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.
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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.
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.
The rock archetype: iwakura and iwasaka
The Japanese fascination, indeed obsession with binding, manipulating and even crippling plants for gardens or miniature landscapes thus has its roots in a cultural phenomenon dating back literally thousands of years.
The appreciation of the beauty of natural rock has been one of the most pronounced characteristics of the Japanese garden throughout its history. Rocks are employed in garden composition for their sensory, scenic and symbolic effects, a distinction David Slawson introduced. Many Japanese and Western academics trace this love of pure, unadulterated stone to the worship - possibly dating from neolithic times - of huge boulders and rocky outcrops such as those found in ancient Shinto shrines. These rocks were often bound with the shime-nawa ropes mentioned above to indicate their sacred character, as is the case in the Omiwa shrine near Nara. Rocks thus identified are accepted as go-shintai, the abode of a deity, leading many to conclude that prehistoric Shintoism must have undergone an animistic phase. It is my opinion, however, that the appreciation of the beauty of rocks, and the worship of a divine presence concealed behind them, is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of Shintoism. Such rocks were originally called iwakura and iwasaka, literally meaning "rock seat" and "rock boundary", suggesting that they were placed in preanimistic times as markers, denoting occupation of land or property. At some stage their original meaning and function were forgotten, and they acquired religious as well as territorial significance. Later still even similar naturally occurring (not man-made) rock-formations came to be seen as abodes of deities.
Mirei Shigemori, on the other hand, argues that certain unique natural stone and rock formations were considered sacred from the very beginning. To these were added, over the course of time, other rocks, thereby creating a sacred precinct which was at least in part man-made. In the final phase, a particular sanctuary might have all its rocks imported. This marked the beginning of Japanese garden architecture proper.
However different these standpoints, both underline the special status afforded the natural rock in Japan. Castle walls aside, natural stone has never played a mapr role as a building material in traditional Japanese architecture. On the contrary, stone is finely appreciated for the subtle distinctions of its form, colour and texture, and an individual rock may even be assigned the human characteristics of head and feet, front and back. Rock has thereby acquired archetypal status, and a Japanese garden without an unusual rock or rock group, natural or carved, is quite inconceivable.
Sacred islands and ponds
The gardens built during the Asuka. Nara and Heian eras clearly reflect the first great wave of Chinese influ ence to reach Japanese culture. The scenery of the ear liest Japanese garden prototype is dominated by islands and ponds. As such it quite literally illustrates the Smo-Japanese word for "landscape", san-sui. or "moun tain-water" At the same time it reflects the ancient Chinese dual pnnciple of Yin and Yang, in terms of gar dening. The Heian garden is large in scale; it is more a seascape than a landscape garden designed to be en joyed by boating The later gardens of the Heian period are usually sited within the rectangular framework of the Shmden-style architecture of early Heian palaces and temples of Pure Land Buddhism. Such gardens were generally designed by their noble owners them selves as a setting for courtly festivities, whereby the elements of the garden sought to imitate the external forms of nature.
The agricultural archetype: shinden
The daily offerings of rice and sake which are made to the deity of sun and food in the shrines of the Imperial Ancestors at Ise are prepared from rice specially grown in the so-called "Divine Fields", or shinden. These fields represent a last surviving example of Japanese geo-mancy as it existed prior to its replacement by the Chinese system imported with the first wave of Chinese influence in the Nara and Heian eras. It was the agricultural cycle of rice-growing (introduced in Japan in the Yayoi era, between 200 BC and 250 AD) which, together with the territorial practices described earlier, contributed most to the architecture of the sacred precincts and religious rites of Shintoism.
The geomantic relations between the various elements of the Divine Fields are simple and clear: on one side there is a mountain, from which water flows down to the fields; on the other lies the torii, the typical Shinto gate signalling the entrance to a sacred precinct and isolating it from the secular outside world. No attempt is yet made to orient the entire complex due north, as later stipulated by the rules of imported Chinese geomancy. The whole constitutes a kind of first garden, where deity and human being meet. Rice paddies were integrated into the large-scale gardens of the daimyo nobles from the early Edo era onwards, frequently in the form of a magic square - with 3x3 squares giving one magic square.
Behind the religious practice of growing and tending sacred gardens lies the belief, found throughout Japan, that the local guardian deities live in the mountains in the winter, from where they are ceremonially fetched in spring and taken to spend the summer in the rice paddies, until being returned to the mountains in autumn, after the harvest.
According to research by Nobuzane Tsukushi into ancient folk beliefs in the Ise region, the sun deity at be was ongmally beloved to descend once a year from heaven to a high mountain peak near the Isuzu nver at Ise. From there the villagers earned it down to the vat-ley in the form of a newtyfelled tree, and dragged it across the river at the foot of the mountain The village community then celebrated the arnval of the deity on the opposite shore, with a local maiden serving the deity as priestess and spouse for one night The earliest place of worship of the deity thus lay at the river's edge, and probably consisted of little more than a tree temporarily installed at the centre of a patch of pebbled ground marked by a sacred rope.
Much has been conjectured about the mystenous shiki no himorogt, which we know only to be a sacred precinct strewn with pebbles m which ritual purifications are performed. Such sites are mentioned in chronicles from as earty as the eighth century, and can be seen even today in almost every Shinto shrine - there are a particularly fine examples of shiki no himotogi m the shrines at Ise.
I believe that the origins of these shiki no himorogt lie m those ancient ablution sites on a nverbank where the mountain deity "appeared" to the community of believers for the first time Pebble beaches or pebbled areas in Japanese gardens are more than mere copies of a natural phenomenon They are archetypes of the hallowed ground of Shinto theophany.
