voices and five major organs, which in turn correspond to five emotions - anger, joy, sorrow, terror and thoughtful reflection.
This five-phase system of correspondences thus constitutes both a macrocosmograph and a psychogram. It creates continuous cross-references between the outer world of nature and the inner world of man. Even today, the many Chinese pharmacies still practising at a local level in Japan will invariably have on display a chart of these correspondences. A further indication of the importance of this system may be seen in the fact that both the city and gardens of Heian-kyo were laid out in the form of Chinese mandalas, and can thus be interpreted as microcosmic replicas of the universe.
The ancient Japanese belief that evil spirits always come from the north-east, from the ki-mon, the Devil's Gate, probably had its roots in a natural phenomenon: in China and Japan, the bitterly cold winter winds come from the north-east. China furthermore suffered barbarian attacks from this same direction throughout its history, while the hostile and militant tribes who populated the north-eastern regions of Japan were only finally subdued by the Yamato clan. Heian-kyo was safely protected from any such "threat" by Mount Hiei, the highest peak in the armchair of mountains cradling the former Japanese capital and lying exactly north-east of the city.
The gardens of the Heian period may be found in three different types of setting. Some are contained within the palaces of the emperor and the aristocracy and thus fully subordinate to their architectural surroundings. Others are sited on the city outskirts, acting as a kind of intermediary between the urban environment and unspoilt nature. Others still adorn the main courtyards of Pure Land Buddhist temples.
The Japanese sense of beauty:
The veneration of the unique in nature and the perfection of the man-made type
The early Chinese gardens attached to imperial palaces served as hunting grounds. Such gardens were less the object of architectural design than their Near Eastern contemporaries, but were nevertheless enclosed by walls. Here, too, nature was moulded and monitored; even the animals within the park were subject to human control. The ancient gardens of the Near and Far East represented no opposite extremes of "unnatural" and "natural". They differed simply in the type and degree of their artificiality.
The Japanese garden displays this same figurative symbiosis of right angle and natural form in ever new variations throughout the five major epochs of its history. In his seminal essay on Japanese design, Walter Dodd Ramberg expresses his view that beauty is perceived and venerated in Japan either as a property of natural accident or as the perfection of man-made type. In Shintoism, the oldest native Japanese religion, the unique or extraordinary in nature is often venerated as go-shintai, the abode of a deity. Go-shintai may be an unusually-shaped rock, a tree weathered over the centuries, a strikingly jagged mountain or a waterfall of rare shape or size. In later periods of Japanese history artists made deliberate use of the beauty of natural chance, as revealed in the sophisticated flaws of their pottery glazing and the splashes in their calligraphy.
At the same time, however, the Japanese culture also perceives and pursues beauty in the perfection of the man-made type - in the delicate proportions of the diaphanous paper screen, the wooden lattices on the facades of traditional town houses and the clear linearity of the modular system of classic Japanese architecture. The constructed artefact is viewed as a sort of building set, whose individual blocks are combined according to fixed rules with ever greater functionality and aesthetic perfection. Man's play instinct naturally prompts him to explore and expand these self-imposed systems in ever new permutations.
These two ways of perceiving beauty - as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type - are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious supenmposition that best characterizes the traditional Japanese perception of beauty.
I see this overlapping of the rational and the random, the right angle and the natural form, at all levels of Japanese design: in ornamental tea-house niches (tokonoma) hung with scrolls of calligraphy, in a composition of natural, moss-covered rocks viewed through the rectangular frame of a traditional paper sliding screen, or in a theatrical decor of lions bounding through a bamboo grove which takes up the regular rhythm of the sliding internal partitions below. At their best, these two opposites of random and imposed order complement each other like the Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other. Without the contrast provided by a rectangular visual frame or rectilinear background, it would not be possible to recognize a handful of boulders, however carefully selected, as a garden. Thus the "garden" in Japan cannot be treated independently of architecture. The fortuitous order of nature serves to reinforce the rational order imposed by the right angle, and vice versa. In the quest for the perfect fusion -physical and intellectual - of these two opposites, in the quest for a kind of aesthetic unio mystica, I see a recurrent motif of the Japanese sense of beauty, one which runs like a hidden thread through the great works of Japanese art right up to the present day.
