Tracing Zen Lines in the Garden

For Masuno, garden design and Zen are synonymous activities, the principles and philosophical ideas of each perfectly complementary. His aim as a practicing Soto Zen priest, landscape artist, and mindful living authority is to create gardens as a respite, or antidote, to the aleatory pressures of daily life. 

There are some Japanese landscape designers whose work you instantly recognize. Take, for example, the gardens of Sesshu Toyo (1420–1506), a Zen monk, scholar, and important Japanese ink landscape painter. Only a handful of Sesshu's gardens remain today, but enough to place him at the forefront of a unique approach to design that often replicated the forms seen in his paintings.

Signature Designers of the Past

Kobori Enshu (1579–1647) was an accomplished tea master who created an original aesthetic known as kirei sabi, a bright and refined version of the tea ceremony. As a landscape designer, he is known for his mastery of space and ability to seamlessly integrate architecture and gardens. He is also celebrated for his innovative, dynamic forms of topiary. His influential work is still much admired today.

Working mostly in the Kansai region, Ogawa Jihei VII (1860-1933) was a pioneer of modern landscaping. He combined elements of Western naturalism and traditional Japanese garden aesthetics associated with the refined tastes of Kyoto. A master at water management, his finest work incorporates shallow, curvaceous, pebble-strewn streams that contrast with powerful waterfall arrangements, the differing aquatic flows creating a natural soundtrack to his gardens. 

Trained in flower arranging, painting, and the tea ceremony, Mirei Shigemori (1896–1975), transformed himself from being an aesthetic polyglot to the foremost modern garden designer of his age. Shigemori combined extensive research into traditional garden design with fresh avant-garde works that redefined the meaning of Japanese landscaping. He was both an exciting and contentious figure on the modern, postwar Japanese scene. 

Shunmyo Masuno: A Living Legacy

Less divisive, but of comparable importance in the modern age, Shunmyo Masuno is widely regarded as the foremost living Japanese landscape designer. Like Shigemori Mirei, Masuno is both curator of tradition and an astonishing innovator. With projects in both Japan and abroad, he also manages to conduct his duties as a Soto Zen priest. 

For Masuno, garden design and Zen are synonymous activities, the principles and philosophical ideas of each perfectly complementary. His aim as a practicing Soto Zen priest, landscape artist, and mindful living authority, is to create gardens as a respite, or antidote, to the aleatory pressures of daily life. "The garden," he has written, "is a special spiritual place where the mind dwells."

Working with Stone

In the guest notes I contributed a few years ago for Mira Locher's book, The Complete Works of Shunmyo Masuno, I wrote that he has "chosen the most determinate and primal material of all to work with: rock, a substance that ages but does not wither. Embracing tradition and modernity, these gardens are expressive of a keen intelligence and profound knowledge of Japanese culture, yoked with an artist's perspective on landscape. Visionary garden designers like this appear perhaps once in a single generation, if that." It's a statement I still stand by. 

In accord with the 11th-century garden manual Sakuteiki, which instructs garden makers to ishi no kowan wo shitagahite, or "follow the request of the rocks," Masuno follows this principle in his work. He takes time to "listen" to the stones before placing them."

'Spirit of Place'

Engaging in dialogue with a garden may sound like the act of a shaman rather than landscape designer, but it is integral to the traditional idea of telepathic collaboration, to establishing contact with a garden plot and its jigokoro, or "spirit of place." This elevated, highly sensitized level of communication sees the designer in the role of a medium, an amanuensis. 

Applying a powerfully Zen-infused approach to design, Masuno has created an ambient temple, hotel, private company, residential gardens, a university campus, research center, and library landscapes. He believes that the most accomplished Japanese gardens are the equivalent of fine art. 

Despite Masuno's conviction that tradition and modernity can coexist, there is less concern in the contemporary garden about adhering to underlying principles pertaining to older imperatives. These include geomancy, the taking of measures to ward off malign spirits, or the transgressing of age-old taboos. 