The geomantic relations between the various elements of the Divine Fields are simple and clear: on one side there is a mountain, from which water flows down to the fields; on the other lies the torii, the typical Shinto gate signalling the entrance to a sacred precinct and isolating it from the secular outside world. No attempt is yet made to orient the entire complex due north, as later stipulated by the rules of imported Chinese geomancy. The whole constitutes a kind of first garden, where deity and human being meet. Rice paddies were integrated into the large-scale gardens of the daimyo nobles from the early Edo era onwards, frequently in the form of a magic square - with 3x3 squares giving one magic square.
Behind the religious practice of growing and tending sacred gardens lies the belief, found throughout Japan, that the local guardian deities live in the mountains in the winter, from where they are ceremonially fetched in spring and taken to spend the summer in the rice paddies, until being returned to the mountains in autumn, after the harvest.
According to research by Nobuzane Tsukushi into ancient folk beliefs in the Ise region, the sun deity at be was ongmally beloved to descend once a year from heaven to a high mountain peak near the Isuzu nver at Ise. From there the villagers earned it down to the vat-ley in the form of a newtyfelled tree, and dragged it across the river at the foot of the mountain The village community then celebrated the arnval of the deity on the opposite shore, with a local maiden serving the deity as priestess and spouse for one night The earliest place of worship of the deity thus lay at the river's edge, and probably consisted of little more than a tree temporarily installed at the centre of a patch of pebbled ground marked by a sacred rope.
Much has been conjectured about the mystenous shiki no himorogt, which we know only to be a sacred precinct strewn with pebbles m which ritual purifications are performed. Such sites are mentioned in chronicles from as earty as the eighth century, and can be seen even today in almost every Shinto shrine - there are a particularly fine examples of shiki no himotogi m the shrines at Ise.
I believe that the origins of these shiki no himorogt lie m those ancient ablution sites on a nverbank where the mountain deity "appeared" to the community of believers for the first time Pebble beaches or pebbled areas in Japanese gardens are more than mere copies of a natural phenomenon They are archetypes of the hallowed ground of Shinto theophany.
The territorial archetype: shime
The earliest Shinto sanctuaries combine different facets of ancient Japanese civilization, such as respect for territorial rights, the worship of nature, the sense of purity and the cultivation of rice.
The art of knotting and binding was probably one of the first manual skills mastered by the early inhabitants of East Asia. The binding of grasses, bushes and trees was used to signal a personal claim to land or other property. It set a shime, a mark of occupation or possession and hence of power. I have already set out, in a number of publications, the complex set of deductions which have led me to conclude that from the archaic Japanese shime is derived the Japanese word shima, "garden". Shime literally means a "bound artefact", which in turn signifies "occupation" (the verb shimeru possesses all three meanings). The word shima, derived from shime, means "land" or, more specifically, "land which has been taken possession of". It later acquired the meaning of "garden", or rather "a section of nature fenced off from the wilderness". It finally came to mean "island", a "piece of land floating in the untamed ocean". In the noun shime-nawa, (literally "rope of occupation"), used to describe the ropes delimiting a sacred area or sanctifying a holy object within a Shinto shrine, we find a use of the word shime which goes beyond the politico-economic sense of possession as expressed by binding to assume a religio-magical significance.
The art of knotting and binding was probably one of the first manual skills mastered by the early inhabitants of East Asia. The binding of grasses, bushes and trees was used to signal a personal claim to land or other property. It set a shime, a mark of occupation or possession and hence of power. I have already set out, in a number of publications, the complex set of deductions which have led me to conclude that from the archaic Japanese shime is derived the Japanese word shima, "garden". Shime literally means a "bound artefact", which in turn signifies "occupation" (the verb shimeru possesses all three meanings). The word shima, derived from shime, means "land" or, more specifically, "land which has been taken possession of". It later acquired the meaning of "garden", or rather "a section of nature fenced off from the wilderness". It finally came to mean "island", a "piece of land floating in the untamed ocean". In the noun shime-nawa, (literally "rope of occupation"), used to describe the ropes delimiting a sacred area or sanctifying a holy object within a Shinto shrine, we find a use of the word shime which goes beyond the politico-economic sense of possession as expressed by binding to assume a religio-magical significance.
The Japanese landscape: divine islands, divine ponds
It is difficult to imagine a better portrait of Japan than that painted by this poem, written by the twelfth-century poet Saigyo and perhaps inspired by a view over the Inland Sea. Japan is a country of countless isles in the earthquake belt of the eastern Pacific. Over 70 percent of its terrain is mountainous, with live volcanoes and hot springs, and cleft by deep valleys. The coastline is rocky and fissured, offering only occasional sandy bays. There are almost no flat plains. "Small islands in the sea", "winding rivers between mountains", "rugged rocks along the seashore", "stepped waterfalls" and "pebbles in mountain streams" are all terms in the vocabulary of visual archetypes describing Japan. The Japanese garden employs this same vocabulary; its language of forms reflects that of the landscape of Japan.
It is thus no surprise that the topography of the country should also be reflected m Japanese cosmogony in the beginning, so the Kojikichronicles of 712 relate, two deities gave birth to eight islands. Only later did they add other natural elements such as the sea. rivers, mountains, trees and herbs. According to Mirei Shigemori. this ancient theory derives from the impression made by the Japanese landscape on the first settlers arriving by sea. This impression subsequently left a deep impnnt upon the collective Japanese subconscious Man-made recreations of shinto. divine islands, and shmchi. divine ponds, are found even in the earliest prehistoric shnnes. and have proved one of the most fruitful archetypes m the history of the Japanese garden
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