The early Chinese gardens attached to imperial palaces served as hunting grounds. Such gardens were less the object of architectural design than their Near Eastern contemporaries, but were nevertheless enclosed by walls. Here, too, nature was moulded and monitored; even the animals within the park were subject to human control. The ancient gardens of the Near and Far East represented no opposite extremes of "unnatural" and "natural". They differed simply in the type and degree of their artificiality.
The Japanese garden displays this same figurative symbiosis of right angle and natural form in ever new variations throughout the five major epochs of its history. In his seminal essay on Japanese design, Walter Dodd Ramberg expresses his view that beauty is perceived and venerated in Japan either as a property of natural accident or as the perfection of man-made type. In Shintoism, the oldest native Japanese religion, the unique or extraordinary in nature is often venerated as go-shintai, the abode of a deity. Go-shintai may be an unusually-shaped rock, a tree weathered over the centuries, a strikingly jagged mountain or a waterfall of rare shape or size. In later periods of Japanese history artists made deliberate use of the beauty of natural chance, as revealed in the sophisticated flaws of their pottery glazing and the splashes in their calligraphy.
At the same time, however, the Japanese culture also perceives and pursues beauty in the perfection of the man-made type - in the delicate proportions of the diaphanous paper screen, the wooden lattices on the facades of traditional town houses and the clear linearity of the modular system of classic Japanese architecture. The constructed artefact is viewed as a sort of building set, whose individual blocks are combined according to fixed rules with ever greater functionality and aesthetic perfection. Man's play instinct naturally prompts him to explore and expand these self-imposed systems in ever new permutations.
These two ways of perceiving beauty - as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type - are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious supenmposition that best characterizes the traditional Japanese perception of beauty.
I see this overlapping of the rational and the random, the right angle and the natural form, at all levels of Japanese design: in ornamental tea-house niches (tokonoma) hung with scrolls of calligraphy, in a composition of natural, moss-covered rocks viewed through the rectangular frame of a traditional paper sliding screen, or in a theatrical decor of lions bounding through a bamboo grove which takes up the regular rhythm of the sliding internal partitions below. At their best, these two opposites of random and imposed order complement each other like the Chinese principles of Yin and Yang. Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other. Without the contrast provided by a rectangular visual frame or rectilinear background, it would not be possible to recognize a handful of boulders, however carefully selected, as a garden. Thus the "garden" in Japan cannot be treated independently of architecture. The fortuitous order of nature serves to reinforce the rational order imposed by the right angle, and vice versa. In the quest for the perfect fusion -physical and intellectual - of these two opposites, in the quest for a kind of aesthetic unio mystica, I see a recurrent motif of the Japanese sense of beauty, one which runs like a hidden thread through the great works of Japanese art right up to the present day.
Sakutei-ki: "The Classic of Garden-Making"
The Sakutei-ki opens with an excellent introduction to the ground rules of garden architecture in the Heian period:
„The main points to be observed when erecting rocks are:
- Design the pond with respect to its position in the land, follow its request; when you encounter a poten tial site, consider its atmosphere; think of the moun tains and waters of living nature and reflect constantly upon such settings;
- When copying the gardens of famous masters of old, bear in mind the intention of your patron and de sign your version according to your own taste.
-When recreating in your garden the famous natu ral sights of other parts of the world, assimilate such places of beauty so that they become truly your own. Let your garden express their overall effect. Rocks should thus be erected and harmoniously interrelated."