Modern Liberties

According to ancient gardening rules linked to natural phenomena, misfortune might come to the owner of a garden if a stone that was found standing at a vertical angle was placed horizontally. The latter position suggests collapse or death. 

In another example, in this instance of a felicitous setting, visitations by evil forces could be averted by planting a sotetsu (cycad), a plant with sharp, repelling ferns, at the entrance to a garden. It is doubtful that today's landscape designers, liberated from the past, are quite so inhibited about tampering with the natural order, especially those striving to align gardens with art. 

Nature and Human Invention

In accord with garden designer Mirei Shigemori's concept of the "eternal modern," the work of Shunmyo Masuno straddles time zones with the assurance of a master. A good example of his strikingly original approach is the 1991 Canadian Embassy stone garden in Tokyo's Aoyama-ichome district, regarded by many as a modern masterpiece. 

In this highly contemporary garden, rocks and boulders are set across an outside, fourth-floor terrace with a cantilevered roof and a sweeping shakkei (borrowed view) of Akasaka Palace and its verdant tree tops. They are infused with an extraordinary sense of lightness and fluidity. 

The powerful confluence of raw and cut granite has been arranged to represent the Canadian Shield, with a row of contrasting, polished pyramidal forms replicating the Rocky Mountains. The work draws the viewer into the production process itself. Visible on many of his rocks, some of which have been hollowed out to reduce their weight, are cracks and drill marks. These indicate quarry work, a statement on the combined power of nature and creative human intervention. 

Ageing and Permanence

There is, though, a limit to radical innovation. I asked Masuno how he felt about the use of easily replaceable materials such as carbon fiber, concrete, and translucent polycarbonate in some modern Japanese gardens. He responded, "The first thing to consider when creating a modern Japanese garden is whether the material will retain its presence for hundreds of years. I prefer not to use materials that cannot guarantee this," adding, "Ageing is not the same as deterioration." 

The modern mindscape rarely exists entirely independently from the past. The contemporary designer mediates allusions to the Japanese garden while insisting on a personal vision potentially at odds with tradition, yet often incorporates aspects of it — consciously or not. A fine example of Masuno's fusing of tradition and modernity can be found in his design for the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba Science City.

Movement Within Stillness

With rare exceptions, our viewpoint in stone gardens is almost always fixed, restricted to an observation deck that permits a single compositional framing. In this garden, however, we find human forms moving amidst the sculpted rocks. Administrative staff and researchers in white uniforms, random figures in a calculated landscape. 

Responding to the institute's request for practical forms of usage, the garden provides space for workers to gather and discuss their work in an informal manner. Moving around the inside of the garden, the design, from the occupant's perspective, recomposes itself.

Referencing Heien era (794-1185) features, Masuno has threaded a kyokusui, or winding brook, a dry stream strewn with nuggets of rock, through the garden. The expanding-contracting width of the stream, scoping out a route between rocks representing mountains, bores through a landscape that creates the illusion that it has been formed by wind, rain, and erosion. The serpentine flow of the dry river exerts a seemingly magnetic force on the rocks in the garden, inducing them to face the same downstream direction, an effect creating harmony among an irregularity of forms.

The Sacred in the Material

Harmonizing the rational nature of science and intuitive design with his own spiritual grounding as a Zen priest, Masuno has described himself as a devotee of Muso Soseki (1275–1351), a monk and seminal garden designer, who believed that the spiritual world inhabited all living matter. He held that "in the garden, we might discover Buddha nature in all things." 

Like his ancient mentor, Masuno views garden making as a form of spiritual training, a perspective that allows him to create a landscape for an organization that, even in its name, stridently declares its materiality. 

Firmly affixed to the structures of government offices, hotels, plazas, institutes, and residential structures, one wonders about the future of urban landscapes in Japanese cities. Such cities are notorious for their scrap and build, rapid replacement approach to construction. Will gardens of the future be portable structures, readily dismantled, then reassembled in fresh locations like mobile homes or art installations? Tracking the fate of Shunmyo Masuno's work may give us some idea of what the future holds. 

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Author: Stephen Mansfield