I have translated the first words of the scroll, ishi wo tateru, as "to erect rocks". This literal, perhaps unusual rendering is based on T Tamura's revised version of the Sakutei-ki. Tamura believes that the expression ishi wo tateru, and hence the practice of erecting rocks, lies at the heart of Japanese garden architecture of the Heian period. The author of the Sakutei-ki himself seems rather baffled by the concept, and observes: "It is gen erally speaking rare to erect rocks. Rocks are usually laid. We do not seem to use the phrase to lay rocks' in Japanese, however." I see this as just another example of the very concrete and direct language of historical texts. Abstractions such as "landscape", "scenery" or even "garden" were not yet common currency in Heian times. Instead, words which described a con crete, central activity within the garden-making process were used to denote garden design as a whole. Ishi wo tateru is thus used in other contemporary Heian sources as a synonym for garden architecture perse.30 The elements within a garden are not seen as inani mate objects but as beings with their own character and even their own faces. The Sakutei-ki states: „When erecting rocks you should first carry big and small rocks into the garden and assemble them at one spot. Then you should place the standing rocks head upwards, and the lying rocks face upwards, and distribute them across the garden..."
The design principles discussed within the Sakutei-ki fall into two types, reflecting two parallel attitudes to garden architecture. The first type are principles im ported from China; they clearly reflect the relatively strict precepts of Chinese geomancy, employ the mythological metaphors of crane and turtle and the Buddhist triad - all proof of the Heian "craze" for things Chinese. Principles of the second type describe -in considerably vaguer terms - the somewhat more in tuitional approaches appropriate to garden architec ture. According to Japanese scholar Masahiro Tanaka, this second type of principle reveals the "Japanese soul" of the Sakutei-ki.
Amongst these principles Tanaka identifies four con stantly recurring expressions, which are examined be low; they are also italicized in the translation above.
- Shotoku no sansui: literally "mountain-water of liv ing nature". To be borne in mind when erecting rocks, building waterfalls or creating streams and ponds. The expression implies that a garden should be created in the likeness of real nature.
- Kohan nishitagau: literally "following the request". When building a garden stream, an island or a water fall, it is vital to "follow" the "request" of rocks already existing on the site. The concept is frequently expressed simply with the word "follow". Heian gardeners saw rocks not as inorganic matter, but as beings with their own personalities to be treated with love and respect. A precondition of true creativity was the ability to achieve an inner stillness and emptiness within which their "requests" could be heard.
-Suchigaete: "asymmetrical" or "off-balance". Rocks, islands and ponds should always be placed asymmetrically within the otherwise highly symmetrical framework of Shinden-style palaces. The asymmetry of
nature is thereby set against the symmetry of the man-made artefact.
-Fuzei: literally "a breeze of feeling". In Heian times this term was used to describe the genius loci, the aes thetic spirit of a particular place. Fuzei may be discov ered in nature or created in the garden. Confusingly, perhaps, the same word is used to denote the personal artistic taste of the garden architect or his client. Fuzei somehow unites in one concept two apparent oppo-sites: the objectively-given aesthetic spirit of a place, and the subjectively-experienced aesthetic taste of the gardener or his patron.
Tanaka takes these four expressions as proof that the garden architects of the Heian period strove to become one with nature and then to follow its requests. Their aims naturally went far beyond merely copying nature. Their final compositions inevitably reflected the "tastes" of the garden-maker and client, themselves the subjects of cultural conditioning. The gardens most popular in the Heian period are gardens of islands in a pond, based as closely as possible on a natural scene. Often designed to illustrate the charms of the four sea sons or famous natural sights, their lyrical themes are the same of those of Heian poetry and yamato paint ing. The garden architecture of the Heian period is the art of the empathetic imitation of the external forms of nature.
Hindu cosmology: The mountain as axis mundi
The arrival of Buddhism in Japan led to the adoption of a particularly potent archetypal image from the cos mology of a foreign culture: the image of Mount Meru (Shumi-sen in Japanese), the cosmic mountain at the centre of the universe. Representations of this moun tain can be found in many Japanese gardens. The earli est written Buddhist sources, themselves based on even older concepts of Hindu cosmology, see the universe as "a single, circular world system surrounded by a mountain range of iron, cakravala, from which its name is derived"
Buddhist cakravala cosmology exists in a number of forms, varying according to tradition. All, however, ap pear to share the same central concept of the universe as a circular disk with Mount Meru at its centre. Lying in concentric circles around this axis mundi are seven golden mountain ranges and an eighth and last moun tain range of iron, the cakravala. There are oceans be tween the mountains; only in the ocean between the seventh mountain range and the cakravala are there four islands inhabited by man. A further eight unin habited islands float in the other oceans. The disk rests on a foundation of golden earth, which in turn floats on water.
It is important to remember that this image portrays the universe as a whole, and not just our own earth. Mount Meru is the axis of that universe; the golden mountain ranges which encircle it denote the various realms of meditation and heavenly spheres.5This origi nally Indian cosmography was taken up by the Japa nese garden. Mount Meru can thus often be found as a single, towering rock, sometimes surrounded by sub sidiary stones, prominently located within an individual garden. In other cases, the representation of all nine mountains and eight oceans underlies the design of an entire garden. One of the most beautiful examples here is the garden in front of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, where the various islands and rocks in Mirror Lake can be seen as an illustration of an originally Hindu concept of the universe.
Touching the soul of the Japanese islanders even more profoundly than the details of Buddhist-Hinduist cosmology was, however, the powerful image of the mountain at the centre of the universe and of the wafers of both life and death. Mountain and water converge in the image of the island, which appears in Japanese cosmology - as indeed elsewhere - as the first manifestation of land, indeed of form as such.
The recurrent appearance of the cosmic mountain throughout the history of the Japanese garden points to the resonance which the simplicity, power and beauty of this pre-scientific model of the universe finds in the collective Japanese subconscious. What I have here termed an "archetypal image", Mircea Eliade calls a "symbol". A true "symbol", says Eliade, "speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelli gence". The concept of the island in the ocean is pre cisely such a symbol.
Just as the ancient civilizations of East Asia built stupas, temples, even entire cities in the shape of the mandala, symbol of the structural principles of the cos mos as a whole, so it comes as no surprise to find this same mandala, with the axis mundi at its centre, inspir ing the design of many a Japanese garden.
Sakutei-ki: "The Classic of Garden-Making"
The Sakutei-ki, the classic manual of garden architec ture, provides another inexhaustible fund of informa tion regarding Heian attitudes towards nature and gar den design. Japanese scholars consider it probable that the treatise was written in the latter half of the elev enth century by Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a son of Fujiwara no Yonmichi. the builder of Byodo-m temple This attribution would make the author not a profes sional gardener but a member of the Heian nobility, and probably one who avidly followed - and perhaps actively oversaw - the creation of many a palace gar den. The Sakutei-h appears to be simply a compilation of the contemporary rules of garden-making Whether these rules were already common knowledge and found in other books now lost to us. whether they were passed from teacher to pupil as part of an oral tradition, or whether they were stnctly secret, remains a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, the book by Tachibana originally consisted of two scrolls and bore the more appropriate title of Senzai hisho. "Secret Dis courses on Gardens".
The colophon of the scroll, a tailpiece which tradi tionally identifies the writer and place of composition, reads: "A foolish old man. This is a very precious treas ure; it should be kept stnctly secret'." There is reason
to believe, however, that this colophon was only added much later, when the knowledge contained in the scroll had acquired commercial value for a Japanese nobility which had lost most of its power to the samu rai warrior class.
At one point in the Sa'kutei-ki the author himself ad mits: "I have recorded here, without attempting to judge what is good or bad, what I have heard over the years concerning the erecting of rocks The priest En no Enjan acquired the secrets of rock-setting by mutual transmission. I am in possession of his scriptures Even though I have studied and understood its mam princi ples, its aesthetic meaning is so inexhaustible that I frequently fail to grasp it Nor is anyone still alive to day who knows all there is to know about the subject By taking natural scenery of mountains and water, but forgetting the rules and taboos of garden architecture, I fear we will end up with gardens upon which we have forcibly imposed our own forms "
In Heian times, "mutual transmission", like "secret transmission", probably meant simply the passing of knowledge between members of the nobility and Bud dhist priests, the two classes of Heian society actively involved in the study and practice of the arts, and par ticularly garden design Furthermore, "secret" in a Buddhist context did not mean that a text was physically hidden away, but rather that a "key" was necessary to its understanding This "key" would be transmitted orally from master to disciple only when the latter was deemed worthy to receive it
The Sakutei-ki discusses garden art and architectural details within the context of the Shinden-style palace. Sadly it contains no illustrations. The book opens with an introduction to the general principles of garden de sign, and then proceeds to describe the five types of garden which may be laid out along the banks of ponds and streams. It distinguishes between eight types of island and offers some practical advice on ac tual construction. The author further identifies nine ba sic types of waterfall, discusses the various possibilities of garden streams, the different forms of rock settings, and concludes with a jumbled assortment of orally-transmitted dos and don'ts.
The colophon of the scroll, a tailpiece which tradi tionally identifies the writer and place of composition, reads: "A foolish old man. This is a very precious treas ure; it should be kept stnctly secret'." There is reason
to believe, however, that this colophon was only added much later, when the knowledge contained in the scroll had acquired commercial value for a Japanese nobility which had lost most of its power to the samu rai warrior class.
At one point in the Sa'kutei-ki the author himself ad mits: "I have recorded here, without attempting to judge what is good or bad, what I have heard over the years concerning the erecting of rocks The priest En no Enjan acquired the secrets of rock-setting by mutual transmission. I am in possession of his scriptures Even though I have studied and understood its mam princi ples, its aesthetic meaning is so inexhaustible that I frequently fail to grasp it Nor is anyone still alive to day who knows all there is to know about the subject By taking natural scenery of mountains and water, but forgetting the rules and taboos of garden architecture, I fear we will end up with gardens upon which we have forcibly imposed our own forms "
In Heian times, "mutual transmission", like "secret transmission", probably meant simply the passing of knowledge between members of the nobility and Bud dhist priests, the two classes of Heian society actively involved in the study and practice of the arts, and par ticularly garden design Furthermore, "secret" in a Buddhist context did not mean that a text was physically hidden away, but rather that a "key" was necessary to its understanding This "key" would be transmitted orally from master to disciple only when the latter was deemed worthy to receive it
The Sakutei-ki discusses garden art and architectural details within the context of the Shinden-style palace. Sadly it contains no illustrations. The book opens with an introduction to the general principles of garden de sign, and then proceeds to describe the five types of garden which may be laid out along the banks of ponds and streams. It distinguishes between eight types of island and offers some practical advice on ac tual construction. The author further identifies nine ba sic types of waterfall, discusses the various possibilities of garden streams, the different forms of rock settings, and concludes with a jumbled assortment of orally-transmitted dos and don'ts.
Heian attitudes towards nature and garden design
Neither the few surviving remains of gardens of the Heian period nor the hypothetical reconstructions of those lost to us provide sufficient bases upon which to judge contemporary Heian attitudes towards nature and garden architecture. We are thus obliged to rely on historical records of the day, of which two literary sources of particular relevance shall be discussed here The first illustrates the social function of palace gar dens, while the second paints a useful picture of gar den design and construction.
Japan has four distinct seasons, and their transition
Japan has four distinct seasons, and their transition
can be predicted to within one or two days The subtle transformations taking place during these periods of natural change are the central themes of Japanese poetry and painting and the Japanese festival calendar Thus the patterns of kimonos, the flower arrangements in the decorative alcoves of traditional houses, even the type and timing of food served in tradition-conscious Japanese restaurants all reflect the time of year. It is rare even today to receive a letter which does not open with a reference to a seasonal flower or the currently-prevailing humidity or cold
Although the Japanese garden has. over the course of the centuries, evolved through a remarkable variety of sizes and styles, it nevertheless displays a design logic which rs intimately bound up with the genius too of the Japanese landscape - in other words, with the essence of the country as it appears to the human imagination.
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